Friedrich Nietzsche's
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
PRELUDE TO A PHILOSOPHY
OF THE FUTURE
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale
___________
Preface
Supposing
truth to be a woman - what? is the suspicion not well founded that all
philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of
women? that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they
have hitherto been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and
improper means for winning a wench?
Certainly she has not let herself be won - and today every kind of
dogmatism stands sad and discouraged. If
it continued to stand at all! for
there are scoffers who assert it has fallen down, that dogmatism lies on the
floor, more, that dogmatism is at its last gasp. To speak seriously, there are good grounds
for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, the solemn air of finality it
has given itself notwithstanding, may nonetheless have been no more than a
noble childishness and tyronism; and the time is perhaps very close at hand
when it will be grasped in case after case what has been sufficient to
furnish the foundation-stone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers'
edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto been constructing - some popular
superstition or other from time immemorial (such as the soul superstition
which, as the subject-and-ego superstition, has not yet ceased to do mischief
even today), perhaps some play on words, a grammatical seduction, or an
audacious generalization on the basis of very narrow, very personal, very
human, all too human facts. Let us hope
that dogmatic philosophy was only a promise across millennia: as, in a still
earlier age, was astrology, in the service of which more labour, money,
ingenuity and patience has perhaps been expended than for any real science
hitherto - we owe to it and to its 'supra-terrestrial' claims the grand style
of architecture in Asia and Egypt. It
seems that, in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with
eternal demands, all great things have first to wander the earth as monstrous
and fear-inspiring grotesques: dogmatic philosophy, the doctrine of the Vedanta
in Asia and Platonism in Europe for example, was a grotesque of this kind. Let us not be ungrateful to it, even though
it certainly has to be admitted that the worst, most wearisomely protracted and
most dangerous of all errors hitherto has been a dogmatist's error, namely
Plato's invention of pure spirit and the good in itself. But now, when that has been overcome, when
Europe breathes again after the nightmare and can enjoy at any rate a healthier
- sleep, we whose task is wakefulness itself have inherited all the strength which has been
cultivated by the struggle against this error.
To be sure, to speak of spirit and the good as Plato did meant standing
truth on her head and denying perspective itself, the basic condition of
life; indeed, one may ask as a physician: 'how could such a malady attack this
loveliest product of antiquity, Plato? did the wicked Socrates corrupt him
after all? could Socrates have been a corrupter of youth after all? and have
deserved his hemlock?' - But the struggle against Plato, or, to express it more
plainly for 'the people' - has created in
Sils-Maria,
June
1885
________________
Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers
1
The Will to
truth, which is still going to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise; that
celebrated veracity of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with reverence:
what questions this will to truth has already set before us! What strange, wicked, questionable
questions! It is already a long story -
yet does it not seem as if it has only just begun? Is it any wonder we should at last grow
distrustful, lose our patience, turn impatiently away? That the sphinx should teach us too to ask
questions? Who really is it that
here questions us? What really is
it in us that wants 'the truth'? - We did indeed pause for a long time before
the question of the origin of this will - until finally we came to a complete
halt before an even more fundamental question.
We asked after the value of this will. Granted we want truth: why not rather
untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? - The problem of the value of
truth stepped before us - or was it we who stepped before this problem? Which of us is Oedipus here? Which of us sphinx? It is, it seems, a rendezvous of questions
and question-marks. - And, would you
believe it, it has finally almost come to seem to us that this problem has
never before been posed - that we have been the first to see it, to fix our
eyes on it, to hazard it? For
there is a hazard in it and perhaps there exists no greater hazard.
2
'How could
something originate in its antithesis?
Truth in error, for example? Or
will to truth in will to deception? Or
the unselfish act in self-interest? Or
the pure radiant gaze of the sage in covetousness? Such origination is impossible; he who dreams
of it is a fool, indeed worse than a fool; the things of the highest value must
have another origin of their own - they cannot be derivable from this
transitory, seductive, deceptive mean little world, from this confusion of
desire and illusion! In the womb of
being, rather, in the intransitory, in the hidden god, in the "thing in
itself" - that is where their cause must lie and nowhere else!' -
This mode of judgement constitutes the typical prejudice by which
metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this mode of evaluation stands in
the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this their
'faith' that they concern themselves with their 'knowledge', with something
that is at last solemnly baptized 'the truth'.
The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical
values. It has not occurred to even
the most cautious of them to pause and doubt here on the threshold, where
however it was most needful they should: even if they had vowed to
themselves 'de omnibus dubitandum'.
For it may be doubted firstly whether there exist any antitheses at all,
and secondly whether these popular evaluations and value-antitheses, on which
they metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground
valuations, merely provisional perspectives, perhaps moreover the perspectives
of a hole-and-corner, perhaps from below, as it were frog-perspectives, to
borrow an expression employed by painters.
With all the value that may adhere to the true, the genuine, the
selfless, it could be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for all
life might have to be ascribed to appearance, to the will to deception, to
selfishness and to appetite. It might
even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and
honoured things resides precisely in their being artfully related, knotted and
crocheted to these wicked, apparently antithetical things, perhaps even in
their being essentially identical with them.
Perhaps! - But who is willing to concern himself with such dangerous perhapses! For that we have to await the arrival of a
new species of philosopher, one which possesses tastes and inclinations
opposite to and different from those of its predecessors - philosophers of the
dangerous 'perhaps' in every sense. - And to speak in all seriousness: I see
such new philosophers arising.
3
Having kept
a close eye on philosophers and read between their lines for a sufficient
length of time, I tell myself: the greater part of conscious thinking must
still be counted among the instinctive activities, and this is so even in the
case of philosophical thinking; we have to learn differently here as we have
learned differently in regard to heredity and the 'innate'. Just as the act of being born plays no part
in the procedure and progress of heredity, so 'being conscious' is in no
decisive sense the opposite of the instinctive - most of a philosopher's
conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into definite channels by
his instincts. Behind all logic too and
its apparent autonomy there stand evaluations, in plainer terms physiological
demands for the preservation of a certain species of life. For example, that the definite shall be of
greater value than the indefinite, appearance of less value than 'truth': but
such valuations as these could, their regulatory importance for us notwithstanding,
be no more than foreground valuations, a certain species of niaiserie
which may be necessary precisely for the preservation of being such as us. Assuming, that is to say, that it is not
precisely man who is the 'measure of things' ...
4
The
falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement:
it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is
life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even
species-breeding; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest
judgements (to which synthetic judgements a priori belong) are the most
indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic,
without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the
unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the
world by means of numbers, mankind could not live - that to renounce false
judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life:
that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous
fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act
alone, beyond good and evil.
5
What makes
one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is not that one
again and again detects how innocent they are - how often and how easily they
fall into error and go astray, in short their childishness and childlikeness -
but that they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty
and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely
touched on. They pose as having
discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a
cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every
rank, who are more honest and more stupid than they - these speak of
'inspiration'): while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an
'inspiration', generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is
defended by them with reasons sought after the event - they are one and all
advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no
better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptize 'truths'
- and very far from possessing the courage of the conscience which
admits this fact to itself, very far from possessing the good taste of the
courage which publishes this fact, whether to warn a foe or a friend or out of
high spirits and in order to mock itself.
The tartuffery, as stiff as it is virtuous, of old Kant as he lures us
along the dialectical bypaths which lead, more correctly, mislead, to his
'categorical imperative' - this spectacle makes us smile, we who are fastidious
and find no little amusement in observing the subtle tricks of old moralists
and moral-preachers. Not to speak of
that hocus-pocus of mathematical form in which, as if in iron, Spinoza encased
and masked his philosophy - 'the love of his wisdom', to render that
word fairly and squarely - so as to strike terror into the heart of any
assailant who should dare to glance at that invincible maiden and Pallas Athene
- how much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick
recluse betrays!
6
It has
gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a
confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious
memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy
have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant
has grown. To explain how a
philosopher's most remote metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived
at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself first: what morality does this
(does he - ) aim at? I
accordingly do not believe a 'drive to knowledge' to be the father of
philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed
knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool.
But anyone who looks at the basic drives of mankind to see to what
extent they may in precisely this connection have come into play as inspirational
spirits (or demons and kobolds - ) will discover that they have all at some
time or other practised philosophy - and that each one of them would be only
too glad to present itself as the ultimate goal of existence and as the
legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive is tyrannical: and it is as such
that it tries to philosophize. - In the case of scholars, to be sure, in the
case of really scientific men, things may be different - 'better', if you will
- there may really exist something like a drive to knowledge there, some little
independent clockwork which, when wound up, works bravely on without any
of the scholar's other drives playing any essential part. The scholar's real 'interests' therefore
generally lie in quite another direction, perhaps in his family or in making
money or in politics; it is, indeed, almost a matter of indifference whether
his little machine is set up in this region of science or that, whether the
'promising' young worker makes himself into a good philologist or a specialist
in fungus or a chemist - he is not characterized by becoming this or
that. In the philosopher, on the
contrary, there is nothing whatever impersonal; and, above all, his morality
bears decided and decisive testimony to who he is - that is to say, to
the order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relative to one
another.
7
How
malicious philosophers can be! I know of
nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus allowed himself to make against
Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. The literal and foreground meaning of this
word is 'flatterers of Dionysus', that is to say, tyrants' hangers-on and lickspittles;
in addition, however, it is as much as to say 'they are all actors,
there is nothing genuine about them' (for Dionysiokolax was a popular
term for an actor). And the latter
meaning is really the piece of malice that Epicurus discharged at Plato: he was
annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scène of which Plato and
his pupils were masters - of which Epicurus was not a master! He, the old schoolteacher from
8
In every
philosophy there is a point at which the philosopher's 'conviction' appears on
the scene: or, to put it in the words of an ancient Mystery:
adventavit
asinus,
pulcher et
fortissimus.
9
You want to live
'according to nature'? O you noble
Stoics, what fraudulent words! Think of
a being such ass nature is, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond
measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful
and barren and uncertain; think of indifference itself as a power - how could
you live according to such indifference?
To live - is that not precisely wanting to be other than this
nature? Is living not valuating,
preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And even if your imperative 'live according
to nature' meant at bottom the same thing as 'live according to life' - how
could you not do that? Why make a
principle of what you yourselves are and must be? - The truth of it is,
however, quite different: while you rapturously pose as deriving the canon of
your law from nature, you want something quite the reverse of that, you strange
actors and self-deceivers! Your pride
wants to prescribe your morality, your ideal, to nature, yes to nature itself,
and incorporate them in it; you demand that nature should be nature 'according
to the Stoa' and would like to make all existence exist only after your own
image - as a tremendous external glorification and universalization of
Stoicism! All your love of truth
notwithstanding, you have compelled yourselves for so long and with such
persistence and hypnotic rigidity to view nature falsely, namely
Stoically, you are no longer capable of viewing it in any other way - and some
abysmal arrogance infects you at last with the Bedlamite hope that, because
you know how to tyrannize over yourselves - Stoicism is self-tyranny - nature
too can be tyrannized over: for is the Stoic not a piece of nature?...
But this is an old and never-ending story: what formerly happened with the
Stoics still happens today as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in
itself. It always creates the world in
its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive
itself, the most spiritual will to power, to 'creation of the world', to causa
prima.
10
The zeal and
subtlety, I might even say slyness, with which the problem 'of the real and
apparent world' is set upon all over Europe today makes one think hard and
prick up one's ears; and anyone who hears in the background only a 'will to
truth' and nothing more, certainly does not enjoy the best of hearing. In rare and isolated cases such a will to
truth, some extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician's ambition to
maintain a forlorn position, may actually play a part and finally prefer a
handful of 'certainty' to a whole cartful of beautiful possibilities; there may
even exist puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie down and die
on a sure nothing than on an uncertain something. But this is nihilism and the sign of a
despairing, mortally weary soul, however brave the bearing of such a virtue may
appear. In the case of stronger,
livelier thinkers who are still thirsty for life, however, it seems to be
different: when they take sides against appearance and speak even of
'perspective' with an arrogant disdain, when they rank the credibility of their
own body about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence which says 'the
earth stands still', and thus with apparent good humour let slip the firmest
possession (for what is believed in more firmly today than the body?) - who
knows whether they are not at bottom trying to win back something that was
formerly an even firmer possession, some part or other of the old domain
of the faith of former times, perhaps 'the immortal soul', perhaps 'the old
God', in short ideas by which one could live better, that is to say more
vigorously and joyfully, than by 'modern ideas'? There is distrust of these modern
ideas in this outlook, there is disbelief in all that has been constructed
yesterday and today; there is perhaps in addition a little boredom and mockery
which can no longer endure the bric-á-brac of concepts of the most various
origin such as so-called positivism brings to the market today; the disgust of
a more fastidious taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all
these reality-philosophasters in whom there is nothing new or genuine except
this motleyness. In this, it seems to
me, we ought to acknowledge that these sceptical anti-realists and
knowledge-microscopists of today are in the right: the instinct which makes the
recoil from modern reality stands unrefuted - what do we care about the
retrograde bypaths they choose! The
essential thing about them is not that they want to go 'back', but that
they want to - get away. A little
strength, soaring, courage, artistic power more, and they would want to
go up and away - and not back! -
11
It seems to
me that there is today an effort going on everywhere to distract attention from
the actual influence exercised on German philosophy by Kant and, in particular,
prudently to gloss over the value he set upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his
table of categories; with this table in his hand he said: 'This is the hardest
thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.' - But let us
understand this 'could be'! He was proud
of having discovered a new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic
judgements a priori. Granted he
deceived himself in this: the evolution and rapid burgeoning of German
philosophy nonetheless depended on this pride of his and of the eager rivalry
of the whole younger generation to discover, if possible, something of which to
be still prouder - and in any event 'new faculties'! - But let us stop and
reflect: it is time we did so. Kant
asked himself: how are synthetic judgements a priori possible? - and
what, really, did he answer? By means
of a faculty: but unfortunately not in a few words, but so circumspectly,
venerably, and with such an expenditure of German profundity and flourishes
that the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer was
overlooked. People even lost their heads
altogether on account of this new faculty, and the rejoicing reached its climax
when Kant went on further to discover a moral faculty in man - for at that time
the Germans were still moral and by no means practitioners of Realpolitik.
- The honeymoon time of German philosophy arrived; and the young theologians of
the College of Tübingen went straightway off into the bushes - all in search of
'faculties'. And what did they not find
- in that innocent, rich, still youthful era of the German spirit, to which the
malicious fairy, romanticism, piped and sang, in those days when one was not
yet able to distinguish between 'finding' and 'inventing'! They found above all a faculty for the
'supra-sensible': Schelling baptized it intellectual intuition, and therewith
satisfied the most heartfelt longings of his Germans, which longings were
fundamentally pious. One can do no
greater wrong to this whole high-spirited and enthusiastic movement, which was
really youthfulness however boldly it disguised itself in hoary and senile
concepts, than to take it seriously and, an even worse injustice, to treat it
with moral indignation; it is enough to say that one grew older - and the dream
disappeared. A time came when one rubbed
one's eyes: one is still rubbing them today.
One had been dreaming: and the first and foremost of the dreamers was -
old Kant. 'By means of a faculty' - he
had said, or at least meant. But is that
- an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of
the question? How does opium induce
sleep? 'By means of a faculty', namely
the virtus dormitiva - replies the doctor in Molière,
quia est in eo
virtus dormitiva,
cujos est natura
sensus assoupire.
But answers
like that belong in comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question
'how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?' with another question:
'why is belief in such judgements necessary?' - that is to say, it is
time to grasp that, for the purpose of preserving being such as ourselves, such
judgements must be believed to be true; although they might of course
still be false judgements! Or,
more clearly, crudely and basically: synthetic judgements a priori
should not 'be possible' at all: we have no right to them, in our mouths they are
nothing but false judgements. But belief
in their truth is, of course, necessary as foreground belief and ocular
evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life. - Finally, in considering
the enormous influence 'German philosophy' - I hope you understand its right to
inverted commas? - has exercised throughout Europe, one cannot doubt that a
certain virtus dormitiva has played a part in it: the noble idlers, the
virtuous, the mystics, the artists, the three-quarter Christians and the
political obscurantists of all nations were delighted to possess, thanks to
German philosophy, an antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism which had
overflowed out of the previous century into this, in short - 'sensus
assoupire' ...
12
As for
materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted things there are; and
perhaps no scholar in Europe is still so unscholarly today as to accord it
serious significance except for handy everyday use (as an abbreviated means of
expression) - thanks above all to the Pole Boscovich who, together with the
Pole Copernicus, has been the greatest and most triumphant opponent of ocular
evidence hitherto. For while Copernicus
persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not
stand firm, Boscovich taught us to abjure belief in the last thing of earth
that 'stood firm', belief in 'substance', in 'matter', in the earth-residuum
and particle atom: it was the greatest triumph over the senses hitherto
achieved on earth. - One must, however, go still further and also declare war,
a remorseless war of the knife, on the 'atomistic need' which, like that more
famous 'metaphysical need', still goes on living a dangerous afterlife in
regions where no-one suspects it - one must also first of all finish off that
other and more fateful atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest,
the soul atomism. Let this
expression be allowed to designate that belief which regards the soul as being
something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon:
this belief ought to be ejected from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary
by that same act to get rid of 'the soul' itself and thus forgo one of the
oldest and most venerable of hypotheses: as is often the way with clumsy
naturalists, who can hardly touch 'the soul' without losing it. But the road to new forms and refinements of
the soul-hypothesis stands open: and such conceptions as 'mortal soul' and
'soul as multiplicity of the subject' and 'soul as social structure of the
drives and emotions' want henceforth to possess civic rights in science. To be sure, when the new psychologist
puts an end to the superstition which has hitherto flourished around the
soul-idea with almost tropical luxuriance, he has as it were thrust himself out
into a new wilderness and a new mistrust - it may be that the older
psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it - : ultimately,
however, he sees that, by precisely that act, he has also condemned himself to inventing
the new - and, who knows? perhaps to finding it. -
13
Physiologists
should think again before postulating the drive to self-preservation as the
cardinal drive in an organic being. A
living thing desires above all to vent its strength - life as such is
will to power - : self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most
frequent consequences of it. - In short, here as everywhere, beware of superfluous
teleological principles! - such as is the drive to self-preservation (we owe it
to Spinoza's inconsistency). For this is
a requirement of method, which has essentially to be economy of principles.
14
It is
perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics too is only an
interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to our own requirements,
if I may say so!) and not an explanation of the world: but insofar as it
is founded on belief in the senses, it passes for more than that and must
continue to do so for a long time to come.
It has the eyes and the hands on its side, it has ocular evidence and
palpability on its side: and this has the effect of fascinating, persuading, convincing
an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes - for it instinctively follows the
canon of eternal, popular sensualism.
What is obvious, what has been 'explained'? Only that which can be seen and felt - thus
far has every problem to be scrutinized.
Obversely: it was precisely in opposition to palpability that the charm
of the Platonic mode of thinking, which was a noble mode of thinking,
consisted - on the part of men who perhaps rejoiced in even stronger and more
exacting senses than our contemporaries possess, but who knew how to experience
a greater triumph in mastering them: which they did by means of pale, cold,
grey conceptual nets thrown over the motley whirl of the senses - the mob of
the senses, as Plato called them. This
overcoming and interpretation of the world in the manner of Plato involved a
kind of enjoyment different from that which the physicists of today
offer us, or from that offered us by the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among
the labourers in physiology, with their principle of the 'smallest possible
effort' and the greatest possible stupidity.
'Where man has nothing more to see or grasp he has nothing more to do' -
that is certainly a different imperative from the Platonic, but for an uncouth
industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, which has
nothing but course work to get through, it may well be the right one.
15
If one is to
pursue physiology with a good conscience one is compelled to insist that the
organs of sense and not phenomena in the sense of idealist philosophy:
for if they were they could not be causes!
Sensualism is therefore at least a regulative hypothesis, certainly a
heuristic principle. - What? and others even go so far as to say that the
external world is the work of our organs?
But then our body, as a piece of this external world, would be the work
of our organs! But then our organs
themselves would be - the work of our organs!
This, it seems to me, is a complete reductio ad absurdum,
supposing that the concept causa sui is something altogether
absurd. Consequently the external world
is not the work of our organs - ?
16
There are
still harmless self-observers who believe 'immediate certainties' exist, for
example 'I think' or, as was Schopenhauer's superstition, 'I will': as though
knowledge here got hold of its object pure and naked, as 'thing in itself', and
no falsification occurred either on the side of the subject or on that of the
object. But I shall reiterate a hundred
times that 'immediate certainty', like 'absolute knowledge' and 'thing in
itself', contains a contradictio in adjecto: we really ought to get free
from the seduction of words! Let the
people believe that knowledge is total knowledge, but the philosopher must say
to himself: when I analyse the event expressed in the sentence 'I think', I
acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to
prove - for example, that it is I who think, that it has to be something
at all which thinks, that thinking is an
activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an
'I' exists, finally that what is designated by 'thinking' has already been
determined - that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided that matter
within myself, by what standard could I determine that what is happening is not
perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? Enough:
this 'I think' presupposes that I compare my present state with other
known states of myself in order to determine what it is: on account of this
retrospective connection with other 'knowledge' at any rate it possesses no
immediate certainty for me. - In place of that 'immediate certainty' in which
the people may believe in the present case, the philosopher acquires in this
way a series of metaphysical questions, true questions of conscience for the
intellect, namely: 'Whence do I take the concept thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an
"I" as cause, and finally of an "I" as cause of
thought?' Whoever feels able to answer
these metaphysical questions straight away with an appeal to a sort of intuitive
knowledge, as he does who says: 'I think, and know at least that this is true,
actual and certain' - will find a philosopher today ready with a smile and two
question-marks. 'My dear sir,' the
philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, 'it is improbable you are not
mistaken: but why do you want the truth at all?' -
17
As for the
superstitions of the logicians, I shall never tire of underlining a concise
little fact which these superstitious people are loathe to admit - namely, that
a thought comes when 'it' wants, not when 'I' want; so that it is a falsification
of the facts to say: the subject 'I' is the condition of the predicate
'think'. It thinks: but that this
'it' is precisely that famous old 'I' is, to put it mildly, only an assumption,
an assertion, above all not an 'immediate certainty'. For even with this 'it thinks' one has
already gone too far: this 'it' already contains an interpretation of
the event and does not belong to the event itself. The inference here is in accordance with the
habit of grammar: 'thinking is an activity, to every activity pertains one who
acts, consequently - '. It was more or
less in accordance with the same scheme that the older atomism sought, in
addition to the 'force' which acts, that little lump of matter in which it resides,
out of which it acts, the atom; more rigorous minds at last learned to get
along without this 'residuum of earth', and perhaps we and the logicians as
well will one day accustom ourselves to getting along without that little 'it'
(which is what the honest old 'I' has evaporated into).
18
It is
certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable: it is with
precisely this charm that it entices subtler minds. It seems that the hundred times refuted
theory of 'free will' owes its continued existence to this charm alone - :again
and again there comes along someone who feels he is strong enough to refute it.
19
Philosophers
are given to speaking of the will as if it were the best-known thing in the
world; Schopenhauer, indeed, would have us understand that the will alone is
truly known to us, known completely, known without deduction or addition. But it seems to me that in this case too
Schopenhauer has done only what philosophers in general are given to doing:
that he has taken up a popular prejudice and exaggerated it. Willing seems to be above all something complicated,
something that is a unity only as a word - and it is precisely in this one
word that the popular prejudice resides which has overborne the always
inadequate caution of the philosophers.
Let us therefore be more cautious for once, let us be 'unphilosophical'
- let us say: in all willing there is, first of all, a plurality of sensations,
namely the sensation of the condition we leave, the condition of the
sensation towards which we go, the sensation of this 'leaving' and
'going' itself, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation which, even
without our putting 'arms and legs' in motion, comes into play through a kind
of habit as soon as we 'will'. As
feelings, and indeed many varieties of feeling, can therefore be recognized as
an ingredient of will, so, in the second place, can thinking: in every act of
will there is a commanding thought - and do not imagine that this thought can
be separated from the 'willing', as though will would then remain over! Thirdly, will is not only a complex of
feeling and thinking, but above all an emotion: and in fact the emotion
of command. What is called 'freedom of
will' is essentially the emotion of superiority over him who must obey: 'I am
free, "he" must obey' - this consciousness adheres to every will, as
does that tense attention, that straight look which fixes itself exclusively on
one thing, that unconditional evaluation 'this and nothing else is
necessary now', that inner certainty that one will be obeyed, and whatever else
pertains to the state of him who gives commands. A man who wills - commands something
in himself which obeys or which he believes obeys. But now observe the strangest thing of all
about the will - about this so complex thing for which people have only one
word: inasmuch as in the given circumstances we at the same time command and
obey, and as the side which obeys knows the sensations of constraint,
compulsion, pressure, resistance, motion which usually begin immediately after
the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are in the habit of
disregarding and deceiving ourselves over this duality by means of the
synthetic concept 'I'; so a whole chain of erroneous conclusions and
consequently of false evaluations of the
will itself has been attached to the will itself - so that he who wills
believes wholeheartedly that willing suffices for action. Because in the great majority of cases
willing takes place only where the effect of the command, that is to say
obedience, that is to say the action, was to be expected, the appearance
has translated itself into the sensation, as if there were here a necessity
of effect. Enough: he who wills
believes with a tolerable degree of certainty that will and action are somehow
one - he attributes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will
itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of that sensation of power which all
success brings with it. 'Freedom of
will' - is the expression for that complex condition of pleasure of the person
who wills, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the
executor of the command - who as such also enjoys the triumph over resistance
involved but who thinks it was his will itself which overcame these
resistances. He who wills adds in this
way the sensations of pleasure of the successful executive agents, the
serviceable 'under-wills' or under-souls - for our body is only a social
structure composed of many souls - to his sensations of pleasure as commander. L'effet, c'est moi: what happens here
is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth: the ruling
class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing it is absolutely a question of
commanding and obeying, on the basis, as I have said already, of a social
structure composed of many 'souls': on which account a philosopher should claim
the right to include willing as such within the field of morality: that is, of
morality understood as the theory of the relations of dominance under which the
phenomenon of life arises. -
20
That
individual philosophical concepts are not something arbitrary, something
growing up autonomously, but on the contrary grow up connected and related to one
another; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they appear to emerge in the
history of thought, they nonetheless belong just as much to a system as do the
members of the fauna of a continent: that fact is in the end also shown in the
fact that the most diverse philosophers unfailingly fill out again and again a
certain basic scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell they always trace
once more the identical orbit: however independent of one another they may
feel, with their will to criticism or systematism, something in them leads
them, something drives them in a definite order one after another: it is
precisely that innate systematism and relationship of concepts. Their thinking is in fact not so much a
discovering as a recognizing, a remembering, a return and home-coming to a
far-off, primordial, total household of the soul out of which those concepts
one emerged - philosophizing is to that extent a species of atavism of the
first rank. The singular family
resemblance between all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is easy enough
to explain. Where there exists a
language affinity it is quite impossible, thanks to the common philosophy of
grammar - I mean thanks to unconscious domination and directing by similar
grammatical functions - to avoid everything being prepared in advance for a
similar evolution and succession of philosophical systems: just as the road
seems to be barred to certain other possibilities of world interpretation. Philosophers within the domain of the
Ural-Altaic languages (in which the concept of the subject is least developed)
will in all probability look 'into the world' differently and be found on
different paths from the Indo-Germans and Moslems: the spell of definite
grammatical functions is in the last resort the spell of physiological
values judgements and racial conditions. - So much by way of retort to Locke's
superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas.
21
The causa
sui is the best self-contradiction hitherto imagines, a kind of logical
rape and unnaturalness: but mankind's extravagant pride has managed to get
itself deeply and frightfully entangled with precisely this piece of
nonsense. For the desire for 'freedom of
will' in that metaphysical superlative sense which is unfortunately still dominant
in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the whole and sole
responsibility for one's actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance,
society from responsibility for them, is nothing less than the desire to be
precisely that causa sui and, with more than Münchhausen temerity, to
pull oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one's own
hair. Assuming it is possible in this
way to get beyond the peasant simplicity of this celebrated concept 'free will'
and banish it from one's mind, I would then ask whoever does that to carry his
'enlightenment' a step further and also banish from his mind the contrary of
that unnatural concept 'free will': I mean 'unfree will', which amounts to an
abuse of cause and effect. One ought not
to make 'cause' and 'effect' into material things, as natural scientists
do (and those who, like them, naturalize in their thinking - ), in accordance
with the prevailing mechanistic stupidity which has the cause press and push
until it 'produces an effect'; one ought to employ 'cause' and 'effect' only as
pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose
of designation, mutual understanding, not explanation. In the 'in itself' there is nothing of
'causal connection', of 'necessity', of 'psychological unfreedom'; there 'the
effect' does not 'follow the cause', there no 'law' rules. It is we alone who have fabricated
causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom,
motive, purpose; and when we falsely introduce this world of symbols into
things and mingle it with them as though this symbol-world always behaved,
namely mythologically. 'Unfree
will' is mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak
wills. - It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a
thinker detects in every 'causal connection' and 'psychological necessity'
something of compulsion, exigency, constraint, pressure, unfreedom: such
feelings are traitors, the person who has them gives himself away. And, if I have observed correctly, 'unfreedom
of will' is in general conceived as a problem from two completely antithetical
standpoints but always in a profoundly personal manner: one will at not
price give up his 'responsibility', his belief in himself, the personal
right to his deserts (the vain races belong here - ), the other, on the
contrary, will not be responsible for anything, to blame for anything, and out
of an inner self-contempt wants to be able to shift off his
responsibility for himself somewhere else.
This latter, when he writes books, tends today to espouse the cause of
the criminal; his most pleasing disguise is a kind of socialist sympathy. And the fatalism of the weak-willed is indeed
beautified to an astonishing degree when it can present itself as 'la
religion de la souffrance humaine': that is its 'good taste'.
22
You must
pardon me as an old philologist who cannot refrain from the maliciousness of
putting his finger on bad arts of interpretation: but 'nature's conformity to
law' of which you physicists speak so proudly, as though - it exists only
thanks to your interpretation and bad 'philology' - it is not a fact, not a
'text', but rather only a naive humanitarian adjustment and distortion of
meaning with which you go more than half-way to meet the democratic instincts
of the modern soul! 'Everywhere equality
before the law - nature is in this matter no different from us and no better
off than we': a nice piece of mental reservation in which vulgar hostility
towards everything privileged and autocratic, as well as a second and more
subtle atheism, lie once more disguised.
'Ni dieu, ni maître' - that is your motto too: and therefore
'long live the law of nature!' - isn't that so?
But, as aforesaid, that is interpretation, not text; and someone could
come along who, with an opposite intention and art of interpretation, knew how
to read out of the same nature and with regard to the same phenomena the
tyrannically ruthless and inexorable enforcement of power-demands - an
interpreter who could bring before your eyes the universality and
unconditionality of all 'will to power' in such a way that almost any word and
even the word 'tyranny' would finally seem unsuitable or as a weakening and
moderating metaphor - as too human - and who nonetheless ended by asserting of
this world the same as you assert of it, namely that is has a 'necessary' and
'calculable' course, but not because laws prevail in it but because laws
are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences
every moment. Granted this too is only
interpretation - and you will be eager enough to raise this objection? - well,
so much the better. -
23
All
psychology has hitherto remained anchored to moral prejudices and timidities:
it has not ventured into the depths. To
conceive it as morphology and the development-theory of the will to power,
as I conceive it - has never so much as entered the mind of anyone else:
insofar as it is permissible to see in what has hitherto been written a symptom
of what has hitherto been kept silent.
The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deep into the most
spiritual world, which is apparently the coldest and most free of
presuppositions - and, as goes without saying, has there acted in a harmful,
inhibiting, blinding, distorting fashion.
A genuine physio-psychology has to struggle with unconscious resistances
in the heart of the investigator, it has 'the heart' against it: even a theory
of the mutual dependence of the 'good' and the 'wicked' impulses causes, as a
more refined immorality, revulsion to a conscience still strong and hearty -
and even more a theory of the derivation of all good impulses from wicked
ones. Supposing, however, that someone
goes so far as to regard the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and lust
for domination as life-conditioning emotions, as something which must
fundamentally and essentially be present in the total economy of life,
consequently must be heightened further if life is to be heightened further -
he suffers from such a judgement as from seasickness. And yet even this hypothesis is far from
being the strangest and most painful in this tremendous, still almost
unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge - and there are in fact a hundred good
reasons why everyone should keep away from it who - can! On the other hand: if your ship has
been driven into these seas, very well!
Now clench your teeth! Keep your
eyes open! Keep a firm hand on the helm!
- We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush
perhaps what is left of our own morality by venturing to voyage thither - but
what do we matter! Never yet has
a deeper world of insight revealed itself to daring travellers and
adventurers: and the psychologist who in this fashion 'brings a sacrifice' - it
is not the sacrifizio dell-intelletto, on the contrary! - will at
least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall again be recognized
as the queen of the sciences, to serve and prepare for which the other sciences
exist. For psychology is now once again
to road to the fundamental problems.
Part Two: The Free Spirit
24
O sancta
simplicitas! What
strange simplification and falsification mankind lives in! One can never cease to marvel once one has
acquired eyes for this marvel! How we
have made everything around us bright and free and easy and simple! How we have known how to bestow on our senses
a passport to everything superficial, on our thoughts a divine desire for
wanton gambolling and false conclusions! - how we have from the very beginning
understood how to retain our ignorance so as to enjoy an almost inconceivable
freedom, frivolity, impetuosity, bravery, cheerfulness of life, so as to enjoy
life! And only on this now firm and granite
basis of ignorance has knowledge hitherto been able to rise up, the will to
knowledge on the basis of a far more powerful will, the will to non-knowledge,
to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as
its antithesis but - as its refinement!
for even if, here as elsewhere, language cannot get over its
coarseness and continues to speak of antitheses where there are only degrees
and many subtleties of gradation; even if likewise the incarnate tartuffery of
morals which is now part of our invincible 'flesh and blood' twists the words
in the mouths even of us men of knowledge: here and there we grasp that fact
and laugh at how it is precisely the best knowledge that wants most to hold us
in this simplified, altogether artificial, fabricated, falsified world,
how it is willy-nilly in love with error because, as a living being, it is - in
love with life!
25
After so
cheerful an exordium a serious word would like to be heard: it addresses itself
to the most serious. Take care,
philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering 'for the sake of truth'! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and fine
neutrality of your conscience, it makes you obstinate against rebuffs and red
rags, it makes you stupid, brutal and bullish if in the struggle with danger,
slander, suspicion, casting out and even grosser consequences of hostility you
finally even have to act as defenders of truth on earth - as if 'truth' were so
innocuous and inept a person she stood in need of defending! And precisely by you, you knights of most
sorrowful countenance, you idlers and cobweb-spinners of the spirit! After all, you know well enough that it
cannot matter in the least whether precisely you are in the right, just
as no philosopher hitherto has been in the right, and that a more praiseworthy
veracity may lie in every little question-mark placed after your favourite
words and favourite theories (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all
your solemn gesticulations and smart answers before courts and accusers! Better to step aside! Flee away and conceal yourselves! And have your masks and subtlety, so that you
may be misunderstood! Or feared a
little! And do not forget the garden,
the garden with golden trellis-work. And
have about you people who are like a garden - or like music on the waters in
the evening, when the day is already becoming a memory; - choose the good
solitude, the free, wanton, easy solitude which gives you too a right to remain
in some sense good! How poisonous, how
cunning, how bad every protracted war makes one when it cannot be waged with
open force! How personal a
protracted fear makes one, a protracted keeping watch for enemies, for possible
enemies! These outcasts of society, long
persecuted and sorely hunted - also the enforced recluses, the Spinozas and
Giordano Brunos - in the end always become refined vengeance-seekers and
brewers of poison, even if they do so under the most spiritual masquerade and
perhaps without being themselves aware of it (just dig up the foundation of
Spinoza's ethics and theology!) - not to speak of the stupidity of moral
indignation, which is in the philosopher an unfailing sign that he has lost his
philosophical sense of humour. The
martyrdom of the philosopher, his 'sacrifice for truth', brings to light what
there has been in him of agitator and actor; and if one has hitherto regarded
him only with artistic curiosity, in the case of many a philosopher it is easy
to understand the dangerous desire to see him for once in his degeneration
(degenerated into 'martyr', into stage- and platform-ranter). But if one does harbour such a desire, one
has to be clear what it is one will get to see - merely a satyr play,
merely a farcical after-piece, merely a continuing proof that the long tragedy has
come to an end: supposing that every philosophy was in its inception a long
tragedy. -
26
Every
superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he
is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where, as its
exception, he may forget the rule 'man' - except in the one case in which, as a
man of knowledge in the great and exceptional sense, he will be impelled by an
even stronger instinct to make straight for this rule. He who, when trafficking with men, does not
occasionally glisten with all the shades of distress, green and grey with
disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom and loneliness, is certainly not a man of an
elevated taste; but if he does not voluntarily assume this burden and
displeasure, if he continually avoids it and, as aforesaid, remains hidden quietly
and proudly away in his citadel, then one thing is sure: he is not made, not
predestined for knowledge. For if he
were, he would one day have to say to himself: 'The devil can take my good
taste! the rule is more interesting than the exception - than I, the
exception!' - and would go down, would above all 'go in'. The study of the average human being,
protracted, serious, and with much dissembling, self-overcoming, intimacy, bad
company - all company is bad company except the company of one's equals - :this
constitutes a necessary part of the life-story of every philosopher, perhaps
the most unpleasant and malodorous part and the part must full of
disappointments. If he is lucky,
however, as a favourite child of knowledge ought to be, he will encounter means
of facilitating and cutting short his task - I mean so-called cynics, that is
to say people who recognize the animal, the commonness, the 'rule' in
themselves and yet still possess a degree of spirituality and appetite which
constrains them to speak of themselves and their kind before witnesses -
sometimes they even wallow in books as in their own dung. Cynicism is the only form in which common
souls come close to honesty; and the higher man must prick up his ears at every
cynicism, whether coarse or refined, and congratulate himself whenever a
buffoon without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out in his presence. There are even cases in which fascination
mingles with the disgust: namely where, by a caprice of nature, such an
indiscreet goat and monkey is touched with genius, as in the case of the Abbé
Galiani, the profoundest, most sharp-sighted and perhaps also dirtiest man of
his century - he was far more profound than Voltaire and consequently also a
good deal more silent. It is more often the
case that, as already indicated, a scientific head is set on a monkey's body, a
refined, exceptional understanding on a common soul - no rare occurrence, for
instance, among physicians and moral physiologists. And whenever anyone speaks, without bitterness,
rather innocuously, of a man as a belly with two needs and a head with one;
whenever anyone sees, seeks and wants to see only hunger, sexual desire,
and vanity, as though these were the actual and sole motives of human actions;
in brief, whenever anyone speaks 'badly' of man - but does not speak ill of
him - the lover of knowledge should listen carefully and with diligence, and he
should in general lend an ear whenever anyone speaks without indignation. For the indignant man, and whoever is
continually tearing and rending himself with his teeth (or, instead of himself,
the world, or God, or society) may indeed morally speaking stand higher than
the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more
commonplace, less interesting, less instructive case. And no-one lies so much as the indignant man. -
27
It is hard
to be understood: especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati
among men who think and live otherwise, namely kurmagati or at best 'as
the frog goes', mandeikagati - I am certainly doing everything I can to
be hard to understand myself! - and one ought to be heartily grateful even for
the will to some subtlety in interpretation.
As regards one's 'good friends', however, who are always too indolent
and think that because they are one's friends they have a right to indolence:
one does well to allow them from the first some room and latitude for
misunderstanding - thus one can laugh at their expense; - or get rid of them
altogether, these good friends - and still laugh!
28
That which
translates worst from one language into another is the tempo of its style,
which has its origin in the character of the race, or, expressed more
physiologically, in the average tempo of its 'metabolism'. These are honestly meant translations which,
as involuntary vulgarizations of the original, are almost falsifications simply
because it was not possible to translate also its brave and happy tempo, which
leaps over and puts behind it all that is perilous in things and words. The German is virtually incapable of presto
in his language: thus, it may be fairly concluded, also of many of the most
daring and delightful nuances of free, free-spirited thought. Just as the buffo and the satyr is
strange to him, in his body and in his conscience, so Aristophanes and
Petronius are untranslatable for him.
Everything staid, sluggish, ponderously solemn, all long-winded and
boring species of style have been developed in profuse multiplicity among the Germans
- pardon me for the fact that even Goethe's prose is, in its blend of elegance
and stiffness, no exception: it is a reflection of the 'good old days', to
which it belongs, and an expression of the German taste of a time when there
still was a 'German taste': it was rococo in moribus et artibus. Lessing constitutes an exception, thanks to
his histrionic nature, which was versed in and understood much: he, who was not
for nothing the translator of Bayle and liked to flee to the neighbourhood of
Diderot and Voltaire and even more to that of the Roman writers of comedy - in
tempo too Lessing loved free-spiritedness, escape from Germany. But how could the German language, even in
the prose of a Lessing, imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his Principe,
lets us breathe the subtle dry air of Florence and cannot help presenting the
most serious affairs in a boisterous allegrissimo: not perhaps without a
malicious artist's sense of the contrast he is risking - thoughts protracted,
difficult, hard, dangerous and the tempo of the gallop and the most wanton good
humour. Who, finally, would venture a
German translation of Petronius, who was, to a greater degree than any great
musician has hitherto been, a master of presto in invention, ideas,
words - what do all the swamps of the sick wicked world, even of the 'antique
world', matter when one has, like him, the feet of a wind, the blast and
breath, the liberating scorn of a wind that makes everything healthy by making
everything run! And as for
Aristophanes, that transfiguring, complementary spirit for whose sake one excuses
all Greece for having existed, assuming one has grasped in all its profundity what
there is to be excused and transfigured here - I know of nothing that has led
me to reflect more on Plato's concealment and sphinx nature than that happily
preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was
discovered no 'Bible', nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, Platonic - but
Aristophanes. How could even a Plato
have endured life - a Greek like which he had denied - without an Aristophanes!
-
29
Few are made
for independence - it is a privilege of the strong. And he who attempts it, having the completest
right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is
probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies
by a thousand the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the
smallest of which is that no-one can behold how and where he goes astray, is
cut off from others, and is torn to pieces limb from limb by some cave-minotaur
of conscience. If such a one is
destroyed, it takes places so far from the understanding of men that they
neither feel it nor sympathize - and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to the pity of
men! -
30
Our supreme
insights must - and should! - sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes,
when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are not predisposed and
predestined for them. The exoteric and
the esoteric as philosophers formerly distinguished them, among the Indians as
among the Greeks, Persians and Moslems, in short wherever one believed in an
order of rank and not in equality and equal rights - differ one from
another not so much in that the exoteric stands outside and sees, evaluates,
measures, judges from the outside, not from the inside: what is more essential
is that this class sees things from below - but the esoteric sees them from
above! There are heights of the soul
seen from which even tragedy ceases to be tragic; and, taking all the woe of
the world together, who could venture to assert that the sight of it would have
to seduce and compel us to pity and thus to a doubling of that woe?... What
serves the higher type of man as food or refreshment must to a very different
and inferior type be almost poison. The
virtues of the common man would perhaps indicate vice and weakness in a
philosopher; it may be possible that if a lofty type of man degenerated and
perished, he would only thus acquire qualities on whose account it would prove
necessary in the lower world into which he had sunk henceforth to venerate him
as a saint. There are books which
possess an opposite value for soul and health depending on whether the lower
soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful avails itself of
them: in the former case they are dangerous, disintegrative books, which
produces dissolution, in the latter they are herald calls challenging the most
courageous to their courage.
Books for everybody are always malodorous books: the smell of petty
people clings to them. Where the peoples
eats and drinks, even where it worships, there is usually a stink. One should not go into churches if one wants
to breathe pure air. -
31
In our youthful
years we respect and despise without that art of nuance which constitutes the
best thing we gain from life, and, as is only fair, we have to pay dearly for
having assailed men and things with Yes and No in such a fashion. Everything is so regulated that the worst of
all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly misused and made a fool
of until a man learns to introduce a little art into his feelings and even to
venture trying the artificial: as genuine artists of life do. The anger and reverence characteristic of
youth seem to allow themselves no peace until they have falsified men and
things in such a way that they can vent themselves on them - youth as such is
something that falsifies and deceives.
Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally
turns suspiciously on itself, still hot and savage even in its suspicion and
pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how it impatiently rends
itself, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, as if it had blinded
itself deliberately! During this
transition one punishes oneself by distrusting one's feelings; one tortures
one's enthusiasm with doubts, indeed one feels that even a good conscience is a
danger, as though a good conscience were a screening of oneself and a sign that
one's subtler honesty had grown weary; and above all one takes sides, takes
sides on principle, against 'youth'. - A decade later: and one grasps
that all this too - was still youth!
32
Throughout
the longest part of human history - it is called prehistoric times - the value
or non-value of an action was derived from its consequences: the action itself
came as little into consideration as did its origin, but, in much the same way
as today in China a distinction or disgrace reflects back from the child onto
its parents, so it was the retroactive force of success or failure which led
men to think well or ill of an action.
Let us call this period the pre-moral period of mankind: they
imperative 'know thyself!' was then still unknown. Over the past ten thousand years, on the
other hand, one has in a few large tracts of the earth come step by step to the
point at which it is no longer the consequences but the origin of the action
which determines its value: a great event, taken as a whole, a considerable
refinement of vision and standard, the unconscious after-effect of the
sovereignty of aristocratic values and of belief in 'origins', the sign of a
period which may be called the moral in the narrower sense: the first
attempt at self-knowledge has been made.
Instead of the consequences, the origin: what an inversion of
perspectives! And certainly one achieved
only after protracted struggles and vacillations! To be sure, a fateful new superstition, a
peculiar narrowness of interpretation therewith became dominant: men
interpreted the origin of an action in the most definite sense as origin in an intention;
men became unanimous in their belief that the value of an action resided
in the value of the intention behind it.
The intention as the whole origin and pre-history of an action: it is
under the sway of this prejudice that one has morally praised, blamed, judged
and philosophized on earth almost to the present day. - But ought we not today
to have arrived at the necessity of once again determining upon an inversion
and shift of values, thanks to another self-examination and depending on the
part of man - ought we not to stand on the threshold of a period which should
be called, negatively at first, the extra-moral: today, when among us
immoralists at least the suspicion has arisen that the decisive value of an
action resides in precisely that which is not intentional in it, and
that all that in it which is intentional, all of it that can be seen, known,
'conscious', still belongs to its surface and skin - which, like every skin,
betrays something but conceals still more? In brief, we believe that the intention is
only a sign and symptom that needs interpreting, and a sign, moreover, that
signifies too many things and which thus taken by itself signifies practically
nothing - that morality in the sense in which it has been understood hitherto,
that is to say the morality of intentions, has been a prejudice, a
precipitancy, perhaps something provisional and precursory, perhaps something of
the order of astronomy and alchemy, but in any event something that must be
overcome. The overcoming of morality, in
a certain sense even the self-overcoming of morality: let this be the name for
that protracted secret labour which has been reserved for the subtlest, most
honest and also most malicious consciences as living touchstones of the soul. -
33
There is
nothing for it: the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one's neighbour,
the entire morality of self-renunciation must be taken mercilessly to task and
brought to court: likewise the aesthetics of 'disinterested contemplation'
through which the emasculation of art today tries, seductively enough, to give
itself a good conscience. There is much
too much sugar and sorcery in those feelings of 'for others', of 'not
for me', for one not to have become doubly distrustful here and to ask: 'are
they not perhaps - seductions?'
That they give pleasure - to him who has them and to him who
enjoys their fruits, also to the mere spectator - does not yet furnish an
argument in their favour, but urges us rather to caution. So let us be cautious!
34
Whatever
standpoint of philosophy we may adopt today: from every point of view the erroneousness
of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can
get our eyes on - we find endless grounds for it which would like to lure us to
suppose a deceptive principle in the 'nature of things'. But he who makes our thinking itself, that
is to say, 'the mind', responsible for the falsity of the world - an honourable
way out taken by every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei - :he who
takes this world, together with space, time, form, motion, to be the result of
a false conclusion: such a one would have good cause, to say the least,
to learn finally to mistrust thinking itself: would it not have played on us
the biggest hoax ever? and what guarantees would there be that it would not go
on doing what it has always done? In all
seriousness: the innocence of thinkers has something touching and inspiring of
reverence in it which permits them even today to go up to consciousness and ask
it to give them honest answers: whether it is 'real', for example, and
why it really keeps the external world so resolutely at a distance, and other
questions of the sort. The belief in
'immediate certainties' is a piece of moral naivety which does honour to
us philosophers: but - we ought not to be 'merely moral' men! Apart from the moral aspect, that belief is a
piece of stupidity which does us little honour!
In civil life an ever-ready mistrustfulness may count as a sign of 'bad
character' and thus be an imprudent thing to have: here among us, beyond the
civil world and its Yes and No - what is there to stop us from being imprudent
and saying: the philosopher, as the creature which has hitherto always been
most fooled on earth, has by now a right to 'bad character' - he has
today the duty to be distrustful, to squint wickedly up out of every
abyss of suspicion. - You must forgive me this humorous expression and grimace:
for I have long since learned to think differently, to judge differently on the
subject of deceiving and being deceived, and I keep in readiness at least a
couple of jabs in the ribs for the blind rage with which philosophers resist
being deceived. Why not? It is no more than a moral prejudice that
truth is worth more than appearance; it is even the worst-proved assumption
that exists. Let us concede at least
this much: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective
evaluations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and
awkwardness exhibited by some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the 'apparent
world' altogether, well, assuming you could do that - at any rate
nothing would remain of your 'truth' either!
Indeed, what compels us to assume there exists any essential antithesis
between 'true' and 'false'? Is it not
enough to suppose grades of apparentness and as it were lighter and darker
shades and tones of appearance - different valeurs, to speak in the
language of painters? Why could the
world which is of any concern to us - not be a fiction? And he who then objects: 'but to the fiction
there belongs an author?' - could he not be met with the round retort: why? Does this 'belongs' perhaps not also belong
to the fiction? Are we not permitted to
be a little ironical now about the subject as we are about the predicate and
object? Ought the philosopher not to
rise above the belief in grammar? All
due respect to governesses: but is it not time that philosophy renounced the
beliefs of governesses?
35
Oh
Voltaire! Oh humanity! Of imbecility! There is some point to 'truth', to the search
for truth; and if a human being goes about it too humanely - 'il ne cherche
le vrai que pour faire le bien' - I wager he finds nothing!
36
Granted that
nothing is 'given' as real except our world of desires and passions, that we
can rise or sink to no other 'reality' than the reality of our drives - for
thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another - :is it not
permitted to make the experiment and ask the question whether that which is
given does not suffice for an understanding even of the so-called
mechanical (or 'material') world? I do
not mean as a deception, an 'appearance', an 'idea' (in the Berkeleyan and
Schopenhaueran sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our
emotions themselves - as a more primitive form of the world of emotions in
which everything still lies locked in mighty unity and then branches out and
develops in the organic process (also, as is only fair, is made weaker and more
sensitive), as a kind of instinctual life in which all organic functions,
together with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion,
metabolism, are still synthetically bound together - as an antecedent form
of life? - In the end, it is not merely permitted to make this experiment: it
is commanded by the conscience of method. Not to assume several kinds of causality so
long as the experiment of getting along with one has not been taken to its
ultimate limits ( - to the point of nonsense, if I may say so): that is a
morality of method which one may not repudiate nowadays - it follows 'from its
definition', as a mathematician would say.
In the end, the question is whether we really recognize will as efficient,
whether we believe in the causality of will: if we do so - and fundamentally
belief in this is precisely our belief in causality itself - then we have
to make the experiment of positing causality of will hypothetically as the only
one. 'Will' can of course operate only
on 'will' - and not on 'matter' (not on 'nerves', for example - ): enough, one
must venture the hypothesis that wherever 'effects' are recognized, will is
operating upon will - and that all mechanical occurrences, insofar as a force
is active in them, are force of will, effects of will. - Granted finally that
one succeeded in explaining our entire instinctual life as the development and
ramification of one basic form of will - as will to power, as is my
theory - ; granted that one could trace all organic functions back to this will
to power and could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation
and nourishment - they are one problem - one would have acquired the
right to define all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world
described and defined according to its 'intelligible character' - it would be
'will to power' and nothing else. -
37
'What? Does
that, to speak vulgarly, not mean: God is refuted but the devil is not -
?' On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And who the devil compels you to speak
vulgarly! -
38
As happened
lately, in all the clarity of modern times, with the French Revolution, that
gruesome and, closely considered, superfluous farce, into which, however, noble
and enthusiastic spectators all over Europe interpreted from a distance their
own indignations and raptures so long and so passionately that the text
disappeared beneath the interpretation: so a noble posterity could once
again misunderstand the entire past and only thus perhaps make the sight of it
endurable. - Or rather: has this not already happened? have we ourselves not
been this 'noble posterity'? And,
insofar as we comprehend this, is it not at this moment - done with?
39
No-one is
likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes happy or makes
virtuous: excepting perhaps the dear 'idealists', who rapturize over the good, the
true and the beautiful, and let all kinds of colourful, clumsy and good-natured
desiderata swim about together in their pond.
Happiness and virtue are no arguments.
But even thoughtful spirits like to forget that making unhappy and
making evil are just as little counter-arguments. Something might be true although at the same
time harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it could pertain to
the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would
destroy one - so that the strength of a spirit could be measured by how much
'truth' it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it
attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified. But there can be no doubt that for the
discovery of certain parts of truth the wicked and unhappy are in a more
favourable position and are more likely to succeed; not to speak of the wicked
who are happy - a species about whom the moralists are silent. Perhaps severity and cunning provide more favourable
conditions for the formation of the strong, independent spirit and philosopher
than does than gentle, sweet, yielding good-naturedness and art of taking
things lightly which is prized in a scholar and rightly prized. Supposing in advance that the concept
'philosopher' is not limited to the philosopher who writes books - or, worse,
writes books of his philosophy! - A final trait in the image of the
free-spirited philosopher is provided by Stendhal, and in view of what German
taste is I do not want to fail to emphasize it - for it goes against
German taste. 'Pour être bon
philosophe', said this last great psychologist, 'il faut être sec,
clair, sans illusion. Un banquier, qui a
fair fortune, a une partie due caractère requis pour faire des découvertes en
philosophie, c'est-à-dire pour vois clair dans ce qui est.'
40
Everything
profound loves the mask; the profoundest things of all hate even image and
parable. Should not nothing less than
the opposite be the proper disguise under which the shame of a god goes
abroad? A questionable question: it
would be strange if some mystic or other had not already ventured to meditate
some such thing. There are occurrences
of so delicate a description that one does well to bury them and make them
unrecognizable with a piece of coarseness; there are acts of love and
extravagant magnanimity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a
stick and to give the eyewitness and thrashing and so confuse his memory. Some know how to confuse and mistreat their own
memory, so as to take revenge at least on this sole confidant - shame is
inventive. It is not the worst things of
which one is most ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a mask - there is so
much goodness in cunning. I could
believe that a man who had something fragile and valuable to conceal might roll
through life thick and round as an old, green, thick-hooped wine barrel: the
refinement of his shame would have it so.
A man whose shame has depth encounters his destinies and delicate
decisions too on paths which very few ever reach and of whose existence his
intimates and neighbours may not know: his mortal danger is concealed from
their eyes, as is the fact that he has regained his sureness of life. Such a hidden man, who instinctively uses
speech for silence and concealment and is inexhaustible in evading
communication, wants a mask of him to roam the heads and hearts of his
friends in his stead, and he makes sure that it does so; and supposing he does
not want it, he will one day come to see that a mask is there in spite of that
- and that that is a good thing. Every
profound spirit needs a mask: more, around every profound spirit a mask is
continually growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is to say shallow
interpretation of every word he speaks, every step he takes, every sign of life
he gives. -
41
One must
test oneself to see whether one is destined for independence and command; and
one must do so at the proper time. One
should not avoid one's tests, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game
one could play and are in the end tests which are taken before ourselves and
before no other judge. Not to cleave to
another person, though he be the one you love most - every person is a prison,
also a nook and corner. Not to cleave to
a fatherland, though it be the most suffering and in need of help - it is
already easier to sever your heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to cleave to a feeling of pity, though it
be for the higher men into whose rare torment and helplessness chance allowed
us to look. Not to cleave to a science,
though it lures one with the most precious discoveries seemingly preserved
precisely for us. Not to cleave
to one's own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the
bird which flies higher and higher so as to see more and more beneath it - the
danger which threatens the flier. Not to
cleave to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of some part of us,
of our 'hospitality' for example, which is the danger of dangers for rich and
noble souls who expend themselves prodigally, almost indifferently, and take
the virtue of liberality to the point where it becomes a vice. One must know how to conserve oneself:
the sternest test of independence.
42
A new
species of philosopher is appearing: I venture to baptize these philosophers
with a name not without danger in it. As
I divine them, as they let themselves be divined - for it pertains to their
nature to want to remain a riddle in some respects - these philosophers
of the future might rightly, but perhaps also wrongly, be described as attempters. This name itself is in the end only an
attempt and, if you will, a temptation.
43
Are they new
friends of 'truth', these coming philosophers?
In all probability: for all philosophers have hitherto loved their
truths. But certainly they will not be
dogmatists. It must offend their pride,
and also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman,
which has hitherto been the sacred desire and hidden sense of all dogmatic
endeavours. 'My judgement is my
judgement: another cannot easily acquire a right to it' - such a philosopher of
the future may perhaps say. One has to
get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. 'Good' is no longer good when your neighbour
takes it into his mouth. And how could
there exist a 'common good'! The
expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little
value. In the end it must be as it is
and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound,
shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the
rare. -
44
After all
this do I still need to say that they too will be free, very free
spirits, these philosophers of the future - just as surely as they will not be
merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater and thoroughly
different that does not want to be misunderstand or taken for what it is
not. But in saying this I feel I have a duty,
almost as much towards them as towards us, their heralds and precursors, us
free spirits! - to blow away from all of us an ancient and stupid prejudice and
misunderstanding which has all too long obscured the concept 'free spirit' like
a fog. In all the countries of Europe
and likewise in America there exists at present something that misuses this
name, a very narrow, enclosed, chained up species of spirits who desire
practically the opposite of that which informs our aims and instincts - not to
mention the fact that in regard to those new philosophers appearing they
must certainly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, in short and regrettably, among
the levellers, these falsely named 'free spirits' - eloquent and
tirelessly scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its 'modern ideas',
men without solitude one and all, without their own solitude, good clumsy
fellows who, while they cannot be denied courage and moral respectability, are
unfree and ludicrously superficial, above all in their fundamental inclination
to see in the forms of existing society the cause of practically all
human failure and misery: which is to stand the truth happily on its head! What with all their might they would like to
strive after is the universal green pasture happiness of the herd, with
security, safety, comfort and an easier life for all; their two most
oft-recited doctrines and ditties are 'equality of rights' and 'sympathy for
all that suffers' - and suffering itself they take for something that has to be
abolished. We, who are the
opposite of this, and have opened our eyes and our conscience to the question
where and how the plant 'man' has hitherto grown up most vigorously, we think
that this has always happened under the opposite conditions, that the
perilousness of his situation had first to become tremendous, his powers of
invention and dissimulation (his 'spirit' - ) had, under protracted pressure
and constraint, to evolve into subtlety and daring, his will to life had to be
intensified into unconditional will to power - we think that severity, force,
slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the art
of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, dreadful,
tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species
'man' just as much as does its opposite - we do not say enough when we say even
that much, and at any rate we are, in what we say and do not say on this point,
at the other end from all modern ideology and herd desiderata: as its
antipodes perhaps? Is it any wonder we
'free spirits' are not precisely the most communicative of spirits? that we do
not want to betray in every respect from what a spirit can free itself
and to what it is then perhaps driven?
And as for the dangerous formula 'beyond good and evil' with which we at
any rate guard against being taken for what we are not: we are something
different from 'libres-penseurs', 'liberi pensatori', 'Freidenker', or
whatever else all these worthy advocates of 'modern ideas' like to call
themselves. At home in many countries of
the spirit, or at least having been guests there; having again and again eluded
the agreeable musty nooks and corners into which predilection and prejudice,
youth, origin, the accidents of people and books, or even weariness from
wandering seemed to have consigned us; full of malice towards the lures of
dependence which reside in honours, or money, or offices, or raptures of the
senses; grateful even to distress and changeful illness because it has always
liberated us from some rule and its 'prejudice', grateful to the god, devil,
sheep and worm in us, curious to the point of vice, investigators to the point
of cruelty, with rash fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for
the most indigestible, ready for every task that demands acuteness and sharp
senses, ready for every venture thanks to a superfluity of 'free will', with
fore- and back-souls into whose ultimate intentions no-one can easily see, with
fore- and backgrounds to whose end no foot may go, hidden under mantles of
light, conquerors even though we look like heirs and prodigals, collectors and
arrangers from morn till night, misers of our riches and our full-crammed
cupboards, thrifty in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemata, sometimes
proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls of
labour even in broad daylight; yes, even scarecrows when we need to be - and
today we need to be: insofar, that is, as we are born, sworn, jealous friends
of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude -
such a type of man are we, we free spirits! and perhaps you too are
something of the same type, you coming men? you new philosophers? -
Part Three: The Religious Nature
45
The human
soul and its frontiers, the compass of inner human experience in general attained
hitherto, the heights, depths and distances of this experience, the entire
history of the soul hitherto and its still unexhausted possibilities:
this is the predestined hunting-ground for a born psychologist and lover of the
'big-game hunt'. But how often must he
say despairingly to himself: 'one man! alas, but one man! and this great forest
and jungle!' And thus he wishes he had a
few hundred beaters and subtle well-instructed tracker dogs whom he could send
into the history of the human soul and there round up his game. In vain: he discovers again and again,
thoroughly and bitterly, how hard it is to find beaters and dogs for all the
things which arouse his curiosity. The
drawback in sending scholars out into new and dangerous hunting-grounds where
courage, prudence, subtlety in every sense are needed is that they cease to be
of any use precisely where the 'big hunt', but also the big danger,
begins - precisely there do they loose their keenness of eye and keenness of
nose. To divine and establish, for
example, what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience
has had in the soul of homines religiosi one would oneself perhaps have
to be as profound, as wounded, as monstrous as Pascal's intellectual conscience
was - and then there would still be needed that broad heaven of bright,
malicious spirituality capable of looking down on this turmoil of dangerous and
painful experiences, surveying and ordering them and forcing them into
formulas. - But who could do me this service!
And who could have the time to wait for such servants! - they appear too
rarely, they are at all times so very improbable! In the end one has to do everything oneself
if one is to know a few things
oneself: that is to say, one has much to do! - But a curiosity like mine
is after all the most pleasurable of vices - I beg your pardon! I meant to say:
the love of truth has its reward in Heaven, and already upon earth. -
46
The faith
such as primitive Christianity demanded and not infrequently obtained in the
midst of a sceptical and southerly free-spirited world with a centuries-long
struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, plus the education
in tolerance provided by the Imperium Romanum - this faith is not
that gruff, true-hearted liegeman's faith with which a Luther, say, or a
Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit cleaved to his God and
his Christianity; it is rather than faith of Pascal which resembles in a
terrible fashion a protracted suicide of reason - of a tough, long-lived,
wormlike reason which is not to be killed instantaneously with a single
blow. The Christian faith is from the
beginning sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence
of the spirit, at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism
in this faith exacted of an over-ripe, manifold and much-indulged conscience:
its presupposition is that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably painful,
that the entire past and habitude of such a spirit resists the absurdissimum
which 'faith' appears to it to be.
Modern men, with their obtuseness to all Christian nomenclature, no
longer sense the gruesome superlative which lay for an antique taste in the
paradoxical formula 'god on the cross'.
Never and nowhere has there hitherto been a comparable boldness in
inversion, anything so fearsome, questioning and questionable, as this formula:
it promised a revaluation of all antique values. - It is the orient, the innermost
orient, it is the oriental slave who in this fashion took vengeance on Rome and
its noble and frivolous tolerance, on Roman 'catholicism' of faith, that has
enraged slaves in their masters and against their masters. 'Enlightenment' enrages: for the slave wants
the unconditional, he understands in the domain of morality too only the
tyrannical, he loves as he hates, without nuance, into the depths of him, to
the point of pain, to the point of sickness - the great hidden suffering
he feels is enraged at the noble taste which seems to deny
suffering. Scepticism towards suffering,
at bottom no more than a pose of aristocratic morality, was likewise not the
least contributory cause of the last great slave revolt which began with the
French Revolution.
47
Wherever the
religious neurosis has hitherto appeared on earth we find it tied to three
dangerous dietary prescriptions: solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence - but
without our being able to decide with certainty which is cause here and which
effect, or whether any relation of cause and effect is involved here at
all. The justification of the latter
doubt is that one of the most frequent symptoms of the condition, in the case
of savage and tame peoples, is the most sudden and most extravagant
voluptuousness which is then, just as suddenly, reversed into a convulsion of
penitence and a denial of world and will: both perhaps interpretable as masked
epilepsy? But nowhere is it more
necessary to renounce interpretations: around no other type has there grown up
such an abundance of nonsense and superstition, none seems to have hitherto
interested men, even philosophers, more - the time has come to cool down a
little on this matter, to learn caution: better, to look away, to go away.
- Still in the background of the most recent philosophy, the Schopenhaueran,
there stands, almost as the problem in itself, this gruesome question-mark of
the religious crisis and awakening. How
is denial of the will possible?
How is the saint possible? - this really seems to have been the question
over which Schopenhauer became a philosopher and set to work. And thus it showed a genuinely Schopenhaueran
outcome that his most convinced adherent (perhaps also his last adherent, so
far as Germany is concerned - ), namely Richard Wagner, brought his own life's
work to an end at precisely this point and at last introduced that dreadful and
eternal type onto the stage as Kundry, type vécu, just as it is; and at
the very time when the psychiatrists of almost all the nations of Europe had an
opportunity of studying it at close quarters wherever the religious neurosis -
or, as I call it, 'the religious nature' - staged its latest epidemic parade
and outbreak as the 'Salvation Army'. - But if one asks what it has really been
in this whole phenomenon of the saint that has interested men of all types and
ages, even philosophers, so immoderately, then the answer is, beyond doubt, the
appearance of the miraculous adhering to it, namely the direct succession of
opposites, of morally antithetical states of soul: here it seemed a
palpable fact that a 'bad man' all at once became a 'saint', a good man. Psychology has hitherto come to grief at this
point: has it not been principally because it has acknowledged the dominion of
morality, because it itself believed in antithetical moral values and
saw, read, interpreted these antitheses into the text and the
facts? - What? The 'miracle' only an
error of interpretation? A lack of
philology? -
48
It seems
that their Catholicism is much more an intrinsic part of the Latin races than
the whole of Christianity in general is of us northerners; and that unbelief
consequently signifies something altogether different in Catholic countries
from what it does in Protestant - namely a kind of revolt against the spirit of
the race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit (or lack of spirit
- ) of the race. We northerners are
undoubtedly descended from barbarian races also in respect of our talent for
religion: we have little talent for it.
We may except the Celts, who therefore supplied the best soil for the
reception of the Christian infection in the north - the Christian ideal came to
blossom, so far as the pale northern sun permitted it, in France. How uncongenially pious are to our taste even
these latest French sceptics when they have in them any Celtic blood! How Catholic, how un-German does August
Comte's sociology smell to us with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical that clever and charming
cicerone of Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve, despite all his hostility towards the
Jesuits! And even more so Ernest Renan:
how inaccessible to us northerners is the language of a Renan, in whom every
other minute some nothingness of religious tension topples a soul which is in a
refined sense voluptuous and relaxed!
Repeat these beautiful words of his - and what malice and high spirits
are at once aroused in reply in our probably less beautiful and sterner, that
is to say German, souls: - 'Disons donc hardiment que la religion est en
produit de l'homme normal, que l'homme est le plus dans le vrai quand il est le
plus religieux et le plus assuré d'une destinée infinie ... C'est quand il est
bon qu'il veut que la vertu corresponde à une ordre éternelle, c'est quand il
contemple les choses d'une manière déintéressée qu'il trouve la mort révoltante
et absurde. Comment ne pas suppose que
c'est dans ces moments-là, que l'homme voit le mieux?...' These words are so totally antipodal
to my ears and habits that when I discovered them my immediate anger wrote
beside them 'la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!' - until my
subsequent anger actually began to like them, these words with their
upside-down truth! It is so pleasant, so
distinguishing, to possess one's own antipodes!
49
What astonishes
one about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the tremendous amount of
gratitude that emanates from it - the kind of man who stands thus before
nature and before life is a very noble one! - Later, when the rabble came to
predominate in Greece, fear also overran religion; and Christianity was
preparing itself. -
50
The passion
for God: there is the peasant, true-hearted and importunate kind, like Luther's
- the whole of Protestantism lacks southern delicatezza. There is an oriental ecstatic kind, like that
of a slave who has been undeservedly pardoned and elevated, as for example in
the case of Augustine, who lacks in an offensive manner all nobility of bearing
and desire. There is the womanly tender
and longing kind which presses bashfully and ignorantly for a unio mystica
et physica: as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In many cases it appears strangely enough as
a disguise for the puberty of a girl or a youth; now and then even as the
hysteria of an old maid, also as her final ambition - the church has more than
once canonized the woman in question.
51
Hitherto the
mightiest men have still bowed down reverently before the saint as the enigma
of self-constraint and voluntary final renunciation: why did they bow? They sensed in him - as it were behind the
question-mark presented by his fragile and miserable appearance - the superior
force that sought to prove itself through such a constraint, the strength of
will in which they recognized and knew how to honour their own strength and joy
in ruling: they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the
saint. In addition to this, the sight of
the saint aroused a suspicion in them: such an enormity of denial, of
anti-nature, will not have been desired for nothing, they said to themselves. Is there perhaps a reason for it, a very
great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret visitors and
informants, might possess closer knowledge?
Enough, the mighty of the world learned in fact of him a new fear, they
sensed a new power, a strange enemy as yet unsubdued - it was the 'will to
power' which constrained them to halt before the saint. They had to question him. -
52
In the
Jewish 'Old Testament', the book of divine justice, there are men, things and
speeches of so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to
set beside it. One stands in reverence
and trembling before these remnants of what man once was and has sorrowful
thoughts about old Asia and its little jutting-out promontory Europe, which
would like to signify as against Asia the 'progress of man'. To be sure: he who is only a measly tame
domestic animal and knows only the needs of a domestic animal (like our
cultured people of today, the Christians of 'cultured' Christianity included -
) has no reason to wonder, let alone to sorrow, among those ruins - the taste
for the Old Testament is a touchstone in regard to 'great' and 'small' - :
perhaps he will find the New Testament, the book of mercy, more after his own
heart (there is in it a great deal of genuine delicate, musty odour of devotee
and petty soul). To have glued this New
Testament, a species of rococo taste in every respect, on to the Old Testament
to form a single book, as 'bible', as 'the book of books': that is
perhaps the greatest piece of temerity and 'sin against the spirit' than
literary Europe has on its conscience.
53
Why atheism
today? - 'The father' in God is thoroughly refuted; likewise 'the judge', 'the
rewarder'. Likewise his 'free will': he
does not hear - and if he heard he would still not know how to help. The worst thing is: he seems incapable of
making himself clearly understood: is he himself vague about what he means? -
These are what, in the course of many conversations, asking and listening, I
found to be the causes of the decline of European theism; it seems to me that
the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth - but that it rejects the
theistic answer with profound mistrust.
54
What, at
bottom, is the whole of modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes - and indeed rather in spite
of him than on the basis of his precedent - all philosophers have been making
an attentat on the ancient soul concept under the cloak of a critique of
the subject-and-predicate concept - that is to say, an attentat on the
fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as an epistemological
scepticism, is, covertly or openly, anti-Christian: although, to speak
to more refined ears, by no means anti-religious. For in the past one believed in 'the soul' as
one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said 'I' is the
condition, 'think' is the predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity
to which a subject must be thought of as cause. Then one tried with admirable artfulness and
tenacity to fathom whether one could not get out of this net - whether the
reverse was not perhaps true: 'think' the condition, 'I' conditioned; 'I' thus
being only a synthesis produced by thinking. Kant wanted fundamentally to prove
that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved - nor could be
object: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, that is
to say of 'the soul', may not always have been remote from him, that idea
which, as the philosophy of the Vedanta, has exerted immense influence on earth
before.
55
There is a
great ladder of religious cruelty with many rungs; but three of them are the
most important. At one time one
sacrificed human beings to one's god, perhaps precisely those human beings one
loved best - the sacrifice of the first-born present in all prehistoric
religions belongs here, as does the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the
Mithras grotto on the isle of Capri, that most horrible of all Roman
anachronisms. Then, in the moral epoch
of mankind, one sacrificed to one's god the strongest instincts one possessed,
one's 'nature'; the joy of this festival glitters in the cruel glance of
the ascetic, the inspired 'anti-naturalist'.
Finally: what was left to be sacrificed?
Did one not finally have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy,
healing, all hope, all faith in a concealed harmony, in a future bliss and
justice? Did one not have to sacrifice
God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity,
gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice
God for nothingness - this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty
was reversed for the generation which is even now arising: we all know
something of it already. -
56
He who,
prompted by some enigmatic desire, has, like me, long endeavoured to think
pessimism through to the bottom and to redeem it from the half-Christian,
half-German simplicity and narrowness with which it finally presented itself to
this century [i.e. nineteenth century], namely in the form of the
Schopenhaueran philosophy; he who has really gazed with an Asiatic and more
than Asiatic eye down into the most world-denying of all possible modes of
thought - beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer,
under the spell and illusion of morality - perhaps by this very act, and
without really intending to, may have had his eyes opened to the opposite
ideal: to the ideal of the most exuberant, most living and most world-affirming
man, who has not only learned to get on and treat with all that was and is but
who wants to have it again as it was and is to all eternity, insatiably
calling out da capo not only to himself but to the whole piece and play,
and not only to a play but fundamentally to him who needs precisely this play -
and who makes it necessary: because he needs himself again and again - and
makes himself necessary - What? And
would this not be circulus vitiosus deus?
57
With the
strength of his spiritual sight and insight the distance, and as it were the
space, around man continually expands: his world grows deeper, ever new stars,
ever new images and enigmas come into view.
Perhaps everything on which the spirit's eye has exercised its
profundity and acuteness has been really but an opportunity for its exercise, a
game, something for children and the childish.
Perhaps the most solemn concepts which have occasioned the most strife
and suffering, the concepts 'God' and 'sin', will one day seem to us of no more
importance than a child's toy and a child's troubles seem to an old man - and
perhaps 'old man' will then have need of another toy and other troubles - still
enough of a child, an eternal child!
58
Has it been
observed to what extent a genuine religious life (both for its favourite labour
of microscopic self-examination and that gentle composure which calls itself
'prayer' and which is a constant readiness for the 'coming of god' - ) requires
external leisure or semi-leisure, I mean leisure with a good conscience,
inherited, by blood, which is not altogether unfamiliar with the aristocratic
idea that work degrades - that is to say, makes soul and body
common? And that consequently modern,
noisy, time-consuming, proud and stupidly proud industriousness educates and
prepares precisely for 'unbelief' more than anything else does? Among those in Germany for example who
nowadays live without religion, I find people whose 'free-thinking' is of
differing kinds and origins but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness
from generation to generation has extinguished the religious instincts: so that
they no longer have any idea what religions are supposed to be for and as it
were merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dumb
amazement. They feel they are already
fully occupied, these worthy people, whether with their businesses or with
their pleasures, not to speak of the 'fatherland' and the newspapers and
'family duties': it seems that they have no time at all left for religion,
especially as it is not clear to them whether it involves another business or
another pleasure - for they tell themselves it is not possible that one goes to
church simply to make oneself miserable.
They are not opposed to religious usages; if participation in such
usages is demanded in certain cases, by the state for instance, they do what is
demanded of them as one does so many things - with patient and modest
seriousness and without much curiosity and discomfort - it is only that they
live too much aside and outside even to feel the need for any for or against in
such things. The great majority of
German middle-class Protestants can today be numbered among these indifferent
people, especially in the great industrious centres of trade and commerce;
likewise the great majority of industrious scholars and the entire university
equipage (excepting the theologians, whose possibility and presence there
provides the psychologist with ever more and ever subtler enigmas to
solve). Pious or even merely
church-going people seldom realize how much good will, one might even
say wilfulness, it requires nowadays for a German scholar to take the problem
of religion seriously; his whole trade (and, as said above, the tradesmanlike
industriousness to which his modern conscience obliges him) disposes him to a
superior, almost good-natured merriment in regard to religion, sometimes mixed
with a mild contempt directed at the 'uncleanliness' of spirit which he
presupposes wherever one still belongs to the church. It is only with the aid of history (thus not
from his personal experience) that the scholar succeeds in summoning up a
reverent seriousness and a certain shy respect towards religion; but if he
intensifies his feelings towards it even to the point of feeling grateful to
it, his has still in his own person not got so much as a single step closer to
that which still exists as church or piety: perhaps the reverse. The practical indifference to religious
things in which he was born and raised is as a rule sublimated in him into a
caution and cleanliness which avoids contact with religious people and things;
and it can be precisely the depth of his tolerance and humanity that bids him
evade the subtle distress which tolerance itself brings with it. - Every age
has its own divine kind of naivety for the invention of which other ages may
envy it - and how much naivety, venerable, childlike and boundlessly stupid
naivety there is in the scholar's belief in his superiority, in the good
conscience of his tolerance, in the
simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man
as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above
- he, the little presumptuous dwarf and man of the mob, the brisk and busy head
- and handyman of 'ideas', of 'modern ideas'!
59
He who has seen
deeply into the world knows what wisdom there is in the fact that men are
superficial. It is their instinct for
preservation which teaches them to be fickle, light and false. Here and there, among philosophers as well as
artists, one finds a passionate and exaggerated worship of 'pure forms': let
no-one doubt that he who needs the cult of surfaces to that extent has
at some time or other made a calamitous attempt to get beneath
them. Perhaps there might even exist an
order of rank in regard to these burnt children, these born artists who can
find pleasure in life only in the intention of falsifying its image (as it were
in a long drawn-out revenge on life - ): one could determine the degree to
which life has been spoiled for them by the extent to which they want to see
its image falsified, attenuated and made otherworldly and divine - one could
include the homines religiosi among the artists and their highest
rank. It is the profound suspicious fear
of an incurable pessimism which compels whole millennia to cling with their
teeth to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear born of that
instinct which senses that one might get hold of the truth too soon,
before mankind was sufficiently strong, sufficiently hard, sufficient of an
artist.... Piety, the 'life in God', would, viewed in this light, appear as the
subtlest and ultimate product of the fear of truth, as the artist's
worship of an intoxication before the most consistent of all falsifications, as
the will to inversion of truth, to untruth at any price. Perhaps there has up till now been no finer
way of making man himself more beautiful than piety: through piety man can
become to so great a degree art, surface, play of colours, goodness, that one
no longer suffers at the sight of him. -
60
To love men for
the sake of God - that has been the noblest and most remote feeling
attained to among men up till now. That
love of man without some sanctifying ulterior objective is one piece of
stupidity and animality more, that the inclination to this love of man
has first to receive its measure, its refinement, its grain of salt and drop of
amber from a higher inclination - whatever man it was who first felt and
'experience' this, however much his tongue may have faltered as it sought to
express such a delicate thought, let him be holy and venerated to us for all
time as the man who has soared the highest and gone the most beautifully
astray!
61
The
philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits - as the man of the
most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the collective
evolution of mankind: this philosopher will make use of the existing religions
for his work of education and breeding, just as he will make use of existing
political and economic conditions. The
influence on selection and breeding, that is to say the destructive as well as
the creative and formative influence which can be exercised with the aid of the
existing religions, is manifold and various depending on the kind of man placed
under their spell and protection. For
the strong and independent prepared and predestined for command, in whom the
art and reason of a ruling race is incarnated, religion is one more means of
overcoming resistance so as to be able to rule: as a bond that unites together
ruler and ruled and betrays and hands over to the former the consciences of the
latter, all that is hidden and most intimate in them which would like to
exclude itself from obedience; and if some natures of such noble descent
incline through lofty spirituality to a more withdrawn and meditative life and
reserve to themselves only the most refined kind of rule (over select disciples
or brothers), then religion can even be used as a means of obtaining peace from
the noise and effort of cruder modes of government, and cleanliness from
the necessary dirt of all politics.
Thus did the Brahmins, for example, arrange things: with the aid of a
religious organization they gave themselves the power of nominating their kings
for the people, while keeping and feeling themselves aside and outside as men
of higher and more than kingly tasks. In
the meantime, religion also gives a section of the ruled guidance and
opportunity for preparing itself for future rule and command; that is to say,
those slowly rising orders and classes in which through fortunate marriage
customs the strength and joy of the will, the will to self-mastery, is always
increasing - religion presents them with sufficient instigations and
temptations to take the road to higher spirituality, to test the feelings of great
self-overcoming, of silence and solitude - asceticism and puritanism are
virtually indispensable means of educations and ennobling if a race wants to
become master over its origins in the rabble, and work its way up towards
future rule. To ordinary men, finally,
the great majority, who exist for service and general utility and who may
exist only for that purpose, religion gives an invaluable contentment with
their nature and station, manifold peace of heart, an ennobling of obedience,
one piece of joy and sorrow more to share with their fellows, and some
transfiguration of the whole everydayness, the whole lowliness, the whole
half-bestial poverty of their souls.
Religion and the religious significance of life sheds sunshine over
these perpetual drudges and makes their own sight tolerable to them, it has the
effect which an Epicurean philosophy usually has on sufferers of a higher rank,
refreshing, refining, as it were making the most use of suffering,
ultimately even sanctifying and justifying.
Perhaps nothing in Christianity and Buddhism is so venerable as their
art of teaching even the lowliest to set themselves through piety in an
apparently higher order of things and thus to preserve their contentment with
the real order, within which they live hard enough lives - and necessarily have
to!
62
In the end,
to be sure, to present the debit side of the account to these religions and to
bring into the light of day their uncanny perilousness - it costs dear and
terribly when religions hold sway, not as means of education and
breeding in the hands of the philosopher, but in their own right and as sovereign,
when they themselves want to be final ends and not means beside other
means. Among men, as among every other
species, there is a surplus of failures, of the sick, the degenerate, the
fragile, of those who are bound to suffer; the successful cases are, among men
too, always the exception, and, considering that man is the animal whose
nature has not yet been fixed, the rare exception. But worse still: the higher the type of man a
man represents, the greater the improbability he will turn out well:
chance, the law of absurdity in the total economy of mankind, shows itself in
its most dreadful shape in its destructive effect on higher men, whose
conditions of life are subtle, manifold and difficult to compute. Now what is the attitude of the above-named
two chief religions towards this surplus of unsuccessful cases? They seek to preserve, to retain in life,
whatever can in any way be preserved, indeed they side with it as a matter of
principle as religions for sufferers, they maintain that all those who
suffer from life as from an illness are in the right, and would like every
other feeling of life to be counted false and become impossible. However highly one may rate this kindly
preservative solicitude, inasmuch as, together with all the other types of man,
it has been and is applied to the highest type, which has hitherto almost
always been the type that has suffered most: in the total accounting the hitherto
sovereign religions are among the main reasons the type 'man' has been
kept on a lower level - they have preserved too much of that which ought to
perish. We have inestimable benefits
to thank them for; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to be
impoverished in face of all that the 'spiritual men' of Christianity, for
example, have hitherto done for Europe!
And yet, when they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the
oppressed and despairing, a staff and stay to the irresolute, and lured those
who were inwardly shattered and had become savage away from society into
monasteries and houses of correction for the soul: what did they have to do in
addition so as thus, with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to work
at the preservation of everything sick and suffering, which means in fact and
truth at the corruption of the European race? Stand all evaluations on their head - that
is what they had to do! And smash the strong,
contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down everything
autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts proper to the
highest and most successful of the type 'man', into uncertainty, remorse of
conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the whole love of the earthly and
of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly - that
is the task the church set itself and had to set itself, until in its
evaluation 'unworldliness', 'unsensuality', and 'higher man' were finally fused
together into one feeling.
Supposing one were able to view the strangely painful and at the same
time coarse and subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and
unconcerned eye of an Epicurean god, I believe there would be no end to one's
laughter and amazement: for does it not seem that one will has dominated
Europe for eighteen centuries, the will to make of man a sublime abortion? But he who, with an opposite desire, no
longer Epicurean but with some divine hammer in his hand, approached this
almost deliberate degeneration and stunting of man such as constitutes the
European Christian (Pascal for instance), would he not have to cry out in rage,
in pity, in horror: 'O you fools, you presumptuous, pitying fools, what have
you done! Was this a work for your
hands! How you have bungled and botched
my beautiful stone! What a thing for you
to take upon yourselves!' - What I am saying is: Christianity has been the most
fatal kind of self-presumption ever. Men
not high or hard enough for the artistic refashioning of mankind; men
not strong or farsighted enough for the sublime self-constraint needed to allow
the foreground law of thousandfold failure and perishing to prevail; men not
noble enough to see the abysmal disparity in order of rank and abysm of rank
between man and man - it is such men who, with their 'equal before God',
have hitherto ruled over the destiny of Europe, until at last a shrunken,
almost ludicrous species, a herd animal, something full of good will, sickly
and mediocre has been bred, the European of today ...
Part Four: Maxims and Interludes
63
He who is a
teacher from the very heart takes all things seriously only with reference to
his students - even himself.
64
'Knowledge for
its own sake' - this is the last snare set by morality: one therewith gets
completely entangled with it once more.
65a
The charm of
knowledge would be small if so much shame did not have to be overcome on the
road to it.
65b
One is most
dishonest towards one's God: he is not permitted to sin!
66
The
inclination to disparage himself, to let himself be robbed, lied to and
exploited, could be the self-effacement of a god among men.
67
Love of one
is a piece of barbarism: for it is practised at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.
68
'I have done
that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have
done that' - says my pride, and remains adamant. At last - memory yields.
69
One has been
a bad spectator of life if one has not also seen the hand that in a considerate
fashion - kills.
70
If one has
character one also has one's typical experience which recurs again and again.
71
The sage as
astronomer. - As long as you still feel the stars as being something 'over you'
you still lack the eye of the man of knowledge.
72
It is not
the strength but the duration of exalted sensations which makes exalted men.
73a
He
who attains his ideal by that very fact transcends it.
73b
Many a peacock
hides his peacock tail from all eyes - and calls it his pride.
74
A man with
genius is unendurable if he does not also possess at least two other things:
gratitude and cleanliness.
75
The degree
and kind of a man's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.
76
Under
conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.
77
With one's
principles one seeks to tyrannize over one's habits or to justify or honour or scold
or conceal them - two people with the same principles probably seek something
fundamentally different with them.
78
He who
despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
79
A soul which
knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its dregs - its lowest part
comes up.
80
A thing
explained is a thing we have no further concern with. - What did that god mean
who counselled: 'know thyself!'? Does
that perhaps mean: 'Have no further concern with thyself! become objective!' -
And Socrates? - And the 'man of science'? -
81
It is
dreadful to die of thirst in the sea. Do
you have to salt your truth so much that it can no longer even - quench thirst?
82
'Pity for
all' - would be harshness and tyranny for you, my neighbour!
83
Instinct -
When the house burns down one forgets even one's dinner. - Yes: but one
retrieves it from the ashes.
84
Woman learns
how to hate to the extent that she unlearns how - to charm.
85
The same
emotions in man and woman are, however, different in tempo: therefore man and
woman never cease to misunderstand one another.
86
Behind all
their personal vanity women themselves always have their impersonal contempt -
for 'woman'. -
87
Bound heart,
free spirit - If one binds one's heart firmly and
imprisons it one can allow one's spirit many liberties: I have said that
before. But no-one believes it if he
does not already known it ...
88
One begins
to mistrust very clever people when they become embarrassed.
89
Terrible
experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something
terrible.
90
Heavy,
melancholy people grow lighter through precisely that which makes others heavy,
through hatred and love, and for a while they rise to their surface.
91
So cold, so
icy one burns one's fingers on him!
Every hand that grasps him starts back! - And for just that reason many
think he is glowing hot.
92
Who has not
for the sake of his reputation - sacrificed himself? -
93
There is no hatred
for men in geniality, but for just that reason all too much contempt for men.
94
Mature
manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at
play.
95
To be
ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the ladder at the end of which
one is also ashamed of one's morality.
96
One ought to
depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa - blessing rather than in
love with it.
97
What? A great man?
I always see only the actor of his own ideal.
98
If
one trains one conscience it will kiss us as it bites.
99
The
disappointed man speaks. - 'I listened for an echo and I heard only praise - .'
100
Before
ourselves we all pose as being simpler than we are: thus do we take a rest from
our fellow men.
101
Today a man
of knowledge might easily feel as if he were God become animal.
102
To discover
he is loved in return ought really to disenchant the lover with the
beloved. 'What? She is so modest as to love even
you? Or so stupid? Or - or -.'
103
The danger
in happiness - 'Now everything is turning out well for me, now I love every
destiny - who would like to be my destiny?'
104
It is not
their love for men but the impotence of their love for men which hinders the
Christians of today from - burning us.
105
The free spirit, the 'pious man of knowledge'
- finds pia fraus even more offensive to his taste (to his kind
of 'piety') than impia fraus.
Hence the profound lack of understanding of the church typical of the
'free spirit' - his kind of unfreedom.
106
By
means of music the passions enjoy themselves.
107
To close
your ears to even the best counter-argument once the decision has been taken:
sign of a strong character. Thus an
occasional will to stupidity.
108
There are no
moral phenomenal at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena ...
109
The criminal
is often enough not equal to his deed: he disparages and slanders it.
110
A criminal's
lawyers are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed
to the advantage of him who did it.
111
Our vanity
is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.
112
He who feels
predestined to regard and not believe finds all believers too noisy and
importunate: he rebuffs them.
113
'You want to
make him interested in you? Then pretend
to be embarrassed in his presence -'
114
The
tremendous expectation in regard to sexual love and the shame involved in this
expectation distorts all a woman's perspectives from the start.
115
Where
neither love nor hate is in the game a woman is a mediocre player.
116
The great
epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our
evil qualities as our best qualities.
117
The will to
overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another emotion or of
several others.
118
There is an
innocence in admiration: he has it to whom it has not yet occurred that he too
could one day be admired.
119
Disgust with
dirt can be so great that it prevents us from cleaning ourselves - from
'justifying' ourselves.
120
Sensuality
often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to
pull out.
121
It was a
piece of subtle refinement that God learned Greek when he wanted to become a
writer - and that he did not learn it better.
122
To enjoy
praise is with some people only politeness of the heart - and precisely the
opposite of vanity of the spirit.
123
Even
concubinage has been corrupted: - by marriage.
124
He who
rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but at the fact that he feels
no pain where he had expected to feel it.
A parable.
125
When we have
to change our opinion about someone we hold the inconvenience he has therewith
caused us greatly to his discredit.
126
A people is
a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. - Yes: and then to get
round them.
127
Science
offends the modesty of all genuine women.
They feel as if one were trying to look under their skin - or worse!
under their clothes and finery.
128
The more
abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it.
129
The devil has
the widest perspectives for God, and that is why he keeps so far away from him
- the devil being the oldest friend of knowledge.
130
What a
person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines - when he
ceases to show what he can do.
Talent is also finery; finery is also a hiding place.
131
The sexes
deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that fundamentally they
love and honour only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more
pleasantly - ). Thus man wants woman to
be peaceful - but woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however
well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace.
132
One
is punished most for one's virtues.
133
He who does
not know how to find the road to his ideal lives more frivolously and
impudently than the man without an ideal.
134
All
credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth comes only from the
senses.
135
Pharisaicism
is not degeneration in a good man: a good part of it is rather the condition of
all being good.
136
One seeks a
midwife for his thoughts, another someone to whom he can be a midwife: thus
originates a good conversation.
137
When one has
dealings with scholars and artists it is easy to miscalculate in opposite directions:
behind a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man, and
behind a mediocre artist often - a very remarkable man.
138
What we do
in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with
whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so.
139
In
revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.
140
Counsel as
conundrum - 'If the bonds are not to burst - you must
try to cut them first.'
141
The belly is
the reason man does not so easily take himself for a god.
142
The chastest
expression I have ever heard: 'Dans le véritable amour c'est l'âme, qui
enveloppe le corps.'
143
Our vanity
would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for
us. The origin of many a morality.
144
When a woman
has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her
sexuality. Unfruitfulness itself
disposes one to a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may be allowed
to say so, 'the unfruitful animal'.
145
Comparing
man and woman in general one may say: woman would not have the genius for
finery if she did not have the instinct for the secondary role.
146
He who
fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a
monster. And when you gaze long into an
abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
147
From old
Florentine novels, moreover - from life: 'buona femmina e mala femmina vuol
bastone'. Sacchetti, Nov. [18]86.
148
To seduce
one's neighbour to a good opinion and afterwards faithfully to believe in this
good opinion of one's neighbour: who can do this trick as well as women?
149
That which
an age feels to be evil us usually an untimely after-echo of that which was
formerly felt to be good - the atavism of an older ideal.
150
Around the
hero everything becomes a tragedy, around the demi-god a satyr-play; and around
God everything becomes - what? Perhaps a
'world'? -
151
It is not
enough to possess a talent: one must also possess your permission to possess it
- eh, my friends?
152
'Where the
tree of knowledge stands is always Paradise': thus speak the oldest and
youngest serpents.
153
That which
is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
154
Objection, evasion,
happy distrust, pleasure in mockery are signs of health: everything
unconditional belongs in pathology.
155
The
sense of the tragic increases and diminishes with sensuality.
156
Madness is
something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the
rule.
157
The thought
of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad
night.
158
To our
strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience
submits.
159
One has
to require good and ill: but why to precisely the person who did us good or
ill?
160
One no
longer loves one's knowledge enough when one has communicated it.
161
Poets behave
impudently towards their experiences: they exploit them.
162
'Our neighbour
is not our neighbour but our neighbour's neighbour' - thus thinks every people.
163
Love brings
to light the exalted and concealed qualities of a lover - what is rare and
exceptional in him: to that extent it can easily deceive as to what is normal
in him.
164
Jesus said
to his Jews: 'The law was made for servants - love God as I love him, as his
son! What have we sons of God to do with
morality!' -
165
Concerning
every party - A shepherd always has need of a bellwether
- or he must himself occasionally be one.
166
You may lie
with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you nonetheless tell
the truth.
167
With hard
men intimacy is a thing of shame - and something precious.
168
Christianity
gave Eros poison to drink - he did not die of it, to be sure, but degenerated
into vice.
169
To talk
about oneself a great deal can also be a means of concealing oneself.
170
In
praise there is more importunity than in blame.
171
Pity in a
man of knowledge seems almost ludicrous, like sensitive hands on a cyclops.
172
From love of
man one sometimes embraces anyone (because one cannot embrace everyone): but
one must never let this anyone know it ...
173
One does not
hate so long as one continues to rate low, but only when one has come to rate
equal or higher.
174
You
utilitarians, you too love everything useful only as a vehicle of
your inclinations - you too really find the noise of its wheels intolerable?
175
Ultimately
one loves one's desires and not that which is desired.
176
The vanity
of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.
177
Perhaps
no-one has ever been sufficiently truthful about what 'truthfulness' is.
178
Clever people
are not credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!
179
The
consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether
indifferent to the fact that we have 'improved' in the meantime.
180
There is an
innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause.
181
It
is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.
182
The
familiarity of the superior embitters, because it may not be returned.
183
'Not that you
lied to me but that I no longer believe you - that is what has distressed me
-.'
184
There
is a wild spirits of good-naturedness which looks like malice.
185
'I do not
like it.' - why? - 'I am not up to it.' - Has anyone ever answered like that?
Part Five: On the Natural History of Morals
186
Moral
sensibility is as subtle, late, manifold, sensitive and refined in Europe today
as the 'science of morals' pertaining to it is still young, inept, clumsy and coarse-fingered
- an interesting contrast which sometimes even becomes visible and incarnate in
the person of a moralist. Even the
expression 'science of morals' is, considering what is designated by it, far
too proud, and contrary to good taste: which is always accustomed to
choose the more modest expressions. One
should, in all strictness, admit what will be needful here for a long
time to come, what alone is provisionally justified here: assembly of
material, conceptual comprehension and arrangement of a vast domain of delicate
value-feelings and value-distinctions which live, grow, beget and perish - and
perhaps attempts to display the more frequent and recurring forms of these
living crystallizations - as preparation of a typology of morals. To be sure: one has not been so modest
hitherto. Philosophers one and all have,
with a strait-laced seriousness that provokes laughter, demanded something much
higher, more pretentious, more solemn of themselves as soon as they have
concerned themselves with morality as a science: they wanted to furnish the rational
ground of morality - and every philosopher hitherto has believed he has
furnished this rational ground; morality itself, however, was taken as
'given'. How far from their clumsy pride
was that apparently insignificant task left in dust and mildew, the task of
description, although the most delicate hands and senses could hardly be
delicate enough for it! It was precisely
because moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only somewhat vaguely in
an arbitrary extract or as a chance abridgement, as morality of their
environment, their class, their church, the spirit of their times, their
climate and zone of the earth, for instance - it was precisely because they
were ill informed and not even very inquisitive about other peoples, ages and
former times, that they did not so much catch sight of the real problems of
morality - for these came into view only if we compare many
moralities. Strange though it may sound,
in all 'science of morals' hitherto the problem of morality itself has been lacking:
the suspicion was lacking that there was anything problematic here. What philosophers called 'the rational ground
of morality' and sought to furnish was, viewed in the proper light, only a
scholarly form of faith in the prevailing morality, a new way of expressing
it, and thus itself a fact within a certain morality, indeed even in the last
resort a kind of denial that this morality ought to be conceived of as a
problem - and in any event the opposite of a testing, analysis, doubting and
vivisection of this faith. Hear, for
example, with what almost venerable innocence Schopenhauer still presented his
task, and draw your own conclusions as to how scientific a 'science' is whose
greatest masters still talk like children and old women: - 'The principle', he
says (Fundamental Problems of Ethics),
the fundamental proposition on
whose content all philosophers of ethics are actually at one: neminem
laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva - is actually the proposition
of which all the teachers of morals endeavour to furnish the rational ground
... the actual foundation of ethics which has been sought for centuries
like the philosopher's stone.
- The
difficulty of furnishing the rational ground for the above-quoted proposition
may indeed be great - as is well known, Schopenhauer too failed to do it - ;
and he who has ever been certain how insipidly false and sentimental this
proposition is in a world whose essence is will to power - may like to recall that
Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, actually - played the flute....
Every day, after dinner: read his biographers on this subject. And by the way: a pessimist, world-denier and
God-denier, who comes to a halt before morality - who affirms morality
and plays the flute, affirms laede neminem morality: what? is that
actually - a pessimist?
187
Quite apart
from the value of such assertions as 'there exists in us a categorical
imperative' one can still ask: what does such an assertion say of the man who
asserts it? There are moralities which
are intended to justify their authors before others; other moralities are
intended to calm him and make him content with himself; with others he wants to
crucify and humiliate himself; with others he wants to wreak vengeance, with
others hide himself, with others transfigure himself and set himself on high;
this morality serves to make its author forget, that to make him or something
about him forgotten; many moralists would like to exercise power and their
creative moods on mankind; others, Kant perhaps among them, give to understand
with their morality: 'what is worthy of respect in me is that I know how to
obey - and things ought to be no different with you!' - in short,
moralities too are only a sign-language of the emotions.
188
Every
morality is, as opposed to laisser aller, a piece of tyranny against
'nature', likewise against 'reason': but that can be no objection to it unless
one is in possession of some other morality which decrees that any kind of
tyranny and unreason is impermissible.
The essential and invaluable element in every morality is that it is a
protracted constraint: to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism one
should recall the constraint under which every language has hitherto attained
strength and freedom - the metrical constraint, the tyranny of rhyme and
rhythm. How much trouble the poets and
orators of every nation have given themselves! - not excluding a few
present-day prose writers in whose ears there dwells an inexorable conscience -
'for the sake of foolishness', as the utilitarian fools say, thinking they are
clever - 'from subjection to arbitrary laws', as the anarchists say, feeling
themselves 'free', even free-spirited.
But the strange fact is that all there is or has been on earth of
freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance and masterly certainty, whether in thinking
itself, or in ruling, or in speaking and persuasion, in the arts as in morals,
has evolved only by virtue of the 'tyranny of such arbitrary laws'; and, in all
seriousness, there is no small probability that precisely this is 'nature' and
'natural' - and not that laisser aller! Every artist knows how far from the feeling
of letting himself go his 'natural' condition is, the free ordering, placing,
disposing, forming in the moment of 'inspiration' - and how strictly and subtly
he then obeys thousandfold laws which precisely on account of their severity
and definiteness mock all formulation in concepts (even the firmest concept is
by comparison something fluctuating, manifold, ambiguous - ). The essential thing 'in heaven and upon
earth' seems, to say it again, to be a protracted obedience in one
direction: from out of that there always emerges and has always emerged in the
long run something for the sake of which it is worthwhile to live on earth, for
example virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality - something
transfiguring, refined, mad and divine.
Protracted unfreedom of spirit, mistrustful constraint in the
communicability of ideas, the discipline thinkers imposed on themselves to
think within an ecclesiastical or courtly rule or under Aristotelian
presuppositions, the protracted spiritual will to interpret all events
according to a Christian scheme and to rediscover and justify the Christian God
in every chance occurrence - all these violent, arbitrary, severe, gruesome and
anti-rational things have shown themselves to be the means by which the
European spirit was disciplined in its strength, ruthless curiosity and subtle
flexibility: though admittedly an irreplaceable quantity of force and spirit
had at the same time to be suppressed, stifled and spoiled (for here as
everywhere 'nature' shows itself as it is, in all its prodigal and indifferent
magnificence, which is noble though it outrage our feelings). That for thousands of years European thinkers
thought only so as to prove something - today, on the contrary, we suspect any
thinker who 'wants to prove something' - that they always knew in advance that
which was supposed to result from the most rigorous cogitation, as used
to be the case with Asiatic astrology and is still the case with the innocuous
Christian-moral interpretation of the most intimate personal experiences 'to
the glory of God' and 'for the salvation of the soul' - this tyranny, this
arbitrariness, this rigorous and grandiose stupidity has educated the
spirit; it seems that slavery, in the cruder and in the more refined sense, is
the indispensable means also for spiritual discipline and breeding. Regard any morality from this point of view: it
is 'nature' in it which teaches hatred of laisser aller, of too great
freedom, and which implants the need for limited horizons and immediate tasks -
which teaches the narrowing of perspective, and thus in a certain sense
stupidity, as a condition of life and growth.
'Thou shalt obey someone and for a long time: otherwise thou
shalt perish and lose all respect for thyself' - this seems to be nature's
imperative, which is, to be sure, neither 'categorical' as old Kant demanded it
should be (hence the 'otherwise' - ), nor addressed to the individual (what do
individuals matter to nature!), but to peoples, races, ages, classes, and above
all to the entire animal 'man', to mankind.
189
The
industrious races find leisure very hard to endure: it was a masterpiece of English
instinct to make Sunday so extremely holy and boring that the English
unconsciously long again for their week- and working-days - as a kind of
cleverly devised and cleverly intercalated fast, such as is also to be
seen very frequently in the ancient world (although, as one might expect in the
case of southern peoples, not precisely in regard to work -). There have to be fasts of many kinds; and
wherever powerful drives and habits prevail legislators have to see to it that
there are intercalary days on which such a drive is put in chains and learns to
hunger again. Seen from a higher
viewpoint, entire generations and ages, if they are infected with some moral
fanaticism or other, appear to be such intercalated periods of constraint and
fasting, during which a drive learns to stoop and submit, but also to purify
and intensify itself; certain philosophical sects (for example the Stoa
in the midst of the Hellenistic culture, with its air grown rank and
overcharged with aphrodisiac vapours) likewise permit of a similar
interpretation. - This also provides a hint towards the elucidation of that
paradox why it was precisely during Europe's Christian period and only under
the impress of Christian value judgements that the sexual drive sublimated itself
into love (amour-passion).
190
There is
something in Plato's morality which does not really belong to Plato but is only
to be met with in his philosophy, one might say in spite of Plato: namely
Socratism, for which he was really too noble.
'No-one wants to do injury to himself, therefore all badness is
involuntary. For the bad mad does injury
to himself: this he would not do if he knew that badness is bad. Thus the bad man is bad only in consequence
of an error; if one cures him of his error, one necessarily makes him - good.'
- This way of reasoning smells of the mob, which sees in bad behaviour
only its disagreeable consequences and actually judges 'it is stupid to
act badly'; while it takes 'good' without further ado to be identical with
'useful and pleasant'. In the case of
every utilitarian morality one may conjecture in advance a similar origin and
follow one's nose: one will seldom go astray. - Plato did all he could to
interpret something refined and noble into his teacher's proposition, above all
himself - he, the most intrepid of interpreters, who picked up the whole of
Socrates only in the manner of a popular tune from the streets, so as to
subject it to infinite and impossible variations: that is, to make it into all
his own masks and multiplicities. One
might ask in jest, and in Homeric jest at that: what is the Platonic Socrates
if not prosthe Platon opithen te Platon messe te chimaira?
191
The old
theological problem of 'faith' and 'knowledge' - or, more clearly, of instinct
and reason - that is to say, the question whether in regard to the evaluation
of things instinct deserves to have more authority than rationality, which
wants to evaluate and act according to reasons, according to a 'why?', that is
to say according to utility and fitness for a purpose - this is still that old
moral problem which first appeared in the person of Socrates and was already
dividing the minds of men long before Christianity. Socrates himself, to be sure, had, with the
taste appropriate to his talent - that of a superior dialectician - initially
taken the side of reason; and what indeed did he do all his life long but laugh
at the clumsy incapacity of his noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like
all noble men, and were never able to supply adequate information about the
reasons for their actions? Ultimately,
however, in silence and secrecy, he laughed at himself too: he found in
himself, before his more refined conscience and self-interrogation, the same
difficulty and incapacity. But why, he
exhorted himself, should one therefore abandon the instincts! One must help both them and reason to
receive their due - one must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid
them with good arguments. This was the
actual falsity of that great ironist, who had so many secrets; he
induced his conscience to acquiesce in a sort of self-outwitting: fundamentally
he had seen through the irrational aspect of moral judgement. - Plato, more
innocent in such things and without the craftiness of the plebeian, wanted at
the expenditure of all his strength - the greatest strength any philosopher had
hitherto had to expend! - to prove to himself that reason and instinct move of
themselves towards one goal, towards the good, towards 'God'; and since
Plato all theologians and philosophers have followed the same path - that is to
say, in moral matters instinct, or as the Christians call it 'faith', or as I
call it 'the herd', has hitherto triumphed.
One might have to exclude Descartes, the father of rationalism (and
consequently the grandfather of the Revolution), who recognized only the
authority of reason: but reason is only an instrument, and Descartes was
superficial.
192
He who has
followed the history of an individual science will find in its evolution a clue
to the comprehension of the oldest and most common processes of all 'knowledge
and understanding': in both cases it is the premature hypotheses, the fictions,
the good stupid will to 'believe', the lack of mistrust and patience which are
evolved first - it is only late, and then imperfectly, that our senses learn to
be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of understanding. It is more comfortable for our eye to react
to a particular object by producing again an image it has often produced before
than by retaining what is new and different in an impression: the latter
requires more strength, more 'morality'.
To hear something new is hard and painful for the ear; we hear the music
of foreigners badly. When we hear a
foreign language we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds we hear into words
which have a more familiar and homely ring: thus the Germans, for example, once
heard arcubalista and adapted it into Armbrust. The novel finds our senses, too, hostile and
reluctant; and even in the case of the 'simplest' processes of the senses, the
emotions, such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotions of laziness, dominate.
- As little as a reader today reads all the individual words (not to speak of
the syllables) of a page - he rather takes about five words in twenty
haphazardly and 'conjectures' their probable meaning - just as little do we see
a tree exactly and entire with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape;
it is so much easier for us to put together an approximation of a tree. Even when we are involved in the most
uncommon experiences we still do the same thing: we fabricate the greater part
of the experience and can hardly be compelled not to contemplate some
event as its 'inventor'. All this means:
we are from the very heart and from the very first - accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and
hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than
one realizes. - In a lively conversation I often see before me the fact of the
person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined by the thought
he is expressing or which I believe has been called up in him that this degree
of clarity far surpasses the power of my eyesight - so that the play of
the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been invented by
me. Probably the person was making a
quite different face or none whatever.
193
Quidquid
luce fuit, tenebris agit: but also the other way
round. That which we experience in
dreams, if we experience it often, is in the end just as much a part of the
total economy of our soul as is anything we 'really' experience: we are by
virtue of it richer or poorer, feel one need more or one need fewer, and
finally are led along a little in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful
moments of our waking spirit by the habits of our dreams. Suppose someone has often flown in his dreams
and finally as soon as he starts dreaming becomes conscious of a power and art
of flying as if it were a privilege he possessed, likewise as his personal and
enviable form of happiness: such a man as believes he can realize any arc and
angle with the slightest impulse, as knows the feeling of a certain divine
frivolity, a 'going up' without tension or constraint, a 'going down' without
condescension or abasement - without gravity! - how should the man who
knew such dream-experiences and dream-habits not find at last that the word
'happiness' had a different colour and definition in his waking hours too! How should he not have a different
kind of - desire for happiness? 'Soaring
rapture' as the poets describe it must seem to him, in comparison with this
'flying', too earthy, muscular, violent, too 'grave'.
194
The
diversity of men is revealed not only in the diversity of their tables of what
they find good, that is to say in the fact that they regard diverse goods worth
striving for and also differ as to what is more or less valuable, as to the
order or rank of the goods they all recognize - it is revealed even more in
what they regard as actually having and possessing what they find
good. In regard to a woman, for example,
the more modest man counts the simple disposal of her body and sexual
gratification as a sufficient and satisfactory sign of having, of possession;
another, with a more jealous and demanding thirst for possession, sees the
'question-mark', the merely apparent quality of such a having and requires
subtler tests, above all in order to know whether the woman not only gives
herself to him but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to
have - : only thus does she count to him as 'possessed'. A third, however, is not done with jealousy
and desire for having even then; he asks himself whether, when the woman gives
up everything for him, she does not perhaps do so for a phantom of him: he
demands that she know him to the very heart before she is able to love him at
all, he dares to let himself be unravelled -.
He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no
longer deceives herself about him but loves him as much for his devilry and
hidden insatiability as she does for his goodness, patience and
spirituality. One would like to possess
a people: and all the higher arts of a Cagliostro and Catiline seem to him
right for that end. Another, with a more
refined thirst for possession, says to himself: 'one may not deceive where one
wants to possess' - he is irritated and dissatisfied at the idea that it is a
mask of him which rules the hearts of the people: 'so I must let myself
bee known and, first of all, know myself!' Among helpful and charitable people one almost
always finds that clumsy deceitfulness which first adjusts and adapts him who
is to be helped: as if, for example, he 'deserved' help, desired precisely their
help, and would prove profoundly grateful, faithful and submissive to theme in
return for all the help he had received - with these imaginings they dispose of
those in need as if they were possessions, and are charitable and helpful at
all only from a desire for possessions.
They are jealous if one frustrates or anticipates them when they want to
help. Parents involuntarily make of
their child something similar to themselves - they call it 'education' - and at
the bottom of her heart no mother doubts that in her child she has borne a
piece of property, no father disputes his right to subject it to his
concepts and values. Indeed, in former
times (among the ancient Germans, for instance) it seemed proper for fathers to
possess power of life or death over the newborn and to use it as they thought
fit. And as formerly the father, so
still today the teacher, the class, the priest, the prince unhesitatingly see
in every new human being an opportunity for a new possession. From which it follows ...
195
The Jews - a
people 'born for slavery' as Tacitus and the whole ancient world says, 'the
chosen people' as they themselves say and believe - the Jews achieved that
miracle of inversion of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple
of millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination - their prophets fused
'rich', 'godless', 'evil', 'violent', 'sensual' into one and were the first to
coin the word 'world' as a term of infamy.
It is in this inversion of values (with which is involved the employment
of the word for 'poor' as a synonym of 'holy' and 'friend') that the
significance of the Jewish people resides: with them there begins the slave
revolt in morals.
196
It is to be inferred
that there exist countless dark bodies close to the sun - such as we shall
never see. This is, between ourselves, a
parable; and a moral psychologist reads the whole starry script only as a
parable and sign-language by means of which many things can be kept secret.
197
One
altogether misunderstands the beast of prey and man of prey (Cesare Borgia for
example), one misunderstands 'nature', so long as one looks for something
'sick' at the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths,
or even for an inborn 'hell' in them - : as virtually all moralists have done
hitherto. It seems, does it not, that
there exists in moralists a hatred for the jungle and the tropics? And that the 'tropical man' has to be
discredited at any cost, whether as the sickness and degeneration of man or as
his own hell and self-torment? But
why? For the benefit of 'temperate
zones'? The benefit of temperate
men? Of the 'moral'? Of the mediocre? - This for the chapter
'Morality as Timidity'.
198
All these
moralities which address themselves to the individual person, for the promotion
of his 'happiness' as they say - what are they but prescriptions for behaviour
in relation to the degree of perilousness in which the individual person
lives with himself; recipes to counter his passions, his good and bad
inclinations insofar as they have will to power in them and would like to play
the tyrant; great and little artifices and acts of prudence to which there
clings the nook-and-cranny odour of ancient household remedies and old-woman
wisdom; one and all baroque and reasonable in form - because they address
themselves to 'all', because they generalize where generalization is
impermissible - speaking unconditionally and all, taking themselves for
unconditional, flavoured with more than one grain of salt, indeed
tolerable only, and occasionally even tempting, when they learn to smell
overspices and dangerous, to smell above all of 'the other world': all this is,
from an intellectual point of view, of little value and far from constituting
'science', not to speak of 'wisdom', but rather, to say it again and to say it
thrice, prudence, prudence, prudence, mingled with stupidity, stupidity,
stupidity - whether it be that indifference and statuesque coldness towards the
passionate folly of the emotions which the Stoics advised and applied; or that
no-more-laughing and no-more-weeping of Spinoza, that destruction of the
emotions through analysis and vivisection which he advocated so naively; or
that depression of the emotions to a harmless mean at which they may be
satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morals; even morality as enjoyment of the
emotions is a deliberate thinning down and spiritualization through the
symbolism of art, as music for instance, or as love of God or love of man for
the sake of God - for in religion the passions again acquire civic rights,
assuming that ...; finally, even that easygoing and roguish surrender to the
emotions such as Hafiz and Goethe taught, that bold letting fall of the reins,
that spiritual-physical licentia morum in the exceptional case of wise
old owls and drunkards for whom there is 'no longer much risk in it'. This too for the chapter 'Morality as
Timidity'.
199
Inasmuch as
ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds
(family groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches), and always
very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command -
considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practised and
cultivated among men better or longer than obedience, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by
now innate as a kind of formal conscience which commands: 'thou shalt
unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that', in short 'thou
shalt'. This need seeks to be satisfied
and to fill out its form with a content; in doing so it grasps about wildly,
according to the degree of its strength, impatience and tension, with little
discrimination, as a crude appetite, and accepts whatever any commander -
parent, teacher, law, class prejudice, public opinion - shouts in its
ears. The strange narrowness of human
evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and
rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been
inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we think of this instinct taken to its
ultimate extravagance there would be no commanders or independent men at all;
or, if they existed, they would suffer from a bad conscience and in order to be
able to command would have to practise a deceit upon themselves: the deceit,
that is, that they too were only obeying.
This state of things actually exists in Europe today: I call it the
moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They
know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to
pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands (commands of ancestors, of
the constitution, of justice, of the law or even of God), or even to borrow
herd maxims from the herd's way of thinking and appear as 'the first servant of
the people' for example, or as 'instruments of the common good'. On the other hand, the herd-man in Europe
today makes himself out to be the only permissible kind of man and glorifies
the qualities through which he is tame, peaceable and useful to the herd as the
real human virtues: namely public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness,
moderation, modesty, forbearance, pity.
In those cases, however, in which leaders and bellwethers are thought to
be indispensable, there is attempt after attempt to substitute for them an
adding-together of clever herd-men: this, for example, is the origin of all
parliamentary constitutions. All this
notwithstanding, what a blessing, what a release from a burden becoming
intolerable, the appearance of an unconditional commander is for this
herd-animal European, the effect produced by the appearance of Napoleon is the
latest great witness - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the
history of the higher happiness this entire century [nineteenth] has attained
in its most valuable men and moments.
200
The man of an
era of dissolution which mixes the races together and who therefore contains
within him the inheritance of a diversified descent, that is to say contrary
and often not merely contrary drives and values which struggle with one another
and rarely leave one another in peace - such a man of late cultures and broken
lights will, on average, be a rather weak man: his fundamental desire is that
the war which he is should come to an end; happiness appears to him, in
accord with a sedative (for example Epicurean or Christian) medicine and mode
of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of repose, of tranquillity, of
satiety, of unity at last attained, as a 'Sabbath of Sabbaths', to quote the
holy rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man. - If, however, the
contrariety and war in such a nature should act as one more stimulus and
enticement to life - and if, on the other hand, in addition to powerful and
irreconcilable drives, there has also been inherited and cultivated a proper
mastery and subtlety in conducting a war against oneself, that is to say
self-control, self-outwitting: then there arise those marvellously
incomprehensible and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for
victory and the seduction of others, the fairest examples of which are
Alcibiades and Caesar ( - to whom I should like to add that first
European agreeable to my taste, the Hohenstaufen Friedrich II), and among
artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They
appear in precisely the same ages as those in which that rather weak type with
his desire for rest comes to the fore: the two types belong together and
originate in the same causes.
201
So long as
the utility which dominates moral value-judgements is solely that which is
useful to the herd, so long as the object is solely the preservation of the
community and the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively in that which
seems to imperil the existence of the community: so long as that is the case
there can be no 'morality of love of one's neighbour'. Supposing that even there a constant little
exercise of consideration, pity, fairness, mildness, mutual aid was practised,
supposing that even at that stage of society all those drives are active which
are later honourable designated 'virtues' and are finally practically equated with
the concept 'morality': in that era they do not yet by any means belong to the
domain of moral valuations - they are still extra-moral. An act of pity, for example, was during the
finest age of Rome considered neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral;
and even if it was commended, this commendation was entirely compatible with a
kind of involuntary disdain, as soon, that is, as it was set beside any action
which served the welfare of the whole, of the res publica. Ultimately 'love of one's neighbour' is
always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when
compared with fear of one's neighbour.
Once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and
made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one's neighbour which again
creates new perspectives of moral valuation.
There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness,
foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which had hitherto
had not only to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility -
under different names, naturally, from those chosen here - but also mightily
developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the
community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these
drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous - now that the diversionary outlets
for them are lacking - and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to
calumny. The antithetical drives and
inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd instinct draws
its conclusions. How much or how little
that is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an
opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now the
moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives,
breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the
average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community
goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken:
consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and
calumniated. Lofty spiritual
independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous;
everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour
quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient,
self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires
moral names and honours. Eventually,
under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to
educate one's feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of
severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern
and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and
awakens mistrust, 'the lamb', even more 'the sheep', is held in higher and
higher respect. There comes a point of
morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it
takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so
honestly and wholeheartedly. Punishment:
that seems to it somehow unfair - certainly the idea of 'being punished' and
'having to punish' is unpleasant to it, makes it afraid. 'Is it not enough to render him harmless? Why punish him as well? To administer punishment is itself dreadful!'
- with this question herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its
ultimate conclusion. Supposing all
danger, the cause of fear, could be abolished, this morality would therewith
also be abolished: it would no longer be necessary, it would no longer regard
itself as necessary! - He who examines the conscience of the present-day
European will have to extract from a thousand moral recesses and hiding-places
always the same imperative, the imperative of herd timidity: 'we wish that
there will one day no longer be anything to fear!' One day - everywhere in Europe the will and
way to that day is now called 'progress'.
202
Let us
straightaway say once more what we have already said a hundred times: for ears today
offer such truths - our truths - no ready welcome. We know well enough how offensive it sounds
when someone says plainly and without metaphor that man is an animal; but it
will be reckoned almost a crime in us that precisely in regard to men of
'modern ideas' we constantly employ the terms 'herd', 'herd instinct', and the
like. But what of that! we can do no
other: for it is precisely here that our new insight lies. We have found that in all principal moral
judgements Europe has become unanimous, including the lands where Europe's
influence predominates: one manifestly knows in Europe what Socrates
thought he did not know, and what that celebrated old serpent once promised to
teach - one 'knows' today what is good and evil. Now it is bound to make a harsh sound and one
not easy for ears to hear when we insist again and again: that which here
believes it knows, that which here glorifies itself with its praising and
blaming and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herd-animal man: the
instinct which has broken through and come to predominate and prevail over the
other instincts and is coming to do so more and more in proportion to the
increasing physiological approximation and assimilation of which it is the
symptom. Morality is in Europe today
herd-animal morality - that is to say, as we understand the thing, only one
kind of human morality beside which, before which, after which many other,
above all higher, moralities are possible or ought to be possible. But against such a 'possibility', against
such an 'ought', this morality defends itself with all its might: it says,
obstinately and stubbornly, 'I am morality itself, and nothing is morality
besides me!' - indeed, with the aid of a religion which has gratified and
flattered the sublimest herd-animal desires, it has got to the point where we
discover even in political and social institutions an increasingly evident
expression of this morality: the democratic movement inherits the
Christian. But that the tempo of this
movement is much too slow and somnolent for the more impatient, for the sick
and suffering of the said instinct, is attested by the ever-more frantic
baying, the ever-more undisguised fang-baring of the anarchist dogs which now
rove the streets of European culture: apparently the reverse of the placidly
industrious democrats and revolutionary ideologists, and even more so of the
stupid philosophasters and brotherhood fanatics who call themselves socialists
and want a 'free society', they are in fact at one with them all in their total
and instinctive hostility towards every form of society other than that of the autonomous
herd (to the point of repudiating even the concepts 'master' and 'servant' - ni
dieu ni maître says a socialist formula - ); at one in their tenacious
opposition to every special claim, every special right and privilege (that is
to say, in the last resort to every right: for when everyone is equal
no-one will need any 'rights' - ); at one in their mistrust of punitive justice
(as if it were an assault on the weaker, an injustice against the necessary
consequence of all previous society - ); but equally at one in the religion of
pity, in sympathy with whatever feels, lives, suffers (down as far as the
animals, up as far as 'God' - the extravagance of 'pity for God' belong in a
democratic era - ); at one, one and all, in the cry and impatience of pity, in
mortal hatred for suffering in general, to let suffer; at one in their
involuntary gloom and sensitivity, under whose spell Europe seems threatened
with a new Buddhism; at one in their faith in the morality of mutual
pity, as if it were morality in itself and the pinnacle, the attained
pinnacle of man, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of the present
and the great redemption from all the guilt of the past - at one, one and all,
in their faith in the community as the saviour, that is to say in the
herd, in 'themselves' ...
203
We, who have
a different faith - we, to whom the democratic movement is not merely a form
assumed by political organization in decay but also a form assumed by man in
decay, that is to say in diminishment, in process of becoming mediocre and
losing his value: whither must we direct our hopes? - Towards new
philosophers, we have no other choice; towards spirits strong and original
enough to make a start on antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse
'eternal values'; towards heralds and forerunners, towards men of the future
who in the present knot together the constraint which compels the will of
millennia on to new paths. To teach
man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to
prepare for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and
breeding so as to make an end of that gruesome dominion of chance and nonsense
that has hitherto been called 'history' - the nonsense of the 'greatest number'
is only its latest form - : for that a new kind of philosopher and commander
will some time be needed, in face of whom whatever has existed on earth of
hidden, dreadful and benevolent spirits may well look pale and dwarfed. It is the image of such leaders which hovers
before our eyes - may I say that aloud, you free spirits? The circumstances one would have in part to
create, in part to employ, to bring them into existence; the conjectural paths
and tests by virtue of which a soul could grow to such height and power it
would feel compelled to these tasks; a revaluation of values under whose
novel pressure and hammer a conscience would be steeled, a heart transformed to
brass, so that it might endure the weight of such a responsibility; on the
other hand, the need for such leaders, the terrible danger they might not
appear or might fail or might degenerate - these are our proper cares
and concerns, do you know that, you free spirits? These are the heavy, remote thoughts and
thunder clouds that pass across our life's sky. There are few more grievous pains than once
to have beheld, divined, sensed, how an extraordinary man missed his way and
degenerated: but he who has the rare eye for the collective danger that 'man'
himself may degenerate, he who, like us, has recognized the tremendous
fortuitousness which has hitherto played its game with the future of man - a
game in which no hand, not even a 'finger of God' took any part! - he who has
divined the fatality that lies concealed in the idiotic guilelessness and blind
confidence of 'modern ideas', even more in the whole of Christian-European
morality: he suffers from a feel of anxiety with which no other can be compared
- for he comprehends in a single glance all that which, given a
favourable accumulation and intensification of forces and tasks, could be cultivated
out of man, he knows with all the knowledge of his conscience how the
greatest possibilities in man are still unexhausted and often before the type
man has been faced with strange decisions and new paths - he knows even better
from his most painful memories against what wretched things an evolving being
of the highest rank has hitherto usually been shattered and has broken off,
sunk and has itself become wretched. The
collective degeneration of man down to that which the socialist dolts
and blockheads today see as their 'man of the future' - as their ideal! - this
degeneration and diminution of man to the perfect herd animal (or, as they say,
to the man of the 'free society'), this animalization of man to the pygmy
animal of equal rights and equal
pretensions is possible, there is no doubt about that! He who has once thought this possibility
through to the end knows one more kind of disgust than other men do - and
perhaps also a new task!...
Part Six: We Scholars
204
At the risk
that moralizing will here too prove to be what it has always been - namely an
undismayed montrer ses plaies, as Balzac says - I should like to venture
to combat a harmful and improper displacement of the order of rank between
science and philosophy which is today, quite unnoticed and as if with a perfect
good conscience, threatening to becoming established. In my view it is only from one's experience
- experience always means bad experience, does it not? - that one can acquire
the right to speak on such a higher question of rank: otherwise one will talk
like a blind man about colours or like women and artists against science
('oh this wicked science', their modesty and instinct sighs, 'it always exposes
the facts!' - ). The Declaration
of Independence of the man of science, his emancipation from philosophy, is one
of the more subtle after-effects of the democratic form and formlessness of
life: the self-glorification and presumption of the scholar now stands
everywhere in full bloom and in its finest springtime - which does not mean to
say that in this case self-praise smells sweetly. 'Away with all masters!' - that is what the
plebeian instinct desires here too; and now that science has most successfully
resisted theology, whose 'handmaid' it was for too long, it is now, with great
high spirits and a plentiful lack of understanding, taking it upon itself to
lay down laws for philosophy and for once to play the 'master' - what am I
saying? to play the philosopher itself.
My memory - the memory of a man of science, if I may say so! - is full
of arrogant naiveties I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from young
scientists and old physicians (not to speak of the most cultured and conceited
of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both by profession
-). Now it was the specialist and
jobbing workman who instinctively opposed synthetic undertakings and capacities
in general; now the industrious labourer who had got a scent of the otium
and noble luxury in the philosopher's psychical economy and felt wronged and
diminished by it. Now it was that colour
blindness of the utility man who sees in philosophy nothing but a series of refuted
systems and a wasteful expenditure which 'benefits' nobody. Now a fear of disguised mysticism and a
rectification of the frontiers of knowledge leaped out; now a disrespect for an
individual philosopher which had involuntarily generalized itself into a disrespect
for philosophy. Finally, what I found
most frequently among young scholars was that behind the arrogant disdain for
philosophy there lay the evil after-effect of a philosopher himself, from whom
they had, to be sure, withdrawn their allegiance, without, however, having got
free from the spell of his disparaging evaluation of other philosophers - the
result being a feeling of ill humour towards philosophy in general. (This is the sort of after-effect which, it
seems to me, Schopenhauer, for example, has had on Germany in recent years -
with his unintelligent rage against Hegel he succeeded in disconnecting the
entire last generation of Germans from German culture, which culture was, all
things considered, a high point and divinatory refinement of the historical
sense: but Schopenhauer himself was in precisely this respect poor,
unreceptive and un-German to the point of genius.) In general and broadly speaking, it may have
been above all the human, all too human element, in short the poverty of the
most recent philosophy itself, which has been most thoroughly prejudicial to
respect for philosophy and has opened the gates to the instinct of the
plebeian. For one must admit how
completely the whole species of a Heraclitus, a Plato, an Empedocles, and
whatever else these royal and splendid hermits of the spirit were called, is
lacking in our modern world; and to what degree, in face of such
representatives of philosophy as are, thanks to fashion, at present as completely
on top as they are completely abysmal (in Germany, for example, the two lions
of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann)
- a worthy man of science is justified in feeling he is of a better
species and descent. It is, in
particular, the sight of those hotchpotch-philosophers who call themselves
'philosophers of reality' or 'positivists' which is capable of implanting a
perilous mistrust in the soul of an ambitious young scholar: these gentlemen
are at best scholars and specialists themselves, that fact is palpable! - they
are one and all defeated men brought back under the sway of science, who
at some time or other demanded more of themselves without having the
right to this 'more' and the responsibility that goes with it - and who now
honourably, wrathfully, revengefully represent by word and deed the unbelief
in the lordly task and lordliness of philosophy. Finally: how could things be otherwise! Science is flourishing today and its good
conscience shines in its face, while that to which the whole of modern
philosophy has gradually sunk, this remnant of philosophy, arouses distrust and
displeasure when it does not arouse mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to 'theory of knowledge',
actually no more than a timid epochism and abstinence doctrine: a philosophy
that does not even get over the threshold and painfully denies itself
the right of entry - that is philosophy at its last gasp, an end, an agony,
something that arouses pity. How could
such a philosophy - rule!
205
The perils
in the way of the evolution of the philosopher are in truth so manifold today
one may well doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The compass and tower-building of the
sciences has grown enormous, and therewith the probability has also grown
enormous that the philosopher will become weary while still no more than a
learner, or that he will let himself be stopped somewhere and 'specialize': so
that he will never reach his proper height, the height from which he can survey,
look around and look down. Or
that he will reach this height too late, when his best time is past and his
best strength spent; or damaged, coarsened, degenerate, so that his view, his
total value judgement, no longer means much.
Perhaps it is the very refinement of his intellectual conscience which
makes him linger on the way and arrive late; he fears he may be seduced into
dilettantism, into becoming an insect with a thousand feet and a thousand
antennae, he knows too well that one who has lost respect for himself can no
longer command, can no longer lead as a man of knowledge either, unless
he wants to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper of
the spirit, in short a miss-leader. This
is ultimately a question of taste even if it were not a question of
conscience. In addition to this, so as
to redouble his difficulties, there is the fact that the philosopher demands of
himself a judgement, a Yes or No, not in regard to the sciences but in regard
to life and the value of life - that he is reluctant to believe he has a right,
to say nothing of a duty, to come to such a judgement, and has to find his way
to this right and this faith only through the widest - perhaps most disturbing
and shattering - experiences, and often hesitating, doubting, and being struck
dumb. Indeed, the mob has long
confounded and confused the philosopher with someone else, whether with the man
of science or with the religiously exalted, dead to the senses, 'dead to the world'
fanatic and drunkard of God; and today if one hears anyone commended for living
'wisely' or 'like a philosopher', it means hardly more than 'prudently and
apart'. Wisdom: that seems to the rabble
to be a kind of flight, an artifice and means for getting oneself out of a
dangerous game; but the genuine philosopher - as he seems to us, my
friends? - lives 'unphilosophically' and 'unwisely', above all imprudently,
and bears the burden and duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life -
he risks himself constantly, he plays the dangerous game ...
206
In
comparison with a genius, that is to say with a being which either begets
or bears, both words taken in their most comprehensive sense - the
scholar, the average man of science, always has something of the old maid about
him: for, like her, he has no acquaintanceship with the two most valuable
functions of mankind. To both of them,
indeed, to the scholar and to the old maid, one concedes respectability, by way
of compensations as it were - one emphasizes the respectability in these cases
- and experiences the same feeling of annoyance at having been constrained to
this concession. Let us look more
closely: what is the man of science? An
ignoble species of man for a start, with the virtues of an ignoble, that is to
say subservience, unauthoritative and un-self-sufficient species of man: he
possesses industriousness, patient acknowledgement of his proper place in the
rank and file, uniformity and moderation in abilities and requirements, he
possesses the instinct for his own kind and for that which his own kind have
need of, for example that little bit of independence and green pasture without
which there is no quiet work, that claim to honour and recognition (which first
and foremost presupposes recognizability - ), that sunshine of a good name,
that constant affirmation of his value and his utility with which his inner distrust,
the dregs at the heart of all dependent men and herd animals, have again and
again to be overcome. The scholar also
possesses, as is only to be expected, the diseases and ill breeding of an
ignoble species: he is full of petty envy and has very keen eyes for what is
base in those natures to whose heights he is unable to rise. He is trusting, butt only like one who
sometimes lets himself go but never lets himself flow out; and it is
precisely in the presence of men who do flow out that he becomes the more
frosty and reserved - his eyes is then like a reluctant smooth lake whose
surface is disturbed by no ripple of delight or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing of which a
scholar is capable comes from the instinct of mediocrity which characterizes
his species: from that Jesuitism of mediocrity which instinctively works for
the destruction of the uncommon man and tries to break or - better still! -
relax every bent bow. For relaxing
with importunate pity: that is the true art of Jesuitism, which has always
understood how to introduce itself as the religion of pity. -
207
However
gratefully one may go to welcome an objective spirit - and who has not
been sick to death of everything subjective and its accursed ipsissimosity! -
in the end one has to learn to be cautious with one's gratitude too and put a
stop to the exaggerated way in which the depersonalization of the spirit is
today celebrated as redemption and transfiguration, as if it were the end in
itself: as is usually the case within the pessimist school, which also has good
reason to accord the highest honours to 'disinterested knowledge'. The objective man who no longer scolds or
curses as the pessimist does, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific
instinct, after a thousandfold total and partial failure, for once comes to
full bloom, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are: but he
belongs in the hand of one who is mightier.
He is only an instrument, let us say a mirror - he is not an 'end
in himself'. And the objective man is in
fact a mirror: accustomed to submitting to whatever wants to be known, lacking
any other pleasure than that provided by knowledge, by 'mirroring' - he waits
until something comes along and then gently spreads himself out, so that not
even the lightest footsteps and the fluttering of ghostly beings shall be lost
on his surface and skin. Whatever still
remains to him of his 'own person' seems to him accidental, often capricious,
more often disturbing: so completely has he become a passage and reflection of
forms and events not his own. He finds
it an effort to think about 'himself', and not infrequently he thinks about
himself mistakenly; he can easily confuse himself with another, he fails to
understand his own needs and is in this respect alone unsubtle and
negligent. Perhaps he is troubled by his
health or by the pettiness and stuffiness of his wife and friends, or by a lack
of companions and company - yes, he forces himself to reflect on his troubles:
but in vain! Already his thoughts are
roaming off to a more general case, and tomorrow he will know as little
how to help himself as he did yesterday.
He no longer knows how to take himself seriously, nor does he have the
time for it: he is cheerful, not because he has no troubles but because
he has no fingers and facility for dealing with his troubles. His habitual going out to welcome everything
and every experience, the sunny and ingenuous hospitality with which he accepts
all he encounters, his inconsiderate benevolence, his perilous unconcernedness
over Yes and No: alas, how often he has to suffer for these his virtues! - and
as a human being in general he can all too easily become the caput mortuum
of these virtues. If love and hatred are
demanded of him, I mean love and hatred ass God, woman and animal understand
them - : he will do what he can and give what he can. But one ought not to be surprised if it is
not very much - if he proves spurious, brittle, questionable and soft. His love and hatred are artificial and more
of a tour de force, a piece of vanity and exaggeration. For he is genuine only when he can be
objective: only in his cheerful totalism can he remain 'nature' and
'natural'. His mirroring soul, for ever
polishing itself, no longer knows how to affirm or how to deny; he does not
command, neither does he destroy. 'Je
ne méprise presque rien' - he says with Leibniz: one should not overlook or
underestimate the presque! Nor is
he an exemplar; he neither leads nor follows; he sets himself altogether too
far off to have any reason to take sides between good and evil. When he was for so long confused with the philosopher,
with the Caesarian cultivator and Gewaltmensch of culture, he was done
much too great honour and what is essential in him was overlooked - he is an
instrument, something of a slave, if certainly the sublimest kind of slave, but
in himself he is nothing - presque rien!
The objective man is an instrument, a precious, easily damaged and
tarnished measuring instrument and reflecting apparatus which ought to be
respected and taken good care of; but he is not an end, a termination and
ascent, a complementary man in whom the rest of existence is justified,
a conclusion - and even less a beginning, a begetting and first cause,
something solid, powerful and based firmly on itself that wants to be master:
but rather only a delicate, empty, elegant, flexible mould which has first to
wait for some content so as 'to form' itself by it - as a rule a man without
content, a 'selfless' man. Consequently
nothing for women either, in parenthesis. -
208
When a
philosopher today gives us to understand that he is not a sceptic - I hope the
foregoing account of the objective spirit has brought this out? - all the world
is offended to hear it; thereafter he is regarded with a certain dread, there
is so much one would like to ask him ... indeed, among timid listeners, of whom
there are nowadays a very great number, he is henceforth considered
dangerous. It is as if, in his rejection
of scepticism, they seemed to hear some evil, menacing sound from afar, as if
some new explosive were being tested somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit,
perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilist, a pessimism bonae voluntatis
which does not merely say No, will No, but - dreadful thought! does
No. Against this kind of 'good will' - a
will to the actual active denial of life - there is today confessedly no better
sedative and soporific than scepticism, the gentle, gracious, lulling poppy
scepticism; and even Hamlet is prescribed by the doctors of our time
against the 'spirit' and its noises under the ground. 'Are our ears not already filled with nasty
sounds?' says the sceptic as a friend of sleep and almost as a kind of security
police: 'this subterranean No is terrible!
Be quiet, you pessimistic moles!'
For the sceptic, that delicate creature, is all too easily frightened;
his conscience is schooled to wince at every No, indeed, even at a hard
decisive Yes, and to sense something like a sting. Yes! and No! - that is to him contrary to
morality; on the other hand, he likes his virtue to enjoy a noble continence,
perhaps by saying after Montaigne 'What do I know?' Or after Socrates: 'I know
that I know nothing.' Or: 'If it did
stand open, why go straight in?' Or:
'What is the point of hasty hypotheses?
To make no hypothesis at all could well be a part of good taste. Do you absolutely have to go straightening
out what is crooked? Absolutely have to
stop up every hole with oakum? Is there
not plenty of time? Does time not have
time? Oh you rogues, are you unable to wait? Uncertainty too has its charms, the sphinx
too is a Circe, Circe too was a philosopher.' - Thus does a sceptic console
himself; and it is true he stands in need of some consolation. For scepticism is the most spiritual
expression of a certain complex physiological condition called in ordinary
language nervous debility and sickliness; it arises whenever races and classes
long separated from one another are decisively and suddenly crossed. In the new generation, which has as it were
inherited varying standards and values in its blood, all is unrest, disorder,
doubt, experiment; the most vital forces have a retarding effect, the virtues
themselves will not let one another grow and become strong, equilibrium, centre
of balance, upright certainty are lacking in body and soul. But that which becomes most profoundly sick
and degenerates in such hybrids is the will: they no longer have any
conception of independence of decision, of the valiant feeling of pleasure in
willing - even in their dreams they doubt the 'freedom of the will'. Our Europe of today, the scene of a
senselessly sudden attempt at radical class - and consequently race -
mixture, is as a result sceptical from top to bottom, now with that agile
scepticism which springs impatiently and greedily from branch to branch, now
gloomy like a cloud overcharged with question-marks - and often sick to death
of its will! Paralysis of will: where does
one not find this cripple sitting today!
And frequently so dressed up! How
seductively dressed up! There is the
loveliest false finery available for this disease; and that most of that which
appears in the shop windows today as 'objectivity', 'scientificality', 'l'art
pour l'art', 'pure will-less knowledge' is merely scepticism and
will-paralysis dressed up - for this diagnosis of the European sickness I am
willing to go bail. - Sickness of will is distributed over Europe unequally: it
appears most virulently and abundantly where culture has been longest,
indigenous it declines according to the extent to which 'the barbarian' still -
or again - asserts his rights under the loose-fitting garment of Western
culture. In present-day France,
consequently, as one can as easily deduce as actually see, the will is sickest;
and France, which has always possessed a masterly adroitness in transforming
even the most fateful crises of its spirit into something charming and
seductive, today really demonstrates its cultural ascendancy over Europe as the
school and showcase for all the fascinations of scepticism. The strength of will, and to will one things
for a long time, is somewhat stronger already in Germany, and stronger again in
the north of Germany than in the centre of Germany; considerably stronger in
England, Spain and Corsica, there in association with dullness, here with
hardness of head - not to speak of Italy, which is too young to know what it
wants and first has to prove whether it is capable of willing - but strongest
of all and most astonishing in that huge empire-in-between, where Europe as it
were flows back into Asia, in Russia.
There the strength to will has for long been stored up and kept in
reserve, there the will is waiting menacingly - uncertain whether it is a will
to deny or a will to affirm - in readiness to discharge itself, to borrow one
of the physicists favourite words. It
may need not only wars in India and Asian involvements to relieve Europe of the
greatest danger facing it, but also internal eruptions, the explosion of the
empire into small fragments, and above all the introduction of the
parliamentary imbecility, including the obligation upon everyone to read his
newspaper at breakfast. I do not say
this because I desire it: the reverse would be more after my heart - I mean
such an increase in the Russian threat that Europe would have to resolve to
become equally threatening, namely to acquire a single will by means of
a new caste dominating all Europe, a protracted terrible will of its own which
could set its objectives thousands of years ahead - so that the long-drawn-out
comedy of its petty states and the divided will of its dynasties and
democracies should finally come to an end.
The time for petty politics is past: the very next century [twentieth
century] will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the whole earth - the
compulsion to grand politics.
209
To what
extent the new warlike age upon which we Europeans have obviously entered may
perhaps also be favourable to the evolution of a new and stronger species of
scepticism: on that question I should like for the moment to speak only in a
parable which amateurs of German history will easily understand. That unscrupulous enthusiast for tall handsome
grenadiers who, as king of Prussia, brought into existence a military and
sceptical genius - and therewith at bottom that new type of German which has
just triumphantly emerged - the questionable mad father of Frederick the Great,
himself had on one point the grasp and lucky clutch of genius: he knew
what was then lacking in Germany and which deficiency was a hundred times more
alarming and pressing than any deficiency in culture or social polish - his
antipathy for the youthful Frederick was the product of a deep instinctual
fear. Men were lacking; and he
suspected, with the bitterest vexation, that his own son was not enough of a
man. In that he was deceived: but who
would not have been deceived in his place?
He saw his son lapse into the atheism, the esprit, the
pleasure-seeking frivolity of ingenious Frenchmen - he saw in the background
the great blood-sucker, the spider scepticism, he suspected the incurable
wretchedness of a heart which is no longer enough for evil or for good, of a
broken will which no longer commands, can no longer command. But in the meantime there grew up in his son
that more dangerous and harder new species of scepticism - who knows to what
extent favoured by precisely the father's hatred and the icy melancholy of
a will sent into solitude? - the scepticism of audacious manliness, which is
related most closely to genius for war and conquest and which first entered
Germany in the person of the great Frederick.
This scepticism despises and yet grasps to itself; it undermines and
takes into possession; it does not believe but retains itself; it gives
perilous liberty to the spirit but it keeps firm hold on the heart; it is the German
form of scepticism which, as a continuation of Frederick-ism intensified into
the most spiritual domain, for a long time brought Europe under the dominion of
the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks to the indomitably strong and tough
masculinity of the great German philologists and critical historians (who, seen
aright, were also one and all artists in destruction and disintegration), there
became established, gradually and in spite of all the romanticism in music and
philosophy, a new conception of the German spirit in which the trait of
manly scepticism decisively predominated: whether as intrepidity of eye, as
bravery and sternness of dissecting hand, or as tenacious will for perilous
voyages of discovery, for North Pole expeditions of the spirit beneath desolate
and dangerous skies. There may be good
reason for warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians to cross themselves
before precisely this spirit: cet esprit fataliste, ironique,
mephistophelique Michelet calls it, not without a shudder. But if one wishes to appreciate what a mark
of distinction is this fear of the 'man' in the German spirit through which
Europe was awoken from its 'dogmatic slumber', one might like to recall the
earlier conception which it had to overcome - and how it is not very long since
a masculinized woman could, with unbridled presumption, venture to commend the
Germans to Europe's sympathy as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed and poetic
dolts. One should at last have a
sufficiently profound comprehension of Napoleon's astonishment when he caught
sight of Goethe: it betrays what had for centuries been thought was meant by
the 'German spirit'. Voilà un homme!'
- which is to say: 'but that is a man!
And I had expected only a German!' -
210
Supposing,
then, that in the image of the philosophers of the future some trait provokes the
question whether they will not have to be sceptics in the sense last suggested,
this would still designate only something about them - and not them
themselves. They might with equal
justification let themselves be called critics; and they will certainly be
experimenters. Through the name with
which I have ventured to baptize them I have already expressly emphasized
experiment and the delight in experiment: was this because, as critics body and
soul, they like to employ experiment in a new, perhaps wider, perhaps more
dangerous sense? Will they, in their
passion for knowledge, have to go further with audacious and painful
experiments than the tender and pampered taste of a democratic century can
approve of? - There can be no doubt that these coming men will want to dispense
least with those serious and not indubious qualities which distinguish the
critic from the sceptic: I mean certainty in standards of value, conscious
employment of a unity of method, instructed courage, independence and ability
to justify oneself; indeed, they confess to taking a pleasure in
negating and dissecting and to a certain self-possessed cruelty which knows how
to wield the knife and certainty and deftness even when the heart bleeds. They will be harder (and perhaps not
always only against themselves) than humane men might wish, they will not
consort with 'truth' so as to be 'pleased' by it or 'elevated' and 'inspired' -
they will rather be little disposed to believe that truth of all things
should be attended by such pleasures.
They will smile, these stern spirits, if someone should say in their
presence: 'This thought elevates me: how should it not be true?' Or: 'This work delights me: how should it not
be beautiful?' Or: 'This artist enlarges
me: how should he not be great?' - perhaps they will have not only a smile but
a feeling of genuine disgust for all such fawning enthusiasm, idealism,
feminism, hermaphroditism, and he who could penetrate into the secret chambers
of their hearts would hardly discover there the intention of reconciling 'Christian feelings' with
'classical taste' and perhaps even with 'modern parliamentarianism' (as such a
conciliatory spirit is said to exist even among philosophers in our very
uncertain and consequently conciliatory century). Critical discipline and every habit conducive
to cleanliness and severity in things of the spirit will be demanded by these
philosophers not only of themselves: they could even display them as their kind
of decoration - nonetheless they still do not want to be called critics on that
account. It seems to them no small
insult to philosophy when it is decreed, as is so happily done today:
'Philosophy itself is criticism and critical science - and noting whatever
besides!' This evaluation of philosophy
may enjoy the applause of every positivist in France and Germany ( - and it
might possibly have flattered the heart and taste of Kant: one should
recall the titles of his principal works): our new philosophers will still say:
critics are the philosophes' instruments and for that reason very far from
being philosophers themselves! Even the
great Chinaman of Königsberg was only a great critic. -
211
I insist
that philosophical labourers and men of science in general should once and for
all cease to be confused with philosophers - that on precisely this point 'to
each his own' should be strictly applied, and not much too much given to the
former, much too little to the latter.
It may be required for the education of a philosopher that he himself
has also once stood on all those steps on which his servants, the scientific
labourers of philosophy, remain standing - have to remain standing; he
himself must perhaps have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian
and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and reader of riddles and
moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and practically everything, so as to
traverse the whole range of human values and value-feelings and be able
to gaze from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every
height, from the nook-and-corner into every broad expanse with manifold eyes
and a manifold conscience. But all these
are only preconditions of his task: this task itself demands something
different - it demands that he create values. Those philosophical labourers after the noble
exemplar of Kant and Hegel have to take some great fact of evaluation - that is
to say, former assessments of value, creations of value which have
become dominant and are for a while called 'truths' - and identify them and
reduce them to formulas, whether in the realm of logic or of politics
(morals) or of art. It is the
duty of these scholars to take everything that has hitherto happened and been
valued, to make it clear, distinct, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate
everything long, even 'time' itself, and to subdue the entire past: a
tremendous and wonderful task in the service of which every subtle pride, every
tenacious will can certainly find satisfaction.
Actual philosophers, however, are commanders and law-givers: they
say 'thus it shall be!', it is they who determine the Wherefore and
Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all
the philosophical labourers, of all those who have subdued the past - they
reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been
becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their 'knowing' is creating, their
creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is - will to power. - Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such
philosophers?...
212
It seems to
me more and more that the philosopher, being necessarily a man of
tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always ground himself and had
to find himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy has always been the
ideal of today. Hitherto these
extraordinary promoters of mankind who have been called philosophers and have
seldom felt themselves to be friends of knowledge but, rather, disagreeable
fools and dangerous question-marks - have found their task, their hard,
unwanted, unavoidable task, but finally the greatness of their task, in being
the bad conscience of their age. By
laying the knife vivisectionally to the bosom of the very virtues of the age
they betrayed what was their own secret: to know a new greatness of man,
a new untrodden path to his enlargement.
Each time they revealed how much hypocrisy, indolence, letting oneself
go and letting oneself fall, how much falsehood was concealed under the most
honoured type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived;
each time they said: 'We have to go thither, out yonder, where you today
are least at home.' In face of the world
of 'modern ideas' which would like to banish everyone into a corner and
'speciality', a philosopher, assuming there could be philosophers today, would
be compelled to see the greatness of man, the concept 'greatness', precisely in
his spaciousness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in diversity: he would even
determine value and rank according to how much and how many things one could
endure and take upon oneself, how far one could extend one's
responsibility. Today the taste of the
age and the virtue of the age weakens and attenuates the will, nothing is so
completely timely as weakness of will: consequently, in the philosopher's ideal
precisely strength of will, the hardness and capacity for protracted decisions,
must constitute part of the concept 'greatness'; with just as much
justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a shy, renunciatory,
humble, selfless humanity was appropriate to an opposite age, to one such as,
like the sixteenth century, suffered from its accumulation of will and the
stormiest waters and flood-tides of selfishness. In the age of Socrates, among men of nothing
but wearied instincts, among conservative ancient Athenians who let themselves
go - 'towards happiness', as they said, towards pleasure, as they behaved - and
who at the same time had in their mouth the old pretentious words to which
their lives had long ceased to given them any right, irony was perhaps
required for greatness of soul, that Socratic malicious certitude of the old
physician and plebeian who cut remorselessly into his own flesh as he did into
the flesh and heart of the 'noble', with a look which said distinctly enough:
'do not dissemble before me! Here - we
are equal!' Today, conversely, when the
herd animal alone obtains and bestows honours in Europe, when 'equality of
rights' could all too easily change into equality in wrongdoing: I mean into a
general war on everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher
soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, creative fullness of power
and mastery - today, being noble, wanting to be by oneself, the ability to be
different, independence and the need for self-responsibility pertains to the
concept 'greatness'; and the philosopher will betray something of his ideal
when he asserts: 'He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the
most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of
his virtues, the superabundant will; this shall be called greatness: the
ability to be as manifold as whole, as vast as full.' And, to ask it again: is greatness - possible
today?
213
What a
philosopher is, is hard to learn, because it cannot be taught: one has to
'know' it from experience - or one ought to be sufficiently proud not to
know it. But that nowadays all the world
talks of things of which it cannot have experience is most and worst
evident in respect of philosophers and the philosophical states of mind - very
few know them or are permitted to know them, and all popular conceptions of
them are false. Thus, for example, that
genuinely philosophical combination of a bold exuberant spirituality which runs
presto and a dialectical severity and necessity which never takes a
false step is to most thinkers and scholars unknown from experience and
consequently, if someone should speak of it in their presence, incredible. They imagine every necessity as a state of
distress, as a painful compelled conformity and constraint; and thought itself
they regard as something slow, hesitant, almost as toil and often as 'worthy of
the sweat of the noble' - and not at all as something easy, divine, and
a closest relation of high spirits and the dance! 'Thinking' and 'taking something seriously',
giving it 'weighty consideration' - to them these things go together: that is
the only way they have 'experienced' it.
Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that
it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of
necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative
placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height - in short, that necessity and
'freedom of will' are then one in them.
In the last resort there exists an order of rank of states of soul with
which the order of rank of problems accords; and the supreme problems repel
without mercy anyone who ventures near them without being, through the elevation
and power of his spirituality, predestined to their solution. Of what avail is it if nimble commonplace
minds or worthy clumsy mechanicals and empiricists crowd up to them, as they so
often do today, and with their plebeian ambition approach as it were this
'court of courts'! But coarse feet may
never tread such carpets: that has been seen to in the primal law of things;
the doors remain shut against such importunates, though they may batter and
shatter their heads against them! For
every elevated world one has to be born or, expressed more clearly, bred
for it: one has a right to philosophy - taking the word in the grand sense -
only by virtue of one's origin; one's ancestors, one's 'blood' are the decisive
thing here too. Many generations must
have worked to prepare for the philosopher; each of his virtues must have been
individually acquired, tended, inherited, incorporated, and not only the bold,
easy, delicate course and cadence of his thoughts but above all the readiness
for great responsibilities, the lofty glance that rules and looks down, the
feeling of being segregated from the mob and its duties and virtues, the genial
protection and defence of that which is misunderstood and calumniated, be it
god or devil, the pleasure in and exercise of grand justice, the art of
commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye which seldom admires, seldom
looks upward, seldom loves ...
Part Seven: Our Virtues
214
Our virtues?
- it is probable that we too still have our virtues, although naturally they
will not be those square and simple virtues on whose account we hold our
grandfathers in high esteem but also hold them off a little. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we
first-born of the twentieth century - with all our dangerous curiosity, our
multiplicity and art of disguise, our mellow and as it were sugared cruelty in
spirit and senses - if we are to have virtues we shall presumably have
only such virtues as have learned to get along with our most secret and heartfelt
inclinations, with our most fervent needs: very well, let us look for them
within our labyrinths! - where, as is well known, such a variety of things lose
themselves, such a variety of things get lost for ever. And is there anything nicer than to look
for one's own virtues? Does this not
almost mean: to believe in one's own virtue? But this 'believing in one's virtue' - is
this not at bottom the same thing as that which one formerly called one's 'good
conscience', that venerable long conceptual pigtail which our grandfathers used
to attach to the back of their heads and often enough to the back of their
minds as well? It seems that, however
little we may think ourselves old-fashioned and grandfatherly-respectable in
other respects, in one thing we are nonetheless worthy grandsons of these
grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience: we too still wear their
pigtail. - Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be -
different!...
215
As in the
realm of the stars it is sometimes two suns which determine the course of a
planet, as in certain cases suns of differing colours shine on a single planet
now with a red light, now with a green light, and sometimes striking it at the
same time and flooding it with many colours: so we modern men are, thanks to
the complicated mechanism of our 'starry firmament', determined by differing
moralities; our actions shine alternately in differing colours, they are seldom
unequivocal - and there are cases enough in which we perform many-coloured
actions.
216
Love of
one's enemies? I think that has been
well learned: it happens thousandfold today, on a large and small scale;
indeed, occasionally something higher and more sublime happens - we learn to despise
when we love, and precisely when we love best - but all this unconsciously,
without noise, without ostentation, with that modesty and concealment of
goodness which forbids the mouth solemn words and the formulas of virtue. Morality as a posture - goes against our
taste today. This too is progress: just
as it was progress when religion as a posture finally went against the taste of
our fathers, including hostility and Voltarian bitterness towards religion (and
whatever else formerly belonged to the gesture-language of free-thinkers). It is the music in our conscience, the dance
in our spirits, with which puritan litanies, moral preaching and philistinism
will not chime.
217
Beware of
those who set great store on being credited with moral tact and subtlety in
moral discrimination! If once they
blunder in our presence (not to speak of in respect of us) they
never forgive us - they unavoidably take to slandering and derogating us, even
if they still remain our 'friends'. - Blessed are the forgetful: for they shall
'have done' with their stupidities too.
218
The
psychologists of France - and where else today are there psychologists? - have
still not yet exhausted the bitter and manifold pleasure they take in the bêtise
bourgeoise, just as if ... enough, they thereby betray something. Flaubert, for example, the worthy citizen of
Rouen, in the end no longer saw, heard or tasted anything else - it was his
mode of self-torment and more refined cruelty.
I now suggest, by way of a change - for this is getting boring - a new
object of enjoyment: the unconscious cunning of the attitude adopted by all
good, fat, worthy spirits of mediocrity towards more exalted spirits and their
tasks, that subtle, barbed, Jesuitical cunning which is a thousand times
subtler than the taste and understanding of this middle class in its best
moments - subtler even than the understanding of its victims - : another
demonstration that, of all forms of intelligence discovered hitherto,
'instinct' is the most intelligent. In
brief: study, psychologists, the philosophy of the 'rule' in its struggle with
the 'exception': there you have a spectacle fit for the gods and for divine
maliciousness! Or, still more clearly:
carry out vivisection on the 'good man', on the 'homo bonae voluntatis'
... on yourselves!
219
Moral judgement
and condemnation is the favourite form of revenge of the spiritually limited on
those who are less so, likewise a form of compensation for their having been
neglected by nature, finally an occasion for acquiring spirit and becoming
refined - malice spiritualizes. Deep in
their hearts they are glad there exists a standard according to which those
overloaded with the goods and privileges of the spirit are their equals - they
struggle for the 'equality of all before God' and it is virtually for that
purpose that they need the belief in God. It is among them that the most vigorous
opponents of atheism are to be found.
Anyone who told them 'a lofty spirituality is incompatible with any kind
of worthiness and respectability of the merely moral man' would enrage them - I
shall take care not to do so. I should,
rather, like to flatter them with my proposition that a lofty spirituality
itself exists only as the final product of moral qualities; that it is a
synthesis of all those states attributed to the 'merely moral' man after they
have been acquired one by one through protracted discipline and practice,
perhaps in the course of whole chains of generations; that lofty spirituality
is the spiritualization of justice and of that benevolent severity which knows
itself empowered to maintain order of rank in the world among things
themselves - and not only among men.
220
Now that the
'disinterested' are praised so widely one has, perhaps not without some danger,
to become conscious of what it is the people are really interested in,
and what in general the things are about which the common man is profoundly and
deeply concerned: including the educated, even the scholars and, unless all
appearance deceives, perhaps the philosophers as well. The fact then emerges that the great majority
of those things which interest and stimulate every higher nature and more
refined and fastidious taste appear altogether 'uninteresting' to the average
man - if he nonetheless notices a devotion to these things, he calls it 'désintéressé'
and wonders how it is possible to act 'disinterestedly'. There have been philosophers who have known
how to lend this popular wonderment a seductive and mystical-otherworldly
expression ( - perhaps because they did not know the higher nature from
experience?) - instead of stating the naked and obvious truth that the
'disinterested' act in a very interesting and interested act, provided
that ... 'And love?' - what! Even an act
performed out of love is supposed to be 'unegoistic'? But you blockheads - ! 'And commendation of him who sacrifices?' -
But he who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and received
something in return - perhaps something of himself in exchange for something of
himself - that he gave away here in order to have more there, perhaps in
general to be more or to feel himself 'more'.
But this is a domain of questions and answers in which a more fastidious
taste prefers not to linger: truth has so much to stifle her yawns here when
answers are demanded of her. She is,
after all, a woman: one ought not to violate her.
221
It can
happen, said a pettifogging moral pedant, that I honour and respect an
unselfish man: but not because he is unselfish but because he seems to me to
have the right to be useful to another man at his own expense. Enough: the question is always who he
is and who the other is. In one
made and destined for command, for example, self-abnegation and modest
retirement would be not a virtue but the waste of a virtue: so it seems to
me. Every unegoistic morality which
takes itself as unconditional and addresses itself to everybody is not merely a
sin against taste: it is an instigation to sins of omission, one seduction more
under the mask of philanthropy - and a seduction and injury for precisely the
higher, rarer, privileged. Moralities
must first of all be brought home to them - until they at last come to
understand that it is immoral to say: 'What is good for one is good for
another.' - Thus my moralistic pedant and bonhomme: does he deserve to be
laughed at for thus exhorting moralities to morality? But one should not be too much in the right
if one wants to have the laughers on one's own side; a grain of wrong is
even an element of good taste.
222
Where pity
and fellow-suffering is preached today - and, heard aright, no other religion
is any longer preached now - the psychologist should prick up his ears: through
all the vanity, all the noise characteristic of these preachers (as it is of
all preachers) he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of
self-contempt. It is part of that
darkening and uglification of Europe which has now been going on for a hundred
years (the earliest symptoms of which were first recorded in a thoughtful
letter of Galiani's to Madame d'Epinay): if it is not the cause of it! The man of 'modern ideas', that proud ape, is
immoderately dissatisfied with himself: that is certain. He suffers: and his vanity would have him
only 'suffer with his fellows' ...
223
The hybrid
European - a tolerably ugly plebeian, all in all - definitely requires a
costume: he needs history as his storeroom for costumes. He realizes, to be sure, that none of them
fits him properly - he changes and changes.
Consider the nineteenth century with regard to these rapid predilections
and changes in the style-masquerade; notice too the moments of despair because
'nothing suits' us - . It is in vain we
parade ourselves as romantic or classical or Christian or Florentine or baroque
or 'national', in moribus and artibus: the 'cap doesn't fit'! But the 'spirit', especially the 'historical
spirit', perceives an advantage even in this despair: again and again another
piece of the past and of foreignness is tried out, tried on, taken off, packed
away, above all studied - we are the first studious age in puncto
of 'costumes', I mean those of morality, articles of faith, artistic tastes and
religions, prepared as no other age has been for the carnival in the grand
style, for the most spiritual Shrovetide laughter and wild spirits, for the
transcendental heights of the most absolute nonsense and Aristophanic universal
mockery. Perhaps it is precisely here
that we are discovering the realm of our invention, that realm where we
too can still be original, perhaps as parodists of world history and God's buffoons
- perhaps, even if nothing else of today has a future, precisely our laughter
may still have a future!
224
The historical
sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order of rank of the evaluations
according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived, the
'divinatory instinct' for the relationships of these evaluations, for the
revelation of the authority of values to the authority of effective forces):
this historical sense, to which we Europeans lay claim as our speciality, has
come to us in the wake of the mad and fascinating semi-barbarism into
which Europe has been plunged through the democratic mingling of classes and
races - only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and mode of life, of
cultures that formerly lay close beside or on top of one another, streams into
us 'modern souls' thanks to this mingling, our instincts now run back in all
directions, we ourselves are a kind of chaos - : in the end, as I said before,
'the spirit' perceives its advantage in all this. Through our semi-barbarism in body and
desires we have secret access everywhere such as a noble age never had, above
all the access to the labyrinth of unfinished cultures and to every
semi-barbarism which has ever existed on earth; and, insofar as the most
considerable part of human culture hitherto has been semi-barbarism,
'historical sense' means virtually the sense and instinct for everything, the
taste and tongue for everything: which at once proves it to be an ignoble
sense. We enjoy Homer again, for
instance: perhaps it is our happiest advance that we know how to appreciate
Homer, whom the men of a noble culture (the French of the seventeenth century,
for example, such as Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for his esprit vaste,
and even their dying echo, Voltaire) cannot and could not assimilate so easily
- whom they hardly permitted themselves to enjoy. The very definite Yes and No of their palate,
their easily aroused disgust, their hesitant reserve with regard to everything
strange, their horror of the tastelessness even of a lively curiosity, and in
general that unwillingness of a noble and self-sufficient culture to admit to a
new desire, a dissatisfaction with one's own culture, an admiration for what is
foreign: all this disposes them unfavourably towards even the best things in
the world which are not their property and could not become their prey -
and no sense is so unintelligible to such men as the historical sense and its
obsequious plebeian curiosity. It is no
different with Shakespeare, that astonishing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of
tastes over which an ancient Athenian of the circle of Aeschylus would have
half-killed himself with laughter or annoyance: but we - we accept precisely
this confusion of colours, this medley of the most delicate, the coarsest and
the most artificial, with a secret confidence and cordiality, we enjoy him as
an artistic refinement reserved precisely for us and allow ourselves to be as
little disturbed by the repellent fumes and the proximity of the English rabble
in which Shakespeare's art and taste live as we do on the Chiaja of Naples,
where we go our way enchanted and willing with all our senses alert, however much
the sewers of the plebeian quarters may fill the air. That as men of the 'historical sense' we have
our virtues is not to be denied - we are unpretentious, selfless, modest,
brave, full of self-restraint, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very
accommodating - with all that, we are perhaps not very 'tasteful'. Let us finally confess it to ourselves: that
which we men of the 'historical sense' find hardest to grasp, to feel, taste,
love, that which at bottom finds us prejudiced and almost hostile, is just what
is complete and wholly mature in every art and culture, that which constitutes
actual nobility in works and in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon
self-sufficiency, the goldness and coldness displayed by all things which have become
perfect. Perhaps our great virtue of the
historical sense necessarily stands opposed to good taste, or to the
very best taste at any rate, and it is precisely the brief little pieces of
good luck and transfiguration of human life that here and there come flashing
up which we find most difficult and laboursome to evoke in ourselves: those
miraculous moments when a great power voluntarily hated before the boundless
and immeasurable - when a superfluity of subtle delight in sudden restraint and
petrifaction, in standing firm and fixing oneself, was enjoyed on ground still
trembling. Measure is alien to
us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the
unmeasured. Like a rider on a charging
steed we let fall the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like
semi-barbarians - and attain our state of bliss only when we are most - in
danger.
225
Whether it
be hedonism or pessimism or utilitarianism or eudaemonism: all these modes of
thought which assess the value of things according to pleasure and pain,
that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are foreground
modes of thought and naiveties which anyone conscious of creative powers
and an artist's conscience will look down on with derision, though not without
pity. Pity for you! That, to be sure, is not pity for social
'distress', for 'society' and its sick and unfortunate, for the vicious and
broken from the start who lie all around us; even less is it pity for the
grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave classes who aspire after domination -
they call it 'freedom'. Our pity
is a more elevated, more farsighted pity - we see how man is diminishing
himself, how you are diminishing him! - and there are times when we
behold your pity with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves
against this pity - when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any kind
of frivolity. You want if possible - and
there is no madder 'if possible' - to abolish suffering; and we? - it
really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than
it has ever been! Well-being as you
understand it - that is no goal, that seems to us an end! A state which soon renders man ludicrous and
contemptible - which makes it desirable that he should perish! The discipline of suffering, of great
suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has
created every elevation of mankind hitherto?
That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength,
its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in
undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of
depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it -
has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great
suffering? In man, creature and creator
are united: in man there is matter, fragment, excess, clay, mud, madness,
chaos; but in man there is also creator, sculptor, the hardness of the hammer,
the divine spectator and the seventh day - do you understand this
antithesis? And that your pity is
for the 'creature in man', for that which has to be formed, broken, forged,
torn, burned, annealed, refined - that which has to suffer and should
suffer? And our pity - do you not
grasp whom our opposite pity is for when it defends itself against your
pity as the worst of all pampering and weakening? - Pity against pity,
then! - But, to repeat, there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure
and pain and pity; and every philosophy that treats only of them is a piece of
naivety. -
226
We
immoralists! - This world which concerns us, in
which we have to love and fear, this almost invisible, inaudible world
of subtle commanding, subtle obeying, a world of 'almost' in every respect,
sophistical, insidious, sharp, tender: it is well defended, indeed, against
clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity!
We are entwined in an austere shirt of duty and cannot get out of
it - and in this we are 'men of duty', we too!
Sometimes, it is true, we may dance in our 'chains' and between our
'swords'; often, it is no less true, we gnash our teeth at it and grown
impatiently at the unseen hardship of our lot.
But do what we will, fools and appearances speak against us and say
'these are men without duty' - we always have fools and appearances
against us!
227
Honesty -
granted that this is our virtue, from which we cannot get free, we free spirits
- well, let us labour at it with all love and malice and not weary of
'perfecting' ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have: may its
brightness one day overspread this ageing culture and its dull, gloomy
seriousness like a gilded azure mocking evening glow! And if our honesty should one day nonetheless
grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and like to
have things better, easier, gentler, like an agreeable vice: let us remain hard,
we last of the Stoics! And let us send
to the aid of our honesty whatever we have of devilry in us - our disgust at
the clumsy and casual, our nitimur in vetitum', our adventurer's
courage, our sharp and fastidious curiosity, our subtlest, most disguised, most
spiritual will to power and world-overcoming which wanders avidly through all
the realm of the future - let us go to the aid of our 'god' with all our
'devils'! It is probable that we shall
be misunderstood and taken for what we are not: but what of that! People will say: 'Their "honesty" -
is their devilry and nothing more!' But
what of that! And even if they were
right! Have all gods hitherto not been
such devils grown holy and been rebaptized?
And what do we know of ourselves, when all's said and done? And what the spirit which leads us on would
like to be called (it is a question of names)? And how many spirits we harbour? Our honesty, we free spirits - let us see to
it that our honesty does not become our vanity, our pomp and finery, our
limitation, our stupidity! Every virtue
tends towards stupidity, every stupidity towards virtue; 'stupid to the point
of saintliness' they say in Russia - let us see to it that through honesty we
do not finally become saints and bores!
Is life not a hundred times too short to be - bored in it? one would
have to believe in eternal life to ...
228
May I be
forgiven the discovery that all moral philosophy hitherto has been boring and a
soporific - and that 'virtue' has in my eyes been harmed by nothing more than
it has been by this boringness of its advocates; in saying which,
however, I should not want to overlook their general utility. It is important that as few people as
possible should think about morality - consequently it is very important
that morality should not one day become interesting! But do not worry! It is still now as it has always been: I see
no-one in Europe who has (or propagates) any idea that thinking about
morality could be dangerous, insidious, seductive - that fatality could
be involved! Consider, for example, the
indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians and with what clumsy and worthy
feet they walk, stalk (a Homeric metaphor says it more plainly) along in the
footsteps of Bentham, just as he himself had walked in the footsteps of the
worthy Helvétius (no, he was not a dangerous man, this Helvétius, ce
senateur Pococurante as Galiani called him - ). No new idea, no subtle expression or turn of
an old idea, not even a real history of what had been thought before: an impossible
literature altogether, unless one knows how to leaven it with a little
malice. For into these moralists too
(whom one has to read with mental reservations if one has to read them
at all - ) there has crept that old English vice called cant, which is moral
tartuffery, this time concealed in the new form of scientificality; there
are also signs of a secret struggle with pangs of conscience, from which a race
of former Puritans will naturally suffer.
(Is a moralist not the opposite of a Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards
morality as something questionable, as worthy of question-marks, in short as a
problem? Is moralizing not -
immoral?) Ultimately they all want English
morality to prevail: inasmuch as mankind, or the 'general utility', or 'the
happiness of the greatest number', no! the happiness of England would
best be served; they would like with all their might to prove to themselves
that to strive after English happiness, I mean after comfort and fashion
(and, as the supreme goal, a seat in Parliament), is at the same time the true
path of virtue, indeed that all virtue there has ever been on earth has
consisted in just such a striving. Not
one of all these ponderous herd animals with their uneasy conscience (who
undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as the cause of the general welfare -
) wants to know or scent that the 'general welfare' is not an ideal, or a goal,
or a concept that can be grasped at all, but only an emetic - that what is
right for one cannot by any means therefore be right for another, that
the demand for one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the
higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and
man, consequently also between morality and morality. They are a modest and thoroughly mediocre
species of man, these English utilitarians, and, as aforesaid, insofar as they
are boring one cannot think sufficiently highly of their utility. One ought even to encourage them:
which is in part the objective of the following rhymes.
Hail,
continual plodders, hail!
'Lengthen out the
tedious tale',
Pedant still in
head and knee,
Dull, of humour
not a trace,
Permanently commonplace,
Sans génie et
sans esprit!
229
In late ages
which may be proud of their humaneness there remains so much fear, so much superstitious
fear of the 'savage cruel beast', to have mastered which constitutes the very
pride of those more humane ages, that even palpable truths as if by general
agreement, remain unspoken for centuries, because they seem as though they
might help to bring back to life that savage beast which has been finally laid
to rest. Perhaps I am risking something
when I let one of these truths escape: let others capture it again and give it
sufficient of the 'milk of pious thoughts' for it to lie still and forgotten in
its old corner. - One should open one's eyes and take a new look at cruelty;
one should at last grow impatient, so that the kind of immodest fat errors
which have, for example, been fostered about tragedy by ancient and modern
philosophers should no longer go stalking virtuously and confidently
about. Almost everything we call 'higher
culture' is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty
- this is my proposition; the 'wild beast' has not been laid to rest at all, it
lives, flourishes, it has merely become - deified. That which constitutes the painful
voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; that which produces a pleasing effect in
so-called tragic pity, indeed fundamentally in everything sublime up to the
highest and most refined thrills of metaphysics, derives its sweetness solely
from the ingredient of cruelty mixed in with it. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in
the ecstasies of the Cross, the Spaniard watching burnings or bullfight, the
Japanese of today crowding in to the tragedy, the Parisian suburban workman who
has a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who, with will
suspended, 'experiences' Tristan und Isolde - what all of these enjoy
and look with secret ardour to imbibe is the spicy potion of the great Circe
'cruelty'. Here, to be sure, we must put
aside the thick-witted psychology of former times which had to teach of cruelty
only that it had its origin in the sight of the sufferings of others:
that is also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment of one's own suffering, of
making oneself suffer - and wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to
self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation, as among
Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general to desensualization, decarnalization,
contrition, to Puritanical spasms of repentance, to conscience-vivisection and
to a Pascalian sacrifizio dell'intelletto, he is secretly lured and
urged onward by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrills of cruelty directed against
himself. Consider, finally, how even
the man of knowledge, when he compels his spirit to knowledge which is counter
to the inclination of his spirit and frequently also to the desires of his
heart -by saying No, that is, when he would like to affirm, love, worship -
disposes as an artist in and transfigurer of cruelty; in all taking things
seriously and thoroughly, indeed, there is already a violation, a desire to
hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which ceaselessly strives for
appearance and the superficial - in all desire to know there is already a drop
of cruelty.
230
Perhaps what
I have said here of a 'fundamental will of the spirit' may not be immediately
comprehensible: allow me to explain. - That commanding something which the
people calls 'spirit' wants to be master within itself and around itself and to
feel itself master: out of multiplicity it has the will to simplicity, a will
which binds together and tames, which is imperious and domineering. In this its needs and capacities are the same
as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows and
multiplies. The power of the spirit to
appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to
assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel
what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and
falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in
every piece of 'external world'. Its
intention in all this is the incorporation of new 'experiences', the
arrangement of new things within old divisions - growth, that is to say; more
precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power. This same will is served by an apparently
antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for
arbitrary shutting-out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or
that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against
much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon,
an acceptance and approval of ignorance: all this being necessary according to
the degree of its power to appropriate, its 'digestive power', to speak in a
metaphor - and indeed 'the spirit' is more like a stomach than anything
else. It is here that there also
belongs the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps
with a mischievous notion that such and such is not the case, that it is
only being allowed to pass for the case, a joy in uncertainty and ambiguity, an
exultant enjoyment of the capricious narrowness and secrecy of a
nook-and-corner, of the all too close, of the foreground, of the exaggerated,
diminished, displaced, beautified, an enjoyment of the capriciousness of all
these expressions of power. Finally
there also belongs here that not altogether innocent readiness of the spirit to
deceive other spirits and to dissemble before them, that continual pressing and
pushing of a creative, formative, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys
the multiplicity and cunning of its masks, it enjoys too the sense of being
safe that this brings - for it is precisely through its protean arts that it is
best concealed and protected! This
will to appearance, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak - is counteracted
by that sublime inclination in the man of knowledge which takes a profound,
many-sided and thorough view of things and will take such a view: as a
kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste which every brave
thinker will recognize in himself, provided he has hardened and sharpened for
long enough his stern discipline and stern language. He will say 'there is something cruel in the
inclination of my spirit' - let the amiable and virtuous try to talk him out of
that! In fact, it would be nicer if,
instead of with cruelty, we were perhaps credited with an 'extravagant honesty'
- we free, very free spirits - and perhaps that will actually one
day be our posthumous fame? In the
meantime - for it will be a long time before that happens - we ourselves are
likely to be least inclined to dress up in moralistic verbal tinsel and
valences of this sort: all our labour hitherto has spoiled us for this taste
and its buoyant luxuriousness. They are
beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of
wisdom, sacrifice for the sake of knowledge, heroism of the truthful - there is
something about them that makes one's pride swell. but we hermits and marmots long ago became
convinced that this worthy verbal pomp too belongs among the ancient false
finery, lumber and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such
flattering colours and varnish too the terrible basic text homo natura
must again be discerned. For to
translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful
interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and
daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura; to confront man
henceforth with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science,
man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and
stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical
bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him 'you are more! you are
higher! you are of a different origin!' - that may be a strange and extravagant
task but it is a task - who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant
task? Or, to ask the question
differently: 'why knowledge at all?' - Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked
ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no
better answer ...
231
Learning
transforms us, it does that which all nourishment does which does not merely
'preserve' - : as the physiologist knows.
But at the bottom of us, 'right down deep', there is, to be sure,
something unteachable, a granite stratum of spiritual fate, of predetermined
decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. In the case of every cardinal problem there
speaks an unchangeable 'this is I'; about man and woman, for example, a thinker
cannot relearn but only learn fully - only discover all that is 'firm and
settled' within him on this subject. One
sometimes comes upon certain solutions to problems which inspire strong belief
in us; perhaps one thenceforth calls them one's 'convictions'. Later - one sees them only as footsteps to
self-knowledge, signposts to the problem which we are - more correctly,
to the great stupidity which we are, to our spiritual fate, to the unteachable
'right down deep'. - Having just paid myself such a deal of pretty compliments
I may perhaps be more readily permitted to utter a few truths about 'woman as
such': assuming it is now understood from the outset to how great an extent
these are only - my truths. -
232
Woman wants
to be independent: and to that end she is beginning to enlighten men about
'woman as such' - this is one of the worst developments in the general uglification
of Europe. For what must these clumsy
attempts on the part of female scientificality and self-exposure not bring to
light! Woman has so much reason for
shame; in woman there is concealed so much pedanticism, superficiality,
schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty unbridledness and petty immodesty -
one needs only to study her behaviour with children! - which has fundamentally
been most effectively controlled and repressed hitherto by fear of
man. Woe when the 'eternal-boring in
woman' - she has plenty of that! - is allowed to venture forth! When she begins radically and on principle to
forget her arts and best policy: those of charm, play, the banishing of care,
the assuaging of grief and taking lightly, together with her subtle aptitude
for agreeable desires! Already female
voices are raised which, by holy Aristophanes! make one tremble; there are
threatening and medically explicit statements of what woman wants of
man. Is it not in the worst of taste
when woman sets about becoming scientific in that fashion? Enlightenment in this field has hitherto been
the affair and endowment of men - we remained 'among ourselves' in this; and
whatever women write about 'woman', we may in the end reserve a good suspicion
as to whether woman really wants or can want enlightenment about
herself ... Unless a woman is looking for a new adornment for herself in
this way - self-adornment pertains to the eternal-womanly, does it not? - she
is trying to inspire fear of herself - perhaps she is seeking dominion. But she does not want truth: what is
truth to a woman! From the very first
nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth - her
great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: it is precisely this
art and this instinct in woman which we love and honour: we who have a
hard time and for our refreshment like to associate with creatures under whose
hands, glances and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity
appear to us almost as folly. Finally I
pose the question: has any woman ever conceded profundity to a woman's mind or
justice to a woman's heart. And is it
not true that on the whole 'woman' has hitherto been slighted most by woman
herself - and not at all by us? - We men want woman to cease compromising
herself through enlightenment: just as it was man's care and consideration for
woman which led the Church to decree: mulier taceat in ecclesia! It was to the benefit of woman when Napoleon
gave the all too eloquent Madame de Staël to understand: mulier taceat in
politicis! - and I think it is a true friend of women who calls on them
today: mulier taceat de muliere!
233
It betrays
corruption of the instincts - quite apart from the fact that it betrays bad
taste - when a woman appeals precisely to Madame Roland or Madame de Staël or
Monsieur George Sand as if something in favour of 'woman as such' were
thereby demonstrated. Among men the
above-named are the three comic women as such - nothing more! - and
precisely the best involuntary counter-argument against emancipation and
female autocracy.
234
Stupidity in
the kitchen; woman as cook; the dreadful thoughtlessness with which the
nourishment of the family and the master of the house is provided for! Woman does not understand what food means:
and she wants to be the cook! If woman
were a thinking creature she would, having been the cook for thousands of
years, surely have had to discover the major facts of physiology, and likewise
gained possession of the art of healing.
It is through bad female cooks - through the complete absence of reason
in the kitchen, that the evolution of man has been longest retarded and most
harmed: even today things are hardly any better. A lecture for high-school girls.
235
There are
fortunate turns of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words,
in which an entire culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized. Among these is Madame de Lambert's remark to
her son: 'mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que de follies, qui vous feront
grand plaisir' - the most motherly and prudent remark, incidentally, that
was ever addressed to a son.
236
That which
Dante and Goethe believed of woman - the former when he sang 'ella guardava
suso, ed io in lei' - : I do not doubt that every nobler woman will resist
this belief, for that is precisely what she believes of the
eternal-manly ...
237
Seven
Proverbs for Women
How the
slowest tedium flees when a man comes on his knees! Age and scientific thought give even virtue
some support.
Sober garb
and total muteness dress a woman with - astuteness.
Who has
brought me luck today? God! - and my couturier.
Young: a
cavern decked about. Old: a dragon
sallies out.
Noble name,
a leg that's fine, man as well: of were he mine!
Few words,
much meaning - slippery ground, many a poor
she-ass has found!
Men have
hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the
heights: as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger,
sweeter, soulful - but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall
not fly away.
238
To blunder
over the fundamental problem of 'man and woman', to deny here the most abysmal
antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps to dream
here of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and duties: this is a typical
sign of shallow-mindedness, and a thinker who has proved himself to be shallow
on this dangerous point - shallow of instinct! - may be regarded as suspect in
general, more, as betrayed, as found out: he will probably be too 'short' for
all the fundamental questions of life, those of life in the future too,
incapable of any depths. On the
other hand, a man who has depth, in his spirit as well as in his desires, and
also that depth of benevolence which is capable of hardness and severity and is
easily confused with them, can think of woman only in an oriental way -
he must conceive of woman as a possession, as property with lock and key, as
something predestined for service and attaining her fulfilment in service - in
this matter he must take his stand on the tremendous intelligence of Asia, on
Asia's superiority of instinct, as the Greeks formerly did: they were Asia's
best heirs and pupils and, as is well known, from Homer to the age of Pericles,
with the increase of their culture and the amplitude of their powers,
also became step by step more strict with women, in short more
oriental. How necessary, how logical,
how humanly desirable even, this was: let each ponder for himself!
239
The weak sex
has in no age been treated by men with such respect as it is in ours - that
pertains to the democratic inclination and fundamental taste, as does
disrespectfulness to old age - : is it any wonder if this respect is
immediately abused? She wants more, she
learns to demand, in the end she finds this tribute of respect almost
offensive, she would prefer competition for rights, indeed a real stand-up
fight: enough, woman loses in modesty.
Let us add at once that she also loses in taste. She unlearns fear of man: but the
woman who 'unlearns fear' sacrifices her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture out when the
fear-inspiring in man, let us put it more precisely and say the man in
man, is no longer desired and developed, is fair enough, also comprehensible
enough; what is harder to comprehend is that, through precisely this fact -
woman degenerates. That is what is
happening today: let us not deceive ourselves!
Wherever the spirit of industry has triumphed over the military and
aristocratic spirit woman now aspires to the economic and legal independence of
a clerk: 'woman as clerk' stands inscribed on the portal of the modern society
now taking shape. And she thus seizes
new rights, looks to become 'master', and inscribes the 'progress' of woman on
her flags and banners, the reverse is happening with dreadful clarity: woman
is retrogressing. Since the French
Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown less in the same
proportion as her rights and claims have grown greater; and the 'emancipation
of woman', insofar as it has been demanded and advanced by women themselves
(and not only by male shallow-pates), is thus revealed as a noteworthy symptom
of the growing enfeeblement and blunting of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this movement,
an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever
woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart. To lose her sense for the ground on which she
is most sure of victory; to neglect to practise the use of her own proper
weapons; to let herself go before the man, perhaps even 'to the extent of
producing a book', where formerly she kept herself in check and in subtle
cunning humility; to seek with virtuous assurance to destroy man's belief that
a fundamentally different ideal is wrapped up in woman, that there is
something eternally, necessarily feminine; emphatically and loquaciously to
talk man out of the idea that woman has to be maintained, cared for, protected,
indulged like a delicate, strangely wild and often agreeable domestic animal;
the clumsy and indignant parade of all of slavery and bondage that woman's
position in the order of society has hitherto entailed and still entails (as if
slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition of every higher
culture, of every enhancement of culture) - what does all this mean if not a
crumbling of the feminine instinct, a defeminizing? To be sure, there are sufficient idiotic
friends and corrupters of woman among the learned asses of the male sex who
advise woman to defeminize herself in this fashion and to imitate all the
stupidities with which 'man' in Europe, European 'manliness', is sick - who
would like to reduce woman to the level of 'general education', if not to that
of newspaper reading and playing at politics.
Here and there they even want to turn women into free-spirits and literati:
as if a woman without piety would not be something utterly repellent or ludicrous
to a profound and godly man - ; almost
everywhere her nerves are being shattered by the most morbid and dangerous of
all the varieties of music (our latest German music), and she is being rendered
more and more hysterical with every day that passes and more and more incapable
of her first and last profession, which is to bear strong children. There is a desire to make her in general more
'cultivated' and, as they say, to make the 'weak sex' strong through
culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner possible that
making human beings 'cultivated' and making them weaker - that is to say,
enfeebling, fragmenting, contaminating, the force of the will, have
always gone hand in hand, and that the world's most powerful and influential
women (most recently the mother of Napoleon) owed their power and ascendancy
over men precisely to the force of their will - and not to schoolmasters! That in woman which inspires respect and
fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more 'natural' than that of
the man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws
beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner
savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and
virtues are.... That which, all fear notwithstanding, evokes pity for this
dangerous and beautiful cat 'woman' is that she appears to be more afflicted,
more vulnerable, more in need of love and more condemned to disappointment than
any other animal. Fear and pity: it is
with these feelings that man has hitherto stood before woman, always with one
foot in tragedy, which lacerates as it delights. - What? And is this now over with? And is woman now being deprived of her enchantment? Is woman slowly being made boring? O Europe! Europe! We know the horned beast which always
attracted your most, which again and again threatens you with danger! Your ancient fable could once again become
'history' - once again a monstrous stupidity could master you and carry you
off! And no god concealed within it, no!
merely an 'idea', a 'modern idea'!...
Part Eight: Peoples and Fatherlands
240
I have
heard, once again for the first time - Richard Wagner's overture to the Meistersinger:
it is a magnificent, overladen, heavy and late art which has the pride to
presuppose for its understanding that two centuries of music are still living -
it is to the credit of the Germans that such a pride was not misplaced! What forces and juices, what seasons and zones
are not mixed together here! Now it
seems archaic, now strange, acid and too young, it is as arbitrary as it is
pompous-traditional, it is not infrequently puckish, still more often rough and
uncouth - it has fire and spirit and at the same time the loose yellow skin of
fruits which ripen too late. It flows
broad and full: and suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, as it were a
gap between cause and effect, an oppression producing dreams, almost a
nightmare - but already the old stream of well-being broadens and widens again,
the stream of the most manifold well-being, of happiness old and new, very
much including the happiness of the artist in himself, which he has no desire
to conceal, his happy, astonished knowledge of the masterliness of the means he
is here employing, new, newly acquired, untried artistic means, as his art
seems to betray to us. All in all, no
beauty, nothing of the south or of subtle southerly brightness of sky, nothing
of gracefulness, no dance, hardly any will to logic; a certain clumsiness,
even, which is actually emphasized, as if the artist wanted to say: 'it is
intentional'; a cumbersome drapery, something capriciously barbarous and
solemn, a fluttering of venerable learned lace and conceits; something German
in the best and worst sense of the word, something manifold, formless and
inexhaustible in the German fashion; a certain German powerfulness and
overfullness of soul which is not afraid to hide itself among the refinements
of decay - which perhaps feels itself most at east there; a true, genuine token
of the German soul, which is at once young and aged, over-mellow and still too
rich in future. This kind of music best
expresses what I consider true of the Germans: they are of the day before
yesterday and the day after tomorrow - they have as yet no today.
241
We 'good
Europeans': we too have our hours when we permit ourselves a warm-hearted
patriotism, a lapse and regression into old loves and narrownesses - I have
just given an example of it - hours of national ebullition, of patriotic
palpitations and floods of various outmoded feelings. More ponderous spirits than we may have done
with what in our case is confined to a few hours and is then over only after a
longer period: one takes half a year, another half a life, according to the
speed and power with which he digests it and of his 'metabolism'. Indeed, I can imagine dull, sluggish races
which, even in our fast-moving Europe, would need half a century to overcome
such atavistic attacks of patriotism and cleaving to one's native soil and to
be restored to reason, I mean to 'good Europeanism'. And, while digressing on this possibility, I
chanced to become the ear-witness of a conversation between two old 'patriots'
- it is clear they were both hard of hearing and thus spoke all the
louder. 'He has and knows as much
philosophy as a peasant or a fraternity student,' said one of them: 'he is
still innocent. But what does that
matter nowadays! It is the age of the
masses: they fall on their faces before anything massive. And in politicis likewise. A statesman who builds for them another Tower
of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call "great" -
what does it matter if we, more cautious and reserved than they, persist in the
old belief that it is the great idea along which can bestow greatness on a deed
or a cause. Suppose a statesman were to
put his nation in the position of having henceforth to pursue "grand
politics", for which it was ill equipped and badly prepared by nature, so
that it had to sacrifice its old and sure virtues for the sake of a new and
doubtful mediocrity - suppose a statesman were to condemn his nation to
"politicizing" at all, while the nation had hitherto had something
better to do and think about and in the depths of its soul still retained a
cautious disgust for the restlessness, emptiness and noisy wrangling of those
nations which actually do practise politics - suppose such a statesman were to
goad the slumbering passions and desires of his nation, turn its former
diffidence and desire to stand aside into a stigma and its predilection for
foreign things and its secret infiniteness into a fault, devalue its most
heartfelt inclinations in its own eyes, reverse its conscience, make its mind
narrow and its taste "national" - what! a statesman who did all this,
a statesman for whom his nation would have to atone for all future time,
assuming it had a future - would such a statesman be great?' 'Undoubtedly!' the other patriot replied
vehemently: 'otherwise he would not have been able to do it! Perhaps you may say it was mad to want to do
such a thing? But perhaps everything
great has been merely mad to begin with!' - 'Misuse of words!' cried the other:
- 'strong! strong! strong and mad! Not
great!' - The old men had obviously grown heated as they thus shouted their
'truths' in one another's faces; I, however, in my happiness and beyond,
considered how soon a stronger will become master of the strong; and also that
when one nation becomes spiritually shallower there is a compensation for it:
another nation becomes deeper. -
242
Whether that
which now distinguishes the European be called 'civilization' or 'humanization'
or 'progress'; whether one calls it simply, without implying any praise or
blame, the democratic movement in Europe: behind all the moral and political
foregrounds indicated by such formulas a great physiological process is
taking place and gathering greater and ever greater impetus - the process of
the assimilation of all Europeans, their growing detachment from the conditions
under which races dependent on climate and class originate, their increasing
independence of any definite milieu which, through making the same
demands for centuries, would like to inscribe itself soul and body - that is to
say, the slow emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of
man which, physiologically speaking, possesses as its typical distinction a
maximum of the art and power of adaptation.
This process of the becoming European, the tempo of which can be
retarded by great relapses but which will perhaps precisely through them gain
in vehemence and depth - the still-raging storm and stress of 'national
feeling' belongs here, likewise the anarchism now emerging - : this process
will probably lead to results which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the
apostles of 'modern ideas', would be least inclined to anticipate. The same novel conditions which will on
average create a levelling and mediocritizing of man - a useful, industrious,
highly serviceable and able herd-animal man - are adapted in the highest degree
to giving rise to exceptional men of the most dangerous and enticing
quality. For while the power of
adaptation which continually tries out changing conditions and begins a new
labour with every new generation, almost with every new decade, cannot make
possible the powerfulness of the type; while the total impression
produced by such future Europeans will probably be that of multifarious,
garrulous, weak-willed and highly employable workers who need a master,
a commander, as they need their daily bread; while, therefore, the
democratization of Europe will lead to the production of a type prepared for slavery
in the subtlest sense: in individual and exceptional cases the strong
man will be found to turn out stronger and richer than has perhaps ever
happened before - thanks to the unprejudiced nature of his schooling, thanks to
the tremendous multiplicity of practice, art and mask. What I mean to say is that the
democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for
the breeding of tyrants - in every sense of that word, including the
most spiritual.
243
I hear with
pleasure that our sun is moving rapidly in the direction of the constellation
of Hercules: and I hope that men on the earth will in this matter
emulate the sun. And we at their head,
we good Europeans! -
244
There was a
time when it was usual to call the Germans 'profound', and this was meant as a
term of distinction: now, when the most successful type of the new Germanism thirsts
after quite different honours and perhaps feels that anything profound lacks
'dash', it is almost timely and patriotic to doubt whether that commendation of
former days was not founded on self-deception: whether German profundity is not
at bottom something different and worse - and something which, thanks be to
God, one is on the verge of successfully getting rid of. Let us therefore try to learn anew about
German profundity: all that is required is a little vivisection of the German
soul. - The German soul is above all manifold, of diverse origins, put together
and superimposed rather than actually constructed: the reason for that is its
source. A German who would make bold to
say 'two souls, alas, within my bosom dwell' would err very widely from the
truth, more correctly he would fall short of the truth by a large number of
souls. As a people of the most
tremendous mixture and mingling of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of
the pre-Aryan element, as the 'people of the middle' in every sense, the
Germans are more incomprehensible, more comprehensive, more full of
contradictions, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, even more
frightening to themselves than other people are - they elude definition
and are for that reason alone the despair of the French. It is characteristic of the Germans that the
question 'what is German?' never dies out among them. Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well
enough: 'we are known' they cried to him jubilantly - but Sand too
though she knew them. Jean Paul knew
what he was doing when he declared himself incensed by Fichte's mendacious but
patriotic flatteries and exaggerations - but it is likely that Goethe thought
otherwise of the Germans than Jean Paul did, even though he agreed with him
about Fichte. What Goethe really thought
of the Germans? - But there were many things round him about which he never
expressed himself clearly and his whole life long he knew how to maintain a
subtle silence - he had no doubt good reason.
What is certain is that it was not 'the Wars of Liberation' which made
him look up more cheerfully, any more than it was the French Revolution - the
event on account of which he rethought his Faust, indeed the
whole problem of 'man', was the appearance of Napoleon. There exist statements by Goethe in which, as
if he was from another country, he condemns with impatient severity that which
the Germans take pride in: the celebrated German Gemüt he once defined
as 'indulgence of others' weaknesses, and one's own'. Was he wrong? - it is characteristic of the
Germans that one is seldom wholly wrong about them. The German soul has corridors and
interconnecting corridors in it, there are caves, hiding-places, dungeons in
it; its disorder possesses much of the fascination of the mysterious; the
German is acquainted with the hidden paths to chaos. And as everything loves its symbol, the
German loves clouds and all that is obscure, becoming, crepuscular, damp and
dismal: the uncertain, unformed, shifting, growing of every kind he feels to be
'profound'. The German himself is
not, he is becoming, he is 'developing'.
'Development' is thus the truly German discovery and lucky shot in the
great domain of philosophical formulas - a ruling concept which, in concert
with German beer and German music, is at work at the Germanization of all
Europe. Foreigners are astonished and
drawn by the enigmas which the contradictory nature at the bottom of the German
soul propounds to them (which Hegel reduced to a system and Richard Wagner
finally set to music). 'Good-natured and
malicious' - such a juxtaposition, nonsensical in respect of any other people,
is unfortunately too often justified in
245
The 'good
old days' are gone, in Mozart they sang themselves out - how fortunate are we
that his rococo still speaks to us, that his 'good company', his tender
enthusiasm, his child-like delight in chinoiserie and ornament, his
politeness of the heart, his longing for the graceful, the enamoured, the
dancing, the tearful, his faith in the south may still appeal to some residue
in us! Alas, some day it will be gone -
but whom can doubt that understanding and taste for Beethoven will be gone first!
- for Beethoven was only the closing cadence of a transition of style and
stylistic breach and not, as Mozart was, the closing cadence of a great
centuries-old European taste. Beethoven
is the intermediary between an old mellow soul that is constantly crumbling and
a future over-young soul that is constantly arriving; upon his music
there lies that twilight of eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope - the
same light in which Europe lay bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it
danced around the Revolution's Tree of Liberty and finally almost worshipped
before Napoleon. But how quickly this
feeling is now fading away, how hard it is today even to know of this
feeling - how strange to our ears sounds the language of Rousseau, Schiller,
Shelley, Byron, in whom together the same European destiny that in
Beethoven knew how to sing found its way into words! - Whatever German music
came afterwards belongs to romanticism, that is to say to a movement which was,
historically speaking, even briefer, even more fleeting, even more superficial
than that great interlude, that transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon
and to the rise of democracy. Weber: but
what are Freischütz and Oberon to us today! Or Marschner's Hans Heiling and Vampyr! Or even Wagner's Tannhäuser! It is dead, if not yet forgotten, music. All this music of romanticism was, moreover,
insufficiently noble, insufficiently musical, to maintain itself anywhere but
in the theatre and before the mob; it was from the very first second-rate music
to which genuine musicians paid little regard.
It was otherwise with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master who was, on
account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, speedily honoured and just as
speedily forgotten: as the beautiful intermezzo of German music. But as for Schumann, who took things
seriously and was also taken seriously from the first - he was the last to
found a school - : do we not now think it a piece of good fortune, a relief, a
liberation that this Schumann-romanticism has been overcome? Schumann, fleeing into the 'Saxon
Switzerland' of his soul, his nature half Werther, half Jean Paul, not at all
like Beethoven, not at all Byronic! - his music for Manfred is a mistake
and misunderstanding to the point of injustice - Schumann, with his taste which
was fundamentally a petty taste (that is to say a dangerous inclination,
doubly dangerous among Germans, for quiet lyricism and drunkenness of feeling),
continually going aside, shyly withdrawing and retiring, a noble effeminate
delighting in nothing but anonymous weal and woe, a kind of girl and noli me
tangere from the first: this Schumann was already a merely German
event in music, no longer a European event, as Beethoven was, as to an even
greater extent Mozart had been - in him German music was threatened with its
greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul of Europe and
sinking into a merely national affair.
246
- What a
torment books written in German are for him who has a third ear! How disgustedly he stands beside the slowly
turning swamp of sounds without resonance, of rhythms that do not dance, which
the Germans call a 'book'! Not to
mention the German who reads books!
How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know, or think they ought to
know, that there is art in every good sentence - art that must be
grasped if the sentence is to be understood!
A misunderstanding of its tempo, for example: and the sentence itself is
misunderstood! That one must be in no
doubt about the syllables that determine the rhythm, that one should feel the
disruption of a too-severe symmetry as intentional and as something attractive,
that one should lend a refined and patient ear to every staccato, every rubato,
that one should divine the meaning in the sequence of vowels and diphthongs and
how delicately and richly they can colour and recolour one another through the
order in which they come: who among book-reading Germans has sufficient
goodwill to acknowledge such demands and duties and to listen to so much art and
intention in language? In the end one
simply 'has no ear for it': and so the greatest contrasts in style go unheard
and the subtlest artistry is squandered as if on the deaf. - These were
my thoughts when I noticed how two masters of the art of prose were clumsily
and unsuspectingly confused with one another: one from whom words fall cold and
hesitantly as from the roof of a damp cavern - he calculates on the heavy
dullness of their sound and echo - and another who handles his language like a
supple blade and feels from his arm down to his toes the perilous delight of
the quivering, over-sharp steel that wants to bite, hiss, cut. -
247
How little
German style has to do with sound and the ears is shown by the fact that
precisely our good musicians write badly.
The German does not read aloud, does not read for the ear, but merely
with his eyes: he has put his ears away in the drawer. In antiquity, when a man read - which he did
very seldom - he read to himself aloud, and indeed in a loud voice; it was a
matter for surprise if someone read quietly, and people secretly asked
themselves why he did so. In a loud
voice: that is to say, with all the crescendos, inflections, variations of tone
and changes of tempo in which the ancient public world took pleasure. In those days the rules of written style were
the same as those of spoken style; and these rules depended in part on the
astonishing development, the refined requirements of ear and larynx, in part on
the strength, endurance and power of ancient lungs. A period is, in the sense in which the
ancients understood it, above all a physiological whole, inasmuch as it is
composed by a single breath.
Periods such as appear with Demonsthenes or Cicero, rising twice and
sinking twice and all within a single breath: these are delights for men
of antiquity, who knew from their own schooling how to value the virtue
of them, the rarity and difficulty of the delivery of such a period - we
have really no right to the grand period, we moderns, we who are short
of breath in every sense! For these
ancients were one and all themselves dilettantes in rhetoric, consequently
connoisseurs, consequently critics - and so they drove their orators to extremes;
in the same way as, in the last century, when all Italians and Italiennes knew
how to sing, virtuosity in singing (and therewith also the art of melody - )
attained its height with them. In
Germany, however, there was (until very recently, when a kind of platform
eloquence began shyly and heavily to flap its young wings) really but one
species of public and fairly artistic oratory: that from the
pulpit. The preacher was the only one in
Germany who knew what a syllable, what a word weighs, how a sentence strikes,
rises, falls, runs, runs to an end, he alone had a conscience in his ears,
often enough a bad conscience: for there is no lack of reasons why it is
precisely the German who rarely achieves proficiency in oratory, or almost
always achieves it too late. The
masterpiece of German prose is therefore, as is to be expected, the masterpiece
of its greatest preacher: the Bible has been the best German book
hitherto. Compared with Luther's Bible
almost everything else is merely 'literature' - a thing that has not grown up
in Germany and therefore has not taken and does not take root in German hearts:
as the Bible has done.
248
There are
two kinds of genius: the kind which above all begets and wants to beget, and
the kind which likes to be fructified and to give birth. And likewise there are among peoples of
genius those upon whom has fallen the woman's problem of pregnancy and the
secret task of forming, maturing, perfecting - the Greeks, for example, were a
people of this kind, and so were the French - ; and others who have to fructify
and become the cause of new orders of life - like the Jews, the Romans and, to
ask it in all modesty, the Germans? - peoples tormented and enraptured by
unknown fevers and irresistibly driven outside themselves, enamoured of and
lusting after foreign races (after those which 'want to be fructified') and at
the same time hungry for dominion, like everything which knows itself full of
generative power and consequently 'by the grace of God'. These two kinds of genius seek one another,
as man and woman do; but they also misunderstand one another - as man and woman
do.
249
Every people
has its own tartuffery and calls it its virtues. - The best that one is one
does not know - one cannot know.
250
What Europe owes
to the Jews? - Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing that is at
once of the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the dreadfulness
and majesty of infinite demands, infinite significances, the whole romanticism
and sublimity of moral questionabilities - and consequently precisely the most
attractive, insidious and choicest part of those iridescences and seductions to
life with whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is
now aflame - and perhaps burning itself up.
We artists among the spectators and philosophers are - grateful to the
Jews for this.
251
If a people
is suffering and wants to suffer from nationalistic nervous fever and
political ambition, it must be expected that all sorts of clouds and disturbances
- in short, little attacks of stupidity - will pass over its spirit into the
bargain: among present-day Germans, for example, now the anti-French stupidity,
now the anti-Jewish, now the anti-Polish, now the Christian-romantic, now the
Wagnerian, now the Teutonic, now the Prussian (just look at those miserable
historians, those Sybels and Treitschkes, with their thickly bandaged heads -
), and whatever else these little obfuscations of the German spirit and
conscience may be called. May it be forgiven
me that I too, during a daring brief sojourn in a highly infected area, did not
remain wholly free of the disease and began, like the rest of the world, to
entertain ideas about things that were none of my business: first symptom of
the political infection. About the Jews,
for example: listen. - I have never met a German who was favourably inclined
towards the Jews; and however unconditionally all cautious and politic men may
have repudiated real anti-Jewism, even this caution and policy is not directed
against this class of feeling itself but only against its dangerous
immoderation, and especially against the distasteful and shameful way in which
this immoderate feeling is expressed - one must not deceive oneself about that. That Germany has an ample sufficiency
of Jews, that the German stomach, German blood has difficulty (and will
continue to have difficulty for a long time to come) in absorbing even this
quantum of 'Jew' - as the Italians, the French, the English have absorbed them
through possessing a stronger digestion - : this is the clear declaration and
language of a universal instinct to which one must pay heed, in accordance with
which one must act. 'Let in no more
Jews! And close especially the doors to
the East (also to
252
They are no
philosophical race - these English: Bacon signifies an attack on the
philosophical spirit in general, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and
devaluation of the concept 'philosopher' for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant rose up;
it was Locke of whom Schelling had a right to say: 'je méprise Locke';
in their struggle against the English-mechanistic stultification of the world,
Hegel and Schopenhauer were (with Goethe) of one accord: those two hostile
brother geniuses who strove apart towards the antithetical poles of the German
spirit and in doing so wronged one another as only brothers wrong one another.
- What is lacking in England and always has been lacking was realized well
enough by that semi-actor and rhetorician, the tasteless muddlehead Carlyle,
who tried to conceal behind passionate grimaces what he knew about himself:
namely what was lacking in Carlyle - real power of spirituality,
real depth of spiritual insight, in short philosophy. - It is
characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that they should cling firmly to
Christianity: they need its discipline if they are to become 'moral' and
humane. The Englishman, gloomier, more
sensual, stronger of will and more brutal than the German - is for just that
reason, as the more vulgar of the two, also more pious than the German: he is
in greater need of Christianity.
To finer nostrils even this English Christianity possesses a true
English by-scent of the spleen and alcoholic excess against which it is with
good reason employed as an antidote - the subtler poison against the coarser:
and indeed a subtle poisoning is in the case of coarse peoples already a
certain progress, a step towards spiritualization. English coarseness and peasant seriousness
still finds its most tolerable disguise in Christian gestures and in praying
and psalm-singing: more correctly, it is best interpreted and given a new
meaning by those things; and as for those drunken and dissolute cattle who
formerly learned to grunt morally under the constraint of Methodism and more
recently as the 'Salvation Army', a spasm of penitence may really be the
highest achievement of 'humanity' to which they can be raised: that much may
fairly be conceded. But what offends in
even the most humane Englishman is, to speak metaphorically (and not
metaphorically), his lack of music: he has in the movements of his soul and
body no rhythm and dance, indeed not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for
'music'. Listen to him speak; watch the
most beautiful Englishwoman walk - in no land on earth are there more
beautiful doves and swans - finally: listen to them sing! But I ask too much ...
253
There are
truths which are recognized best by mediocre minds because they are most suited
to them, there are truths which possess charm and seductive powers only for
mediocre spirits - one is brought up against this perhaps disagreeable
proposition just at the moment because the spirit of respectable but mediocre
Englishmen - I name Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer - is starting
to gain ascendancy in the mid-region of European taste. Who indeed would doubt that it is useful for such
spirits to dominate for a while? It
would be a mistake to regard exalted spirits who fly off on their own as
especially well adapted to identifying, assembling and making deductions from a
host of little common facts - as exceptions they are, rather, from the first in
no very favourable position with respect to the 'rules'. After all, they have more to do than merely
know something new - namely to be something new, to signify
something new, to represent new values!
The gulf between knowing and being able is perhaps wider, also more
uncanny, than one thinks: the man who is able in the grand style, the creator,
might possibly have to be ignorant - while, on the other hand, for scientific
discoveries such as Darwin's a certain narrowness, aridity and industrious
conscientiousness, something English in short, may not be an unfavourable
disposition. - Finally, let us not forget that the English, with their profound
averageness, have once before brought about a collective depression of the
European spirit: that which is called 'modern ideas' or 'the ideas of the
eighteenth century' or even 'French ideas' - that is to say, that which the German
spirit has risen against in profound disgust - was of English origin, there can
be no doubt about that. The French have
been only the apes and actors of these ideas, also their finest soldiers, also
unhappily their first and most thorough victims: for through the
damnable Anglomania of 'modern ideas' the âme française has finally
grown so thin and emaciated that today one recalls her sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, her profound passionate strength, her noble
inventiveness, almost with disbelief.
But one must hang on with one's teeth to this proposition of historical
equity and defend it against the prejudice of the day: European noblesse
- of feeling, of taste, of custom, in short noblesse in every exalted
sense of the word - is the work and invention of France, European
vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas, that of - England. -
254
Even now
France is still the seat of Europe's most spiritual and refined culture and the
leading school of taste: but one has to know how to find this 'France of
taste'. He who belongs to it keeps
himself well hidden - it may be only a small number in whom it lives and moves,
and they, perhaps, men whose legs are not of the strongest, some of them
fatalists, gloomy, sick, some of them spoilt and artificial, such men as have
an ambition to hide themselves.
One thing they all have in common: their shut their ears to the raving
stupidity and the noisy yapping of the democratic bourgeois. Indeed, it is a coarse and stupid France that
trundles in the foreground today - it recently celebrated, at Victor Hugo's
funeral, a veritable orgy of tastelessness and at the same time
self-admiration. Something else too they
have in common: a great will to resist spiritual Germanization - and an even
greater inability to do so! Perhaps
Schopenhauer has now become more at home and indigenous in this France of the
spirit, which is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany; not
to speak of Heinrich Heine, who has long since entered into the flesh and blood
of the more refined and demanding lyric poets of Paris, or of Hegel, who today,
in the shape of Taine - that is to say, in that of the first of living
historians - exercises an almost tyrannical influence. As for Richard Wagner, however: the more
French music learns to shape itself according to the actual needs of the âme
moderne, the more will it 'Wagnerize', that one can safely predict - it is
doing so sufficiently already! There are
nevertheless three things which, despite all voluntary and involuntary
Germanization and vulgarization of taste, the French can still today exhibit
with pride as their inheritance and possession and as an indelible mark of
their ancient cultural superiority in Europe.
Firstly, the capacity for artistic passions, for devotion to 'form', for
which, together with a thousand others, the term l'art pour l'art has
been devised - it has been present in France for three hundred years and,
thanks to their respect for the 'small number', has again and again made
possible a kind of literary chamber music not to be found anywhere else in
Europe -. The second thing by which the
French can argue their superiority to the rest of Europe is their ancient,
manifold, moralistic culture, by virtue of which one finds an average
even in little romanciers of the newspapers and chance boulevardiers
de Paris a psychological sensitivity and curiosity of which in Germany, for
example, they have no conception (not to speak of having the thing
itself!). The Germans lack the couple of
centuries of moralistic labour needed for this, a labour which, as aforesaid,
France did not spare itself; he who calls the Germans 'naive' on that account
commends them for a fault. (As
antithesis to German inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica,
which is not too distantly related to the boringness of German company - and as
the most successful expression of a genuine French curiosity and inventiveness
in this domain of delicate thrills, one should observe Henri Beyle, that
remarkable anticipator and forerunner who ran with a Napoleonic tempo through his
Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as a detector and
discoverer of this soul - it needed two generations to overtake him, to
divine once more some of the riddles which tormented and delighted him, this
strange Epicurean and question-mark who was France's last great psychologist -
.) There is yet a third claim to
superiority: in the French nature there exists a half-achieved synthesis of
north and south which makes them understand many things and urges them to do
many things which an Englishman will never understand. Their temperament, periodically turning
towards the south and away from the south, in which the Provençal and Ligurian
blood from time to time foams over, preserves them from dreary northern
grey-on-grey and sunless concept-ghoulishness and anaemia - the disease of our German
taste against whose excess one has at just this moment very resolutely
prescribed blood and iron, that is to say 'grand politics' (in accordance with
a dangerous therapeutic which has certainly taught me how to wait but has not
yet taught me how to hope - ). Even now
there exists in France an understanding in advance and welcome for those rarer
and rarely contented men who are too comprehensive to find their satisfaction
in any kind of patriotism and know how to love the south in the north and the
north in the south - for the born Midlanders, the 'good Europeans'. - It was
for them that Bizet made music, that last genius to perceive a new
beauty and a new seduction - who has discovered a region of the south in
music.
255
Against German
music I feel all sorts of precautions should be taken. Suppose one loves the south as I love it, as
a great school of convalescence, for all the diseases of senses and spirit, as
a tremendous abundance of sun and transfiguration by sun, spreading itself over
an autonomous existence which believes in itself: well, such a person will
learn to be somewhat on guard against German music because, by spoiling his
taste again, it will also spoil his health again. Such a southerner, not by descent but by faith,
must, if he dreams of the future of music, also dream of the redemption of
music from the north and have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier,
perhaps wickeder and more mysterious music, a supra-German music which does not
fade, turn yellow, turn pale at the sight of the blue voluptuous sea and the
luminous sky of the Mediterranean, as all German music does; a supra-European
music which holds its own even before the brown sunsets of the desert, whose
soul is kindred to the palm-tree and knows how to roam and be at home among
great beautiful solitary beasts of prey.... I could imagine a music whose
rarest magic would consist in this, that it no longer knew anything of good and
evil, except that perhaps some sailors homesickness, some golden shadow and
delicate weakness would now and then flit across it: an art that would see
fleeing towards it from a great distance the colour of a declining, now almost
incomprehensible moral world, and would be hospitable and deep enough to
receive such late fugitives. -
256
Thanks to
the morbid estrangement which the lunacy of nationality has produced and
continues to produce between the peoples of Europe, thanks likewise to the
short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians who are with its aid on top today
and have not the slightest notion to what extent the politics of disintegration
they pursue must necessarily be only an interlude - thanks to all this, and to
much else that is altogether unmentionable today, the most unambiguous signs
are now being overlooked, or arbitrarily and lyingly misinterpreted, which
declare that Europe wants to become one.
In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century the
general tendency of the mysterious workings of their soul has really been to
prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally
the European of the future: only in their foregrounds, or in hours of weakness,
in old age perhaps, were they among the 'men of the fatherland' - they were
only taking a rest from themselves when they became 'patriots'. I think of men such as Napoleon, Goethe,
Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer; I must not be blamed if I
also include Richard Wagner among them: one should not let oneself be misled
about him by his own misunderstandings - geniuses of his sort seldom have the
right to understand themselves - and even less, to be sure, by the unseemly
noise with which he is opposed and resisted today in France: the fact
nonetheless remains that French late romanticism of the forties and
Richard Wagner belong most closely and intimately together. They are related, fundamentally related, in
all the heights and depths of their needs: it is Europe, the one Europe,
whose soul forces its way longingly up and out through their manifold and
impetuous art - whither? into a new light? towards a new sun? But who could express precisely what all
these masters of new means of speech themselves did not know how to express
clearly? What is certain is that they
were tormented by the same storm and stress, that they sought in the
same way, these last great seekers! One
and all dominated by literature up to their eyes and ears - the first artists
formed and cultivated by world literature - most of them even writers and poets
themselves and mediators and minglers of the arts and senses (as a musician
Wagner belongs among painters, as a poet among musicians, as an artist as such
among actors); one and all fanatics for expression 'at any cost' - I
call particular attention to Delacroix, Wagner's closest relation - one and all
great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the ugly and horrible,
even greater discoverers in effects, in display, in the art of the shop window,
one and all talents far beyond their genius - virtuosos through and through,
with uncanny access to everything that seduces, lures, constrains, overwhelms,
born enemies of logic and straight lines, constantly hankering after the
strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, the self-contradictory; as
human beings Tantaluses of the will, plebeians risen in the world who knew
themselves incapable, in their lives and in their works, of a noble tempo - a lento
- think of Balzac, for instance, - unbridled workers, almost destroying
themselves through work; anti-norians, fomenters off moral disorder, ambitious,
insatiable men without balance or enjoyment; one and all collapsing and sinking
at last before the Christian Cross (and with every right: for whom among them
would have been profound or primary enough for a philosophy of anti-Christ?)
- on the whole an audacious-daring, splendidly violent, high-flying type of
higher men who bore others up with them and whose lot it was to teach their
century - and it is the century of the mob! - the concept 'higher
man'.... Let the German friends of Richard Wagner deliberate whether there is
in Wagnerian art anything simply German, or whether it is not precisely its
distinction that it derives from supra-German sources and impulses: in
considering which it should not be underestimated how indispensable Paris was
for the cultivation of his type, how the depth of his instinct drew him
precisely thither at the most decisive time, and how his whole manner of
appearance and self-apostolate could perfect itself only be his seeing its
French socialist model. Perhaps a
subtler comparison will reveal that, to the credit of Richard Wagner's German
nature, he fashioned stronger, more daring, more severe and more elevated
things than a nineteenth-century Frenchman could have done - thanks to the
circumstance that we Germans are still closer to barbarism than the French - ;
perhaps the most remarkable thing Wagner created is even inaccessible,
inimitable to the entire, so late Latin race for ever and not only for the
present: the figure of Siegfried, that very free human being who may
indeed be much too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic
for the taste of peoples of an ancient, mellow culture. He may even have been a sin against
romanticism, this anti-Romantic Siegfried: well, Wagner amply atoned for this
sin in his old, melancholy days when - anticipating a taste which has since
become political - he began, with the religious vehemence characteristic of
him, if not to walk at any rate to preach the road to Rome. - That these
last words shall not be misunderstood I shall call to my aid a few powerful
rhymes which will reveal what I mean to less refined ears too - what I object
to in 'late Wagner' and his Parsifal music:
- Is this
still German?
From
German heart this sultry ululating?
Of German
body this self-lacerating?
German,
this altar-priest prostration,
This
incense-perfumed stimulation?
German
this reeling, stumbling, tumbling,
This muddy
booming bim-bam-bumbling,
This
nunnish ogling, Ave-hour-bell chiming,
This
false-ecstatic higher-than-heaven climbing?
- Is this
still German? -
Reflect! And then your answer frame:-
For what
you hear is Rome - Rome's faith in all but name!
Part Nine: What is Noble?
257
Every elevation
of the type 'man' has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society - and
so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of
rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some
sense or another. Without the pathos
of distance such as develops from the incarnate differences of classes,
from the ruling caste's constant looking out and looking down on subjects and
instruments and from its equally constant exercise of obedience and command,
its holding down and holding at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos
could not have developed either, that longing for an ever-increasing widening
of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, more
remote, tenser, more comprehensive states, in short precisely the elevation of
the type 'man', the continual 'self-overcoming of man', to take a moral formula
in a supra-moral sense. As to how an
aristocratic society (that is to say, the precondition for this elevation of
the type 'man') originates, one ought not to yield to any humanitarian
illusions: truth is hard. Let us admit
to ourselves unflinchingly how every higher culture on earth has hitherto begun! Men of a still natural nature, barbarians in every
fearful sense of the word, men of prey still in possession of an unbroken
strength of will and lust for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more
civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or upon old
mellow cultures, the last vital forces in which were even then flickering out
in a glittering fireworks display of spirit and corruption. The noble caste was in the beginning always
the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but
primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings
(which, on every level, also means as much as 'more complete beasts' - ).
258
Corruption
as the indication that anarchy threatens within the instincts, and that the
foundation of the emotions which is called 'life' has been shaken: corruption
is something fundamentally different according to which life-form it appears
in. When, for example, an aristocracy
such as that of France at the start of the Revolution throws away its
privileges with a sublime disgust and sacrifices itself to an excess of moral
feeling, then that is corruption - it was really only the closing act of that
corruption which had been going on for centuries by virtue of which it had step
by step abdicated its prerogatives of government and demoted itself to a function
of the monarchy (in the end to no more than its decoration and
show-piece). The essential thing in a
good and healthy aristocracy is, however, that it does not feel itself
to be a function (of the monarchy or of the commonwealth) but as their meaning
and supreme justification - that it therefore accepts with a good conscience
the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed
and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental faith must be that society
should not exist for the sake of society but only as foundation and
scaffolding upon which a select species of being is able to raise itself to its
higher task and in general to a higher existence: like those sun-seeking
climbing plants of Java - they are named sipo matador - which clasp an
oak-tree with their tendrils so long and often that at last, high above it but
supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and display
their happiness. -
259
To refrain
from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation, to equate one's own
will with that of another: this may in a certain rough sense become good
manners between individuals if the conditions for it are present (namely if
their strength and value standards are in fact similar and they both belong to one
body). As soon as there is a desire to
take this principle further, however, and if possible even as the fundamental
principle of society, it at once reveals itself for what it is: as the will
to the denial of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay. One has to think that matter thoroughly
through to the bottom and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially
appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity,
imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest,
exploitation - but why should one always have to employ precisely those words
which have from of old been stamped with a slanderous intention? Even that body within which, as was
previously assumed, individuals treat one another as equals - this happens in
every healthy aristocracy - must, if it is a living and not a decaying body,
itself do all that to other bodies which the individuals within it refrain from
doing to one another: it will have to be the will to power incarnate, it will
want to grow, expand, draw to itself, gain ascendancy - not out of any morality
or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is will to
power. On no point, however, is the
common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here;
everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states
of society in which there will be 'no more exploitation' - that sounds to my
ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. 'Exploitation' does not pertain to a corrupt
or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the
living thing as a fundamental organic function, it is a consequence of the
intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will of life. - Granted this is
a novelty as a theory - as a reality it is the primordial fact of all
history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves!
260
In a tour of
the many finer and coarser moralities which have ruled or still rule on earth I
found certain traits regularly recurring together and bound up with one
another: until at length two basic types were revealed and a basic distinction
emerged. There is master morality
and slave morality - I add at once that in all higher and mixed cultures
attempts at mediation between the two are apparent and more frequently
confusion and mutual misunderstanding between them, indeed sometimes their
harsh juxtaposition - even within the same man, within one soul. The moral value-distinctions have arisen
either among a ruling order which was pleasurably conscious of its distinction
from the ruled - or among the ruled, the slaves and dependants of every degree. In the former case, when it is the rulers who
determine the concept 'good', it is the exalted, proud states of soul which are
considered distinguishing and determine the order of rank. The noble human being separates from himself
those natures in which the opposite of such exalted proud states find
expression: he despises them. It should
be noted at once that in this first type of morality the antithesis 'good' and
'bad' means the same thing as 'noble' and 'despicable' - the antithesis 'good'
and 'evil' originates elsewhere.
The cowardly, the timid, the petty, and those who think only of narrow
utility are despised; as are the mistrustful with their constricted glance,
those who abase themselves, the dog-like type of man who lets himself be
mistreated, the fawning flatterer, above all the liar - it is a fundamental
belief of all aristocrats that the common people are liars. 'We who are truthful' - thus did the nobility
of ancient Greece designate themselves.
It is immediately obvious that designations of moral value were
everywhere first applied to human beings, and only later and
derivatively to actions: which is why it is a grave error when moral
historians start from such questions as 'why has the compassionate action been
praised?' The noble type of man feels himself
to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges
'what harms me is harmful in itself', he knows himself to be that which in
general first accords honour to things, he creates values. Everything he knows to be part of himself, he
honours: such a morality is self-glorification.
In the foreground stands the feeling of plenitude, of power which seeks
to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which
would like to give away and bestow - the noble human being too aids the
unfortunate but not, or almost not, from pity, but more from an urge begotten
by superfluity of power. The noble human
being honours in himself the man of power, also the man who has power over
himself, who understands how to speak and how to keep silent, who enjoys
practising severity and harshness upon himself and feels reverence fro all that
is severe and harsh. 'A hard heart has
Wotan set in my breast', it says in an old Scandinavian saga: a just expression
coming from the soul of a proud Viking.
A man of this type is actually proud that he is not made for
pity: which is why the hero of the saga adds as a warning: 'he whose heart is
not hard in youth will never have a hard heart'. Brave and noble men who think that are at the
farthest remove from that morality which seeks the mark of the moral precisely
in pity or in acting for others or in désintéressement; belief in
oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony for 'selflessness'
belong just as definitely to noble morality as does a mild contempt for and
caution against sympathy and the 'warm heart'. - It is the powerful who understand
how to honour, that is their art, their realm of invention. Deep reverence for age and the traditional -
all law rests on this twofold reverence - belief in and prejudice in favour of
ancestors and against descendants, is typical of the morality of the powerful;
and when, conversely, men of 'modern ideas' believe almost instinctively in
'progress' and 'the future' and show an increasing lack of respect for age,
this reveals clearly enough the ignoble origin of these 'ideas'. A morality of the rulers is, however, most
alien and painful to contemporary taste in the severity of its principle that
one has duties only towards one's equals; that towards being of a lower rank,
towards everything alien, one may act as one wishes or 'as the heart dictates'
and in any case 'beyond good and evil' - : it is here that pity and the like
can have a place. The capacity for and
the duty of protracted gratitude and protracted revenge - both only among one's
equals - subtlety in requital, a refined conception of friendship, a certain
need to have enemies (as conduit systems, as it were, for the emotions of envy,
quarrelsomeness, arrogance - fundamentally so as to be able to be a good friend):
all these are typical marks of noble morality which, as previously indicated,
is not the morality of 'modern ideas' and is therefore hard to enter into
today, also hard to unearth and uncover. - It is otherwise with the second type
of morality, slave morality.
Suppose the abused, oppressed, suffering, unfree, those uncertain of
themselves and weary should moralize: what would their moral evaluations have
in common? Probably a pessimistic
mistrust of the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a
condemnation of man together with his situation. The slave is suspicious of the virtues of the
powerful: he is sceptical and mistrustful, keenly mistrustful, of
everything 'good' that is honoured among them - he would like to convince
himself that happiness itself is not genuine among them. On the other hand, those qualities which
serve to make easier the existence of the suffering will be brought into
prominence and flooded with light: here it is that pity, the kind and helping
hand, the warm heart, patience, industriousness, humility, friendliness come
into honour - for here these are the most useful qualities and virtually the
only means of enduring the burden of existence.
Slave morality is essentially the morality of utility. Here is the source of the famous antithesis
'good' and 'evil' - power and danger were felt to exist in evil, a
certain dreadfulness, subtlety and strength which could not admit of
contempt. Thus, according to slave
morality the 'evil' inspire fear; according to master morality it is precisely
the 'good' who inspire fear and want to inspire it, while the 'bad' man is
judged contemptible. The antithesis
reaches its height when, consistently with slave morality, a breath of disdain
finally also comes to be attached to the 'good' of this morality - it may be a
slight and benevolent disdain - because within the slaves' way of thinking the
good man has in any event to be a harmless man: he is good-natured, easy
to deceive, perhaps a bit stupid, un bonhomme. Wherever slave morality comes to predominate,
language exhibits a tendency to bring the words 'good' and 'stupid' closer to
each other. - A final fundamental distinction: the longing for freedom,
the instinct for the happiness and the refinements of the feeling of freedom,
belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as the art of reverence
and devotion and the enthusiasm for them are the regular symptom of an
aristocratic mode of thinking and valuating. - This makes it clear without
further ago why love as passion - it is our European speciality -
absolutely must be of aristocratic origin: it was, as is well known, invented
by the poet-knights of Provence, those splendid, inventive men of the 'gai
saber' to whom Europe owes so much and, indeed, almost itself. -
261
Among the
things which a noble human being perhaps finds hardest to understand is vanity:
he will be tempted to deny its existence where a different type of human being
will think it palpably evident. For him
the problem is to imagine creatures who try to awaken a good opinion of
themselves which they themselves do not hold - and thus do not 'deserve' either
- and yet subsequently come to believe this good opinion
themselves. This seems to him in part so
tasteless and lacking in self-respect and in part so baroquely irrational that
he would prefer to consider vanity exceptional and in most cases where it is
spoken of he doubts its existence. He
will say, for example: 'I can rate my value incorrectly and yet demand that
others too should recognize my value exactly as I rate it - but that is not
vanity (but self-conceit, or, more usually, what is called "humility"
or "modesty"). Or he will say:
'I can, for many reasons, take pleasure in the good opinion of others, perhaps
because I love and honour them and take pleasure in all their pleasures,
perhaps because their good opinion sustains me in my faith in my own good
opinion, perhaps because the good opinion of others, even when I do not share
it, is still useful to me or promises to be useful - but none of this is
vanity.' The noble human being requires
the assistance of history if he is to see that, from time immemorial, in all
strata which were in any way dependent the common man was only that
which he counted as - in no way accustomed to positing values himself,
he also accorded himself no other value than that which his master accorded him
(it is the intrinsic right of masters to create values). It can be conceived as the consequence of a tremendous
atavism that even now the ordinary man still always waits for an opinion
about himself and then instinctively submits to it: but this happens not merely
in the case of a 'good' opinion, but also in that of a bad and unfair one
(consider, for instance, the greater part of the self-estimates and
self-underestimates which believing women acquire from their father-confessors
and the believing Christian acquires from his Church). Now it is a fact that, in accordance with the
slow rise of the democratic order of things, (and its cause, the mixing of the
blood of masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare impulse to ascribe
a value to oneself on one's own account and to 'think well' of oneself will be
increasingly encouraged and spread wider and wider: but it has at all times an
older, more widespread and more thoroughly ingrained inclination against it -
and in the phenomenon of 'vanity' this older inclination masters the
younger. The vain man takes pleasure in every
good opinion he hears about himself (quite apart from any point of view of
utility and likewise regardless of truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from
every bad opinion: for he submits to both, he feels subject to them from
that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks out in him. - It is 'the slave'
in the vain man's blood, a remnant of the craftiness of the slave - and how
much 'slave' still remains in woman, for example! - which seeks to seduce
him to good opinions about himself; it is likewise the slave who immediately
afterwards falls down before these opinions as if he himself had not called
them forth. - And to say it again: vanity is an atavism.
262
A species
arises, a type becomes fixed and strong, through protracted struggle against
essentially constant unfavourable conditions. Conversely, one knows from the experience of
breeders that species which receive plentiful nourishment and an excess of care
and protection soon tend very strongly to produce variations of their type and
are rich in marvels and monstrosities (also in monstrous vices). Now look for once at an aristocratic
community, Venice, say, or an ancient Greek polis, as a voluntary or
involuntary contrivance for the purpose of breeding: there there are
human beings living together and thrown on their own resources who want their
species to prevail usually because they have to prevail or run the
terrible risk of being exterminated.
Here those favourable conditions, that excess, that protection which
favours variations, is lacking; the species needs itself as species, as
something that can prevail and purchase durability in its continual struggle
against its neighbours or against the oppressed in revolt or threatening
revolt, precisely by virtue of its hardness, uniformity, simplicity of form. The most manifold experience teaches it which
qualities it has principally to thank that, in spite of all gods and men, it
still exists and has always been victorious: these qualities it calls virtues,
these virtues alone does it breed and cultivate. It does so with severity, indeed it wants
severity; every aristocratic morality is intolerant, in the education of the
young, in the measures it takes with respect to women, in marriage customs, in
the relations between young and old, in the penal laws (which are directed only
at variants) - it counts intolerance itself among the virtues under the name
'justice'. A type with few but very
marked traits, a species of stern, warlike, prudently silent, determined and
taciturn men (and, as such, men of the finest feeling for the charm and nuances
of society), is in this way firmly fixed beyond the changes of generations;
continual struggle against ever-constant unfavourable conditions is, as
aforesaid, that which fixes and hardens a type.
In the end, however, there arises one day an easier state of affairs and
the tremendous tension relaxes; perhaps there are no longer any enemies among
their neighbours, and the means of life, even for the enjoyment of life, are
there in plenty. With one stroke the
bond and constraint of the ancient discipline is broken: it is no longer felt
to be a necessity, a condition of existence - if it were to persist it could be
only as a form of luxury, as an archaizing taste. Variation, whether as deviation (into the
higher, rarer, more refined) or as degeneration and monstrosity, is suddenly on
the scene in the greatest splendour and abundance, the individual dares to be
individual and stand out. At these
turning-points of history there appear side by side and often entangled and
entwined together a glorious, manifold, jungle-like growth and up-stirring, a
kind of tropical tempo in competition in growing, and a tremendous
perishing and self-destruction, thanks to the savage egoisms which, turning on
one another and as it were exploding, wrestle together 'for sun and light' and
no longer know how to draw any limitation, any restraint, any forbearance from
the morality reigning hitherto. It was
this morality which stored up such enormous energy, which bent the bow in such
a threatening manner - now it is 'spent', now it is becoming 'outlived'. The dangerous and uncanny point is reached
where the grander, more manifold, more comprehensive life lives beyond
the old morality; the 'individual' stands there, reduced to his own law-giving,
to his own arts and strategems for self-preservation, self-enhancement,
self-redemption. Nothing but new whys
and wherewithals, no longer an common formulas, misunderstanding in alliance
with disrespect, decay, corruption and the highest desires horribly tangled
together, the genius of the race overflowing out of every cornucopia of good
and bad, spring and autumn falling fatally together, full of novel charms and
veils such as pertain to youthful, still unexhausted, still unwearied
corruption. Danger is again present, the
mother of morality, great danger, only this time it comes from the individual,
from neighbour and friend, from the street, from one's own child, from one's
own heart, from the most personal and secret recesses of wish and will: what
will the moral philosophers who come up in this age now have to preach? They discover, these acute observers and
idlers, that the end is fast approaching, that everything around them is
corrupt and corrupting, that nothing can last beyond the day after tomorrow, one
species of man excepted, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have the prospect of
continuing on and propagating themselves - they are the men of the future, the
sole survivors; 'be like them! become mediocre!' is henceforth the only
morality that has any meaning left, that still finds ears to hear it. - But it
is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! - for it can never admit
what it is and what it wants! it has to speak of moderation and dignity and
duty and love of one's neighbour - it will scarcely be able to conceal its
irony! -
263
There is an instinct
for rank which is more than anything else already the sign of a high rank;
there is a delight in the nuances of reverence, which reveals a noble
origin and noble habits. The refinement,
goodness and loftiness of a soul is put to a perilous rest whenever something
passes before it that is of the first rank but not yet protected from
importunate clumsiness and claws by the awe of authority: something that goes
its way unsignalized, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps arbitrarily obscured and
disguised, like a living touchstone. He
whose task and practice it is to explore the soul will avail himself of
precisely this art in many forms in order to determine the ultimate value of a
soul, the unalterable innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will test it
for its instinct of reverence. Différence
engendre haine: the commonness of some natures suddenly spurts up like
dirty water whenever some sacred vessel, some precious object from a closed
shrine, some book with the marks of a great destiny is carried by; and on the
other hand there is an involuntary falling silent, a hesitation of the eye, a
cessation of all gestures, which reveal that a soul feels the proximity
of something most worthy of respect. The
way in which reverence for the Bible has hitherto been generally
maintained in Europe is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of
manners that Europe owes to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate
significance require for their protection an external tyranny of authority, in
order that they may achieve those millennia of continued existence which
are needed if they are to be exhausted and unriddled. Much has been gained when the feeling has at
last been instilled into the masses (into the shallow-pates and greedy-guts of
every sort) that there are things they must not touch; that there are holy
experiences before which they have to take off their shoes and keep their
unclean hands away - it is almost their highest advance towards humanity. Conversely, there is perhaps nothing about
the so-called cultured, the believers in 'modern ideas', that arouses so much
disgust as their lack of shame, the self-satisfied insolence of eye and hand with
which they touch, lick and fumble with everything; and it is possible that more
relative nobility of taste and reverential tact is to be discovered
today among the people, among the lower orders and especially among peasants,
than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, the cultured.
264
That which
his ancestors most liked to do and most constantly did cannot be erased from a
man's soul: whether, for instance, they were diligent savers and the
accessories of a desk and cash-box, modest and bourgeois in their desires,
modest also in their virtues; or whether they lived accustomed to commanding
from morn to night, fond of rough amusements and perhaps of even rougher duties
and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they at some time or other
sacrificed ancient privileges of birth and possessions in order to live
entirely for their faith - for their 'god' - as men of an inexorable and tender
conscience which blushes at all half-measures.
It is quite impossible that a man should not have in his body the
qualities and preferences of his parents and forefathers: whatever appearances
may say to the contrary. This
constitutes the problem of race. If one
knows something about the parents, it is permissible to draw a conclusion about
the child: any sort of untoward intemperance, any sort of narrow enviousness, a
clumsy obstinate self-assertiveness - these three things together have at all
times constituted the characteristics of the plebeian type - qualities of this
sort must be transferred to the child as surely as bad blood; and the best
education and culture will succeed only in deceiving with regard to such
an inheritance. - And what else is the objective of education and culture
today? In our very democratic, that is
to say plebeian age, 'education' and 'culture' have to be in essence the
art of deceiving - of deceiving with regard to origins, to the inherited
plebeian in soul and body. An educator
who today preached truthfulness above all and continually cried to his pupils
'Be true! Be natural! Give yourselves out for what you are!' - even
such a virtuous and simple ass would after a time learn to reach for that furca
of Horace to naturam expellere: with what success? 'The plebeian' usque recurret. -
265
At the risk of
annoying innocent ears I set it down that egoism pertains to the essence of the
noble soul, I mean the immovable faith that to a being such as 'we are' other
beings have to be subordinate by their nature, and sacrifice themselves to us. The noble soul accepts this fact of its
egoism without any question-mark, also without feeling any severity,
constraint, caprice in it, but rather as something that may be grounded in the
primal law of things: - if it sought a name for it, it would say 'it is justice
itself'. Under certain circumstances which make it
hesitate at first, it will admit that there are others with rights equal to its
own; as soon as it is clear as to this question of rank, it moves among these
its equals and equal-in-rights with the same sure modesty and tender reverence
as it applies to itself - in accordance with an innate celestial mechanism
which all stars understand. This
refinement and self-limitation in traffic with its equals is one more
aspect of its egoism - every star is such an egoist - : it honours itself in
them and in the rights it concedes them, it is in no doubt that the exchange of
honours and rights, as the essence of social intercourse, is likewise
part of the natural condition of things.
The noble soul gives as it takes, out of the passionate and sensitive
instinct of requital which lies in its depths.
The concept 'favour' has no meaning or good odour inter pares;
there may be a sublime way of letting gifts from above as it were befall one
and drinking them up thirstily like drops: but for this sort of behaviour the
noble soul has no aptitude. Its egoism
hinders it here: it does not like to look 'up' at all - it prefers to look
either in front, horizontally and slowly, or down - it knows it is at
a height. -
266
'One can
truly respect only him who does not look out for himself.' - Goethe to
Rat Schlosser.
267
The Chinese
have a proverb which mothers even teach their children: siao-sin: 'Make
your heart small!' This is the
characteristic basic tendency in late civilizations: I do not doubt that the
first thing an ancient Greek would remark in us Europeans of today would also
be self-diminution - through that alone we should be 'contrary to his taste'. -
268
What
ultimately is commonness? - Words are sounds designating concepts; concepts,
however, are more or less definite images designating frequently recurring and
associated sensations, groups of sensations.
To understand one another it is not sufficient to employ the same words;
we have also to employ the same words to designate the same species of inner
experiences, we must ultimately have our experience in common. That is why the members of one people
understand one another better than do members of differing peoples even when
they use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together
for a long time under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, needs,
work), there arises from this a group who 'understand one another', a
people. In every soul in this group an
equivalent number of frequently recurring experiences has gained the upper hand
over those which come more rarely: it is on the basis of these that people
understand one another, quickly and ever more quickly - the history of language
is the history of a process of abbreviation - ; it is on the basis of this
quick understanding that they unite together, closely and ever more
closely. The greater the danger, the
greater is the need to reach agreement quickly and easily as to what has to be
done; not to misunderstand one another in situations of danger is an absolute
necessity in human relations. One makes
this same test even in the case of friendships or love-affairs: nothing of that
sort can last once it is discovered that when one party uses words he connects
them with feelings, intentions, perceptions, desires, fears different from
those the other party connects them with.
(Fear of the 'eternal misunderstanding': that is the benevolent genius
who so often keeps persons of differing sex from over-hasty attachments to
which senses and heart prompt them - and not some Schopenhaueran 'genius
of the species' - !) Exactly which
groups of sensations are awakened, begin to speak, issue commands most quickly
within a soul, is decisive for the whole order of ranks of its values and ultimately
determines its table of desiderata. A
human being's evaluations betray something of the structure of his soul
and where it sees its conditions of life, its real needs. Now supposing that need has at all times
brought together only such human beings as could indicate similar requirements,
similar experiences by means of similar signs, it follows that on the whole the
easy communicability of needs, that is to say ultimately the
experiencing of only average and common experiences, must have been the most
powerful of all the powerful forces which have disposed of mankind
hitherto. The more similar, more
ordinary human beings have had and still have the advantage, the more select,
subtle, rare and harder to understand are liable to remain alone, succumb to
accidents in their isolation and seldom propagate themselves. Tremendous counter-forces have to be called
upon to cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the
continuing development of mankind into the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike
- into the common!
269
The more a
psychologist - a born, an unavoidable psychologist and reader of souls - turns
his attention to the more select cases and human beings, the greater grows the
danger of his suffocating from pity: he needs hardness and cheerfulness
more than other men. For the corruption,
the ruination of higher human beings, of more strangely constituted souls, is
the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one's eyes. The manifold torment of the psychologist who
has discovered this ruination, who discovers this whole inner 'wretchedness' of
the higher human being, this eternal 'too late!' in every sense, first once and
then almost always throughout the whole of history - may perhaps one day
make him turn against his whole lot and drive him to attempt self-destruction -
to his own 'ruination'. One will
perceive in almost every psychologist a telltale preference for and pleasure in
associating with everyday and well-ordered people: this betrays that he is in
constant need of a cure, that he requires a kind of flight and forgetting, away
from that which his insights and incisions, his 'trade', has laid upon his
conscience. It is characteristic of him
that he is afraid of his memory. He is
easily silenced by the judgement of others: he listens with a straight face
when people venerate, admire, love, transfigure where he has seen - or
he conceals even his silence by expressly agreeing with some superficial
opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his
situation is so ghastly that precisely where he has learned great pity together
with greater contempt the mob, the cultured, the enthusiasts learn great
veneration - veneration for 'great men' and prodigies on whose account they
bless the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of mankind and themselves, in
whose direction they point the young and on whose model they educate them....
And who knows whether what has happened hitherto in all great cases has not
always been the same thing: that the mob worshipped a god - and that the 'god'
was only a poor sacrificial beast!
Success has always been the biggest liar - and the 'work' itself a kind
of success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by
his creations to the point of unrecognizability: the 'work', that of the artist
or the philosopher, invents him who created it, is supposed to have created it;
'great men', as they are venerated, are bad little fictions invented
afterwards; in the world of historical values false coinage is the rule. Great poets, for example, such as Byron,
Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I do not dare to name greater names, but
I mean them) - as they are and perhaps have to be: men of moments,
enthusiastic, sensual, childish, sudden and frivolous in trust and mistrust;
with souls in which some fracture is usually trying to hide; often taking
revenge with their works for an inner defilement, often seeking with their
exaggerations forgetfulness of an all too faithful memory, often lost in the
mud and almost in love with it, until they become like will-o'-the-wisps around
swamps and pretend to be stars - the people may then call them idealists
- often struggling against a protracted disgust, a recurring spectre of
unbelief which freezes them and compels them to languish for gloria and
to devour 'belief in themselves' out of the hands of intoxicated adulators -
what a torment these great artists and higher human beings in general
are for him who has once divined what they are!
It is so very understandable that they should so easily receive precisely
from woman - who is clairvoyante in the world of suffering and unfortunately
also eager to help and save far beyond her power to do so - those outbursts of
boundless, most devoted pity which the mob, above all the venerating
mob, fails to understand and loads with inquisitive and self-satisfied
interpretations. This pity habitually
deceives itself about its strength; woman would like to believe that love can
do everything - it is her characteristic faith. Alas, he who knows the heart divines how poor,
stupid, helpless, arrogant, blundering, more prone to destroy than save is even
the best and deepest love! - It is possible that within the holy disguise and
fable of Jesus' life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the
martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent
and longing heart which never had sufficient of human love, which demanded
love, to be loved and nothing else, demanded it with hardness, with madness,
with fearful outbursts against those who denied it love; the story of a poor
soul unsated and insatiable in love who had to invent hell so as to send there
those who did not want to love him - and who, having become
knowledgeable about human love, finally had to invent a god who is wholly love,
wholly ability to love - who has mercy on human love because it is so
very paltry and ignorant! He whose
feelings are like this, he who knows about love to this extent - seeks
death. - But why reflect on such painful things? As long as one does not have to. -
270
The
spiritual haughtiness and disgust of every human being who has suffered deeply
- how deeply human beings can suffer almost determines their order of
rank - the harrowing certainty, with which he is wholly permeated and coloured,
that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than even the cleverest
and wisest can know, that he is familiar with, and was once 'at home' in, many
distant, terrible worlds of which 'you know nothing!' ... this
spiritual, silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of
knowledge, of the 'initiated', of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of
disguise necessary to protect itself against contact with importunate and
pitying hands and in general against everything which is not its equal in
suffering. Profound suffering ennobles;
it separates. One of the most subtle
forms of disguise is Epicureanism and a certain ostentatious bravery of taste
which takes suffering frivolously and arms itself against everything sorrowful and
profound. There are 'cheerful people'
who employ cheerfulness because they are misunderstood on account of it - they want
to be misunderstood. There are 'men of
science' who employ science because it produces a cheerful appearance and
because scientificality gives the impression a person is superficial - they want
to give a false impression. There are
free insolent spirits who would like to conceal and deny that they are broken,
proud, incurable hearts (the cynicism of Hamlet - the case of Galiani); and
sometimes folly itself is the mask for an unhappy, all too certain knowledge. -
From which it follows that it is part of a more refined humanity to have
reverence 'for the mask' and not to practise psychology and inquisitiveness in
the wrong place.
271
That which
divides two people most profoundly is a differing sense and degree of
cleanliness. Of what good is all
uprightness and mutual usefulness, of what good is mutual good will: the fact
still remains - they 'cannot bear each other's odour!' The highest instinct of cleanliness places him
who is affected with it in the strangest and most perilous isolation, as a
saint: for precisely this is saintliness - the highest spiritualization of the
said instinct. To know an indescribable
pleasure in bathing, to feel an ardour and thirst which constantly drives the
soul out of night into morning, and out of gloom and 'gloominess' into
brightness, into the glittering, profound, refined - : such an inclination is distinguishing
- it is a noble inclination - but it also separates. - The saint's pity
is pity for the dirt of the human, all too human. And there are degrees and heights at which he
feels pity itself as defilement, as dirt ...
272
Signs of
nobility: never to think of degrading our duties into duties for everybody; not
to want to relinquish or share our own responsibilities; to count our
privileges and the exercising of them among our duties.
273
A human
being who strives for something great regards everybody he meets on his way
either as a means or as a delay and hindrance - or as a temporary
resting-place. The lofty goodness
towards his fellow men which is proper to him becomes possible only when he has
reached his height and he rules.
Impatience and his consciousness that until that time he is condemned to
comedy - for even war is a comedy and a concealment, just as every means
conceals the end - spoil all his association with others: this kind of man
knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.
274
The problem
of those who wait - It requires luck and much that is
incalculable if a higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a
problem is to act - 'break out' one might say - at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and in
every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to what
extent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the awakening call, that chance
event which gives 'permission' to acts, comes but too late - when the best part
of youth and the strength to act has already been used up in sitting still; and
how many a man has discovered to his horror when he 'rose up' that his limbs
had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! 'It is too late' - he has said to himself,
having lost faith in himself and henceforth for ever useless. Could it be that, in the realm of genius,
'Raphael without hands' is, taking the phrase in its widest sense, not the
exception but the rule? - Perhaps genius is not so very rare: perhaps what is
rare is the five hundred hands needed to tyrannize over the kairos,
'the right time' - to take chance by the forelock!
275
He who does
not want to see what is elevated in a man looks all the more keenly for
what is low and foreground in him - and thereby gives himself away.
276
In every kind
of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler:
the dangers facing the latter are bound to be greater, the probability that it
will come to grief and perish is, considering the multiplicity of the
conditions of its life, enormous. - When a lizard loses a finger that finger
grows again: not so in the case of man. -
277
- Annoying!
The same old story! When one has
finished one's house one realizes that while doing so one has learnt unawares
something one absolutely had to know before one - began to build. The everlasting pitiful 'too late!' - The
melancholy of everything finished!...
278
- Wanderer,
who are you? I see you go your way
without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes; moist and sad as a
sounding-lead that has returned to the light unsated from every deep - what was
it looking for down there? - with a breast that does not sigh, with a lip that
hides its disgust, with a hand which now reaches out but slowly: who are you?
what have you done? Repose here: this
place is hospitable to everyone - refresh yourself! And whoever you may be: what would you like
now? What will refresh you? You have only to name it: whatever I have I
offer you! - 'Refreshment? Refreshment? O inquisitive man, what are you saying! But please give me - ‘ What? What? Say it! - 'One more mask! A second mask!' ...
279
Men of
profound sorrow give themselves away when they are happy: they have a way of
grasping happiness as if they wanted to crush and smother it, from jealousy - alas,
they know too well that it will flee away.
280
'Bad! Bad!
What? Is he not going - backwards?' - Yes!
But you ill understand him if you complain about it. He goes backwards as everyone goes backwards
who wants to take a big jump. -
281
'Will they
believe me? but I insist they believe me: I have always thought little of and
about myself, only in very rare instances have I done so, only when compelled,
always without wanting "to go in for it", liable to digress from
"myself", never with any faith in the outcome, thanks to an
unconquerable mistrust of the possibility of self-knowledge which has
led me so far as to sense a contradictio in adjecto even in the concept
"immediate knowledge" which theoreticians permit themselves - this
whole fact is almost the most certain thing I know about myself. There must be a kind of aversion in me to believing
anything definite about myself. - Is there perhaps a riddle concealed
here? Probably; but fortunately not one
for my own teeth. - Does it perhaps betray the species to which I belong? - But
not to me: which suits me well enough. - '
282
'But
whatever has happened to you?' - 'I don't know,' he said, hesitating; 'perhaps
the Harpies flew over my table.' - It sometimes happens today that a mild, moderate,
reserved man suddenly breaks out into a rage, smashes the plates, throws the
table over, screams, raves, insults everybody - and ends by going off ashamed,
furious with himself - where? why? To
starve all alone? To choke on his
recollections? - He who has the desires of an elevated, fastidious soul, and
rarely finds his table laid and his food ready, will be in great danger at all
times: but today the danger he is in has become extraordinary. Thrown into a noisy and plebeian age with
which he has no wish to eat out of the same dish, he can easily perish of
hunger and thirst, or, if he does eventually 'set to' - of a sudden nausea. -
We have all no doubt eaten at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the
most spiritual of us who are most difficult to feed know that dangerous
dyspepsia which comes from a sudden insight and disappointment about our food
and table-companions - the after-dinner nausea.
283
Supposing
one wants to praise at all, it is a refined and at the same time noble piece of
self-control to praise only where one does not agree - for in the other
case one would be praising oneself, which is contrary to good taste - but it is
a sort of self-control which offers a nice instigation and occasion for
constantly being misunderstood.
If one is to be able to afford this real luxury of taste and morality
one has to live, not among blockheads of the spirit, but rather among people in
whom misunderstandings and blunders are still amusing because of their subtlety
- or one will have to pay dearly for it! - 'He praises me: therefore he
thinks I am right' - this asinine conclusion spoils half the life of us
hermits, for it makes asses come along to be our friends and neighbours.
284
To live with
a tremendous and proud self-possession; always beyond - . To have and not have one's emotions, one's
for and against, at will, to condescend to have them for a few hours; to seat
oneself on them as on horses, often as on asses - for one has to know how to
employ their stupidity as well as their fire.
To keep one's three hundred foregrounds; also one's dark glasses: for
there are instances where no-one may look into our eyes, still less into our
'grounds'. And to choose for company
that cheerful and roguish vice, politeness.
And to remain master of one's four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy,
solitude. For solitude is with us a
virtue: it is a sublime urge and inclination for cleanliness which divines that
all contact between man and man - 'in society' - must inevitably be
unclean. All community makes somehow,
somewhere, sometime - 'common'.
285
The greatest
events and thoughts - but the greatest thoughts are the greatest events - are
comprehended last: the generations which are their contemporaries do not experience
such events - they live past them. What
happens here is similar to what happens in the realm of the stars. The light of the furthest stars comes to men
last; and before it has arrived man denies that there are - stars
there. 'How many centuries does a spirit
need to be comprehended?' - that too is a standard, with that too there is
created an order or rank and etiquette such as is needed: for spirit and star.
-
286
'Here is the
prospect free, the spirit exalted.' - But there is an opposite kind of man who is
also on the heights and for whom the prospect is also free - but who looks down.
287
- What is
noble? What does the word 'noble' mean
to us today? What, beneath this heavy,
overcast sky of the beginning rule of the rabble which makes everything leaden
and opaque, betrays and makes evident the noble human being? - It is not his
actions which reveal him - actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable -
; neither is it his 'works'. One finds
today among artists and scholars sufficient who reveal by their works that they
are driven on by a profound desire for the noble: but precisely this need for
the noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself,
and in fact an eloquent and dangerous sign of its lack. It is not the works, it is the faith
which is decisive here, which determines the order or rank here, to employ an
old religious formula in a new and deeper sense: some fundamental certainty
which a noble soul possesses in regard to itself, something which may not be
sought or found and perhaps may not be lost either. - The noble soul has
reverence for itself. -
288
There are
people unavoidable possessed of spirit, let them twist and turn how they may
and hold their hands before their treacherous eyes ( - as if the hand were not
also a traitor! - ): in the end it always comes out that they have something
they are hiding, namely spirit. One of
the subtlest ways of deceiving, for as long as possible at any rate, and of
successfully posing as more stupid than one is - which in everyday life is
often as desirable as an umbrella - is called enthusiasm: plus what
belongs with it, for example virtue.
For, as Galiani, who ought to know, said - : vertu est enthousiasme.
289
One always
hears in the writings of a hermit something of the echo of the desert,
something of the whisper and shy vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words,
even in his cry, there still resounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence
and concealment. He who has sat alone
with his soul day and night, year in year out, in confidential discord and
discourse, and in his cave - it may be a labyrinth, but it may be a gold-mine -
becomes a cave-bear or treasure-hunter or a treasure-guardian and dragon, finds
that his concepts themselves at last acquire a characteristic twilight colour,
a smell of the depths and of must, something incommunicable and reluctant which
blows cold on every passer-by. The
hermit does not believe that a philosopher - supposing that a philosopher has
always been first of all a hermit - has ever expressed his real and final
opinions in books: does one write books precisely to conceal what lies within
us? - indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher could have 'final and
real' opinions at all, whether behind each of his caves there does not and must
not lie another, deeper cave - a stranger, more comprehensive world beyond the
surface, a abyss behind every ground, beneath every 'foundation'. Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy -
that is a hermit's judgement: 'there is something arbitrary in the fact that he
stopped, looked back, looked around here, that he stopped digging and laid his
spade aside here - there is also something suspicious about it.' Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy;
every opinion is also a hiding-place, every word also a mask.
290
Every
profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being
misunderstood. The latter may perhaps
wound his vanity; but the former will wound his heart, his sympathy, which says
always: 'alas, why do you want to have as hard a time of it as I had?'
291
Man, a manifold, mendacious, artificial and
untransparent animal, uncanny to the other animals less on account of his
strength than on account of his cunning and cleverness, invented the good
conscience so as to enjoy his soul for once as simple; and the whole of
morality is a protracted audacious forgery by virtue of which alone it becomes
possible to feel pleasure at the sight of the soul. From this point of view there is perhaps much
more in the concept 'art' than is generally believed.
292
A
philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes,
dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from
without, as if from above and below, as by his kind of events and
thunderclaps; who is himself perhaps a storm and pregnant with new lightnings;
a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrelling, discord and uncanniness is
always going on. A philosopher: alas, a
creature which often runs away from itself, is often afraid of itself - but
which is too inquisitive not to keep 'coming to itself' again ...
293
A man who
says: 'I like this, I take it for my own and mean to protect it and defend it
against everyone'; a man who can do something, carry out a decision, remain
true to an idea, hold on to a woman, punish and put down insolence; a man who
has his anger and his sword and to whom the weak, suffering, oppressed, and the
animals too are glad to submit and belong by nature, in short a man who is by
nature a master - when such a man has pity, well! that pity has
value! But of what account is the pity
of those who suffer! Or, worse, of those
who preach pity! There exists
almost everywhere in Europe today a morbid sensitivity and susceptibility to
pain, likewise a repellent intemperance in lamentation, a tenderization which,
with the aid of religion and odds and ends of philosophy, would like to deck
itself out as something higher - there exists a downright cult of
suffering. The unmanliness of
that which is in such fantastic circles baptized 'pity' is, I think, the first
thing which leaps to the eye. - This latest species of bad taste must be
resolutely and radically excommunicated; and I would like to see the good
amulet 'gai saber' worn around neck and hearts so as to ward it off -
'gay science', to make the matter plain.
294
The Olympian
vice - In spite of that philosopher who, being a
real Englishman, sought to bring laughter into disrepute among all thinking
minds - 'laughter is a bad infirmity of human nature which every thinking man
will endeavour to overcome' (Hobbes) - I would go so far as to venture an order
or rank among philosophers according to the rank of their laughter - rising to
those capable of golden laughter.
And if gods too philosophize, as many an inference has driven me to
suppose - I do not doubt that while doing so they also know how to laugh in a
new and superhuman way - and at the expense of all serious things! Gods are fond of mockery: it seems they
cannot refrain from laughter even when sacraments are in progress.
295
The genius
of the heart as it is possessed by that great hidden one, the tempter god and
born pied piper of conscience whose voice knows how to descend into the
underworld of every soul, who says no word and gives no glance in which there
lies no touch of enticement, to whose mastery belongs knowing how to seem - not
what he is but what to those who follow him is one constraint more to
press ever closer to him, to follow him every more inwardly and thoroughly -
the genius of the heart who makes everything loud and self-satisfied fall
silent and teaches it to listen, who smoothes rough souls and gives them a new
desire to savour - the desire to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may
mirror itself in them - ; the genius of the heart who teaches the stupid and
hasty hand to hesitate and grasp more delicately; who divines the hidden and
forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick and
opaque ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold which has lain long
in the prison of much mud and sand; the genius of the heart from whose touch
everyone goes away richer, not favoured and surprised, not as if blessed and
oppressed with the goods of others, but richer in himself, newer to himself
than before, broken open, blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, more
uncertain perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes
that as yet have no names, full of new will and current, full of new ill will
and counter-current ... but what am I doing, my friends? Of whom am I speaking to you? Have I so far forgot myself that I have not
even told you his name? Unless you have
already yourselves divined who this questionable god and spirit is who wants to
be praised in such a fashion. For
as happens to everyone who has always been on the move and in foreign lands
from his childhood up, so many a strange and not undangerous spirit has crossed
my path too, but above all he of whom I was just speaking, and he again and
again, no less a personage in fact than the god Dionysus, that great
ambiguous and tempter god to whom, as you know, once I brought in all secrecy
and reverence for my first-born - being, as it seems to me, the last to have
brought him a sacrifice: for I have found no one who could have
understood what I was then doing.
Meanwhile, I have learned much, all too much more about the philosophy
of this god and, as I have said, from mouth to mouth - I, the last disciple and
initiate of the god Dionysus: and perhaps I might at last begin to give you, my
friends, a little taste of this philosophy, insofar as I am permitted to? In a hushed voice, as is only proper: for it
involves much that is secret, new, unfamiliar, strange, uncanny. The very fact that Dionysus is a philosopher,
and that gods too therefore philosophize, seems a by no means harmless novelty
and one calculated to excite suspicion precisely among philosophers - among you,
my friends, it will meet with a friendlier reception, unless it comes too late
and not at the right time: for, as I have discovered, you no longer like to
believe in God and gods now. Perhaps I
shall also have to go further in the frankness of my story than may always be
agreeable to the strict habits of your ears?
Certainly the above-named god went further, very much further, in
conversations of this sort, and was always many steps ahead of me.... Indeed,
if it were permitted to follow the human custom of applying to him beautiful,
solemn titles of pomp and virtue, I would have to extol his courage as
investigator and discoverer, his daring honesty, truthfulness and love of
wisdom. But such a god has nothing to do
with all this venerable lumber and pomp.
'Keep that', he would say, 'for yourself and your like and for anyone
else who needs it! I - have no reason to
cover my nakedness!' - One will see that this species of divinity and
philosopher is perhaps lacking in shame? - Thus he once said: 'Under certain
circumstances I love mankind' - alluding to Ariadne, who was present - : 'Man
is to me an agreeable, brave, ingenious animal without equal on earth, he knows
how to make his way through every labyrinth.
I like him: I often ponder how I might advance him and make him
stronger, more evil and profound than he is.' - 'Stronger, more evil and more
profound?' I asked in alarm. 'Yes,' he
repeated, 'stronger, more evil and more profound; also more beautiful' - and as
he said that the tempter god smiled his halcyon smile, as though he had just
paid a charming compliment. Here one
will also see that this divinity is lacking not only in shame - ; and there is
in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all
benefit from instruction by us human beings.
We human beings are - more humane ...
296
Alas, and
yet what are you, my written and painted thoughts! It is not long ago that you were still so
many-coloured, young and malicious, so full of thorns and hidden spices you made
me sneeze and laugh - and now? You have
already taken off your novelty and some of you, I fear, are on the point of
becoming truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically righteous, so
boring! And has it ever been
otherwise? For what things do we write
and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things which let
themselves be written, what alone are we capable of painting? Alas, only that which is about to wither and
is beginning to lose its fragrance!
Alas, only storms departing exhausted and feelings grown old and
yellow! Alas, only birds strayed and
grown weary in flight who now let themselves be caught in the hand - in our
hand! We immortalize that which cannot
live and fly much longer, weary and mellow things alone! And it is only your afternoon, my
written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have the colours, many colours
perhaps, many many-coloured tendernesses and fifty yellows and browns and
greens and reds: - but no-one will divine from these how you looked in your
morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved - wicked
thoughts!
From High Mountains: Epode
Oh life's
midday! Oh festival! Oh garden of summer! I wait in restless ecstasy, I stand and watch
and wait - where are you, friends? It is
you I await, in readiness day and night.
Come now! It is time you were
here!
Was it not
for you the glacier today exchanged its grey for roses? The brook seeks you; and wind and clouds
press higher in the blue, longingly they crowd aloft to look for you.
For you have
I prepared my table in the highest height - who lives so near the stars as I,
or who so near the depths of the abyss?
My empire - has an empire ever reached so far? And my honey - who has tasted the sweetness
of it?
- And there
you are, friends! - But, alas, am I not he you came to
visit? You hesitate, you stare - no, be
angry, rather! Is it no longer - I? Are hand, step, face transformed? And what I am, to you friends - I am
not?
Am I
another? A stranger to myself? Spring from myself? A wrestler who subdued himself too
often? Turned his own strength against
himself too often, checked and wounded by his own victory?
Did I seek
where the wind bites keenest, learn to live where no-one lives, in the desert where
only the polar bear lives, unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god,
become a ghost flitting across the glaciers?
- Old
friends! how pale you look, how full of love and terror! No - be gone!
Be no angry! Here - you
could not be at home: here in this far domain of ice and rocks - here you must
be a huntsman, and like the Alpine goat.
A wicked
huntsman is what I have become! - See how bent my bow! He who drew that bow, surely he was the
mightiest of men - : but the arrow, alas - ah, no arrow is dangerous as that
arrow is dangerous - away! be gone! For
your own preservation!...
You turn
away? - Oh heart, you have borne up well, your hopes stayed strong: now keep
your door open to new friends!
Let the old go! Let memories
go! If once you were young, now - you
are younger!
What once
united us, the bond of one hope - who still can read the sings love once
inscribed therein, now faint and faded?
It is like a parchment - discoloured, scorched - from which the hand shrinks
back.
No longer friends,
but - what shall I call them? - they are the ghosts of friends which at my
heart and window knock at night, which gaze on me and say: 'were we once
friends?' - oh faded word, once fragrant as the rose!
Oh longing
of youth, which did not know itself!
Those I longed for, those I deemed changed into kin of mine -
that they have aged is what has banished them: only he who changes
remains akin to me.
Oh life's
midday! Oh second youth! Oh garden of summer! I wait in restless ecstasy, I stand and watch
and wait - it is friends I await, in readiness day and night, new
friends. Come now! It is time you were here!
This
song is done - desire's sweet cry died on the lips: a sorcerer did it, the
timely friend, the midday friend - no! ask not who he is - at midday it
happened, at midday one became two ...
Now, sure of
victory together, we celebrate the feast of feasts: friend Zarathustra
has come, the guest of guests! Now the
world is laughing, the dread curtain is rent, the wedding day has come for
light and darkness ...
REGARDING JOHN O'LOUGHLIN'S INDIVIDUAL WEBSITES ON TRIPOD.COM