Part Two: The Free Spirit

Part Two: The Free Spirit

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!

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. -

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. -

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!

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! -

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! -

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. -

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!

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. -

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!

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?

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!

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. -

'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! -

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?

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.'

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. -

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.

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.

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. -

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? -