Tag: Cheerfulness

• June 5, 2014

  Testing whether someone is cheerfully ready to inquire with me

  When I want to determine whether someone is cheerfully ready to inquire with me, I ask him five questions. Each question is to be assented to wholeheartedly. 1.) Can you let yourself be led? This question helps to rule out the skeptic, the insincere person, and the coward. How so? The skeptic wants to begin…
• June 3, 2014

  Cheerfulness, tightrope walking, and an amorous rendezvous

  To draw the character of the cheerfully ready person more vividly, I return to Nietzsche’s description of the tightrope walker and the ‘worthy gentleman.’ In one aphorism, Nietzsche distinguishes between non-tightrope walking and tightrope walking situations: ‘To get into only those situations in which illusory virtues are of no use, but in which, like the tightrope-walker…