Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

The fixed stars signify the angel in man. That is why man orients himself by them;
and that is why women have no appreciation for the starry sky; because they have no
sense of the angel in man.
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Does Nature also have a history? Is time also arranged for the events of Nature as
a whole (the inorganic included)? Insofar as that were the case, there would be truth in
the theory of evolution (paleontology). Is there an evolution of storms, of weather
(perhaps corresponding to human history and symbolic of it?)?
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The strange thing about time is that despite eternal change everything in it remains
the same (“everything has happened before”, “nothing new under the sun”). Boredom
= conformity to law = causality. Newness = freedom. The overcoming of time leads to
the idea of the “Eternal Youth” (Wagner). Nature is eternally young. For here indeed
nothing changes, and yet everything is always new. People who have little that
transcends time, like the Jews, always feel world-weary and bored, because in time
everything remains the same; Siegfried, on the other hand, is “eternally young”.
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The present is as spaceless as it is timeless; and the goal of humanity can be
defined as mere-prescence, as omnipresence (one usually understands omnipresence
only as freedom from space, instead of understanding it as also including the
absorption of past and future, of everything unconscious in the conscious present).
The narrowness of consciousness should contain the universe: only then is man
“eternally young” and perfected.
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Pleasure is to be defined even more generally then than the feeling of creation. It
can only be defined unequivocally as the feeling of life, as becoming conscious of
existence; pain as the feeling of some kind of death (thus is sickness painful).
We can thus note this much against eudaemonism, that the goal of the striving
must not be mistaken for the feeling that arises at the goal (which I can know from
experience). When I strive for the higher life, I strive for something whose
accompanying phenomenon is higher pleasure, but not for pleasure itself. Likewise,
man longs for woman, and woman for man, not directly for pleasure.
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