"...Everything is necessity: this is the new knowledge, and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence and knowledge is the way to insight into this innocence. If pleasure, egoism, vanity are necessary for the generation of moral phenomena and their greatest flower, the sense for true and just knowledge; if error and confusion of imagination were the only means by which mankind could raise itself gradually to this degree of self-illumination and self-redemption--who could scorn those means? Who could be sad when he perceives the goal to which those paths lead? Everything in the sphere of morality has evolved; changeable, fluctuating, everything is fluid, it is true: but everything is also streaming onward--to one goal. Even if the inherited habit of erroneous esteeming, loving, hating continues to govern us, it will grow weaker under the influence of growing knowledge: a new habit, that of understanding, non-loving, surveying is gradually being implanted in us on the same ground, and in thousands of years will be powerful enough perhaps to give mankind the strength to produce wise, innocent (conscious of their innocence) men as regularly as it now produces unwise, unfair men, conscious of their guilt--these men are the necessary first stage, but not the opposite of those to come."
--Friedrich Nietzsche, on "Irresponsibility and innocence." Partial quote (the italics are his).
This may be a stupid question, and if it is, my apologies. My experience with philosophy is limited to what I've sought out and read on my own. Anyway...I'm aware that Nietzsche believed paradoxes often exist only in the mind of the reader, not that of the author. However, this to me seems quite paradoxical. How can one be both innocent and conscious of innocence?
I suppose the word "innocence" could be interpreted in two ways. Either Nietzsche means "innocent" in the sense that this desired type of man has committed no crime, or he means "innocent" in a more childlike sense--pure and free from debauchery, without experience in the baser pursuits of humanity.
From his references to "pleasure" and "vanity" in contrast to "morality," it would seem to me that the "innocence" Nietzsche meant is of the latter type. Yet to understand that sort of innocence, and what it is to be innocent, one must also realize the alternatives, and in this realization, the original innocence is lost. So my question is, how is "conscious innocence" possible?
--Friedrich Nietzsche, on "Irresponsibility and innocence." Partial quote (the italics are his).
This may be a stupid question, and if it is, my apologies. My experience with philosophy is limited to what I've sought out and read on my own. Anyway...I'm aware that Nietzsche believed paradoxes often exist only in the mind of the reader, not that of the author. However, this to me seems quite paradoxical. How can one be both innocent and conscious of innocence?
I suppose the word "innocence" could be interpreted in two ways. Either Nietzsche means "innocent" in the sense that this desired type of man has committed no crime, or he means "innocent" in a more childlike sense--pure and free from debauchery, without experience in the baser pursuits of humanity.
From his references to "pleasure" and "vanity" in contrast to "morality," it would seem to me that the "innocence" Nietzsche meant is of the latter type. Yet to understand that sort of innocence, and what it is to be innocent, one must also realize the alternatives, and in this realization, the original innocence is lost. So my question is, how is "conscious innocence" possible?
