“The tyrants of the spirit. — The march of science is now no longer crossed by the accidental fact that men live for about seventy years, as was for all too long the case. Formerly, a man wanted to reach the far end of knowledge during this period of time and the methods of acquiring knowledge were evaluated in accordance with this universal longing. The small single questions and experiments were counted contemptible: one wanted the shortest route; one believed that, because everything in the world seemed to be accommodated to man, the knowability of things was also accommodated to a human time-span. To solve everything at a stroke, with a single word — that was the secret desire: the task was thought of in the image of the Gordian knot or in that of the egg of Columbus; one did not doubt that in the domain of knowledge too it was possible to reach one’s goal in the manner of Alexander or Columbus and to settle all questions with a single answer. ‘There is a riddle to be solved’: thus did the goal of life appear to the eye of the philosopher; the first thing to do was to find the riddle and to compress the problem of the world into the simplest riddle-form. The boundless ambition and exultation of being the ‘unriddler of the world’ constituted the thinker’s dreams: nothing seemed worth-while if it was not the means of bringing everything to a conclusion for him! Philosophy was thus a kind of supreme struggle to possess the tyrannical rule of the spirit — that some such very fortunate, subtle, inventive, bold and mighty man was in reserve — one only! — was doubted by none, and several, most recently Schopenhauer, fancied themselves to be that one. — From this it follows that by and large the sciences have hitherto been kept back by the moral narrowness of their disciples and that henceforth they must be carried on with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling. ‘What do I matter!’ — stands over the door of the thinker of the future.”

*

It takes courage to stand between the nothingness of pre-birth and the nothingness of death and be humbly finite — always both wrong and right, always both born and destined to die, always both someone and everyone and everything.

The point is not to avoid being wrong. The point is to be as right as we can possibly be. We will always be a wrong to a degree, because that is how knowing is, and that is how we are.

*

Understanding is finite. Every understanding has its own limits.

Every understanding excludes something that some person at some time will recognize as crucial.

We expose the limits of past understanding and understand in a new way whose limits are invisible to us.

We expose old limits and impose new limits.

(To judge judging as bad and to attempt to refrain from further judging is an unjust act of judgment against judgment.)

*

Anaximander via Simplicius:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

Anaximander via Nietzsche:

Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.