stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

to, the hour we watch over and the element that we frequent. There is nothing more false than the
idea of ‘founts’ of truth. We only find truths where they are, at their time and in their element.
Every truth is truth of an element, of a time and a place” (NP 110). In other words, the active,
affirmative type has no room for the truth that inspires knowledge in opposition to life. “A new
image of thought means primarily that truth is not the element of thought” (NP 104). Instead, the
active, affirmative truth creates his own truth, his own knowledge, his own thought.
The active, affirmative type is not inspired by the Copernican Revolution. The active,
affirmative type does not create what is his own in opposition to life. “Clearly thought cannot
think by itself, any more than it can find truth by itself” (NP 104). Nor is it the case that life
creates what is his own. “Thinking is never the natural exercise of a faculty. Thought never
thinks alone and by itself; moreover it is never simply disturbed by forces which remain external
to it” (NP 108). Instead, the active, affirmative type is inspired by the Copernican Counter-
Revolution. Thought is itself life. The active, affirmative type creates his own thought in the
sense that it affirms life as its own difference, the differential of thought which makes it become.
“Thinking, like activity, is always a second power of thought, not the natural exercise of a
faculty, but an extraordinary even in thought itself, for thought itself. Thinking is the n-th power
of thought. It is still necessary for it to become ‘light,’ ‘affirmative,’ ‘dancing.’ But it will never
attain this power if forces do not do violence to it. Violence must be done to it as thought, a
power, the force of thinking, must throw it into a becoming-active” (NP 108). In this sense,
thought is not given before we live. It has not fallen out of the sky. Instead, thought is generated
within life itself. Here on earth. The active, affirmative thought is apprenticeship, learning. “In
Nietzsche, ‘we the seekers after knowledge or truth’ = ‘we the inventors of new possibilities of
life’” (NP 103).
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