"Rome, 9 January"
Without Dogma (1891)
Context: My position is such that there is no necessity for me to enter into competition with struggling humanity. As to expensive and ruinous pleasures, I am a sceptic who knows how much they are worth, or rather, knows that they are not worth anything.
“To be an artist is to enter into competition with god.”
Quote in: 'An interview with Helen Frankenthaler', by Geldzahler, The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 67
Frankenthaler explains the difference between gesture and signature in her painting
1970s - 1980s
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Someone within me is struggling to lift a great weight, to cast off the mind and flesh by overcoming habit, laziness, necessity.
I do not know from where he comes or where he goes. I clutch at his onward march in my ephemeral breast, I listen to his panting struggle, I shudder when I touch him.
“Plurality is never to be posited without necessity.”
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate
Quaestiones et decisiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi [Questions and the decisions of the Sentences of Peter Lombard] (1495), i, dist. 27, qu. 2, K; also in The Development of Logic (1962), by William Calvert Kneale, p. 243; similar statements were common among Scholastic philosophers, at least as early as John Duns (Duns Scotus).
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.
As cited in "The Myth of Occam's Razor" by William Thorburn, in Mind, Vol. 27 (1918), 345–353.
Actress Dazzles With One Women Show https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/11/18/actress-dazzles-with-one-women-show/ (18 November 2002)
Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Context: The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx’s concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and … can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".
Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxvii
“The struggle against the religious absurdity is more than ever a necessity today.”
1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)
