Literalism

Instead of "creating" more blogs about my commonsense bullshit, I'm going to let someone else say something. Somebody who is often more unsystematic and discursive than I. But … he had better hair. This is from the first page of the best book he wrote and, like all real writing, needs to be dissected. It does, for the most part, blame humanity for being unexamining literalists.

"We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves, – so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? How right is the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’; our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing – to ‘bring something home’. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experiences’, – who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time? I fear we have never really been ‘with it’ in such matters: our heart is simply not in it – and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders ‘What hour struck?’, sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, ‘What did we actually experience then?’ or even, ‘Who are we, in fact?’ and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being – oh! and lose count . . . We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto ‘everyone is furthest from himself ’ applies to us for ever, – we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves . . ."

"On the Genealogy of Morals", page 1, Friedrich Nietzsche (intended to be a "pamphlet")