“Philosophers are prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the corporeal, the senses, fate and bondage, the aimless.”

—Will to Power

This sentence struck me because in my relativist phase I had a prejudice for a lot of these things (esp. “appearance, change, the aimless,” I think, not that I would have used those words), and much of my freshman year involved re-assessing and rejecting that prejudice. This also, of course, coincided with my realization that philosophy is not just stupid word games, but rather a life-changing personal project. Key reading: Paradise Lost; Spenser’s Mutabilitie poems.