According to best-selling author and academic Steve Taylor - a man who prides himself on having a Ph.D in transpersonal psychology and the fact that for the last four years he's been included in a list of the world's most spiritually influential living people - we should allow ourselves to be soft in order to:
(i) avoid conflict with others or creating unnecessary friction -
(ii) make ourselves invulnerable "so that disappointments and insults don't bruise" and life is as painless as possible -
(iii) become a good liberal able to "pass through the world" without damaging anything.
Amusingly, this is a man who - I'm told - once made a pilgrimage to Nietzsche's birthplace!
But Nietzsche didn't tell his readers to calm down and he sneered at philosophies about which the best that can be said is that they don't hurt anyone. Indeed, for Nietzsche, it is modern man's excessive sensitivity and decadence that lies at the heart of so many of the problems facing us today. Zarathustra famously speaks of the diamond who asks of the charcoal:
"Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your heart? Why is there so little fate in your look?"
He insists that creators are of necessity hard; that they impose and impress themselves upon others and upon life with cruelty and innocence. And he laughs at the weaklings who think themselves good merely because their claws are blunt ...
Notes
Readers interested in Dr Taylor and his work should visit: stevenmtaylor.com
His poem, Be Soft (for Russel Williams), Dec. 2015, can be found directly by clicking here.
Readers interested in Nietzsche's thought can consult the digital critical edition of his complete works and letters based on the G. Colli and M. Montinari text, ed. by Paolo D’Iorio: click here.
The above painting of Nietzsche, by Angela Vera Concha (2010), can be found here along with other interesting stuff.
