The superman is the man who passes over, away from man as he is so far, but away whereto? Man so far is the last man. But if this manner of living being, "man," in distinction from other living beings on earth, plants and animals, is endowed with "rationality"; and if ratio, the power to perceive and reckon with things, is at bottom a way of forming ideas; then the particular manner of the last must consist in a particular manner of forming ideas. Nietzsche calls it blinking, without relating blinking explicitly to the nature of representing or idea-forming, without inquiring into the essential sphere, and above all the essential origin, of representational ideas. But we must nonetheless give its full weight to the term Nietzsche uses for this kind of ideation, namely, blinking, according to the context in which it appears. We must not take it to be the same thing as the merely superficial and incidental wink by which we signal to each other on special occasions that in fact we are no longer taking seriously what is being said and proposed, and what goes on in general. This kind of winking can spread only because all forming of ideas is itself a kind of blinking. Ideas formed in this way present and propose of everything only the glitter, only the appearance of surfaces and foreground facets. Only what is so proposed
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