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

Technician Theoretician
Euler Riemann
In linguistics: Pott Humboldt
(Bopp)
In physics: Faraday Maxwell
both in high measure: Helmholtz and Darwin among others.
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Age is death, youth is life. The greater a person is, the less he ages, and the less
his will gets weaker with age.
However, there is no one besides Jesus Christ who would not have wanted less in
his old age than in his youth. That is shown in the musically weak Parsifal (which is
intellectually a fresher, more powerful conception than its musical execution suggests;
even though its themes, the grave and flower motifs, but also the Holy Communion
and Parsifal motifs in the variation of Act III, belong among the greatest). It is shown
above all by Ibsen, whose will has two culminating points, a highest, Peer Gynt, a
lower, Rosmersholm, but who otherwise moved in a steadily descending line; it is also
shown by Beethoven, whose art attained its greatest height in the Appassionata and
especially in the “Waldsteinsonate” (third movement, where it came near almost to
God), but then however diminished; the “Ninth” is not Beethoven’s greatest work.
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The criminal (as slave) often seeks a person of great perfection (and here, as a
judge of people’s imperfection, is much harsher than a good man), because he so
wants to obtain belief from outside (not through an inner change of mind). If he
believes he has found such a person, he gives himself up to him in the most complete
slavery; and searches obtrusively for people to whom he could serve as a slave. He
also wants to live as a slave so as never to be alone.
If a third person then enters the circle, the criminal is perplexed; for clearly one
cannot be a servant to two masters at the same time, but the criminal is a servant to
every person (whether free or unfree) by whom he is with.
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