“Islamic philosophy shared the ancient view that man is a special kind of being; that his ability to reason—his power to know himself and the whole—is the activity that marks him as different from other animals; and that reasoning is therefore the ultimate purpose of his existence. It regarded this difference between man and other living beings as a radical one—as radical as, if not more radical than, the difference between inanimate and animate beings, the soulless and the souled.” (Source: Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, page 16.)
“[T]here is a greater distance between human and human than between human and beast.” (Source: Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, page 281.)
“[T]his kind of man that he [Zarathustra] conceives [i.e., the Superman], conceives reality as it is: it is strong enough for that—, it is not estranged from it, not engrossed in something different from it, it is reality itself, it contains even all its frighteningness and questionableness, only with that can man have greatness…” (Source: Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny”, section 5; my translation.)
“This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” (Source: Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1067; Walter Kaufmann’s translation.)
“[A] man is the not yet fixed, not yet established beast (aph. 62): man becomes natural by acquiring his final, fixed character. For the nature of a being is its end, its completed state, its peak (Aristotle, Politics 1252b 32-34). ‘I too speak of “return to nature,” although it is properly not a going back but an ascent—up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness . . .’ (Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an untimely man” nr. 48). Man reaches his peak through and in the philosopher of the future as the truly complementary man in whom not only man but the rest of existence is justified (aph. 207). He is the first man who consciously creates values on the basis of the understanding of the will to power as the fundamental phenomenon. His action constitutes the highest form of the most spiritual will to power and therewith the highest form of the will to power.” (Source: Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”.)
“A Nietzschean history of philosophy recovers in Plato what is fundamental to all the greatest philosophers, what ultimately moves or motivates them. Most fundamental are two passions or loves. Philosophy is the passion to understand the whole rationally, the love of wisdom that is, Socrates indicated in the Symposium, the highest eros of a whole that can be understood as eros and nothing besides. Political philosophy, the acts of communication and legislation undertaken on behalf of that primary passion, is driven by love of the human, philanthropy[. …] Philanthropy, a now common word, has an uncommon sense in the philosophers, for it denotes action on behalf of the human in its highest reach, the reach for understanding. A Nietzschean history of political philosophy studies the actions undertaken by the greatest thinkers to further the human through the advancement of philosophy.” (Source: Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic, pp. 13-14.)
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