I have been trying to reread Daybreak, for probably the sixth or eighth time.

This is the book that originally, back in 2004, made me start a notebook to capture the connections I was seeing across passages and across books in Nietzsche’s corpus, which before had existed only in the margins of the books themselves. Eventually, the notebook grew so large and complex that locating an associated passage could take up a whole morning, and it began to bog down my reading. At that point I transferred the passages into memos on my Palm PDA, which I’d hacked and made into a wiki. I could text search the passages and organize them in affinity clusters. That database got so large it brought both my desktop Palm app and the Palm device to a crash-prone crawl. In early 2008, when I got an iPod Touch capable of browsing the web, I imported my Palm wiki onto a web-based wiki. Even that got too big for the original host, and text searching became maddeningly slow, so I had to move it to a faster server. Today the wiki lives at brain.anomalogue.com, and it is bigger and faster than it has ever been.

But despite the performance upgrades my reading is painfully slow because of the wiki. If I read authors other than Nietzsche, I’m mostly okay. But Nietzsche shifts my mind into an associative mode, and the wiki amplifies that mode by offering fresh associated passages I’d forgotten when I connect passages I do remember. Then the linking cascades and ignites new lines of thought, and then I end up writing instead of reading.

Today I had a really good example of this effect, and I’m going to walk through what happened.

It started with aphorism 526:

Not willing to be a symbol. — I commiserate with princes: they are not permitted to vanish into society from time to time, and so they come to know mankind only from an uncomfortable and dissimulated position; the continual compulsion to signify something in the end makes of them solemn nullities. — And so it is with all who see it their duty to be symbols.

This reminded me of a passage from Twilight of the Idols:

What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

I’d thought about the nullification of individuals when they take on public identities. Or, more likely, such people are already nullities, adopting identities in an effort to construct some semblance of selfhood.

I’ve seen this happen with some people who never developed their own first-person perspective, and also, tragically, with a few who lost their perspective seeking — or demanding — recognition from others.

It was interesting to think that not only joiners of movements, but also leaders can be zeros.

But this passage was connected with a couple of other passages that mentioned non-individual naughts, nullities and zeros. This one stood out, because it links into my current project, and also some of Nick Gall’s recent thinking on turning versus overcoming:

I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbour, are even capable of living in a way which is damaging to the species, i.e. ‘unreasonably’ and ‘badly’. What might have harmed the species may have become extinct many thousands of years ago and may by now belong to the things that are no longer possible even for God. Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all, perish! In both cases you are probably still in some way a promoter and benefactor of humanity and are thus entitled to your eulogists — as well as to your mockers! But you will never find someone who could completely mock you, the individual, even in your best qualities, someone who could bring home to you as far as truth allows your boundless, fly- and frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth — for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius! Perhaps even laughter still has a future when the proposition ‘The species is everything, an individual is always nothing’ has become part of humanity and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility is accessible to everyone at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only ‘gay science’ will remain. At present, things are still quite different; at present, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself; at present, we still live in the age of tragedy, in the age of moralities and religions. What is the meaning of the ever-new appearance of these founders of moralities and religions, of these instigators of fights about moral valuations, these teachers of pangs of conscience and religious wars? What is the meaning of these heroes on this stage? For these have been the heroes thus far; and everything else, even if at times it was all that we could see and was far too near, has always served only to set the stage for these heroes, whether as machinery and backdrop or in the role of confidant and servant. (The poets, for example, were always the servants of some kind of morality.) It is obvious that these tragedies, too, work in the interest of the species, even if they should believe that they are working in the interest of God, as God’s emissaries. They, too, promote the life of the species by promoting the faith in life. ‘Life is worth living’, each of them shouts, ‘there is something to life, there is something behind life, beneath it; beware!’ This drive, which rules the highest as well as the basest of human beings — the drive for the preservation of the species — erupts from time to time as reason and passion of mind; it is then surrounded by a resplendent retinue of reasons and tries with all its might to make us forget that fundamentally it is drive, instinct, stupidity, lack of reasons. Life ought to be loved, because –! Man ought to advance himself and his neighbour, because –! What names all these Oughts and Becauses have been given and may yet be given in the future! The ethical teacher makes his appearance as the teacher of the purpose of existence in order that what happens necessarily and always, by itself and without a purpose, shall henceforth seem to be done for a purpose and strike man as reason and an ultimate commandment; to this end he invents a second, different existence and takes by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence off its old, ordinary hinges. To be sure, in no way does he want us to laugh at existence, or at ourselves — or at him; for him, an individual is always an individual, something first and last and tremendous; for him there are no species, sums, or zeroes. Foolish and fanciful as his inventions and valuations may be, badly as he may misjudge the course of nature and deny its conditions — and all ethical systems hitherto have been so foolish and contrary to nature that humanity would have perished from every one had it gained power over humanity — all the same! Every time ‘the hero’ appeared on stage, something new was attained: the gruesome counterpart of laughter, that profound shock that many individuals feel at the thought: ‘Yes, living is worth it! Yes, I am worthy of living!’ Life and I and you and all of us became interesting to ourselves once again for a while. There is no denying that in the long run each of these great teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature: the brief tragedy always changed and returned into the eternal comedy of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter’ — to cite Aeschylus — must in the end also come crashing down on the greatest of these tragedians. Despite all this corrective laughter, human nature on the whole has surely been altered by the recurring emergence of such teachers of the purpose of existence — it has acquired one additional need, the need for the repeated appearance of such teachers and such teachings of a ‘purpose’. Man has gradually become a fantastic animal that must fulfill one condition of existence more than any other animal: man must from time to time believe he knows why he exists, his race cannot thrive without a periodic trust in life — without faith in the reason in life! And ever again the human race will from time to time decree: ‘There is something one is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh at.’ And the most cautious friend of man will add: ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom but also the tragic, with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of the preservation of the species.’ And therefore! Therefore! Therefore! Oh, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood? We, too, have our time!

“Life and I and you and all of us became interesting to ourselves once again for a while. There is no denying that in the long run each of these great teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature: the brief tragedy always changed and returned into the eternal comedy of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter’ — to cite Aeschylus — must in the end also come crashing down on the greatest of these tragedians. ” — that reminded me of something… Anaximander!

There are so many suns yet to rise.