Nietzschean Lectio Divina: On Finding the Fundamental Law of the Authentic Self

"But how can we find ourselves again? How can the human being get to know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and if the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: 'This is really you, this is no longer outer shell.' Besides, it is an agonizing, dangerous undertaking to dig down into yourself in this way, to force your way by the shortest route down the shaft of your own being. How easy it is to do damage to yourself that no doctor can heal. And moreover, why should it be necessary, since everything--our friendships and enmities, our look and our handshake, our memory and what we forget, our books and our handwriting--bears witness to our being. But there is only one way in which this crucial inquiry can be carried out. Let the young soul look back on its life with the question: What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making it happy? Place this series of revered objects before you, and perhaps their nature and their sequence will reveal to you a law, the fundamental law of your authentic self. Compare these objects, observe how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures the others, how they form a stepladder on which until now you have climbed up to yourself, for your true being does not lie deeply hidden within you, but rather immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your ego. Your true educators and cultivators reveal to you the true primordial sense and basic stuff of your being, something that is thoroughly incapable of being educated and cultivated, but something that in any event is bound, paralyzed, and difficult to gain access to. Your educators can be nothing other than your liberators...Certainly, there are other ways of finding oneself, of coming to oneself out of the stupor in which we usually float as in a dark cloud, but I know of no better way than to reflect on one's own educators and cultivators."

--Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer As Educator," Unfashionable Observations, trans. by Richard T. Gray, Stanford University Press (1995), 174-175.