One of my proudest moments was when I got into 2 PhD programs in Continental Philosophy about 25 years ago, but decided not to go.  There are many reasons (the job market was bleak), but I think some of it had to do with one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms I mentioned last time.

Nietzsche’s aphorism 399 from Assorted Opinions and Maxims (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche, 1879) teaches a practical lesson about human finitude, intellectual maturity, and the limits of restless seeking.

Here is the text (a standard modern rendering):

399. Being Satisfied

We show that we have attained maturity of understanding when we no longer go where rare flowers lurk under the thorniest hedges of knowledge, but are satisfied with gardens, forests, meadows, and ploughlands, remembering that life is too short for the rare and uncommon.

Core teaching about the human condition:

The aphorism highlights a fundamental tension in human nature: the drive toward the exceptional, rare, and difficult versus the reality of limited time and energy.

Immature seeking vs. mature contentment: The “rare flowers… under the thorniest hedges of knowledge” represent the human temptation to pursue the exotic, profound, obscure, or extraordinarily difficult for its own sake—whether out of curiosity, ambition, vanity, or the romantic idealization of the exceptional. Youthful or restless minds treat knowledge-seeking as an endless adventure into the extreme. Maturity of understanding (Reife des Verstandes) consists in recognizing that this pursuit is often disproportionate to life’s brevity.

Finitude as a defining fact: Nietzsche underscores a basic fact of the human condition and our being-toward-death—life is short. Because time is limited, one cannot (and should not) exhaust oneself chasing every rare or extraordinary insight. The ordinary domains of knowledge and experience (“gardens, forests, meadows, and ploughlands”) are not second-rate; they are sufficient and more proportional to human existence.

Wisdom as measured satisfaction: True intellectual and existential maturity involves a form of self-limitation and contentment (Sich genügen lassen). This is not a call to laziness or anti-intellectualism, but a recognition that overvaluing rarity can lead to frustration, wasted effort, or a kind of spiritual restlessness that never settles. Humans are prone to dissatisfaction with the accessible and common; maturity corrects this by affirming that the everyday can be enough.

In the broader context of Nietzsche’s middle-period writings, this fits his critique of romantic excess, metaphysical overreaching, and the free spirit’s need for psychological economy. While Nietzsche elsewhere celebrates bold experimentation and the overcoming of limits, here he stresses a complementary virtue: the ability to stop, to accept sufficiency, and to live within the constraints of a finite life rather than treating knowledge or experience as an infinite, thorny quest for the rare. In short, the aphorism portrays the human condition as one marked by restless striving that must eventually yield to realistic self-limitation if understanding is to mature.

It seems akin to the wealthy who relentlessly pursue rare and uncommon treasures to amass, just in the case of intellectuals pursuing the next “fundamental discovery” that is soon forgotten and replaced with a new quest.

The analogy is apt and sharpens the force of the aphorism.

Nietzsche is diagnosing a characteristically human restlessness: the compulsion to chase what is scarce, difficult, and prestigious precisely because it is scarce, difficult, and prestigious. For the wealthy collector, the rare treasure functions as a marker of distinction and a temporary satiation of an appetite that quickly regenerates; the object itself is almost secondary to the pursuit and the status it confers. For certain intellectuals, the “fundamental discovery” plays the same role—an apparent breakthrough that promises to redefine the field, only to be absorbed, revised, or displaced by the next one. In both cases the underlying psychology is similar: an inability or refusal to be content with what is already ample and accessible, driven by the allure of the exceptional.

The aphorism suggests that this pattern reveals a lack of intellectual (and existential) maturity. The “thorniest hedges” are not merely hard to reach; they are disproportionately costly relative to the shortness of life. Chasing them becomes a kind of refined dissatisfaction—an elevated form of the same acquisitive drive that animates the collector of rarities. Maturity, on Nietzsche’s account here, consists in recognizing that the ordinary domains of knowledge (the gardens, meadows, and fields) already contain more than enough that is true, useful, and life-enhancing, and that the endless pursuit of the rare often substitutes the thrill of the hunt for genuine understanding or wisdom.

There is a quiet irony in the comparison as well. Both the collector and the intellectual who lives for the next paradigm-shifting insight risk turning their activity into a form of conspicuous consumption of the extraordinary. What looks like high-minded dedication can mask the same inability to say “enough.” Nietzsche is not counseling mediocrity or the abandonment of inquiry; he is pointing to a form of self-knowledge that knows when further pursuit of the exceptional has become a distraction from living and thinking well within human limits.

I once asked a professor why she wrote her book on Husserl when it would never be in anyone’s personal library and university libraries throw out books to make room for new ones.  It’s a humbling thought.

The professor’s book on Husserl, like most specialized scholarship, will almost certainly have a short practical afterlife: a few citations while the conversation is still warm, a place on the shelves of research libraries for a while, and then gradual displacement as newer work takes its room. Personal libraries rarely keep such volumes unless the owner has a particular attachment. In that sense the book is one of those “rare flowers” that cost considerable labor to reach and yet do not endure in the ordinary spaces of life.

My question to her exposes the same tension Nietzsche’s aphorism names. There is a persistent human (and academic) impulse to produce something that feels distinctive, foundational, or lasting — the next careful contribution that might matter. Yet the material conditions of knowledge (shelf space, attention, shifting fashions, the sheer volume of publication) make permanence rare. Recognizing this can be sobering: much of the effort that feels urgent and high-stakes is, measured against time and ordinary use, closer to the temporary than we like to admit.

At the same time, the value of the work need not rest entirely on its survival in libraries. For many scholars the writing is also a way of thinking something through carefully, of clarifying their own understanding, of participating in an ongoing conversation, or of leaving a temporary but usable path for the next few people who need it. The book may not become a permanent resident of anyone’s shelves, yet the process of writing it, and the brief usefulness it has, can still be real. Maturity of understanding, in the spirit of the aphorism, might consist less in refusing to write such books than in doing the work without requiring it to be rare or everlasting in order to count.  And E-Books these days escape the shelf-life problem.

The thought I raised with the professor is useful precisely because it undercuts the quieter forms of vanity that can attach to scholarship. It asks whether the pursuit is still worth the cost once the illusion of lasting significance is set aside — and that is a question worth keeping open.

On this issue and “Being satisfied, I’m reminded of the adventurer Odysseus stuck on the Island of Calypso tempted by all the rare and uncommon things of godhood but all he wants is to return to his home and wife.  Counterposed to the unhomely, to restlessness, dwelling is to be at peace.  Heidegger says “in what does the nature of dwelling consist? … The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace (Poetry, Language, Thought, BDT, 148-9).” Said otherwise, the unhomeliness of man consists precisely in his lack of ability to remain at home, “The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell (PLT, BDT, 161).”

The parallel we draw is rich and illuminating.

Odysseus on Calypso’s island is a powerful image of the choice Nietzsche’s aphorism describes. Calypso offers him the rarest of rarities: immortality, god-like ease, endless time, and a divine companion. Everything uncommon and extraordinary is placed before him. Yet what he wants is the ordinary finite life — his home, his wife, his mortal place. He chooses the “garden, forest, meadow, and field” over the thorny hedge that leads to the rarest flower of all. The longing for home is stronger than the temptation of the exceptional. In that moment he embodies a kind of maturity of understanding: life (even a limited, human life) is preferred to an endless, unhomely elevation beyond the human.

Heidegger’s reflections on dwelling deepen the same contrast. When he traces bauen back through wuon and wunian to the sense of remaining in peace, he is pointing to a fundamental human capacity that is always at risk. Dwelling is not merely occupying a house; it is the ability to be brought to peace, to stay, to let the ordinary and near be enough. The “real dwelling plight,” as he puts it, is that mortals continually lose this capacity and must learn it again. Unhomeliness (Unheimlichkeit) is not an occasional mood but a structural possibility of human existence: the tendency to be always elsewhere, always searching, never at rest in what is given.

Placed beside Nietzsche’s aphorism, these two images — Odysseus refusing Calypso, and Heidegger’s account of the need to learn to dwell — illuminate each other. Nietzsche speaks psychologically and practically: the mature mind stops chasing rare knowledge because life is short. Heidegger speaks more ontologically: the human being is the being who must learn to remain, to be at peace in the near, because its very essence includes a tendency toward restlessness and displacement. Both diagnose a form of dissatisfaction with the ordinary that drives the endless pursuit of the uncommon. Both suggest that a deeper satisfaction lies in the capacity to stay, to accept limits, and to find peace in what is already at hand. Maturity — whether of understanding (Nietzsche) or of dwelling (Heidegger) — involves learning, again and again, how to stay.