explosivecombat | NIETZSCHE; DEAD PHILOSOPHERS' INBOX

...

'But so it goes'.

All that, and that's all you have to say?

What else would you have me say?

I don't understand how, in light of all that, you can be so content to take your cues from someone else's initiative while you're here. Accepting what happened, maybe, because there's no sense in doing anything else when there's no way of altering those circumstances, but...

You left, and now you know exactly what's waiting for you if you should ever leave again, but for the duration you're here with literally an entire world of opportunities available to you. We spoke once of evolution, and you thought you'd finished yours; I don't understand how you could, given those circumstances — not when you're at a point where every day is so precious that to stagnate almost seems an insult. You were the one who told me the days we spend here aren't meaningless, regardless of what we're going back to. I don't...

...

I'm articulating myself badly. Forgive me, and take it as simply a facet of being upset.

I certainly hope you aren't upset on my behalf; I'm a horrible person to waste the sentiment on.

I suppose the question I have to ask you now, however, is why you consider living as I choose to live to be meaningless or otherwise squandering the opportunity that I've been given. Why you consider such a thing to be stagnation.

I don't understand. Perfection is a motivation, and it gives you a reason to strive. I don't understand why the context hasn't changed with your environment. Why does a soldier without a war care how perfect a weapon he is? Why are you still...attached to that, if there's no reason for it here and no opportunity for you to return to it later? You've been a scholar, soldier, and teacher, so you can't tell me the way you live now is all there is to you. What makes you so determined to stay the way you are, in light of the knowledge that you're going to have to anyway once you leave this world already?

You might have to resign yourself to revisiting this topic with me again and again until I've truly grasped it. I hope that's not a problem.

It isn't a problem, no; you aren't the first person to be unable to understand it. As it stands, the most I can tell you is that I can think of a few reasons why a soldier without a war would care how perfect a weapon he is.

The first is that being a weapon is a vital part of his identity - that no matter how many years he's physically been off the battlefield, he never really left the battlefield entirely. That's one possibility.

Another is that he won't be a soldier without a war for very long, and he intends to be prepared.

And how could he possibly know he won't be without a war for very long?

Come now. You're better than that.

You wouldn't rather teach me than start a war?

That is an honest question, by the way.

When my superior officer declares war - because it isn't a question of "if" - then I'll go to war. That's simply how things are. That could be three days from now; it could be three years from now. I have no way to know.

However, what I'm willing to do professionally has nothing to do with my personal thoughts regarding you, or anyone else for that matter. Should you be willing to learn until that time comes, I'll teach you.

I have one last question for you, then, before I leave things alone. A simple yes or no is fine, if you'd rather not give details. I'm just curious, given the nature of something we've discussed about this topic before.

If I stopped your superior officer, would that also stop you, the way that stopping a gunman would by extension stop the gun? I'm curious where you'd be left in the aftermath, if rather than addressing you, someone were to cut off the hand that wields you, instead.

Edited 2013-05-27 07:01 (UTC)

In the event that my superior officer is stopped and I've received no direct orders regarding what should happen next, I would proceed to act in my own self-interest. Obviously, what that entails depends heavily on the situation.

I'm glad to hear you have a self-interest. The way you talk, sometimes it seems as though that isn't the case.

Again, what I do professionally and what I think as an individual are often completely separate affairs; most of our conversations regarding my self-interest are centered around the professional aspect of things.

I suppose that's why I don't understand why you think I'm doing nothing with myself here, outside of following around my superior officer like some sort of mindless automaton. I've made progress in ways that I don't discuss with others very often; just because I don't choose to broadcast my thoughts on the matter to everyone I speak to doesn't mean those thoughts don't exist. I suppose my advancements here have been more pesonal than anything; my significant other is perhaps more aware of them than anyone.

You can't fault me for basing my inferences about you on the things I know about you, most of which deals with your professional life. Or with having my difficulties at keeping the two as separate as you appear to. It's not that I don't appreciate the nature of maintaining those two roles — far from it, actually — but that I think you tend to keep them more discrete than I would've expected you to.

Dare I ask what you expected...?

I expected you to be like me.

Now I'm curious.

Part of what enabled my significant other to accept my double lives was the fact that I was the same person in both of them. I had my reasons for keeping them separate, but I didn't really change from one to the other, save for perhaps what color hat I was wearing at the time.

I couldn't make strides in my personal life without them affecting my professional one; by corollary, if I were determined to keep my professional life unchanging and constant, then I would be fixing my development as an individual, as well. From what you've just said, that's not the same for you.

It isn't.

If I were to take a guess and say that you've never intentionally killed another human being, would I be correct? I promise it's relevant to the discussion; I'm not asking for the sake of shock value or trying to overassert myself.

I haven't. That's an answer I hope never changes.

Then I hope you'll also allow the assumption that whatever your professional life consists of and what mine consists of are on two separate planes entirely. There's no way to word "I murder people for a living" nicely, but when it comes down to it, that's what I've always done; one can argue that circumstances are different for a soldier on an active battlefield, perhaps, because war is one of the few exceptions humans tend to make for when killing is acceptable, but the point remains that I wouldn't have become a soldier in the first place if I weren't prepared to kill. My life has always centered around taking the lives of others. Always.

When one lives as I do, then the problem isn't that you aren't the same in your personal and professional lives - the problem comes when you are.

There's a fine distinction between what you do and what you are. The former certainly affects the latter, but it's the latter that stays constant between lives. Regardless of whether or not you choose to spend your leisure time murdering people, you don't get to stop being a murderer just because you've switched from one life to the other.

That's the part I have trouble reconciling — how you can develop in only half of your existence, while leaving the other half constant. And I'm well aware that it's a special case in particular for soldiers, but I'd expect a soldier whose personal and professional lives conflict that way to exhibit signs of guilt and remorse, which isn't something I've seen out of you.

You haven't seen it because it isn't there. I don't need to be told that that's unnatural or inhuman or what have you - whatever one's reaction might be to that sort of thing, I've heard it many, many times before, and I accepted that part of my existence long ago. If anything, it's convenient, given what it is that I do.

And I think that's why you can't reconcile the situation I'm explaining to you - you're expecting me to react in a way that a human being would. I don't, and I never have, but it's very important for me to be able to live among others as though I do.

Does that make more sense?

I wonder if I should feel triumphant that my riddle wasn't wrong.

Did your significant other know?

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