Mediocre / Exceptional



Exceptional                          -                      Mediocre
Representation                     -                      Will
Earthly                                 -                       Transcendent
Desires                                 -                       No desires
Individual                             -                      Universal




Beneath our individual characters there is a universal character - the 'same will in all' as Schopenhauer puts it. This common character is always speaking, but not often heard. If we are able to quiet our will - our various earthly desires - then we are more able to hear its voice.




[...] so long as the knowledge is only that which is involved in the principium individuationis, and which positively follows the principle of sufficient reason, the power of the motives is irresistible.

But when the principium individuationis is seen through, when the Ideas, and indeed the inner nature of the thing-in-itself, are immediately recognized as the same will in all, and the result of this knowledge is a universal quieter of willing, then the individual motives become ineffective, because the kind of knowledge that corresponds to them is obscured and pushed into the background by knowledge of quite a different kind.

[...] the character can never partially change, but must, with the consistency of a law of nature, realize in the particular individual the will whose phenomena it is in general and as a whole. But this whole, the character itself, can be entirely eliminated by the above mentioned change of knowledge.

It is this elimination or suppression at which Asmus marvels, as said above, and which he describes as the "catholic, transcendental change." It is also that which in the Christian Church is very appropriately called new birth or regeneration, and the knowledge from which it springs, the effect of divine grace.

Therefore, it is not a question of change, but of an entire suppression of the character;

and so it happens that, however different the characters that arrived at that suppression were before it, they nevertheless show after it a great similarity in their mode of conduct, although each speaks very differently according to his concepts and dogmas.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.403




[Nietzsche] attacks Christian morality precisely because of its "leveling" effect, its successful effort to prolong the life of a society composed of mediocrities:

"We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian - there is no doubt that human beings are getting 'better' all the time."

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 212



Related posts:-
Growing Down
The Mature Individual
Small Mind/Large Mind 
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