“[…] the thinkers and workers in science; they have rarely aimed at producing effects but have dug away quietly under their mole-hills. They have thus caused little annoyance or discomfort, and often, as objects of mockery and laughter, have without desiring it even alleviated the life of men of the vita activa.” – Nietzsche, Morgenröte
And to the scientists, there, he is the nicest! Good thing philosophers have always been small in number. 😉
But,
“Let us, as men of the vita contemplativa, not forget what kind of evil and ill-fortune has come upon the man of the vita activa through the after-effects of contemplation – in short, what counter-reckoning the vita activa has in store for us if we boast too proudly before it of our good deeds…” (emphasis mine)
“Of ll the means of producing exaltation, it has been human sacrifice which has at all times most exalted and elevated man. And perhaps every other endeavor could still be thrown down by one tremendous idea, so that it would achieve victory over the most victorious – the idea of self-sacrificing mankind. But to whom should mankind sacrifice itself? One could already take one’s oath that, if ever the constellation of this idea appears above the horizon, the knowledge of truth would remain as the one tremendous goal commensurate with such a sacrifice, because for this goal no sacrifice is too great. In the meantime, the problem of the extent to which mankind can as a whole take steps toward the advancement of knowledge has never yet been posed; not to speak of what drive to knowledge could drive mankind to the point of dying with the light of an anticipatory wisdom in its eyes. Perhaps, if one day an alliance has been established with the inhabitants of other stars for the purpose of knowledge, and knowledge has been communicated from star to star for a few millennia: perhaps enthusiasm for knowledge may then rise to such a high-water mark!”
“Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man.”
And finally,
“…However high mankind may have evolved – and perhaps at the end it will stand even lower than at the beginning! – it cannot pass over into a higher order, as little as the ant and the earwig can at the end of its ‘earthly course’ rise up to kinship with God and eternal life. The becoming drags the has-been along behind it: why should an exception to this eternal spectacle be made on behalf of some little star or for any little species upon it! Away with such sentimentalities!”
This expresses only a tiny bit of what I love so much about Nietzsche, for the complexity of his own thoughts and feelings it reveals, something to which I can certainly very much relate: his own deep conflicts one can begin to feel when one tries stringing together several of his ideas, even when those ideas are separated by only a few paragraphs. It is what makes him so difficult to understand – his mind is a labyrinth, his words are often not what they seem, and the shape of the labyrinth shifts, sometimes so subtly, one doesn’t even notice, and sometimes so abruptly, one is rattled about in confusion and mistrust of one’s own senses – and one should mistrust them! Only one as internally tortured as he could really understand the feelings that would motivate such words, and this he knew. To understand Nietzsche is not to figure out what the statements of his writings literally say, and to agree with him is not to accept that those statements are true.
Oh, and I suppose it is worth mentioning – but you may already know – that the vita activa and vita contemplativa are references to Aristotle – and actually in the very text I’m currently reading for the course I am in! That means two things: (1) one might need to have some idea what Aristotle said about them, and (2) one might need to consider that how Nietzsche thought of them was not quite how Aristotle conceived of them. In other words, it is not implausible that Nietzsche took this pair of ideas and used them to express something more his own, and he perhaps saw some similarity with Aristotle’s ideas, but did not stay true to the Aristotelian conceptions.