2020 Nietzsche Daybreak Polyp-arms of our being
Nutriment for We the People is representation according to our constitutional numbers.
Seven changes were made to ungender the opening:
1.
However far a person may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than one’s image of the totality of drives which constitute one’s being.
2.
A person can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly unknown.
3.
This nutriment is therefore a work of chance: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold – the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others.
4.
Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment does or does not bear with it.
5.
Our experiences are, as already said, all in this sense means of nourishment, but the nourishment is scattered indiscriminately without distinguishing between the hungry and those already possessing a superfluity.
6.
And as a consequence of this chance nourishment of the parts, the whole, fully grown polyp will be something just as accidental as its growth has been.
7.
To express it more clearly: suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it desires gratification – or exercise of its strength, or discharge of its strength, or the saturation of an emptiness – these are all metaphors –: it then regards every event of the day with a view to seeing how it can employ it for the attainment of its goal; whether one is moving, or resting or angry or reading or speaking or fighting or rejoicing, the drive will in its thirst as it were taste every condition into which the person may enter, and as a rule will discover nothing for itself there and will have to wait and go on thirsting: in a little while it will grow faint, and after a couple of days or months of non-gratification it will wither away like a plant without rain.
*Next Up: 1 May and Arendt Footnotes.
Posted by Bryan W. Brickner
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