PLEASE NOTE: Today’s post will be my last one before my usual summer break. I plan to resume posting twice a month (on the second and fourth Mondays of each month) on September 13.
Judgments, judgments over the value of life, for or against, can finally never be true: they only have value as symptoms, only come under consideration as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Human beings who fall prey to the stupidity of treating judgments on the value of life as though they had any truth are like donkeys. Both such humans and donkeys are jackasses.
What’s more, whether one is dealing with a human creature who displays such stupidity, or with a donkey, an old, jocular proverb conveys wisdom. That proverb says that if you want to teach a jackass anything new, you first have to get its attention; and what you need to do to get its attention is to hit it as hard as you can right between the eyes with a large, heavy axe-handle.
Unfortunately, however, jackasses have a habit of slipping back into stupidities even after they’ve been so whacked. Thus, the teaching that follows needs to come quickly after the jackass has been struck to attention, and that teaching must include guidance of how to remain attentive even after the immediate results of the axe-whacking have passed. If the jackass, human or donkey, is to retain the learning, it must be taught to cultivate that learning as though it were the food one needs to sustain one’s life—and that part of the training, the part that inculcates the habit of always continuing to cultivate what once has been planted in the soil of one’s soul, is indeed just such life-sustaining food, even if the rest of what’s taught the jackass is of no great consequence in itself.
A bunch of jackasses
* * *
All of us are jackasses to one extent or another, and such things as our current pandemic sometimes serve as axe-handles to get our attention. They can reduce us to silence, breaking us loose from the constant chatter with which we entertain ourselves and one another by exchanging our “opinions” — those asinine “value-judgments” that Nietzsche tries to whack us out of with the dictum above. If reading Nietzsche’s line manages to get our attention, we can give thanks that it managed finally to slap us into silence, so that we are able at last just to listen.
That’s what it is to be truly attentive: it’s to be reduced to profound silence, wherein at last we are given over to doing no more than listening—or, to use an older word that says the same thing, hearkening. We can only hearken insofar as we are reduced to silence in the face of all our clattering impulses, opinions, wishes, whims, and judgments, especially judgments of the value of things, whether those things be larks, leeches, or life itself.
When we so hearken, we become at last able to hear whatever may voice itself in such silence, the very silence broken by the crack of the axe-handle striking us between the eyes. So stuck wide open and attentive, we can finally hear what beckons us, calling to us so loudly in the silence that we have no real choice left but to heed that call. We finally do willingly what we have all along been called to do, pursuing our genuine human vocation — which in its original sense just means “calling.”
When struck sufficiently suddenly with full force by a big enough axe handle, even the biggest jackasses among us are finally brought to hearken, hear, and heed the call to become true human beings.
May we all be so hammered.
Yet another jackass