How many rules should we obey on a daily basis?
Hundreds; Maybe thousands.
They are necessary to live together, but which ones do we impose ourselves?
Nietzsche has a couple of things to say about it:
We can rest assured that this philosopher had a poster of Schopenhauer in his room, much like having one of Ozzy Osbourne.
Of course, he studied in depth that “Will and Representation”, that the famous pessimist wrote; The duality of our world.
Then he noticed a pattern:
Plato spoke of a ‘real’ world (which we could only grasp with our intellect) and an ‘apparent’ world, which we perceived with our senses.
For Kant, the ‘Real’ world exists, but we cannot imagine it, not even perceive it. We have to settle for the one we live with.
Was it a conspiracy?
A lot of philosophers talked about two worlds.
Even Christianity speaks of “this world” and “the world after death”, stating that the other is perfect and eternal; This is just an anteroom.
Then Nietzsche … let’s say he got mad at it.
To affirm continuously that what we perceive, what we experience, what we live is not ‘real’ or ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’, could only mean that our life was only a shadow.
If so, we were denying life itself.
How was it possible that we had acted like this?
Nietzsche decided to kick the table and through his book “Thus spoke Zarathustra”, propose a complete reformulation of our values.
Imagine: completely rethinking our concepts of purpose, good and evil, and the meaning of life.
There’s a nice example: Self-consciousness.
A scabrous issue, because we have always been taught that ‘ridicule’ will not benefit us at all.
The problem is that there is no manual that defines the types and categories of ridicule that justify triggering our self-consciousness.
We are told that “Making a fool of yourself is bad.”
Then, it’s your turn to speak before 100 people.
Guess what! You are afraid to make a fool of yourself.
That idea drills fiercely into your unconscious.
In the end, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That’s why you must kill your self-consciousness.
Nietzsche ‘unified the worlds’ of philosophy, to glorify life itself.
Self-consciousness is one of many limitations that we impose, thinking that ‘it is the right thing to do’.
We have plenty of chains like that.
It’s our duty to destroy them with joy.
It’s our life.
This exercise isn’t easy: You should spend 10 minutes every day, thinking about whether the limitations that your ‘circumstances’ impose on you are, in fact, ‘real’ …
… or if you have accepted them because ‘the world is like this’ or ‘that’s the way it is’.
Start by downloading my free Body Language tips ebook here:
Much Love and Bliss,
Jesús Enrique Rosas
The Body Language Guy.
