>>7285111>>7287118you both are wrong.
Thus the beast lives unhistorically, for it gets up in the present like a number
without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a part, hides
nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. Thus a
beast can be nothing other than honest. By contrast, the human being resists the
large and ever increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows
him over. It makes his way difficult, like an invisible and dark burden which he
can for appearances' sake even deny, and which he is only too happy to deny in
his interactions with his peers, in order to awaken their envy. Thus, it moves
him, as if he remembered a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something
more closely familiar, the child, which does not yet have a past to deny and
plays in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and the future.
Nonetheless this game must be upset for the child. He will be summoned all
too soon out of his forgetfulness. For he learns to understand the expression “It
was,” that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over
human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically is—a never
completed past tense. If death finally brings the longed for forgetting, it
nevertheless thereby destroys present existence and thus impresses its seal on
the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted living in the past
[Gewesensein], something which exists for the purpose of self-denial, selfdestruction,
and self-contradiction.
from his 2nd untimely meditation. while nietzsche didn't SUCCUMB to nihilism, he was definitely a nihilist.
