I'm working through Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations II
Here is a wonderful moment from chapter 1:
Consider the herds that are
feeding yonder: they know not the meaning of yesterday or to-day; they graze
and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up
with their little loves and hates, at the mercy of the moment, feeling neither
melancholy nor satiety. Man cannot see them without regret, for even in the
pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast's happiness. He wishes
simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain,
for he will not change places with it. He may ask the beast—"Why do you
look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?" The beast wants to
answer—"Because I always forget what I wished to say": but he forgets
this answer too, and is silent; and the man is left to wonder.
[a bit further on]
Thus the beast lives unhistorically, for it gets up in the present like
a number without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a
part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it
is. ... However, with the smallest and
with the greatest good fortune, happiness becomes happiness in the same way:
through forgetting or, to express the matter in a more scholarly fashion, through
the capacity, for as long as the happiness lasts, to sense things unhistorically.
Ron, how come we are always reading the same things? I just looked at this part of Nietzsche yesterday (although in a different collection--"The Use and Abuse of the Past.") The question I was thinking about was whether non-humans can engage in an active forgetting. It is that which allows us to refuse empathy, among other things. I wonder if that is possible for other animals.
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