George Santayana

“ All pure pleasures, including those of seeing and thinking, are without it: they are ingenuous, and terminate in their present object. A philosopher should have learned from Aristotle, if not from his own experience, that at the acme of life we live in the eternal, and that then, as Schopenhauer said, we no longer pry but gaze, and are freed from willing.
This is not to say that Nietzsche was not very happy and witty in his description of the passions that dominate artists and philosophers, and in urging that the life of the spirit was an impassioned thing. ”

“ If I am nothing but the will to grow, how can I ever will to shrink?
But this inconsistency in Nietzsche, like that in Schopenhauer, was an honourable one that came of forgetting a false generalisation in the presence of a clear fact. That the will to be powerful is everywhere was a false generalisation; but it was a clear fact that some people are pious Christians or Epicurean philosophers, who do not care at all about conquering the world. ”

“ If we take a broad view, perhaps the ancient myth that nature tends to re-embody certain fixed types, though inaccurate, gives a better picture of the facts than the modern myth that she is striving to change in one predetermined direction. Nevertheless, the fact that Nietzsche’s attention was fascinated by the will to grow and to dominate shows that he was in sympathy with young things, that his heart was big with the future, and that his age believed in progress. ”

“ An acorn in the ground does not strive to persevere in the state it happens to be in, but expands, absorbs surrounding elements, and transforms them into its own substance, which itself changes its form. Here then is a will to grow, not simply a will to live or to preserve oneself; in fact, as Nietzsche eloquently said, here is a will to perish. It is true that when the oak is full grown it seems to pass to the defensive and no longer manifests the will either to perish or to grow. Even while the will to grow is operating, its scope is not indefinite. ”

“ Schopenhauer affected passionate despair, Nietzsche recommended passionate enterprise, each being wedded exclusively to one of those moods which Faust or Byron could feel alternately and reduce to act with all the dashing tumult of anarchy. The value which the world has in the eyes of its inhabitants is necessarily mixed, so that a sweeping optimism or pessimism can be only a theoretic pose, false to the natural sentiment even of those who assume it. ”

“ The temper of the age ignored that man is a teachable animal living in a natural world. All that was a vulgar convention; in truth a disembodied Will was directed on any and every ideal at random, and when any of these fantastic objects seemed to be attained nothing was really accomplished, nothing was accumulated or learned. ”

“ Nietzsche had his reasons for liking to call the universal principle a lust for power. He believed he was the herald of two hundred years of war, he was in love with the vague image of a military aristocracy, and he was not without a certain biological acumen. ”

“ Yet it is these poses or attitudes, or, if you like, these impertinences, that give importance to transcendental philosophers; it is their representative and contagious side; their views of things would concern us little, if it was the things themselves that we wished to understand, but our whole study is a study in romanticism. ”