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 ...