Nietzsche

July 11, 2024 at 2:17 PM

I read how exactly a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly. Inside its body the caterpillar houses special organs called “discs” from which the parts of the new butterfly will develop. The caterpillar creates a chrysalis for itself, and in a state of deep slumber, its inner organs are entirely liquified save for these enduring discs that will become the new creature’s wings.

This is what reading Nietzsche is like. His pessimism is not an end but a means. A transformation. Disgusted with the systems of power that call themselves “the world,” fed up with all the lies and illusions of their institutions and propaganda, lies of progress, infinite economic growth, and whatnot, and acknowledging world history for the endless record of horror it represents, the individual retreats into a chrysalis of solitude. Despair and nausea at the cruelty of the world are the acids that burn everything she thought she knew, which is to say, her former ideology, an ideology that was not hers but implanted in her. What survives this terrible inner burning of the truth about the sorry state of affairs is her essence, the core of herself, and those discs are capable of a golden metamorphosis. Pessimism does away with the caterpillar and releases the butterfly. While the rest of the insects are below her, feeding on the tiny grasslands Power grows for them, the butterfly, with pure lightness, unburdened and unbound rises towards the sun, rises higher still to drink the nectar of flowers. In the end the butterfly is responsible, through pollination, for the spread of flowers across the world, for the intermixing of their shapes and colors, for the development of new and unknown flowers. She is both beauty and its perpetuation.

Curiously I was reading butterflies retain memories from their lives as caterpillars. I wonder if the butterfly ever feels nostalgia for its childhood and former life as a worm. This would be a natural aspect of its newfound, dizzying freedom.