The unknown knowers
"We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to
ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves
— how should it then come to pass, that we should ever
find
ourselves? Rightly has it been said: 'Where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also.'
Our
treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to those hives
that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight, and as the
honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing
— to bring something 'home to the hive!'
As far as the rest of life with its so-called
'experiences' is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or
sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I fear, never
properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not
our ear. Rather like one who, delighting in a divine distraction, or sunken in
the seas of his own soul, in whose ear the clock has just thundered with all its
force its twelve strokes of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, 'What has
in point of fact just struck?' so do we at times run afterwards, as it were, our
puzzled ears, and ask in complete astonishment and complete embarrassment,
'Through what have we in point of fact just lived?' further, 'Who are we in
point of fact?' and count, after they
have struck, as I have explained, all the
twelve throbbing beats of the clock of our experience, of our life, of our being
— ah! — and count wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain
strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound
to be mistaken, for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, 'Each one is the
farthest away from himself' — as far as ourselves are concerned we are not
'knowers'."
— Friedrich
Nietzsche, Preface to The Genealogy of
Morals
Posted on Sunday - March 06, 2005 at 06:47 PM
