"Beehives of Our Knowedge"

Never fall asleep while reading Nietzche; not only will you have the strangest dreams of your life, but you'll also wake up with highlighter on your arm and face. This was my state this morning...

I was reading Genealogy of Morals last night (for the third time... I hated it the first time I read it, but it's really grown on me... Nietzche very quickly went from being my most hated philosopher to one of my favorites.. next to Kant, of course!) and the very first paragraph of the prologue jumped out at me in a way it's never done before. Maybe I've just never paid attention to the prologue before (it is, afterall, just the prologue.. who really looks at those anyway??) but this time through, this little gem caught my eye:


We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said that "Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also." Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home." As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience"—which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been "missing the point."
Our hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself "What exactly did that clock strike?"—so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed "What have we really just experienced? And more: "Who are we really?" Then, as I've mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man is furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not "knowledgeable people."

And that about sums it up! No seriously, it does... It's like dear old Friedrich was in my head, studying my current feelings of my 'self', when he wrote that. I'm going to get into the warm shower and ruminate over this for a while, and I'll be back some other time to expand on this. Something else I'd like to point out is that the translation I've posted is different than the one I've been reading. Not sure if the differences are important though.