BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(trs. Helen Zimmern - full text)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
CHAPTER I: PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS
CHAPTER II: THE FREE SPIRIT
CHAPTER III: THE RELIGIOUS MOOD
CHAPTER IV: APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES
CHAPTER V: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS
CHAPTER VI: WE SCHOLARS
CHAPTER VII: OUR VIRTUES
CHAPTER VIII: PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
CHAPTER IX: WHAT IS NOBLE?
FROM THE HEIGHTS (POEM TRANSLATED BY L.A. MAGNUS)
 

PREFACE

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then? Is there not
ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they
have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that
the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they
have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled
and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has
never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of
dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien--IF, indeed, it
stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has
fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground--nay more, that it is at
its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for
hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn,
whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have
been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time
is at hand when it will be once and again understood WHAT has
actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute
philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared:
perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as
the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and egosuperstition,
has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some
play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an
audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very
human--all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists,
it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years
afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service
of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience
have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to
it, and to its "super- terrestrial" pretensions in Asia and Egypt,
the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe
themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims,
all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous
and awe- inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has
been a caricature of this kind--for instance, the Vedanta doctrine
in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it,
although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most
tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a
dogmatist error--namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the
Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when
Europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and
at least enjoy a healthier--sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS
ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the
struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very
inversion of truth, and the denial of the PERSPECTIVE--the fundamental
condition--of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as

Plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: "How
did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato?
Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him? Was Socrates
after all a corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock?" But
the struggle against Plato, or--to speak plainer, and for the
"people"--the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of
millenniums of Christianity (FOR CHRISTIANITY IS PLATONISM
FOR THE "PEOPLE"), produced in Europe a magnificent tension of
soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a
tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals. As a
matter of fact, the European feels this tension as a state of distress,
and twice attempts have been made in grand style to
unbend the bow: once by means of Jesuitism, and the second
time by means of democratic enlightenment--which, with the aid
of liberty of the press and newspaper-reading, might, in fact,
bring it about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in
"distress"! (The Germans invented gunpowder--all credit to
them! but they again made things square--they invented printing.)
But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even
sufficiently Germans, we GOOD EUROPEANS, and free, VERY free
spirits--we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension
of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who
knows? THE GOAL TO AIM AT. . . .
Sils Maria Upper Engadine, JUNE, 1885.
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CHAPTER I - PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS

1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous
enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers
have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will
to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable
questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it
were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow
distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this
Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it
really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to
Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to
the origin of this Will--until at last we came to an absolute standstill
before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about
the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY
NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The
problem of the value of truth presented itself before us--or was it
we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is
the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a
rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it
be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had
never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern
it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in
raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.

2. "HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example,
truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to
deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure
sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such
genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse
than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different
origin, an origin of THEIR own--in this transitory, seductive,
illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity,
they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in
the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself--
THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!"--This mode of
reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians
of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at
the back of all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of
theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for something
that is in the end solemnly christened "the Truth." The
fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES
OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of
them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, how-
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ever, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn
vow, "DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM." For it may be doubted,
firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the
popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians
have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial
estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably
made from some corner, perhaps from below--"frog perspectives,"
as it were, to borrow an expression current among
painters. In spite of all the value which may belong to the true,
the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher
and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned
to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity.
It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of
those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being
insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and
apparently opposed things--perhaps even in being essentially
identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself
with such dangerous "Perhapses"! For that investigation one
must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as
will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto
prevalent--philosophers of the dangerous "Perhaps" in every
sense of the term. And to speak in all seriousness, I see such
new philosophers beginning to appear.

3. Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read
between their lines long enough, I now say to myself that the
greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the
instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical
thinking; one has here to learn anew, as one learned anew about
heredity and "innateness." As little as the act of birth comes into
consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity,
just as little is "being-conscious" OPPOSED to the instinctive in
any decisive sense; the greater part of the conscious thinking of
a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced
into definite channels. And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty
of movement, there are valuations, or to speak more
plainly, physiological demands, for the maintenance of a definite
mode of life For example, that the certain is worth more than the
uncertain, that illusion is less valuable than "truth" such valuations,
in spite of their regulative importance for US, might notwithstanding
be only superficial valuations, special kinds of
maiserie, such as may be necessary for the maintenance of
beings such as ourselves. Supposing, in effect, that man is not
just the "measure of things."

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it
is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely.
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The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving,
species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are
fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to
which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most
indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions,
without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world
of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting
of the world by means of numbers, man could not live--that the
renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a
negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF
LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in
a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so,
has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

5. That which causes philosophers to be regarded half- distrustfully
and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how
innocent they are--how often and easily they make mistakes and
lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike they are,--but
that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they
all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness
is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose as
though their real opinions had been discovered and attained
through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent
dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher,
talk of "inspiration"), whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition,
idea, or "suggestion," which is generally their heart's
desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments
sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do
not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders,
also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths,"-- and VERY far
from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself,
very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so
far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or
in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. The spectacle of the
Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he
entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly
mislead) to his "categorical imperative"-- makes us fastidious
ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the
subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. Or, still more
so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which
Spinoza has, as it were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask--in
fact, the "love of HIS wisdom," to translate the term fairly and
squarely--in order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart
of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on that invincible
maiden, that Pallas Athene:--how much of personal timidity
and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!
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6. It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy
up till now has consisted of--namely, the confession of its
originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography;
and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in
every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which
the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how
the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have
been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself:
"What morality do they (or does he) aim at?" Accordingly, I do
not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of
philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has
only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an
instrument. But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of
man with a view to determining how far they may have here
acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find
that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another,
and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look
upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate
LORD over all the other impulses. For every impulse is imperious,
and as SUCH, attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the
case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be
otherwise--"better," if you will; there there may really be such a
thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent
clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away
industriously to that end, WITHOUT the rest of the scholarly
impulses taking any material part therein. The actual "interests"
of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction-
-in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is,
in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little
machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes
a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist;
he is not CHARACTERISED by becoming this or that. In the philosopher,
on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal;
and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and
decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS,--that is to say, in what
order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.

7. How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more
stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on
Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. In its
original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies "Flatterers
of Dionysius"--consequently, tyrants' accessories and lickspittles;
besides this, however, it is as much as to say, "They are
all ACTORS, there is nothing genuine about them" (for Dionysiokolax
was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really
the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was
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annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of
which Plato and his scholars were masters--of which Epicurus
was not a master! He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat
concealed in his little garden at Athens, and wrote three hundred
books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who
knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out who the gardengod
Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?

8. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction"
of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the
words of an ancient mystery:
Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.

9. You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics,
what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like
Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without
purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful
and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE
as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference?
To live--is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise
than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust,
being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that
your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the
same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY?
Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves
are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite
otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the
canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary,
you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your
pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to
Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it
shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything
to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification
and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth,
you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with
such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say,
Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise-- and to
crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the
Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over
yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself
to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? . . .
But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old
times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a
philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world
in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this ty-
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rannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will
to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.

10. The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness,
with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is
dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for
thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in
the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the
sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have
happened that such a Will to Truth--a certain extravagant and
adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn
hope--has participated therein: that which in the end always
prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful
possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience,
who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing,
rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and
the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding
the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems,
however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who
are still eager for life. In that they side AGAINST appearance,
and speak superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the
credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of
the ocular evidence that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently,
allowing with complacency their securest possession to
escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than
in one's body?),--who knows if they are not really trying to win
back something which was formerly an even securer possession,
something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps
the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old God," in short, ideas
by which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously
and more joyously, than by "modern ideas"? There is DISTRUST
of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief
in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is
perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can
no longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied
origin, such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the
market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair
motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in
whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness.
Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those
skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present
day; their instinct, which repels them from MODERN reality,
is unrefuted . . . what do their retrograde by-paths concern us!
The main thing about them is NOT that they wish to go "back,"
but that they wish to get AWAY therefrom. A little MORE
strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be
OFF--and not back!
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11. It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present
to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant
exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently
the value which he set upon himself. Kant was first and
foremost proud of his Table of Categories; with it in his hand he
said: "This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken
on behalf of metaphysics." Let us only understand this
"could be"! He was proud of having DISCOVERED a new faculty
in man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. Granting that
he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid
flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his
pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to
discover if possible something--at all events "new faculties"--of
which to be still prouder!--But let us reflect for a moment--it is
high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?"
Kant asks himself--and what is really his answer? "BY
MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"--but unfortunately not in five
words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display
of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether
loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an
answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this
new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant
further discovered a moral faculty in man--for at that time Germans
were still moral, not yet dabbling in the "Politics of hard
fact." Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the
young theologians of the Tubingen institution went immediately
into the groves--all seeking for "faculties." And what did they not
find--in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German
spirit, to which Romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and
sang, when one could not yet distinguish between "finding" and
"inventing"! Above all a faculty for the "transcendental"; Schelling
christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby gratified the
most earnest longings of the naturally pious-inclined Germans.
One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and
eccentric movement (which was really youthfulness, notwithstanding
that it disguised itself so boldly, in hoary and senile
conceptions), than to take it seriously, or even treat it with moral
indignation. Enough, however--the world grew older, and the
dream vanished. A time came when people rubbed their foreheads,
and they still rub them today. People had been dreaming,
and first and foremost--old Kant. "By means of a means (faculty)"--
he had said, or at least meant to say. 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
means (faculty)," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor
in Moliere,
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Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.
But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high
time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments
a PRIORI possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in
such judgments necessary?"--in effect, it is high time that we
should understand that such judgments must be believed to be
true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves;
though they still might naturally be false judgments! Or, more
plainly spoken, and roughly and readily--synthetic judgments a
priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them;
in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of
course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as plausible belief
and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective view of life.
And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German
philosophy"--I hope you understand its right to inverted
commas (goosefeet)?--has exercised throughout the whole of
Europe, there is no doubt that a certain VIRTUS DORMITIVA had
a share in it; thanks to German philosophy, it was a delight to
the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, the artiste, the threefourths
Christians, and the political obscurantists of all nations,
to find an antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism which
overflowed from the last century into this, in short--"sensus
assoupire." . . .

12. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best- refuted
theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is
now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to
attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday
use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)-- thanks
chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have
hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of
ocular evidence. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe,
contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand
fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing
that "stood fast" of the earth--the belief in "substance," in "matter,"
in the earth-residuum, and particle- atom: it is the greatest
triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth.
One must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless
war to the knife, against the "atomistic requirements" which
still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects
them, like the more celebrated "metaphysical requirements":
one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other
and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best
and longest, the SOUL- ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to desig-
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nate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as
something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an
atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between
ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul"
thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated
hypotheses--as happens frequently to the clumsiness of
naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately
losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and
refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as
"mortal soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity," and "soul as
social structure of the instincts and passions," want henceforth
to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW psychologist
is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto
flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the
soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert
and a new distrust--it is possible that the older psychologists had
a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however,
he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT--
and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.

13. Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down
the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an
organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its
strength--life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only
one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short,
here, as everywhere else, let us beware of SUPERFLUOUS teleological
principles!--one of which is the instinct of self- preservation
(we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). It is thus, in effect,
that method ordains, which must be essentially economy of
principles.

14. It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural
philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-arrangement
(according to us, if I may say so!) and NOT a world-explanation;
but in so far as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded
as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more-
-namely, as an explanation. It has eyes and fingers of its own, it
has ocular evidence and palpableness of its own: this operates
fascinatingly, persuasively, and CONVINCINGLY upon an age
with fundamentally plebeian tastes--in fact, it follows instinctively
the canon of truth of eternal popular sensualism. What is
clear, what is "explained"? Only that which can be seen and felt--
one must pursue every problem thus far. Obversely, however,
the charm of the Platonic mode of thought, which was an ARISTOCRATIC
mode, consisted precisely in RESISTANCE to obvious
sense-evidence--perhaps among men who enjoyed even
stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries,
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but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters
of them: and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional
networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses--
the mob of the senses, as Plato said. In this overcoming of the
world, and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, there
was an ENJOYMENT different from that which the physicists of
today offer us--and likewise the Darwinists and anti-teleologists
among the physiological workers, with their principle of the
"smallest possible effort," and the greatest possible blunder.
"Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also
nothing more for men to do"--that is certainly an imperative
different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be
the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and
bridge- builders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH
work to perform.

15. To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist
on the fact that the sense-organs are not phenomena in the
sense of the idealistic philosophy; as such they certainly could
not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as regulative
hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle. What? And others say
even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then
our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of
our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work
of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete REDUCTIO
AD ABSURDUM, if the conception CAUSA SUI is something fundamentally
absurd. Consequently, the external world is NOT the
work of our organs--?

16. There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there
are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as the
superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though cognition
here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in
itself," without any falsification taking place either on the part of
the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred
times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge"
and the "thing in itself," involve a CONTRADICTIO IN
ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading
significance of words! The people on their part may think that
cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must
say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in
the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions,
the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps
impossible: for instance, that it is _I_ who think, that there must
necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity
and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a
cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already deter-
- 15 -
mined what is to be designated by thinking--that I KNOW what
thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it
is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just
happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion
'I think,' assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present
moment with other states of myself which I know, in order
to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection
with further 'knowledge,' it has, at any rate, no immediate
certainty for me."--In place of the "immediate certainty" in which
the people may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus
finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable
conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: "Whence did I
get the notion of 'thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and effect?
What gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of
an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?"
He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once
by an appeal to a sort of INTUITIVE perception, like the person
who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual,
and certain"--will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation
in a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher will perhaps
give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not
mistaken, but why should it be the truth?"

17. With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire
of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized
by these credulous minds--namely, that a thought comes
when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION
of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the
condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one"
is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a
supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate
certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one
thinks"--even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the
process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers
here according to the usual grammatical formula--"To think is an
activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"
. . . It was pretty much on the same lines that the older
atomism sought, besides the operating "power," the material
particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates--the
atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along
without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall
accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to
get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego"
has refined itself).

18. It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable;
it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle
- 16 -
minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the
"free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is
always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

19. Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it
were the best-known thing in the world; indeed, Schopenhauer
has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to
us, absolutely and completely known, without deduction or addition.
But it again and again seems to me that in this case
Schopenhauer also only did what philosophers are in the habit of
doing--he seems to have adopted a POPULAR PREJUDICE and
exaggerated it. Willing seems to me to be above all something
COMPLICATED, something that is a unity only in name--and it is
precisely in a name that popular prejudice lurks, which has got
the mastery over the inadequate precautions of philosophers in
all ages. So let us for once be more cautious, let us be "unphilosophical":
let us say that in all willing there is firstly a plurality
of sensations, namely, the sensation of the condition "AWAY
FROM WHICH we go," the sensation of the condition "TOWARDS
WHICH we go," the sensation of this "FROM" and "TOWARDS"
itself, and then besides, an accompanying muscular sensation,
which, even without our putting in motion "arms and legs,"
commences its action by force of habit, directly we "will" anything.
Therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of
sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, in
the second place, thinking is also to be recognized; in every act
of the will there is a ruling thought;--and let us not imagine it
possible to sever this thought from the "willing," as if the will
would then remain over! In the third place, the will is not only a
complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an EMOTION,
and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is
termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the emotion of supremacy
in respect to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must
obey"--this consciousness is inherent in every will; and equally
so the straining of the attention, the straight look which fixes
itself exclusively on one thing, the unconditional judgment that
"this and nothing else is necessary now," the inward certainty
that obedience will be rendered--and whatever else pertains to
the position of the commander. A man who WILLS commands
something within himself which renders obedience, or which he
believes renders obedience. But now let us notice what is the
strangest thing about the will,--this affair so extremely complex,
for which the people have only one name. Inasmuch as in the
given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding
AND the obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the
sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and
motion, which usually commence immediately after the act of
- 17 -
will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to
disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by
means of the synthetic term "I": a whole series of erroneous
conclusions, and consequently of false judgments about the will
itself, has become attached to the act of willing--to such a degree
that he who wills believes firmly that willing SUFFICES for
action. Since in the majority of cases there has only been exercise
of will when the effect of the command--consequently obedience,
and therefore action--was to be EXPECTED, the
APPEARANCE has translated itself into the sentiment, as if there
were a NECESSITY OF EFFECT; in a word, he who wills believes
with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow
one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to
the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of
power which accompanies all success. "Freedom of Will"--that is
the expression for the complex state of delight of the person
exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies
himself with the executor of the order-- who, as such, enjoys
also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it
was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the
person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his
successful executive instruments, the useful "underwills" or
under-souls--indeed, our body is but a social structure composed
of many souls--to his feelings of delight as commander. L'EFFET
C'EST MOI. what happens here is what happens in every wellconstructed
and happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing
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 already said, of a social structure
composed of many "souls", on which account a philosopher
should claim the right to include willing- as-such within the
sphere of morals--regarded as the doctrine of the relations of
supremacy under which the phenomenon of "life" manifests
itself.

20. That the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional
or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and
relationship with each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily
they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless
belong just as much to a system as the collective
members of the fauna of a Continent--is betrayed in the end by
the circumstance: how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers
always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of POSSIBLE
philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once
more in the same orbit, however independent of each other they
may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something
within them leads them, something impels them in definite
- 18 -
order the one after the other--to wit, the innate methodology
and relationship of their ideas. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a
discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a
home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the
soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so
far a kind of atavism of the highest order. The wonderful family
resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is
easily enough explained. In fact, where there is affinity of language,
owing to the common philosophy of grammar--I mean
owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar
grammatical functions--it cannot but be that everything is prepared
at the outset for a similar development and succession of
philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against
certain other possibilities of world- interpretation. It is highly
probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic
languages (where the conception of the subject is least developed)
look otherwise "into the world," and will be found on paths
of thought different from those of the Indo-Germans and Mussulmans,
the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately
also the spell of PHYSIOLOGICAL valuations and racial conditions.--
So much by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality with
regard to the origin of ideas.

21. The CAUSA SUI is the best self-contradiction that has yet
been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness;
but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle
itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for
"freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as
still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated,
the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's
actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors,
chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be
precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen
daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the
slough of nothingness. If any one should find out in this manner
the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of "free will" and
put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his
"enlightenment" a step further, and also put out of his head the
contrary of this monstrous conception of "free will": I mean
"non-free will," which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and
effect. One should not wrongly MATERIALISE "cause" and "effect,"
as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them
naturalize in thinking at present), according to the prevailing
mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push
until it "effects" its end; one should use "cause" and "effect" only
as pure CONCEPTIONS, that is to say, as conventional fictions for
the purpose of designation and mutual understanding,--NOT for
- 19 -
explanation. In "being-in-itself" there is nothing of "casual- connection,"
of "necessity," or of "psychological non-freedom"; there
the effect does NOT follow the cause, there "law" does not obtain.
It is WE alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity,
relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and
purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world,
as "being-in-itself," with things, we act once more as we have
always acted--MYTHOLOGICALLY. The "non-free 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, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological
necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness,
oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to
have such feelings--the person betrays himself. And in general, if
I have observed correctly, the "non-freedom of the will" is regarded
as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but
always in a profoundly PERSONAL manner: some will not give up
their "responsibility," their belief in THEMSELVES, the personal
right to THEIR merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this
class); others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for
anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward selfcontempt,
seek to GET OUT OF THE BUSINESS, no matter how.
The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of
taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their
favourite disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the
weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as
"la religion de la souffrance humaine"; that is ITS "good taste."
22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist
from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation,
but "Nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists
talk so proudly, as though--why, it exists only owing to your
interpretation and bad "philology." It is no matter of fact, no
"text," but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and
perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions
to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere
equality before the law--Nature is not different in that
respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in
which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic--
likewise a second and more refined atheism--is once
more disguised. "Ni dieu, ni maitre"--that, also, is what you
want; and therefore "Cheers for natural law!"-- is it not so? But,
as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody
might come along, who, with opposite intentions and modes of
interpretation, could read out of the same "Nature," and with
regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate
and relentless enforcement of the claims of power--an inter-
- 20 -
preter who should so place the unexceptionalness and unconditionalness
of all "Will to Power" before your eyes, that almost
every word, and the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually
seem unsuitable, or like a weakening and softening metaphor--
as being too human; and who should, nevertheless, end by
asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it
has a "necessary" and "calculable" course, NOT, however, because
laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely LACKING,
and every power effects its ultimate consequences every
moment. Granted that this also is only interpretation--and you
will be eager enough to make this objection?--well, so much the
better.
23. All psychology hitherto has run aground on moral prejudices
and timidities, it has not dared to launch out into the depths. In
so far as it is allowable to recognize in that which has hitherto
been written, evidence of that which has hitherto been kept
silent, it seems as if nobody had yet harboured the notion of
psychology as the Morphology and DEVELOPMENT-DOCTRINE OF
THE WILL TO POWER, as I conceive of it. The power of moral
prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most intellectual
world, the world apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced,
and has obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive, blinding,
and distorting manner. A proper physio-psychology has to contend
with unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator,
it has "the heart" against it even a doctrine of the reciprocal
conditionalness of the "good" and the "bad" impulses, causes (as
refined immorality) distress and aversion in a still strong and
manly conscience--still more so, a doctrine of the derivation of
all good impulses from bad ones. If, however, a person should
regard even the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and
imperiousness as life-conditioning emotions, as factors which
must be present, fundamentally and essentially, in the general
economy of life (which must, therefore, be further developed if
life is to be further developed), he will suffer from such a view of
things as from sea-sickness. And yet this hypothesis is far from
being the strangest and most painful in this immense and almost
new domain of dangerous knowledge, and there are in fact a
hundred good reasons why every one should keep away from it
who CAN do so! On the other hand, if one has once drifted hither
with one's bark, well! very good! now let us set our teeth firmly!
let us open our eyes and keep our hand fast on the helm! We sail
away right OVER morality, we crush out, we destroy perhaps the
remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage
thither--but what do WE matter. Never yet did a PROFOUNDER
world of insight reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers,
and the psychologist who thus "makes a sacrifice"--it is not the
- 21 -
sacrifizio dell' intelletto, on the contrary!--will at least be entitled
to demand in return that psychology shall once more be recognized
as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and
equipment the other sciences exist. For psychology is once more
the path to the fundamental problems.
- 22 -

CHAPTER II - THE FREE SPIRIT

24. O sancta simplicitiatas! In what strange simplification and
falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when
once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have
made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple!
how we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything
superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks
and wrong inferences!--how from the beginning, we have contrived
to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable
freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and
gaiety--in order to enjoy life! And only on this solidified, granitelike
foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto,
the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful
will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as
its opposite, but--as its refinement! It is to be hoped, indeed,
that LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness,
and that it will continue to talk of opposites where
there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation; it is
equally to be hoped that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals,
which now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and blood," will
turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones. Here
and there we understand it, and laugh at the way in which precisely
the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this SIMPLIFIED,
thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined, and suitably
falsified world: at the way in which, whether it will or not, it
loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life!
25. After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would
fain be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care,
ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom!
Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own
defense! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your
conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red
rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle
with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse
consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as
protectors of truth upon earth--as though "the Truth" were such
an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!
and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance,
Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye
know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE
just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has
carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truth-
- 23 -
fulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after
your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally
after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping
games before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out of the way!
Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses,
that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared!
And pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with golden trelliswork!
And have people around you who are as a garden--or as
music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes
a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome
solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good
in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad,
does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly
by means of force! How PERSONAL does a long fear make one, a
long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of
society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones--also the
compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos--always
become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade,
and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined
vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation
of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of the
stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a
philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him.
The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of
truth," forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor
lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with
artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to
understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration
(deteriorated into a "martyr," into a stage-and- tribunebawler).
Only, that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear
WHAT spectacle one will see in any case--merely a satyric play,
merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the
long, real tragedy IS AT AN END, supposing that every philosophy
has been a long tragedy in its origin.
26. Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a
privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority--
where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;--
exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed
straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in
the great and exceptional sense. Whoever, in intercourse with
men, does not occasionally glisten in all the green and grey
colours of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess,
and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes;
supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this
burden and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it,
and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel,
- 24 -
one thing is then certain: he was not made, he was not predestined
for knowledge. For as such, he would one day have to say
to himself: "The devil take my good taste! but 'the rule' is more
interesting than the exception--than myself, the exception!" And
he would go DOWN, and above all, he would go "inside." The
long and serious study of the AVERAGE man--and consequently
much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad intercourse
(all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's equals):--
that constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every
philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing
part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favourite child of
knowledge should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who
will shorten and lighten his task; I mean so- called cynics, those
who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace and "the
rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so much spirituality
and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and
their like BEFORE WITNESSES--sometimes they wallow, even in
books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only form in
which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the
higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism,
and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless
right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are
even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust-- namely,
where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet
billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the
profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century--
he was far profounder than Voltaire, and consequently
also, a good deal more silent. It happens more frequently, as has
been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a
fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by
no means rare, especially among doctors and moral physiologists.
And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather
quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a
head with one; whenever any one sees, seeks, and WANTS to
see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real and only
motives of human actions; in short, when any one speaks
"badly"--and not even "ill"--of man, then ought the lover of
knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in
general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without
indignation. For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears
and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself,
the world, 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 ordinary, more indifferent, and less
instructive case. And no one is such a LIAR as the indignant
man.
- 25 -
27. It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks
and lives gangasrotogati [Footnote: Like the river Ganges:
presto.] among those only who think and live otherwise--
namely, kurmagati [Footnote: Like the tortoise: lento.], or at
best "froglike," mandeikagati [Footnote: Like the frog: staccato.]
(I do everything to be "difficultly understood" myself!)--and one
should be heartily grateful for the good will to some refinement
of interpretation. As regards "the good friends," however, who
are always too easy-going, and think that as friends they have a
right to ease, one does well at the very first to grant them a
play-ground and romping-place for misunderstanding--one can
thus laugh still; or get rid of them altogether, these good
friends-- and laugh then also!
28. What is most difficult to render from one language into another
is the TEMPO of its style, which has its basis in the character
of the race, or to speak more physiologically, in the average
TEMPO of the assimilation of its nutriment. There are honestly
meant translations, which, as involuntary vulgarizations, are
almost falsifications of the original, merely because its lively and
merry TEMPO (which overleaps and obviates all dangers in word
and expression) could not also be rendered. A German is almost
incapacitated for PRESTO in his language; consequently also, as
may be reasonably inferred, for many of the most delightful and
daring NUANCES of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the
buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so
Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything
ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all longwinded
and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse
variety among Germans--pardon me for stating the fact that
even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is
no exception, as a reflection of the "good old time" to which it
belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a time when
there was still a "German taste," which was a rococo-taste in
moribus et artibus. Lessing is an exception, owing to his histrionic
nature, which understood much, and was versed in many
things; he who was not the translator of Bayle to no purpose,
who took refuge willingly in the shadow of Diderot and Voltaire,
and still more willingly among the Roman comedy-writers--
Lessing loved also free-spiritism in the TEMPO, and flight out of
Germany. But how could the German language, even in the
prose of Lessing, imitate the TEMPO of Machiavelli, who in his
"Principe" makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and
cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous
allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the
contrast he ventures to present--long, heavy, difficult, dangerous
thoughts, and a TEMPO of the gallop, and of the best, wan-
- 26 -
tonest humour? Finally, who would venture on a German translation
of Petronius, who, more than any great musician hitherto,
was a master of PRESTO in invention, ideas, and words? What
matter in the end about the swamps of the sick, evil world, or of
the "ancient world," when like him, one has the feet of a wind,
the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a wind, which
makes everything healthy, by making everything RUN! And with
regard to Aristophanes--that transfiguring, complementary genius,
for whose sake one PARDONS all Hellenism for having existed,
provided one has understood in its full profundity ALL that
there requires pardon and transfiguration; there is nothing that
has caused me to meditate more on PLATO'S secrecy and
sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that
under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no "Bible," nor
anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic--but a book of Aristophanes.
How could even Plato have endured life--a Greek life
which he repudiated--without an Aristophanes!
29. It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a
privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the
best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is
probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He
enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers
which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is
that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes
isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience.
Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension
of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with
it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back
again to the sympathy of men!
30. Our deepest insights must--and should--appear as follies,
and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come
unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and
predestined for them. The exoteric and the esoteric, as they
were formerly distinguished by philosophers--among the Indians,
as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever
people believed in gradations of rank and NOT in equality
and equal rights--are not so much in contradistinction to one
another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and
viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside,
and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the
class in question views things from below upwards--while the
esoteric class views things FROM ABOVE DOWNWARDS. There
are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears
to operate tragically; and if all the woe in the world were
taken together, who would dare to decide whether the sight of it
- 27 -
would NECESSARILY seduce and constrain to sympathy, and
thus to a doubling of the woe? . . . That which serves the higher
class of men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost
poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings.
The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and
weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly
developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to
acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would
have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he
had sunk. There are books which have an inverse value for the
soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower
vitality, or the higher and more powerful, make use of them. In
the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling
books, in the latter case they are herald-calls which summon the
bravest to THEIR bravery. Books for the general reader are
always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to
them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they
reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into
churches if one wishes to breathe PURE air.
31. In our youthful years we still venerate and despise without
the art of NUANCE, which is the best gain of life, and we have
rightly to do hard penance for having fallen upon men and things
with Yea and Nay. Everything is so arranged that the worst of all
tastes, THE TASTE FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL, is cruelly befooled
and abused, until a man learns to introduce a little art into his
sentiments, and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial, as
do the real artists of life. The angry and reverent spirit peculiar
to youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has suitably
falsified men and things, to be able to vent its passion upon
them: youth in itself even, is something falsifying and deceptive.
Later on, when the young soul, tortured by continual disillusions,
finally turns suspiciously against itself--still ardent and savage
even in its suspicion and remorse of conscience: how it upbraids
itself, how impatiently it tears itself, how it revenges itself for its
long self-blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blindness!
In this transition one punishes oneself by distrust of one's sentiments;
one tortures one's enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even
the good conscience to be a danger, as if it were the selfconcealment
and lassitude of a more refined uprightness; and
above all, one espouses upon principle the cause AGAINST
"youth."--A decade later, and one comprehends that all this was
also still--youth!
32. Throughout the longest period of human history--one calls it
the prehistoric period--the value or non-value of an action was
inferred from its CONSEQUENCES; the action in itself was not
- 28 -
taken into consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty
much as in China at present, where the distinction or disgrace of
a child redounds to its parents, the retro-operating power of
success or failure was what induced men to think well or ill of an
action. Let us call this period the PRE-MORAL period of mankind;
the imperative, "Know thyself!" was then still unknown. --In the
last ten thousand years, on the other hand, on certain large
portions of the earth, one has gradually got so far, that one no
longer lets the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide
with regard to its worth: a great achievement as a whole, an
important refinement of vision and of criterion, the unconscious
effect of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in
"origin," the mark of a period which may be designated in the
narrower sense as the MORAL one: the first attempt at selfknowledge
is thereby made. Instead of the consequences, the
origin--what an inversion of perspective! And assuredly an inversion
effected only after long struggle and wavering! To be sure,
an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation,
attained supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an
action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as
origin out of an INTENTION; people were agreed in the belief
that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention. The
intention as the sole origin and antecedent history of an action:
under the influence of this prejudice moral praise and blame
have been bestowed, and men have judged and even philosophized
almost up to the present day.--Is it not possible, however,
that the necessity may now have arisen of again making
up our minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental
shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness
in man--is it not possible that we may be standing on the
threshold of a period which to begin with, would be distinguished
negatively as ULTRA-MORAL: nowadays when, at least among us
immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive value of an
action lies precisely in that which is NOT INTENTIONAL, and that
all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible, or "sensed" in it,
belongs to its surface or skin-- which, like every skin, betrays
something, but CONCEALS still more? In short, we believe that
the intention is only a sign or symptom, which first requires an
explanation--a sign, moreover, which has too many interpretations,
and consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone: that
morality, in the sense in which it has been understood hitherto,
as intention-morality, has been a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness
or preliminariness, probably something of the same
rank as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something which
must be surmounted. The surmounting of morality, in a certain
sense even the self-mounting of morality-- let that be the name
for the long-secret labour which has been reserved for the most
- 29 -
refined, the most upright, and also the most wicked consciences
of today, as the living touchstones of the soul.
33. It cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice
for one's neighbour, and all self-renunciation-morality, must be
mercilessly called to account, and brought to judgment; just as
the aesthetics of "disinterested contemplation," under which the
emasculation of art nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create
itself a good conscience. There is far too much witchery and
sugar in the sentiments "for others" and "NOT for myself," for
one not needing to be doubly distrustful here, and for one asking
promptly: "Are they not perhaps--DECEPTIONS?"--That they
PLEASE-- him who has them, and him who enjoys their fruit, and
also the mere spectator--that is still no argument in their FAVOUR,
but just calls for caution. Let us therefore be cautious!
34. At whatever standpoint of philosophy one may place oneself
nowadays, seen from every position, the ERRONEOUSNESS of
the world in which we think we live is the surest and most certain
thing our eyes can light upon: we find proof after proof
thereof, which would fain allure us into surmises concerning a
deceptive principle in the "nature of things." He, however, who
makes thinking itself, and consequently "the spirit," responsible
for the falseness of the world--an honourable exit, which every
conscious or unconscious advocatus dei avails himself of--he who
regards this world, including space, time, form, and movement,
as falsely DEDUCED, would have at least good reason in the end
to become distrustful also of all thinking; has it not hitherto been
playing upon us the worst of scurvy tricks? and what guarantee
would it give that it would not continue to do what it has always
been doing? In all seriousness, the innocence of thinkers has
something touching and respect-inspiring in it, which even
nowadays permits them to wait upon consciousness with the
request that it will give them HONEST answers: for example,
whether it be "real" or not, and why it keeps the outer world so
resolutely at a distance, and other questions of the same description.
The belief in "immediate certainties" is a MORAL NAIVETE
which does honour to us philosophers; but--we have now to
cease being "MERELY moral" men! Apart from morality, such
belief is a folly which does little honour to us! If in middle-class
life an ever- ready distrust is regarded as the sign of a "bad
character," and consequently as an imprudence, here among us,
beyond the middle- class world and its Yeas and Nays, what
should prevent our being imprudent and saying: the philosopher
has at length a RIGHT to "bad character," as the being who has
hitherto been most befooled on earth--he is now under OBLIGATION
to distrustfulness, to the wickedest squinting out of every
- 30 -
abyss of suspicion.--Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace
and turn of expression; for I myself have long ago learned to
think and estimate differently with regard to deceiving and being
deceived, and I keep at least a couple of pokes in the ribs ready
for the blind rage with which philosophers struggle against being
deceived. Why NOT? It is nothing more than a moral prejudice
that truth is worth more than semblance; it is, in fact, the worst
proved supposition in the world. So much must be conceded:
there could have been no life at all except upon the basis of
perspective estimates and semblances; and if, with the virtuous
enthusiasm and stupidity of many philosophers, one wished to
do away altogether with the "seeming world"--well, granted that
YOU could do that,--at least nothing of your "truth" would
thereby remain! Indeed, what is it that forces us in general to
the supposition that there is an essential opposition of "true" and
"false"? Is it not enough to suppose degrees of seemingness, and
as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of semblance--
different valeurs, as the painters say? Why might not the world
WHICH CONCERNS US--be a fiction? And to any one who suggested:
"But to a fiction belongs an originator?"--might it not be
bluntly replied: WHY? May not this "belong" also belong to the
fiction? Is it not at length permitted to be a little ironical towards
the subject, just as towards the predicate and object? Might not
the philosopher elevate himself above faith in grammar? All
respect to governesses, but is it not time that philosophy should
renounce governess-faith?
35. O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish
in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes
about it too humanely--"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le
bien"--I wager he finds nothing!
36. Supposing that nothing else is "given" as real but our world
of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other
"reality" but just that of our impulses--for thinking is only a
relation of these impulses to one another:--are we not permitted
to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which
is "given" does not SUFFICE, by means of our counterparts, for
the understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or "material")
world? I do not mean as an illusion, a "semblance," a "representation"
(in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerian 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 a mighty unity, which afterwards
branches off and develops itself in organic processes
(naturally also, refines and debilitates)--as a kind of instinctive
life in which all organic functions, including self- regulation,
- 31 -
assimilation, nutrition, secretion, and change of matter, are still
synthetically united with one another--as a PRIMARY FORM of
life?--In the end, it is not only permitted to make this attempt, it
is commanded by the conscience of LOGICAL METHOD. Not to
assume several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to get
along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest extent
(to absurdity, if I may be allowed to say so): that is a morality
of method which one may not repudiate nowadays--it
follows "from its definition," as mathematicians say. The question
is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as OPERATING,
whether we believe in the causality of the will; if we do
so--and fundamentally our belief IN THIS is just our belief in
causality itself--we MUST make the attempt to posit hypothetically
the causality of the will as the only causality. "Will" can
naturally only operate on "will"--and not on "matter" (not on
"nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded,
whether will does not operate on will wherever "effects"
are recognized--and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as
a power operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect
of will. Granted, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our
entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one
fundamental form of will--namely, the Will to Power, as my
thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be traced
back to this Will to Power, and that the solution of the problem of
generation and nutrition--it is one problem-- could also be found
therein: one would thus have acquired the right to define ALL
active force unequivocally as WILL TO POWER. The world seen
from within, the world defined and designated according to its
"intelligible character"--it would simply be "Will to Power," and
nothing else.
37. "What? Does not that mean in popular language: God is
disproved, but not the devil?"--On the contrary! On the contrary,
my friends! And who the devil also compels you to speak popularly!
38. As happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times
with the French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous
when judged close at hand, into which, however, the noble and
visionary spectators of all Europe have interpreted from a distance
their own indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately,
UNTIL THE TEXT HAS DISAPPEARED UNDER THE
INTERPRETATION), so a noble posterity might once more misunderstand
the whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby make
ITS aspect endurable.--Or rather, has not this already happened?
Have not we ourselves been--that "noble posterity"?
- 32 -

And, in so far as we now comprehend this, is it not--thereby
already past?
39. Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely
because it makes people happy or virtuous--excepting, perhaps,
the amiable "Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good,
true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley, coarse, and goodnatured
desirabilities swim about promiscuously in their pond.
Happiness and virtue are no arguments. It is willingly forgotten,
however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, that to make
unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter- arguments.
A thing could be TRUE, although it were in the highest degree
injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of
existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge
of it--so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the
amount of "truth" it could endure--or to speak more plainly, by
the extent to which it REQUIRED truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened,
damped, and falsified. But there is no doubt that for the
discovery of certain PORTIONS of truth the wicked and unfortunate
are more favourably situated and have a greater likelihood
of success; not to speak of the wicked who are happy--a species
about whom moralists are silent. Perhaps severity and craft are
more favourable conditions for the development of strong, independent
spirits and philosophers than the gentle, refined, yielding
good-nature, and habit of taking things easily, which are
prized, and rightly prized in a learned man. Presupposing always,
to begin with, that the term "philosopher" be not confined to the
philosopher who writes books, or even introduces HIS philosophy
into books!--Stendhal furnishes a last feature of the portrait of
the free-spirited philosopher, which for the sake of German taste
I will not omit to underline--for it is OPPOSED to German taste.
"Pour etre bon philosophe," says this last great psychologist, "il
faut etre sec, clair, sans illusion. Un banquier, qui a fait fortune,
a une partie du caractere requis pour faire des decouvertes en
philosophie, c'est-a-dire pour voir clair dans ce qui est."
40. Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest
things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the
CONTRARY only be the right disguise for the shame of a God to
go about in? A question worth asking!--it would be strange if
some mystic has not already ventured on the same kind of thing.
There are proceedings of such a delicate nature that it is well to
overwhelm them with coarseness and make them unrecognizable;
there are actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimity
after which nothing can be wiser than to take a stick and
thrash the witness soundly: one thereby obscures his recollection.
Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory,
- 33 -
in order at least to have vengeance on this sole party in the
secret: shame is inventive. They are not the worst things of
which one is most ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a
mask--there is so much goodness in craft. I could imagine that a
man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would roll
through life clumsily and rotundly like an old, green, heavilyhooped
wine-cask: the refinement of his shame requiring it to be
so. A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and
his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach, and with
regard to the existence of which his nearest and most intimate
friends may be ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from
their eyes, and equally so his regained security. Such a hidden
nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment,
and is inexhaustible in evasion of communication,
DESIRES and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his
place in the hearts and heads of his friends; and supposing he
does not desire it, his eyes will some day be opened to the fact
that there is nevertheless a mask of him there--and that it is well
to be so. Every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around
every profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to
the constantly false, that is to say, SUPERFICIAL interpretation
of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of life
he manifests.
41. One must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is
destined for independence and command, and do so at the right
time. One must not avoid one's tests, although they constitute
perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the
end tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge.
Not to cleave to any person, be it even the dearest--every person
is a prison and also a recess. Not to cleave to a fatherland,
be it even the most suffering and necessitous--it is even less
difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to
cleave to a sympathy, be it even for higher men, into whose
peculiar torture and helplessness chance has given us an insight.
Not to cleave to a science, though it tempt one with the most
valuable discoveries, apparently specially reserved for us. Not to
cleave to one's own liberation, to the voluptuous distance and
remoteness of the bird, which always flies further aloft in order
always to see more under it--the danger of the flier. Not to
cleave to our own virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any
of our specialties, to our "hospitality" for instance, which is the
danger of dangers for highly developed and wealthy souls, who
deal prodigally, almost indifferently with themselves, and push
the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes a vice. One must
know how TO CONSERVE ONESELF--the best test of independence.
- 34 -
42. A new order of philosophers is appearing; I shall venture to
baptize them by a name not without danger. As far as I understand
them, as far as they allow themselves to be understood--
for it is their nature to WISH to remain something of a puzzle--
these philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also
wrongly, claim to be designated as "tempters." This name itself
is after all only an attempt, or, if it be preferred, a temptation.
43. Will they be new friends of "truth," these coming philosophers?
Very probably, for all philosophers hitherto have loved
their truths. But assuredly they will not be dogmatists. It must
be contrary to their pride, and also contrary to their taste, that
their truth should still be truth for every one--that which has
hitherto been the secret wish and ultimate purpose of all dogmatic
efforts. "My opinion is MY opinion: another person has not
easily a right to it"--such a philosopher of the future will say,
perhaps. One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree
with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's
neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a
"common good"! The expression contradicts itself; that which
can be common is always of small value. In the end things must
be as they are and have always been--the great things remain
for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and
thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for
the rare.
44. Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, VERY
free spirits, these philosophers of the future--as certainly also
they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher,
greater, and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be
misunderstood and mistaken? But while I say this, I feel under
OBLIGATION almost as much to them as to ourselves (we free
spirits who are their heralds and forerunners), to sweep away
from ourselves altogether a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding,
which, like a fog, has too long made the conception of
"free spirit" obscure. In every country of Europe, and the same
in America, there is at present something which makes an abuse
of this name a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of
spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions
and instincts prompt--not to mention that in respect to the NEW
philosophers who are appearing, they must still more be closed
windows and bolted doors. Briefly and regrettably, they belong
to the LEVELLERS, these wrongly named "free spirits"--as glibtongued
and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and
its "modern ideas" all of them men without solitude, without
- 35 -
personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage
nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only, they are not
free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate
partiality for seeing the cause of almost ALL human misery and
failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a
notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would
fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow
happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort,
and alleviation of life for every one, their two most frequently
chanted songs and doctrines are called "Equality of Rights" and
"Sympathy with All Sufferers"--and suffering itself is looked upon
by them as something which must be DONE AWAY WITH. We
opposite ones, however, who have opened our eye and conscience
to the question how and where the plant "man" has
hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this has always
taken place under the opposite conditions, that for this end the
dangerousness of his situation had to be increased enormously,
his inventive faculty and dissembling power (his "spirit") had to
develop into subtlety and daring under long oppression and
compulsion, and his Will to Life had to be increased to the unconditioned
Will to Power--we believe that severity, violence,
slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism,
tempter's art and devilry of every kind,--that everything wicked,
terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as
well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite--we
do not even say enough when we only say THIS MUCH, and in
any case we find ourselves here, both with our speech and our
silence, at the OTHER extreme of all modern ideology and gregarious
desirability, as their antipodes perhaps? What wonder
that we "free spirits" are not exactly the most communicative
spirits? that we do not wish to betray in every respect WHAT a
spirit can free itself from, and WHERE perhaps it will then be
driven? And as to the import of the dangerous formula, "Beyond
Good and Evil," with which we at least avoid confusion, we ARE
something else than "libres-penseurs," "liben pensatori" "freethinkers,"
and whatever these honest advocates of "modern
ideas" like to call themselves. Having been at home, or at least
guests, in many realms of the spirit, having escaped again and
again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks in which preferences
and prejudices, youth, origin, the accident of men and books, or
even the weariness of travel seemed to confine us, full of malice
against the seductions of dependency which he concealed in
honours, money, positions, or exaltation of the senses, grateful
even for distress and the vicissitudes of illness, because they
always free us from some rule, and its "prejudice," grateful to
the God, devil, sheep, and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault,
investigators to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for
- 36 -
the intangible, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible,
ready for any business that requires sagacity and acute senses,
ready for every adventure, owing to an excess of "free will", with
anterior and posterior souls, into the ultimate intentions of which
it is difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds to the end
of which no foot may run, hidden ones under the mantles of
light, appropriators, although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts,
arrangers and collectors from morning till night, misers of
our wealth and our full-crammed drawers, economical in learning
and forgetting, inventive in scheming, sometimes proud of tables
of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work
even in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows--and it is
necessary nowadays, that is to say, inasmuch as we are the
born, sworn, jealous friends of SOLITUDE, of our own profoundest
midnight and midday solitude--such kind of men are we, we
free spirits! And perhaps ye are also something of the same kind,
ye coming ones? ye NEW philosophers?
- 37 -

CHAPTER III - THE RELIGIOUS MOOD

45. The human soul and its limits, the range of man's inner
experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distances
of these experiences, the entire history of the soul UP TO THE
PRESENT TIME, and its still unexhausted possibilities: this is the
preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist and lover of
a "big hunt". But how often must he say despairingly to himself:
"A single individual! alas, only a single individual! and this great
forest, this virgin forest!" So he would like to have some hundreds
of hunting assistants, and fine trained hounds, that he
could send into the history of the human soul, to drive HIS game
together. In vain: again and again he experiences, profoundly
and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for all
the things that directly excite his curiosity. The evil of sending
scholars into new and dangerous hunting- domains, where courage,
sagacity, and subtlety in every sense are required, is that
they are no longer serviceable just when the "BIG hunt," and
also the great danger commences,--it is precisely then that they
lose their keen eye and nose. In order, for instance, to divine
and determine what sort of history the problem of KNOWLEDGE
AND CONSCIENCE has hitherto had in the souls of homines
religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to possess as
profound, as bruised, as immense an experience as the intellectual
conscience of Pascal; and then he would still require that
wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from
above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize
this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.--But who
could do me this service! And who would have time to wait for
such servants!--they evidently appear too rarely, they are so
improbable at all times! Eventually one must do everything
ONESELF in order to know something; which means that one has
MUCH to do!--But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most
agreeable of vices--pardon me! I mean to say that the love of
truth has its reward in heaven, and already upon earth.
46. Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not infrequently
achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited
world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical
schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in
tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave--this faith is NOT
that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a
Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained
attached to his God and Christianity, it is much rather
- 38 -
the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous
suicide of reason--a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason,
which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow. The
Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all
freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same
time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. There is cruelty
and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is adapted to
a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious conscience, it takes for
granted that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably PAINFUL,
that all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the
absurdissimum, in the form of which "faith" comes to it. Modern
men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature,
have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception
which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of
the formula, "God on the Cross". Hitherto there had never and
nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once
so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it
promised a transvaluation of all ancient values--It was the Orient,
the PROFOUND Orient, it was the Oriental slave who thus
took revenge on Rome and its noble, light-minded toleration, on
the Roman "Catholicism" of non-faith, and it was always not the
faith, but the freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling
indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which made the
slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them.
"Enlightenment" causes revolt, for the slave desires the unconditioned,
he understands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals,
he loves as he hates, without NUANCE, to the very depths,
to the point of pain, to the point of sickness--his many HIDDEN
sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems
to DENY suffering. The skepticism with regard to suffering, fundamentally
only an attitude of aristocratic morality, was not the
least of the causes, also, of the last great slave-insurrection
which began with the French Revolution.
47. Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth
so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as
to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence--but without
its being possible to determine with certainty which is cause and
which is effect, or IF any relation at all of cause and effect exists
there. This latter doubt is justified by the fact that one of the
most regular symptoms among savage as well as among civilized
peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality, which then
with equal suddenness transforms into penitential paroxysms,
world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both symptoms perhaps
explainable as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere is it MORE
obligatory to put aside explanations around no other type has
there grown such a mass of absurdity and superstition, no other
- 39 -
type seems to have been more interesting to men and even to
philosophers--perhaps it is time to become just a little indifferent
here, to learn caution, or, better still, to look AWAY, TO GO
AWAY--Yet in the background of the most recent philosophy,
that of Schopenhauer, we find almost as the problem in itself,
this terrible note of interrogation of the religious crisis and awakening.
How is the negation of will POSSIBLE? how is the saint
possible?--that seems to have been the very question with which
Schopenhauer made a start and became a philosopher. And thus
it was a genuine Schopenhauerian consequence, that his most
convinced adherent (perhaps also his last, as far as Germany is
concerned), namely, Richard Wagner, should bring his own life-
work to an end just here, and should finally put that terrible and
eternal type upon the stage as Kundry, type vecu, and as it
loved and lived, at the very time that the mad-doctors in almost
all European countries had an opportunity to study the type close
at hand, wherever the religious neurosis--or as I call it, "the
religious mood"--made its latest epidemical outbreak and display
as the "Salvation Army"--If it be a question, however, as to what
has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages,
and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the saint,
it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein--
namely, the immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states of
the soul regarded as morally antithetical: it was believed here to
be self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once turned into a
"saint," a good man. The hitherto existing psychology was
wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened
principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion
of morals, because it BELIEVED in oppositions of moral
values, and saw, read, and INTERPRETED these oppositions into
the text and facts of the case? What? "Miracle" only an error of
interpretation? A lack of philology?
48. It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply attached to
their Catholicism than we Northerners are to Christianity generally,
and that consequently unbelief in Catholic countries means
something quite different from what it does among Protestants--
namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the race, while with
us it is rather a return to the spirit (or non- spirit) of the race.
We Northerners undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous
races, even as regards our talents for religion--we have POOR
talents for it. One may make an exception in the case of the
Celts, who have theretofore furnished also the best soil for Christian
infection in the North: the Christian ideal blossomed forth in
France as much as ever the pale sun of the north would allow it.
How strangely pious for our taste are still these later French
- 40 -
skeptics, whenever there is any Celtic blood in their origin! How
Catholic, how un-German does Auguste Comte's Sociology seem
to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts! How Jesuitical, that
amiable and shrewd cicerone of Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in
spite of all his hostility to Jesuits! And even Ernest Renan: how
inaccessible to us Northerners does the language of such a
Renan appear, in whom every instant the merest touch of religious
thrill throws his refined voluptuous and comfortably couching
soul off its balance! Let us repeat after him these fine
sentences--and what wickedness and haughtiness is immediately
aroused by way of answer in our probably less beautiful but
harder souls, that is to say, in our more German souls!--
"DISONS DONC HARDIMENT QUE LA RELIGION EST UN PRODUIT
DE L'HOMME NORMAL, QUE L'HOMME EST LE PLUS DANS LE
VRAI QUANT IL EST LE PLUS RELIGIEUX ET LE PLUS ASSURE
D'UNE DESTINEE INFINIE. . . . C'EST QUAND IL EST BON QU'IL
VEUT QUE LA VIRTU CORRESPONDE A UN ORDER ETERNAL,
C'EST QUAND IL CONTEMPLE LES CHOSES D'UNE MANIERE
DESINTERESSEE QU'IL TROUVE LA MORT REVOLTANTE ET ABSURDE.
COMMENT NE PAS SUPPOSER QUE C'EST DANS CES
MOMENTS-LA, QUE L'HOMME VOIT LE MIEUX?" . . . These sentences
are so extremely ANTIPODAL to my ears and habits of
thought, that in my first impulse of rage on finding them, I wrote
on the margin, "LA NIAISERIE RELIGIEUSE PAR EXCELLENCE!"--
until in my later rage I even took a fancy to them, these sentences
with their truth absolutely inverted! It is so nice and such
a distinction to have one's own antipodes!
49. That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient
Greeks is the irrestrainable stream of GRATITUDE which it
pours forth--it is a very superior kind of man who takes SUCH an
attitude towards nature and life.--Later on, when the populace
got the upper hand in Greece, FEAR became rampant also in
religion; and Christianity was preparing itself.
50. The passion for God: there are churlish, honest-hearted, and
importunate kinds of it, like that of Luther--the whole of Protestantism
lacks the southern DELICATEZZA. There is an Oriental
exaltation of the mind in it, like that of an undeservedly favoured
or elevated slave, as in the case of St. Augustine, for instance,
who lacks in an offensive manner, all nobility in bearing and
desires. There is a feminine tenderness and sensuality in it,
which modestly and unconsciously longs for a UNIO MYSTICA ET
PHYSICA, as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In many cases it
appears, curiously enough, as the disguise of a girl's or youth's
puberty; here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also
- 41 -
as her last ambition. The Church has frequently canonized the
woman in such a case.
51. The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently
before the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter
voluntary privation--why did they thus bow? They divined in
him-- and as it were behind the questionableness of his frail and
wretched appearance--the superior force which wished to test
itself by such a subjugation; the strength of will, in which they
recognized their own strength and love of power, and knew how
to honour it: they honoured something in themselves when they
honoured the saint. In addition to this, the contemplation of the
saint suggested to them a suspicion: such an enormity of self-
negation and anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for
nothing--they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a reason
for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might
wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors
and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the world
learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new
power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:--it was the "Will to
Power" which obliged 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 sayings on such an immense scale,
that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it.
One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous
remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts
about old Asia and its little out-pushed peninsula Europe, which
would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the "Progress of
Mankind." To be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame
house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like
our cultured people of today, including the Christians of "cultured"
Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid
those ruins--the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with
respect to "great" and "small": perhaps he will find that the New
Testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart
(there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid
beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound up this New
Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along
with the Old Testament into one book, as the "Bible," as "The
Book in Itself," is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against
the Spirit" which literary Europe has upon its conscience.
53. Why Atheism nowadays? "The father" in God is thoroughly
refuted; equally so "the judge," "the rewarder." Also his "free
will": he does not hear--and even if he did, he would not know
- 42 -
how to help. The worst is that he seems incapable of communicating
himself clearly; is he uncertain?--This is what I have made
out (by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations)
to be the cause of the decline of European theism; it appears to
me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth,--it
rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust.
54. What does all modern philosophy mainly do? Since Descartes--
and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of
his procedure--an ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all
philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise
of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception--that is to
say, an ATTENTAT on the fundamental presupposition of Christian
doctrine. Modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism,
is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN, although (for keener
ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious. Formerly, in effect,
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 is conditioned--to think is an activity for which one
MUST suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then made,
with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get
out of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps true:
"think" the condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I," therefore, only
a synthesis which has been MADE by thinking itself. KANT really
wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could
not be proved--nor the object either: the possibility of an APPARENT
EXISTENCE of the subject, and therefore of "the soul,"
may not always have been strange to him,--the thought which
once had an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philosophy.
55. There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many
rounds; but three of these are the most important. Once on a
time men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just
those they loved the best--to this category belong the firstling
sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the
Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri, that
most terrible of all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral
epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the strongest
instincts they possessed, their "nature"; THIS festal joy shines in
the cruel glances of ascetics and "anti-natural" fanatics. Finally,
what still remained to be sacrificed? Was it not necessary in the
end for men to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all
hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and
justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out of
cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate,
nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness--this paradoxical
- 43 -
mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising
generation; we all know something thereof already.
56. Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatical desire,
has long endeavoured to go to the bottom of the question of
pessimism and free it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness
and stupidity in which it has finally presented itself to
this century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy;
whoever, with an Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye, has actually
looked inside, and into the most world-renouncing of all possible
modes of thought--beyond good and evil, and no longer like
Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the dominion and delusion of
morality,--whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby,
without really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold the opposite
ideal: the ideal of the most world-approving, exuberant, and
vivacious man, who has not only learnt to compromise and arrange
with that which was and is, but wishes to have it again AS
IT WAS AND IS, for all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo,
not only to himself, but to the whole piece and play; and not
only the play, but actually to him who requires the play--and
makes it necessary; because he always requires himself anew--
and makes himself necessary.--What? And this would not be--
circulus vitiosus deus?
57. The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows
with the strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world
becomes profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are
ever coming into view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual
eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been
an occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for
children and childish minds. Perhaps the most solemn conceptions
that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the
conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more
importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an
old man;-- and perhaps another plaything and another pain will
then be necessary once more for "the old man"--always childish
enough, an eternal child!
58. Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or
semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for its
favourite microscopic labour of self-examination, and for its soft
placidity called "prayer," the state of perpetual readiness for the
"coming of God"), I mean the idleness with a good conscience,
the idleness of olden times and of blood, to which the aristocratic
sentiment that work is DISHONOURING--that it vulgarizes body
and soul--is not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently the
modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited, foolishly proud la-
- 44 -
boriousness educates and prepares for "unbelief" more than
anything else? Among these, for instance, who are at present
living apart from religion in Germany, I find "free-thinkers" of
diversified species and origin, but above all a majority of those in
whom laboriousness from generation to generation has dissolved
the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose
religions serve, and only note their existence in the world with a
kind of dull astonishment. They feel themselves already fully
occupied, these good people, be it by their business or by their
pleasures, not to mention the "Fatherland," and the newspapers,
and their "family duties"; it seems that they have no time whatever
left for religion; and above all, it is not obvious to them
whether it is a question of a new business or a new pleasure--for
it is impossible, they say to themselves, that people should go to
church merely to spoil their tempers. They are by no means
enemies of religious customs; should certain circumstances,
State affairs perhaps, require their participation in such customs,
they do what is required, as so many things are done--with a
patient and unassuming seriousness, and without much curiosity
or discomfort;--they live too much apart and outside to feel even
the necessity for a FOR or AGAINST in such matters. Among
those indifferent persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority
of German Protestants of the middle classes, especially in the
great laborious centres of trade and commerce; also the majority
of laborious scholars, and the entire University personnel (with
the exception of the theologians, whose existence and possibility
there always gives psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to
solve). On the part of pious, or merely church-going people,
there is seldom any idea of HOW MUCH good-will, one might say
arbitrary will, is now necessary for a German scholar to take the
problem of religion seriously; his whole profession (and as I have
said, his whole workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled
by his modern conscience) inclines him to a lofty and
almost charitable serenity as regards religion, with which is
occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the "uncleanliness" of
spirit which he takes for granted wherever any one still professes
to belong to the Church. It is only with the help of history (NOT
through his own personal experience, therefore) that the scholar
succeeds in bringing himself to a respectful seriousness, and to a
certain timid deference in presence of religions; but even when
his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards
them, he has not personally advanced one step nearer to that
which still maintains itself as Church or as piety; perhaps even
the contrary. The practical indifference to religious matters in the
midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually sublimates
itself in his case into circumspection and cleanliness,
which shuns contact with religious men and things; and it may
- 45 -
be just the depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts
him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings
with it.--Every age has its own divine type of naivete, for the
discovery of which other ages may envy it: and how much naivete--
adorable, childlike, and boundlessly foolish naivete is involved
in this belief of the scholar in his superiority, in the good
conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting, simple certainty
with which his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and
less valuable type, beyond, before, and ABOVE which he himself
has developed--he, the little arrogant dwarf and mob-man, the
sedulously alert, head-and-hand drudge of "ideas," of "modern
ideas"!
59. Whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless divined
what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial.
It is their preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty,
lightsome, and false. Here and there one finds a passionate and
exaggerated adoration of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as
in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has NEED of the
cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or another
made an unlucky dive BENEATH it. Perhaps there is even an
order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born
artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to FALSIFY its
image (as if taking wearisome revenge on it), one might guess
to what degree life has disgusted them, by the extent to which
they wish to see its image falsified, attenuated, ultrified, and
deified,--one might reckon the homines religiosi among the
artists, as their HIGHEST rank. It is the profound, suspicious fear
of an incurable pessimism which compels whole centuries to
fasten their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence: the
fear of the instinct which divines that truth might be attained
TOO soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough,
artist enough. . . . Piety, the "Life in God," regarded in this light,
would appear as the most elaborate and ultimate product of the
FEAR of truth, as artist-adoration and artist- intoxication in presence
of the most logical of all falsifications, as the will to the
inversion of truth, to untruth at any price. Perhaps there has
hitherto been no more effective means of beautifying man than
piety, by means of it man can become so artful, so superficial, so
iridescent, and so good, that his appearance no longer offends.
60. To love mankind FOR GOD'S SAKE--this has so far been the
noblest and remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained.
That love to mankind, without any redeeming intention in the
background, is only an ADDITIONAL folly and brutishness, that
the inclination to this love has first to get its proportion, its delicacy,
its gram of salt and sprinkling of ambergris from a higher
- 46 -
inclination--whoever first perceived and "experienced" this,
however his tongue may have stammered as it attempted to
express such a delicate matter, let him for all time be holy and
respected, as the man who has so far flown highest and gone
astray in the finest fashion!
61. The philosopher, as WE free spirits understand him--as the
man of the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for
the general development of mankind,--will use religion for his
disciplining and educating work, just as he will use the contemporary
political and economic conditions. The selecting and disciplining
influence--destructive, as well as creative and fashioning-
-which can be exercised by means of religion is manifold and
varied, according to the sort of people placed under its spell and
protection. For those who are strong and independent, destined
and trained to command, in whom the judgment and skill of a
ruling race is incorporated, religion is an additional means for
overcoming resistance in the exercise of authority--as a bond
which binds rulers and subjects in common, betraying and surrendering
to the former the conscience of the latter, their inmost
heart, which would fain escape obedience. And in the case of the
unique natures of noble origin, if by virtue of superior spirituality
they should incline to a more retired and contemplative life,
reserving to themselves only the more refined forms of government
(over chosen disciples or members of an order), religion
itself may be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise
and trouble of managing GROSSER affairs, and for securing
immunity from the UNAVOIDABLE filth of all political agitation.
The Brahmins, for instance, understood this fact. With the help
of a religious organization, they secured to themselves the power
of nominating kings for the people, while their sentiments
prompted them to keep apart and outside, as men with a higher
and super-regal mission. At the same time religion gives inducement
and opportunity to some of the subjects to qualify
themselves for future ruling and commanding the slowly ascending
ranks and classes, in which, through fortunate marriage
customs, volitional power and delight in self-control are on the
increase. To them religion offers sufficient incentives and temptations
to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience the
sentiments of authoritative self-control, of silence, and of solitude.
Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means
of educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its
hereditary baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy.
And finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people,
who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far
entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable contentedness with
their lot and condition, peace of heart, ennoblement of obedi-
- 47 -
ence, additional social happiness and sympathy, with something
of transfiguration and embellishment, something of justification
of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the semianimal
poverty of their souls. Religion, together with the religious
significance of life, sheds sunshine over such perpetually
harassed men, and makes even their own aspect endurable to
them, it operates upon them as the Epicurean philosophy usually
operates upon sufferers of a higher order, in a refreshing and
refining manner, almost TURNING suffering TO ACCOUNT, and in
the end even hallowing and vindicating it. There is perhaps nothing
so admirable in Christianity and Buddhism as their art of
teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by piety to a
seemingly higher order of things, and thereby to retain their
satisfaction with the actual world in which they find it difficult
enough to live--this very difficulty being necessary.
62. To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against
such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost
is always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate
as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the
philosopher, but rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they
wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other
means. Among men, as among all other animals, there is a
surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily
suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men
also, are always the exception; and in view of the fact that man
is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT,
the rare exception. But worse still. The higher the type a
man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will
SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general
constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive
effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of
whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine.
What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions abovementioned
to the SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour to
preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as
the religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon
principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life
as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience
of life as false and impossible. However highly we may
esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inasmuch as in
applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest
and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT
religions--to give a general appreciation of them--are
among the principal causes which have kept the type of "man"
upon a lower level--they have preserved too much THAT WHICH
SHOULD HAVE PERISHED. One has to thank them for invaluable
- 48 -
services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor
at the contemplation of all that the "spiritual men" of Christianity
have done for Europe hitherto! But when they had given comfort
to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff
and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from
society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the brokenhearted
and distracted: what else had they to do in order to
work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience,
for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in
deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE
EUROPEAN RACE? To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is
what they had to do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great
hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down
everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious--all
instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful
type of "man"-- into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and selfdestruction;
forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of
supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly
things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was
obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness,"
"unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one
sentiment. If one could observe the strangely painful, equally
coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the
derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think
one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not
actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for
eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of
man? He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer
Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could
approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of
mankind, as exemplified in the European Christian (Pascal, for
instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and
horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what
have you done! Was that a work for your hands? How you have
hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed
to do!"--I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most
portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard
enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN;
men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with
sublime self- constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold
failures and perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to
see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank
that separate man from man:--SUCH men, with their "equality
before God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at
last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a
gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the
European of the present day.
- 49 -

CHAPTER IV - APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES

63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously--and
even himself--only in relation to his pupils.
64. "Knowledge for its own sake"--that is the last snare laid by
morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once
more.
65. The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much
shame has to be overcome on the way to it.
65A. We are most dishonourable towards our God: he is not
PERMITTED to sin.
66. The tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded,
robbed, deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence of a God
among men.
67. Love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised at the
expense of all others. Love to God also!
68. "I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that,"
says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually--the memory
yields.
69. One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed to see the
hand that--kills with leniency.
70. If a man has character, he has also his typical experience,
which always recurs.
71. THE SAGE AS ASTRONOMER.--So long as thou feelest the
stars as an "above thee," thou lackest the eye of the discerning
one.
72. It is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments
that makes great men.
73. He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.
73A. Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye--and calls it
his pride.
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74. A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least
two things besides: gratitude and purity.
75. The degree and nature of a man's sensuality extends to the
highest altitudes of his spirit.
76. Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself.
77. With his principles a man seeks either to dominate, or justify,
or honour, or reproach, or conceal his habits: two men with
the same principles probably seek fundamentally different ends
therewith.
78. He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself
thereby, as a despiser.
79. A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not itself love,
betrays its sediment: its dregs come up.
80. A thing that is explained ceases to concern us--What did the
God mean who gave the advice, "Know thyself!" Did it perhaps
imply "Cease to be concerned about thyself! become objective!"-
- And Socrates?--And the "scientific man"?
81. It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary that you
should so salt your truth that it will no longer--quench thirst?
82. "Sympathy for all"--would be harshness and tyranny for
THEE, my good neighbour.
83. INSTINCT--When the house is on fire one forgets even the
dinner--Yes, but one recovers it from among the ashes.
84. Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she--forgets how
to charm.
85. The same emotions are in man and woman, but in different
TEMPO, on that account man and woman never cease to misunderstand
each other.
86. In the background of all their personal vanity, women themselves
have still their impersonal scorn--for "woman".
87. FETTERED HEART, FREE SPIRIT--When one firmly fetters
one's heart and keeps it prisoner, one can allow one's spirit
many liberties: I said this once before But people do not believe
it when I say so, unless they know it already.
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88. One begins to distrust very clever persons when they become
embarrassed.
89. Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who
experiences them is not something dreadful also.
90. Heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come temporarily
to their surface, precisely by that which makes others heavy--by
hatred and love.
91. So cold, so icy, that one burns one's finger at the touch of
him! Every hand that lays hold of him shrinks back!--And for that
very reason many think him red-hot.
92. Who has not, at one time or another--sacrificed himself for
the sake of his good name?
93. In affability there is no hatred of men, but precisely on that
account a great deal too much contempt of men.
94. The maturity of man--that means, to have reacquired the
seriousness that one had as a child at play.
95. To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on the ladder at
the end of which one is ashamed also of one's morality.
96. One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa--
blessing it rather than in love with it.
97. What? A great man? I always see merely the play-actor of
his own ideal.
98. When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one while it bites.
99. THE DISAPPOINTED ONE SPEAKS--"I listened for the echo
and I heard only praise."
100. We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler than we are,
we thus relax ourselves away from our fellows.
101. A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as
the animalization of God.
102. Discovering reciprocal love should really disenchant the
lover with regard to the beloved. "What! She is modest enough
to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or--or---"
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103. THE DANGER IN HAPPINESS.--"Everything now turns out
best for me, I now love every fate:--who would like to be my
fate?"
104. Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love,
prevents the Christians of today--burning us.
105. The pia fraus is still more repugnant to the taste (the "piety")
of the free spirit (the "pious man of knowledge") than the
impia fraus. Hence the profound lack of judgment, in comparison
with the Church, characteristic of the type "free spirit"--as ITS
non-freedom.
106. By means of music the very passions enjoy themselves.
107. A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has
been taken, to shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments.
Occasionally, therefore, a will to stupidity.
108. There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a
moral interpretation of phenomena.
109. The criminal is often enough not equal to his deed: he
extenuates and maligns it.
110. The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to
turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of
the doer.
111. Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride
has been wounded.
112. To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and
not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards
against them.
113. "You want to prepossess him in your favour? Then you
must be embarrassed before him."
114. The immense expectation with regard to sexual love, and
the coyness in this expectation, spoils all the perspectives of
women at the outset.
115. Where there is neither love nor hatred in the game,
woman's play is mediocre.
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116. The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain
courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.
117. The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will
of another, or of several other, emotions.
118. There is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him
to whom it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired
some day.
119. Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our
cleaning ourselves--"justifying" ourselves.
120. Sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that
its root remains weak, and is easily torn up.
121. It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished
to turn author--and that he did not learn it better.
122. To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases merely
politeness of heart--and the very opposite of vanity of spirit.
123. Even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage.
124. He who exults at the stake, does not triumph over pain, but
because of the fact that he does not feel pain where he expected
it. A parable.
125. When we have to change an opinion about any one, we
charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby
causes us.
126. A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great
men.--Yes, and then to get round them.
127. In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to the sense
of shame. They feel as if one wished to peep under their skin
with it--or worse still! under their dress and finery.
128. The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more
must you allure the senses to it.
129. The devil has the most extensive perspectives for God; on
that account he keeps so far away from him:--the devil, in effect,
as the oldest friend of knowledge.
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130. What a person IS begins to betray itself when his talent
decreases,--when he ceases to show what he CAN do. Talent is
also an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.
131. The sexes deceive themselves about each other: the reason
is that in reality they honour and love only themselves (or their
own ideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wishes
woman to be peaceable: but in fact woman is ESSENTIALLY
unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed
the peaceable demeanour.
132. One is punished best for one's virtues.
133. He who cannot find the way to HIS ideal, lives more frivolously
and shamelessly than the man without an ideal.
134. From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all good
conscience, all evidence of truth.
135. Pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man; a considerable
part of it is rather an essential condition of being good.
136. The one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the other
seeks some one whom he can assist: a good conversation thus
originates.
137. In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes
mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not
infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre
artist, one finds a very remarkable man.
138. We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only
invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse--and
forget it immediately.
139. In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.
140. ADVICE AS A RIDDLE.--"If the band is not to break, bite it
first--secure to make!"
141. The belly is the reason why man does not so readily take
himself for a God.
142. The chastest utterance I ever heard: "Dans le veritable
amour c'est l'ame qui enveloppe le corps."
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143. Our vanity would like what we do best to pass precisely for
what is most difficult to us.--Concerning the origin of many
systems of morals.
144. When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally
something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces
to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so,
is "the barren animal."
145. Comparing man and woman generally, one may say that
woman would not have the genius for adornment, if she had not
the instinct for the SECONDARY role.
146. He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he
thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss,
the abyss will also gaze into thee.
147. From old Florentine novels--moreover, from life: Buona
femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone.--Sacchetti, Nov. 86.
148. To seduce their neighbour to a favourable opinion, and
afterwards to believe implicitly in this opinion of their neighbour-
-who can do this conjuring trick so well as women?
149. That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable
echo of what was formerly considered good--the atavism of an
old ideal.
150. Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the
demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God
everything becomes--what? perhaps a "world"?
151. It is not enough to possess a talent: one must also have
your permission to possess it;--eh, my friends?
152. "Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always
Paradise": so say the most ancient and the most modern serpents.
153. What is done out of love always takes place beyond good
and evil.
154. Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are
signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
155. The sense of the tragic increases and declines with sensuousness.
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156. Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups,
parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
157. The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it
one gets successfully through many a bad night.
158. Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to
our strongest impulse--the tyrant in us.
159. One MUST repay good and ill; but why just to the person
who did us good or ill?
160. One no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently after one
has communicated it.
161. Poets act shamelessly towards their experiences: they
exploit them.
162. "Our fellow-creature is not our neighbour, but our
neighbour's neighbour":--so thinks every nation.
163. Love brings to light the noble and hidden qualities of a
lover--his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive
as to his normal character.
164. Jesus said to his Jews: "The law was for servants;--love
God as I love him, as his Son! What have we Sons of God to do
with morals!"
165. IN SIGHT OF EVERY PARTY.--A shepherd has always need
of a bell-wether--or he has himself to be a wether occasionally.
166. One may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying
grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.
167. To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something
precious.
168. Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it,
certainly, but degenerated to Vice.
169. To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing
oneself.
170. In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.
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171. Pity has an almost ludicrous effect on a man of knowledge,
like tender hands on a Cyclops.
172. One occasionally embraces some one or other, out of love
to mankind (because one cannot embrace all); but this is what
one must never confess to the individual.
173. One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only
when one esteems equal or superior.
174. Ye Utilitarians--ye, too, love the UTILE only as a VEHICLE
for your inclinations,--ye, too, really find the noise of its wheels
insupportable!
175. One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.
176. The vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is
counter to our vanity.
177. With regard to what "truthfulness" is, perhaps nobody has
ever been sufficiently truthful.
178. One does not believe in the follies of clever men: what a
forfeiture of the rights of man!
179. The consequences of our actions seize us by the forelock,
very indifferent to the fact that we have meanwhile "reformed."
180. There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good
faith in a cause.
181. It is inhuman to bless when one is being cursed.
182. The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may
not be returned.
183. "I am affected, not because you have deceived me, but
because I can no longer believe in you."
184. There is a haughtiness of kindness which has the appearance
of wickedness.
185. "I dislike him."--Why?--"I am not a match for him."--Did
any one ever answer so?
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CHAPTER V - THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS

186. The moral sentiment in Europe at present is perhaps as
subtle, belated, diverse, sensitive, and refined, as the "Science
of Morals" belonging thereto is recent, initial, awkward, and
coarse-fingered:--an interesting contrast, which sometimes
becomes incarnate and obvious in the very person of a moralist.
Indeed, the expression, "Science of Morals" is, in respect to what
is designated thereby, far too presumptuous and counter to
GOOD taste,--which is always a foretaste of more modest expressions.
One ought to avow with the utmost fairness WHAT is
still necessary here for a long time, WHAT is alone proper for the
present: namely, the collection of material, the comprehensive
survey and classification of an immense domain of delicate sentiments
of worth, and distinctions of worth, which live, grow,
propagate, and perish--and perhaps attempts to give a clear idea
of the recurring and more common forms of these living crystallizations--
as preparation for a THEORY OF TYPES of morality. To
be sure, people have not hitherto been so modest. All the philosophers,
with a pedantic and ridiculous seriousness, demanded
of themselves something very much higher, more pretentious,
and ceremonious, when they concerned themselves with morality
as a science: they wanted to GIVE A BASIC to morality-- and
every philosopher hitherto has believed that he has given it a
basis; morality itself, however, has been regarded as something
"given." How far from their awkward pride was the seemingly
insignificant problem--left in dust and decay--of a description of
forms of morality, notwithstanding that the finest hands and
senses could hardly be fine enough for it! It was precisely owing
to moral philosophers' knowing the moral facts imperfectly, in an
arbitrary epitome, or an accidental abridgement--perhaps as the
morality of their environment, their position, their church, their
Zeitgeist, their climate and zone--it was precisely because they
were badly instructed with regard to nations, eras, and past
ages, and were by no means eager to know about these matters,
that they did not even come in sight of the real problems of
morals--problems which only disclose themselves by a comparison
of MANY kinds of morality. In every "Science of Morals"
hitherto, strange as it may sound, the problem of morality itself
has been OMITTED: there has been no suspicion that there was
anything problematic there! That which philosophers called "giving
a basis to morality," and endeavoured to realize, has, when
seen in a right light, proved merely a learned form of good
FAITH in prevailing morality, a new means of its EXPRESSION,
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consequently just a matter-of-fact within the sphere of a definite
morality, yea, in its ultimate motive, a sort of denial that it is
LAWFUL for this morality to be called in question--and in any
case the reverse of the testing, analyzing, doubting, and vivisecting
of this very faith. Hear, for instance, with what innocence--
almost worthy of honour--Schopenhauer represents his
own task, and draw your conclusions concerning the scientificness
of a "Science" whose latest master still talks in the strain of
children and old wives: "The principle," he says (page 136 of the
Grundprobleme der Ethik), [Footnote: Pages 54-55 of Schopenhauer's
Basis of Morality, translated by Arthur B. Bullock, M.A.
(1903).] "the axiom about the purport of which all moralists are
PRACTICALLY agreed: neminem laede, immo omnes quantum
potes juva--is REALLY the proposition which all moral teachers
strive to establish, . . . the REAL basis of ethics which has been
sought, like the philosopher's stone, for centuries."--The difficulty
of establishing the proposition referred to may indeed be
great--it is well known that Schopenhauer also was unsuccessful
in his efforts; and whoever has thoroughly realized how absurdly
false and sentimental this proposition is, in a world whose essence
is Will to Power, may be reminded that Schopenhauer,
although a pessimist, ACTUALLY--played the flute . . . daily after
dinner: one may read about the matter in his biography. A question
by the way: a pessimist, a repudiator of God and of the
world, who MAKES A HALT at morality--who assents to morality,
and plays the flute to laede-neminem morals, what? Is that
really--a pessimist?
187. Apart from the value of such assertions as "there is a categorical
imperative in us," one can always ask: What does such
an assertion indicate about him who makes it? There are systems
of morals which are meant to justify their author in the
eyes of other people; other systems of morals are meant to
tranquilize him, and make him self-satisfied; with other systems
he wants to crucify and humble himself, with others he wishes to
take revenge, with others to conceal himself, with others to
glorify himself and gave superiority and distinction,--this system
of morals helps its author to forget, that system makes him, or
something of him, forgotten, many a moralist would like to exercise
power and creative arbitrariness over mankind, many another,
perhaps, Kant especially, gives us to understand by his
morals that "what is estimable in me, is that I know how to
obey--and with you it SHALL not be otherwise than with me!" In
short, systems of morals are only a SIGN-LANGUAGE OF THE
EMOTIONS.
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188. In contrast to laisser-aller, every system of morals is a sort
of tyranny against "nature" and also against "reason", that is,
however, no objection, unless one should again decree by some
system of morals, that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonableness
are unlawful What is essential and invaluable in every system of
morals, is that it is a long constraint. In order to understand
Stoicism, or Port Royal, or Puritanism, one should remember the
constraint under which every language has attained to strength
and freedom--the metrical constraint, the tyranny of rhyme and
rhythm. How much trouble have the poets and orators of every
nation given themselves!--not excepting some of the prose writers
of today, in whose ear dwells an inexorable conscientiousness--
"for the sake of a folly," as utilitarian bunglers say, and
thereby deem themselves wise--"from submission to arbitrary
laws," as the anarchists say, and thereby fancy themselves
"free," even free-spirited. The singular fact remains, however,
that everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness,
dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed,
whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking
and persuading, in art just as in conduct, has only developed
by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law, and in all seriousness,
it is not at all improbable that precisely this is "nature" and
"natural"--and not laisser-aller! Every artist knows how different
from the state of letting himself go, is his "most natural" condition,
the free arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing in
the moments of "inspiration"--and how strictly and delicately he
then obeys a thousand laws, which, by their very rigidness and
precision, defy all formulation by means of ideas (even the most
stable idea has, in comparison therewith, something floating,
manifold, and ambiguous in it). The essential thing "in heaven
and in earth" is, apparently (to repeat it once more), that there
should be long OBEDIENCE in the same direction, there thereby
results, and has always resulted in the long run, something
which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music,
dancing, reason, spirituality-- anything whatever that is transfiguring,
refined, foolish, or divine. The long bondage of the spirit,
the distrustful constraint in the communicability of ideas, the
discipline which the thinker imposed on himself to think in accordance
with the rules of a church or a court, or conformable to
Aristotelian premises, the persistent spiritual will to interpret
everything that happened according to a Christian scheme, and
in every occurrence to rediscover and justify the Christian God:--
all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness,
has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby
the European spirit has attained its strength, its remorseless
curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that much irrecoverable
strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated, and spoilt in
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the process (for here, as everywhere, "nature" shows herself as
she is, in all her extravagant and INDIFFERENT magnificence,
which is shocking, but nevertheless noble). That for centuries
European thinkers only thought in order to prove something--
nowadays, on the contrary, we are suspicious of every thinker
who "wishes to prove something"--that it was always settled
beforehand what WAS TO BE the result of their strictest thinking,
as it was perhaps in the Asiatic astrology of former times, or as it
is still at the present day in the innocent, Christian-moral explanation
of immediate personal events "for the glory of God," or
"for the good of the soul":--this tyranny, this arbitrariness, this
severe and magnificent stupidity, has EDUCATED the spirit;
slavery, both in the coarser and the finer sense, is apparently an
indispensable means even of spiritual education and discipline.
One may look at every system of morals in this light: it is "nature"
therein which teaches to hate the laisser-aller, the too
great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons, for
immediate duties--it teaches the NARROWING OF PERSPECTIVES,
and thus, in a certain sense, that stupidity is a condition
of life and development. "Thou must obey some one, and for a
long time; OTHERWISE thou wilt come to grief, and lose all
respect for thyself"--this seems to me to be the moral imperative
of nature, which is certainly neither "categorical," as old Kant
wished (consequently the "otherwise"), nor does it address itself
to the individual (what does nature care for the individual!), but
to nations, races, ages, and ranks; above all, however, to the
animal "man" generally, to MANKIND.
189. Industrious races find it a great hardship to be idle: it was a
master stroke of ENGLISH instinct to hallow and begloom Sunday
to such an extent that the Englishman unconsciously hankers
for his week--and work-day again:--as a kind of cleverly
devised, cleverly intercalated FAST, such as is also frequently
found in the ancient world (although, as is appropriate in southern
nations, not precisely with respect to work). Many kinds of
fasts are necessary; and wherever powerful influences and habits
prevail, legislators have to see that intercalary days are appointed,
on which such impulses are fettered, and learn to
hunger anew. Viewed from a higher standpoint, whole generations
and epochs, when they show themselves infected with any
moral fanaticism, seem like those intercalated periods of restraint
and fasting, during which an impulse learns to humble
and submit itself--at the same time also to PURIFY and SHARPEN
itself; certain philosophical sects likewise admit of a similar interpretation
(for instance, the Stoa, in the midst of Hellenic
culture, with the atmosphere rank and overcharged with Aphrodisiacal
odours).--Here also is a hint for the explanation of the
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paradox, why it was precisely in the most Christian period of
European history, and in general only under the pressure of
Christian sentiments, that the sexual impulse sublimated into
love (amour-passion).
190. There is something in the morality of Plato which does not
really belong to Plato, but which only appears in his philosophy,
one might say, in spite of him: namely, Socratism, for which he
himself was too noble. "No one desires to injure himself, hence
all evil is done unwittingly. The evil man inflicts injury on himself;
he would not do so, however, if he knew that evil is evil.
The evil man, therefore, is only evil through error; if one free
him from error one will necessarily make him--good."--This
mode of reasoning savours of the POPULACE, who perceive only
the unpleasant consequences of evil-doing, and practically judge
that "it is STUPID to do wrong"; while they accept "good" as
identical with "useful and pleasant," without further thought. As
regards every system of utilitarianism, one may at once assume
that it has the same origin, and follow the scent: one will seldom
err.-- Plato did all he could to interpret something refined and
noble into the tenets of his teacher, and above all to interpret
himself into them--he, the most daring of all interpreters, who
lifted the entire Socrates out of the street, as a popular theme
and song, to exhibit him in endless and impossible modifications
--namely, in all his own disguises and multiplicities. In jest, and
in Homeric language as well, what is the Platonic Socrates, if
not-- [Greek words inserted here.]
191. The old theological problem of "Faith" and "Knowledge," or
more plainly, of instinct and reason--the question whether, in
respect to the valuation of things, instinct deserves more authority
than rationality, which wants to appreciate and act according
to motives, according to a "Why," that is to say, in conformity to
purpose and utility--it is always the old moral problem that first
appeared in the person of Socrates, and had divided men's
minds long before Christianity. Socrates himself, following, of
course, the taste of his talent--that of a surpassing dialectician--
took first the side of reason; and, in fact, what did he do all his
life but laugh at the awkward incapacity of the noble Athenians,
who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and could never
give satisfactory answers concerning the motives of their actions?
In the end, however, though silently and secretly, he
laughed also at himself: with his finer conscience and introspection,
he found in himself the same difficulty and incapacity. "But
why"--he said to himself-- "should one on that account separate
oneself from the instincts! One must set them right, and the
reason ALSO--one must follow the instincts, but at the same
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time persuade the reason to support them with good arguments."
This was the real FALSENESS of that great and mysterious
ironist; he brought his conscience up to the point that he
was satisfied with a kind of self-outwitting: in fact, he perceived
the irrationality in the moral judgment.-- Plato, more innocent in
such matters, and without the craftiness of the plebeian, wished
to prove to himself, at the expenditure of all his strength--the
greatest strength a philosopher had ever expended--that reason
and instinct lead spontaneously to one goal, to the good, to
"God"; and since Plato, all theologians and philosophers have
followed the same path--which means that in matters of morality,
instinct (or as Christians call it, "Faith," or as I call it, "the
herd") has hitherto triumphed. Unless one should make an exception
in the case of Descartes, the father of rationalism (and
consequently the grandfather of the Revolution), who recognized
only the authority of reason: but reason is only a tool, and Descartes
was superficial.
192. Whoever has followed the history of a single science, finds
in its development a clue to the understanding of the oldest and
commonest processes of all "knowledge and cognizance": there,
as here, the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid
will to "belief," and the lack of distrust and patience are first
developed--our senses learn late, and never learn completely, to
be subtle, reliable, and cautious organs of knowledge. Our eyes
find it easier on a given occasion to produce a picture already
often produced, than to seize upon the divergence and novelty of
an impression: the latter requires more force, more "morality." It
is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we
hear strange music badly. When we hear another language spoken,
we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds into words with
which we are more familiar and conversant--it was thus, for
example, that the Germans modified the spoken word ARCUBALISTA
into ARMBRUST (cross-bow). Our senses are also hostile
and averse to the new; and generally, even in the "simplest"
processes of sensation, the emotions DOMINATE--such as fear,
love, hatred, and the passive emotion of indolence.--As little as a
reader nowadays reads all the single words (not to speak of
syllables) of a page --he rather takes about five out of every
twenty words at random, and "guesses" the probably appropriate
sense to them--just as little do we see a tree correctly and completely
in respect to its leaves, branches, colour, and shape; we
find it so much easier to fancy the chance of a tree. Even in the
midst of the most remarkable experiences, we still do just the
same; we fabricate the greater part of the experience, and can
hardly be made to contemplate any event, EXCEPT as "inventors"
thereof. All this goes to prove that from our fundamental
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nature and from remote ages we have been--ACCUSTOMED TO
LYING. Or, to express it more politely and hypocritically, in short,
more pleasantly--one is much more of an artist than one is
aware of.--In an animated conversation, I often see the face of
the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and sharply
defined before me, according to the thought he expresses, or
which I believe to be evoked in his mind, that the degree of
distinctness far exceeds the STRENGTH of my visual faculty--the
delicacy of the play of the muscles and of the expression of the
eyes MUST therefore be imagined by me. Probably the person
put on quite a different expression, or none at all.
193. Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit: but also contrariwise.
What we experience in dreams, provided we experience it often,
pertains at last just as much to the general belongings of our
soul as anything "actually" experienced; by virtue thereof we are
richer or poorer, we have a requirement more or less, and finally,
in broad daylight, and even in the brightest moments of
our waking life, we are ruled to some extent by the nature of our
dreams. Supposing that someone has often flown in his dreams,
and that at last, as soon as he dreams, he is conscious of the
power and art of flying as his privilege and his peculiarly enviable
happiness; such a person, who believes that on the slightest
impulse, he can actualize all sorts of curves and angles, who
knows the sensation of a certain divine levity, an "upwards"
without effort or constraint, a "downwards" without descending
or lowering--without TROUBLE!--how could the man with such
dream- experiences and dream-habits fail to find "happiness"
differently coloured and defined, even in his waking hours! How
could he fail--to long DIFFERENTLY for happiness? "Flight," such
as is described by poets, must, when compared with his own
"flying," be far too earthly, muscular, violent, far too "troublesome"
for him.
194. The difference among men does not manifest itself only in
the difference of their lists of desirable things--in their regarding
different good things as worth striving for, and being disagreed
as to the greater or less value, the order of rank, of the commonly
recognized desirable things:--it manifests itself much
more in what they regard as actually HAVING and POSSESSING
a desirable thing. As regards a woman, for instance, the control
over her body and her sexual gratification serves as an amply
sufficient sign of ownership and possession to the more modest
man; another with a more suspicious and ambitious thirst for
possession, sees the "questionableness," the mere apparentness
of such ownership, and wishes to have finer tests in order to
know especially whether the woman not only gives herself to
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him, but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to
have-- only THEN does he look upon her as "possessed." A third,
however, has not even here got to the limit of his distrust and
his desire for possession: he asks himself whether the woman,
when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so
for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed,
profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to
let himself be found out. Only then does he feel the beloved one
fully in his possession, when she no longer deceives herself
about him, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his
devilry and concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience,
and spirituality. One man would like to possess a nation, and he
finds all the higher arts of Cagliostro and Catalina suitable for his
purpose. Another, with a more refined thirst for possession, says
to himself: "One may not deceive where one desires to possess"-
-he is irritated and impatient at the idea that a mask of him
should rule in the hearts of the people: "I must, therefore, MAKE
myself known, and first of all learn to know myself!" Among
helpful and charitable people, one almost always finds the awkward
craftiness which first gets up suitably him who has to be
helped, as though, for instance, he should "merit" help, seek just
THEIR help, and would show himself deeply grateful, attached,
and subservient to them for all help. With these conceits, they
take control of the needy as a property, just as in general they
are charitable and helpful out of a desire for property. One finds
them jealous when they are crossed or forestalled in their charity.
Parents involuntarily make something like themselves out of
their children--they call that "education"; no mother doubts at
the bottom of her heart that the child she has borne is thereby
her property, no father hesitates about his right to HIS OWN
ideas and notions of worth. Indeed, in former times fathers
deemed it right to use their discretion concerning the life or
death of the newly born (as among the ancient Germans). And
like the father, so also do the teacher, the class, the priest, and
the prince still see in every new individual an unobjectionable
opportunity for a new possession. The consequence is . . .
195. The Jews--a people "born for slavery," as Tacitus and the
whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the
nations," as they themselves say and believe--the Jews performed
the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of
which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a
couple of millenniums. Their prophets fused into one the expressions
"rich," "godless," "wicked," "violent," "sensual," and for the
first time coined the word "world" as a term of reproach. In this
inversion of valuations (in which is also included the use of the
word "poor" as synonymous with "saint" and "friend") the signifi-
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cance of the Jewish people is to be found; it is with THEM that
the SLAVE-INSURRECTION IN MORALS commences.
196. It is to be INFERRED that there are countless dark bodies
near the sun--such as we shall never see. Among ourselves, this
is an allegory; and the psychologist of morals reads the whole
star-writing merely as an allegorical and symbolic language in
which much may be unexpressed.
197. The beast of prey and the man of prey (for instance, Caesar
Borgia) are fundamentally misunderstood, "nature" is misunderstood,
so long as one seeks a "morbidness" in the constitution of
these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even an
innate "hell" in them--as almost all moralists have done hitherto.
Does it not seem that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of
the tropics among moralists? And that the "tropical man" must
be discredited at all costs, whether as disease and deterioration
of mankind, or as his own hell and self-torture? And why? In
favour of the "temperate zones"? In favour of the temperate
men? The "moral"? The mediocre?--This for the chapter: "Morals
as Timidity."
198. All the systems of morals which address themselves with a
view to their "happiness," as it is called--what else are they but
suggestions for behaviour adapted to the degree of DANGER
from themselves in which the individuals live; recipes for their
passions, their good and bad propensities, insofar as such have
the Will to Power and would like to play the master; small and
great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty
odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them
grotesque and absurd in their form--because they address themselves
to "all," because they generalize where generalization is
not authorized; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking
themselves unconditionally; all of them flavoured not merely
with one grain of salt, but rather endurable only, and sometimes
even seductive, when they are over-spiced and begin to smell
dangerously, especially of "the other world." That is all of little
value when estimated intellectually, and is far from being "science,"
much less "wisdom"; but, repeated once more, and three
times repeated, it is expediency, expediency, expediency, mixed
with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity--whether it be the indifference
and statuesque coldness towards the heated folly of the emotions,
which the Stoics advised and fostered; or the no- morelaughing
and no-more-weeping of Spinoza, the destruction of the
emotions by their analysis and vivisection, which he recommended
so naively; or the lowering of the emotions to an innocent
mean at which they may be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of
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morals; or even morality as the enjoyment of the emotions in a
voluntary attenuation and spiritualization by the symbolism of
art, perhaps as music, or as love of God, and of mankind for
God's sake--for in religion the passions are once more enfranchised,
provided that . . . ; or, finally, even the complaisant and
wanton surrender to the emotions, as has been taught by Hafis
and Goethe, the bold letting-go of the reins, the spiritual and
corporeal licentia morum in the exceptional cases of wise old
codgers and drunkards, with whom it "no longer has much danger."
--This also for the chapter: "Morals as Timidity."
199. Inasmuch as in all ages, as long as mankind has existed,
there have also been human herds (family alliances, communities,
tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always a great number
who obey in proportion to the small number who command--
in view, therefore, of the fact that obedience has been most
practiced and fostered among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably
suppose that, generally speaking, the need thereof is
now innate in every one, as a kind of FORMAL CONSCIENCE
which gives the command "Thou shalt unconditionally do something,
unconditionally refrain from something", in short, "Thou
shalt". This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a
content, according to its strength, impatience, and eagerness, it
at once seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection,
and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders--
parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public
opinion. The extraordinary limitation of human development, the
hesitation, protractedness, frequent retrogression, and turning
thereof, is attributable to the fact that the herd-instinct of obedience
is transmitted best, and at the cost of the art of command.
If one imagine this instinct increasing to its greatest extent,
commanders and independent individuals will finally be lacking
altogether, or they will suffer inwardly from a bad conscience,
and will have to impose a deception on themselves in the first
place in order to be able to command just as if they also were
only obeying. This condition of things actually exists in Europe at
present--I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanding class.
They know no other way of protecting themselves from their bad
conscience than by playing the role of executors of older and
higher orders (of predecessors, of the constitution, of justice, of
the law, or of God himself), or they even justify themselves by
maxims from the current opinions of the herd, as "first servants
of their people," or "instruments of the public weal". On the
other hand, the gregarious European man nowadays assumes an
air as if he were the only kind of man that is allowable, he glorifies
his qualities, such as public spirit, kindness, deference, industry,
temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy, by virtue
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of which he is gentle, endurable, and useful to the herd, as the
peculiarly human virtues. In cases, however, where it is believed
that the leader and bell-wether cannot be dispensed with, attempt
after attempt is made nowadays to replace commanders
by the summing together of clever gregarious men all representative
constitutions, for example, are of this origin. In spite of all,
what a blessing, what a deliverance from a weight becoming
unendurable, is the appearance of an absolute ruler for these
gregarious Europeans--of this fact the effect of the appearance
of Napoleon was the last great proof the history of the influence
of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness to
which the entire century has attained in its worthiest individuals
and periods.
200. The man of an age of dissolution which mixes the races
with one another, who has the inheritance of a diversified descent
in his body--that is to say, contrary, and often not only
contrary, instincts and standards of value, which struggle with
one another and are seldom at peace--such a man of late culture
and broken lights, will, on an average, be a weak man. His fundamental
desire is that the war which is IN HIM should come to
an end; happiness appears to him in the character of a soothing
medicine and mode of thought (for instance, Epicurean or Christian);
it is above all things the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness,
of repletion, of final unity--it is the "Sabbath of
Sabbaths," to use the expression of the holy rhetorician, St.
Augustine, who was himself such a man.--Should, however, the
contrariety and conflict in such natures operate as an ADDITIONAL
incentive and stimulus to life--and if, on the other hand,
in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable instincts, they
have also inherited and indoctrinated into them a proper mastery
and subtlety for carrying on the conflict with themselves (that is
to say, the faculty of self-control and self-deception), there then
arise those marvelously incomprehensible and inexplicable beings,
those enigmatical men, predestined for conquering and
circumventing others, the finest examples of which are Alcibiades
and Caesar (with whom I should like to associate the FIRST of
Europeans according to my taste, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick
the Second), and among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci.
They appear precisely in the same periods when that weaker
type, with its longing for repose, comes to the front; the two
types are complementary to each other, and spring from the
same causes.
201. As long as the utility which determines moral estimates is
only gregarious utility, as long as the preservation of the community
is only kept in view, and the immoral is sought precisely
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and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the maintenance of
the community, there can be no "morality of love to one's
neighbour." Granted even that there is already a little constant
exercise of consideration, sympathy, fairness, gentleness, and
mutual assistance, granted that even in this condition of society
all those instincts are already active which are latterly distinguished
by honourable names as "virtues," and eventually almost
coincide with the conception "morality": in that period they
do not as yet belong to the domain of moral valuations--they are
still ULTRA-MORAL. A sympathetic action, for instance, is neither
called good nor bad, moral nor immoral, in the best period of the
Romans; and should it be praised, a sort of resentful disdain is
compatible with this praise, even at the best, directly the sympathetic
action is compared with one which contributes to the welfare
of the whole, to the RES PUBLICA. After all, "love to our
neighbour" is always a secondary matter, partly conventional
and arbitrarily manifested in relation to our FEAR OF OUR
NEIGHBOUR. After the fabric of society seems on the whole
established and secured against external dangers, it is this fear
of our neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral
valuation. Certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the
love of enterprise, foolhardiness, revengefulness, astuteness,
rapacity, and love of power, which up till then had not only to be
honoured from the point of view of general utility--under other
names, of course, than those here given--but had to be fostered
and cultivated (because they were perpetually required in the
common danger against the common enemies), are now felt in
their dangerousness to be doubly strong--when the outlets for
them are lacking--and are gradually branded as immoral and
given over to calumny. The contrary instincts and inclinations
now attain to moral honour, the gregarious instinct gradually
draws its conclusions. How much or how little dangerousness to
the community or to equality is contained in an opinion, a condition,
an emotion, a disposition, or an endowment-- that is now
the moral perspective, here again fear is the mother of morals. It
is by the loftiest and strongest instincts, when they break out
passionately and carry the individual far above and beyond the
average, and the low level of the gregarious conscience, that the
self-reliance of the community is destroyed, its belief in itself, its
backbone, as it were, breaks, consequently these very instincts
will be most branded and defamed. The lofty independent spirituality,
the will to stand alone, and even the cogent reason, are
felt to be dangers, everything that elevates the individual above
the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth
called EVIL, the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, selfequalizing
disposition, the MEDIOCRITY of desires, attains to
moral distinction and honour. Finally, under very peaceful cir-
- 70 -
cumstances, there is always less opportunity and necessity for
training the feelings to severity and rigour, and now every form
of severity, even in justice, begins to disturb the conscience, a
lofty and rigorous nobleness and self-responsibility almost offends,
and awakens distrust, "the lamb," and still more "the
sheep," wins respect. There is a point of diseased mellowness
and effeminacy in the history of society, at which society itself
takes the part of him who injures it, the part of the CRIMINAL,
and does so, in fact, seriously and honestly. To punish, appears
to it to be somehow unfair--it is certain that the idea of "punishment"
and "the obligation to punish" are then painful and alarming
to people. "Is it not sufficient if the criminal be rendered
HARMLESS? Why should we still punish? Punishment itself is
terrible!"--with these questions gregarious morality, the morality
of fear, draws its ultimate conclusion. If one could at all do away
with danger, the cause of fear, one would have done away with
this morality at the same time, it would no longer be necessary,
it WOULD NOT CONSIDER ITSELF any longer necessary!--
Whoever examines the conscience of the present-day European,
will always elicit the same imperative from its thousand moral
folds and hidden recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the
herd "we wish that some time or other there may be NOTHING
MORE TO FEAR!" Some time or other--the will and the way
THERETO is nowadays called "progress" all over Europe.
202. Let us at once say again what we have already said a hundred
times, for people's ears nowadays are unwilling to hear
such truths--OUR truths. We know well enough how offensive it
sounds when any one plainly, and without metaphor, counts man
among the animals, but it will be accounted to us almost a
CRIME, that it is precisely in respect to men of "modern ideas"
that we have constantly applied the terms "herd," "herdinstincts,"
and such like expressions. What avail is it? We cannot
do otherwise, for it is precisely here that our new insight is. We
have found that in all the principal moral judgments, Europe has
become unanimous, including likewise the countries where European
influence prevails in Europe people evidently KNOW what
Socrates thought he did not know, and what the famous serpent
of old once promised to teach--they "know" today what is good
and evil. It must then sound hard and be distasteful to the ear,
when we always insist that that which here thinks it knows, that
which here glorifies itself with praise and blame, and calls itself
good, is the instinct of the herding human animal, the instinct
which has come and is ever coming more and more to the front,
to preponderance and supremacy over other instincts, according
to the increasing physiological approximation and resemblance of
which it is the symptom. MORALITY IN EUROPE AT PRESENT IS
- 71 -
HERDING-ANIMAL MORALITY, and therefore, as we understand
the matter, only one kind of human morality, beside which,
before which, and after which many other moralities, and above
all HIGHER moralities, are or should be possible. Against such a
"possibility," against such a "should be," however, this morality
defends itself with all its strength, it says obstinately and inexorably
"I am morality itself and nothing else is morality!" Indeed,
with the help of a religion which has humoured and flattered the
sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things have reached
such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this
morality even in political and social arrangements: the DEMOCRATIC
movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement.
That its TEMPO, however, is much too slow and sleepy for the
more impatient ones, for those who are sick and distracted by
the herding-instinct, is indicated by the increasingly furious
howling, and always less disguised teeth- gnashing of the anarchist
dogs, who are now roving through the highways of European
culture. Apparently in opposition to the peacefully
industrious democrats and Revolution-ideologues, and still more
so to the awkward philosophasters and fraternity- visionaries
who call themselves Socialists and want a "free society," those
are really at one with them all in their thorough and instinctive
hostility to every form of society other than that of the
AUTONOMOUS herd (to the extent even of repudiating the notions
"master" and "servant"--ni dieu ni maitre, says a socialist
formula); at one in their tenacious opposition to every special
claim, every special right and privilege (this means ultimately
opposition to EVERY right, for when all are equal, no one needs
"rights" any longer); at one in their distrust of punitive justice
(as though it were a violation of the weak, unfair to the NECESSARY
consequences of all former society); but equally at one in
their religion of sympathy, in their compassion for all that feels,
lives, and suffers (down to the very animals, up even to "God"--
the extravagance of "sympathy for God" belongs to a democratic
age); altogether at one in the cry and impatience of their sympathy,
in their deadly hatred of suffering generally, in their almost
feminine incapacity for witnessing it or ALLOWING it; at one in
their involuntary beglooming and heart-softening, under the spell
of which Europe seems to be threatened with a new Buddhism;
at one in their belief in the morality of MUTUAL sympathy, as
though it were morality in itself, the climax, the ATTAINED climax
of mankind, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of
the present, the great discharge from all the obligations of the
past; altogether at one in their belief in the community as the
DELIVERER, in the herd, and therefore in "themselves."
- 72 -
203. We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic
movement, not only as a degenerating form of political
organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type
of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where
have WE to fix our hopes? In NEW PHILOSOPHERS--there is no
other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate
opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal
valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the
present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will
compel millenniums to take NEW paths. To teach man the future
of humanity as his WILL, as depending on human will, and to
make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective
attempts in rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an
end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto
gone by the name of "history" (the folly of the "greatest number"
is only its last form)--for that purpose a new type of philosopher
and commander will some time or other be needed, at the very
idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult,
terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. The
image of such leaders hovers before OUR eyes:--is it lawful for
me to say it aloud, ye free spirits? The conditions which one
would partly have to create and partly utilize for their genesis;
the presumptive methods and tests by virtue of which a soul
should grow up to such an elevation and power as to feel a
CONSTRAINT to these tasks; a transvaluation of values, under
the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be
steeled and a heart transformed into brass, so as to bear the
weight of such responsibility; and on the other hand the necessity
for such leaders, the dreadful danger that they might be
lacking, or miscarry and degenerate:--these are OUR real anxieties
and glooms, ye know it well, ye free spirits! these are the
heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep across the
heaven of OUR life. There are few pains so grievous as to have
seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has
missed his way and deteriorated; but he who has the rare eye
for the universal danger of "man" himself DETERIORATING, he
who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness
which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of
mankind--a game in which neither the hand, nor even a "finger
of God" has participated!--he who divines the fate that is hidden
under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of "modern
ideas," and still more under the whole of Christo-European morality--
suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared.
He sees at a glance all that could still BE MADE OUT OF
MAN through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of
human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the knowledge
of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the
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greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man
has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:--
he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what
wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank
have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and
become contemptible. The UNIVERSAL DEGENERACY OF MANKIND
to the level of the "man of the future"--as idealized by the
socialistic fools and shallow-pates--this degeneracy and dwarfing
of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a
man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with
equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly POSSIBLE! He who has
thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows
ANOTHER loathing unknown to the rest of mankind--and perhaps
also a new MISSION!
- 74 -

CHAPTER VI - WE SCHOLARS

204. At the risk that moralizing may also reveal itself here as
that which it has always been--namely, resolutely MONTRER SES
PLAIES, according to Balzac--I would venture to protest against
an improper and injurious alteration of rank, which quite unnoticed,
and as if with the best conscience, threatens nowadays to
establish itself in the relations of science and philosophy. I mean
to say that one must have the right out of one's own EXPERIENCE--
experience, as it seems to me, always implies unfortunate
experience?--to treat of such an important question of rank, so
as not to speak of colour like the blind, or AGAINST science like
women and artists ("Ah! this dreadful science!" sigh their instinct
and their shame, "it always FINDS THINGS OUT!"). The declaration
of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from
philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic
organization and disorganization: the self- glorification and selfconceitedness
of the learned man is now everywhere in full
bloom, and in its best springtime--which does not mean to imply
that in this case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct
of the populace cries, "Freedom from all masters!" and after
science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose
"hand-maid" it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness
and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its
turn to play the "master"--what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER
on its own account. My memory-- the memory of a
scientific man, if you please!--teems with the naivetes of insolence
which I have heard about philosophy and philosophers
from young naturalists and old physicians (not to mention the
most cultured and most conceited of all learned men, the philologists
and schoolmasters, who are both the one and the other
by profession). On one occasion it was the specialist and the
Jack Horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against all
synthetic tasks and capabilities; at another time it was the industrious
worker who had got a scent of OTIUM and refined
luxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher, and
felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby. On another occasion
it was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing in
philosophy but a series of REFUTED systems, and an extravagant
expenditure which "does nobody any good". At another time the
fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment of
knowledge became conspicuous, at another time the disregard of
individual philosophers, which had involuntarily extended to
disregard of philosophy generally. In fine, I found most fre-
- 75 -
quently, behind the proud disdain of philosophy in young scholars,
the evil after-effect of some particular philosopher, to whom
on the whole obedience had been foresworn, without, however,
the spell of his scornful estimates of other philosophers having
been got rid of--the result being a general ill-will to all philosophy.
(Such seems to me, for instance, the after-effect of
Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany: by his unintelligent
rage against Hegel, he has succeeded in severing the whole
of the last generation of Germans from its connection with German
culture, which culture, all things considered, has been an
elevation and a divining refinement of the HISTORICAL SENSE,
but precisely at this point Schopenhauer himself was poor, irreceptive,
and un-German to the extent of ingeniousness.) On the
whole, speaking generally, it may just have been the humanness,
all-too-humanness of the modern philosophers themselves,
in short, their contemptibleness, which has injured most radically
the reverence for philosophy and opened the doors to the instinct
of the populace. Let it but be acknowledged to what an
extent our modern world diverges from the whole style of the
world of Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever else all the
royal and magnificent anchorites of the spirit were called, and
with what justice an honest man of science MAY feel himself of a
better family and origin, in view of such representatives of philosophy,
who, owing to the fashion of the present day, are just
as much aloft as they are down below--in Germany, for instance,
the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Duhring and the
amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann. It is especially the sight of
those hotch-potch philosophers, who call themselves "realists,"
or "positivists," which is calculated to implant a dangerous distrust
in the soul of a young and ambitious scholar those philosophers,
at the best, are themselves but scholars and specialists,
that is very evident! All of them are persons who have been
vanquished and BROUGHT BACK AGAIN under the dominion of
science, who at one time or another claimed more from themselves,
without having a right to the "more" and its responsibility--
and who now, creditably, rancorously, and vindictively,
represent in word and deed, DISBELIEF in the master-task and
supremacy of philosophy After all, how could it be otherwise?
Science flourishes nowadays and has the good conscience clearly
visible on its countenance, while that to which the entire modern
philosophy has gradually sunk, the remnant of philosophy of the
present day, excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and
pity Philosophy reduced to a "theory of knowledge," no more in
fact than a diffident science of epochs and doctrine of forbearance
a philosophy that never even gets beyond the threshold,
and rigorously DENIES itself the right to enter--that is philosophy
- 76 -
in its last throes, an end, an agony, something that awakens
pity. How could such a philosophy--RULE!
205. The dangers that beset the evolution of the philosopher are,
in fact, so manifold nowadays, that one might doubt whether this
fruit could still come to maturity. The extent and towering structure
of the sciences have increased enormously, and therewith
also the probability that the philosopher will grow tired even as a
learner, or will attach himself somewhere and "specialize" so that
he will no longer attain to his elevation, that is to say, to his
superspection, his circumspection, and his DESPECTION. Or he
gets aloft too late, when the best of his maturity and strength is
past, or when he is impaired, coarsened, and deteriorated, so
that his view, his general estimate of things, is no longer of
much importance. It is perhaps just the refinement of his intellectual
conscience that makes him hesitate and linger on the
way, he dreads the temptation to become a dilettante, a
millepede, a milleantenna, he knows too well that as a discerner,
one who has lost his self-respect no longer commands, no longer
LEADS, unless he should aspire to become a great play-actor, a
philosophical Cagliostro and spiritual rat- catcher--in short, a
misleader. This is in the last instance a question of taste, if it has
not really been a question of conscience. To double once more
the philosopher's difficulties, there is also the fact that he demands
from himself a verdict, a Yea or Nay, not concerning
science, but concerning life and the worth of life--he learns unwillingly
to believe that it is his right and even his duty to obtain
this verdict, and he has to seek his way to the right and the
belief only through the most extensive (perhaps disturbing and
destroying) experiences, often hesitating, doubting, and dumbfounded.
In fact, the philosopher has long been mistaken and
confused by the multitude, either with the scientific man and
ideal scholar, or with the religiously elevated, desensualized,
desecularized visionary and God- intoxicated man; and even yet
when one hears anybody praised, because he lives "wisely," or
"as a philosopher," it hardly means anything more than "prudently
and apart." Wisdom: that seems to the populace to be a
kind of flight, a means and artifice for withdrawing successfully
from a bad game; but the GENUINE philosopher--does it not
seem so to US, my friends?--lives "unphilosophically" and "unwisely,"
above all, IMPRUDENTLY, and feels the obligation and
burden of a hundred attempts and temptations of life--he risks
HIMSELF constantly, he plays THIS bad game.
206. In relation to the genius, that is to say, a being who either
ENGENDERS or PRODUCES--both words understood in their
fullest sense--the man of learning, the scientific average man,
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has always something of the old maid about him; for, like her,
he is not conversant with the two principal functions of man. To
both, of course, to the scholar and to the old maid, one concedes
respectability, as if by way of indemnification--in these cases one
emphasizes the respectability--and yet, in the compulsion of this
concession, one has the same admixture of vexation. Let us
examine more closely: what is the scientific man? Firstly, a
commonplace type of man, with commonplace virtues: that is to
say, a non-ruling, non-authoritative, and non-self-sufficient type
of man; he possesses industry, patient adaptableness to rank
and file, equability and moderation in capacity and requirement;
he has the instinct for people like himself, and for that which
they require--for instance: the portion of independence and
green meadow without which there is no rest from labour, the
claim to honour and consideration (which first and foremost
presupposes recognition and recognisability), the sunshine of a
good name, the perpetual ratification of his value and usefulness,
with which the inward DISTRUST which lies at the bottom
of the heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals, has
again and again to be overcome. The learned man, as is appropriate,
has also maladies and faults of an ignoble kind: he is full
of petty envy, and has a lynx-eye for the weak points in those
natures to whose elevations he cannot attain. He is confiding,
yet only as one who lets himself go, but does not FLOW; and
precisely before the man of the great current he stands all the
colder and more reserved-- his eye is then like a smooth and
irresponsive lake, which is no longer moved by rapture or sympathy.
The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is
capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from
the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the
destruction of the exceptional man, and endeavours to break--or
still better, to relax--every bent bow To relax, of course, with
consideration, and naturally with an indulgent hand--to RELAX
with confiding sympathy that is the real art of Jesuitism, which
has always understood how to introduce itself as the religion of
sympathy.
207. However gratefully one may welcome the OBJECTIVE spirit-
-and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its
confounded IPSISIMOSITY!--in the end, however, one must learn
caution even with regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to
the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of
the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in
itself, as if it were salvation and glorification--as is especially
accustomed to happen in the pessimist school, which has also in
its turn good reasons for paying the highest honours to "disinterested
knowledge" The objective man, who no longer curses and
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scolds like the pessimist, the IDEAL man of learning in whom the
scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete
and partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments
that exist, but his place is in the hand of one who is more
powerful He is only an instrument, we may say, he is a MIRROR-
-he is no "purpose in himself" The objective man is in truth a
mirror accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to
be known, with such desires only as knowing or "reflecting"
implies--he waits until something comes, and then expands
himself sensitively, so that even the light footsteps and glidingpast
of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface and film
Whatever "personality" he still possesses seems to him accidental,
arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing, so much has he come to
regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms
and events He calls up the recollection of "himself" with an effort,
and not infrequently wrongly, he readily confounds himself
with other persons, he makes mistakes with regard to his own
needs, and here only is he unrefined and negligent Perhaps he is
troubled about the health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere
of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and society--
indeed, he sets himself to reflect on his suffering, but in vain! His
thoughts already rove away to the MORE GENERAL case, and
tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help
himself He does not now take himself seriously and devote time
to himself he is serene, NOT from lack of trouble, but from lack
of capacity for grasping and dealing with HIS trouble The habitual
complaisance with respect to all objects and experiences, the
radiant and impartial hospitality with which he receives everything
that comes his way, his habit of inconsiderate good-nature,
of dangerous indifference as to Yea and Nay: alas! there are
enough of cases in which he has to atone for these virtues of
his!--and as man generally, he becomes far too easily the CAPUT
MORTUUM of such virtues. Should one wish love or hatred from
him--I mean love and hatred as God, woman, and animal understand
them--he will do what he can, and furnish what he can.
But one must not be surprised if it should not be much--if he
should show himself just at this point to be false, fragile, questionable,
and deteriorated. His love is constrained, his hatred is
artificial, and rather UN TOUR DE FORCE, a slight ostentation
and exaggeration. He is only genuine so far as he can be objective;
only in his serene totality is he still "nature" and "natural."
His mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows
how to affirm, no longer how to deny; he does not command;
neither does he destroy. "JE NE MEPRISE PRESQUE RIEN"-- he
says, with Leibniz: let us not overlook nor undervalue the
PRESQUE! Neither is he a model man; he does not go in advance
of any one, nor after, either; he places himself generally too far
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off to have any reason for espousing the cause of either good or
evil. If he has been so long confounded with the PHILOSOPHER,
with the Caesarian trainer and dictator of civilization, he has had
far too much honour, and what is more essential in him has been
overlooked--he is an instrument, something of a slave, though
certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but nothing in himself--
PRESQUE RIEN! The objective man is an instrument, a costly,
easily injured, easily tarnished measuring instrument and mirroring
apparatus, which is to be taken care of and respected; but he
is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in
whom the REST of existence justifies itself, no termination-- and
still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause,
nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master;
but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's- form,
that must wait for some kind of content and frame to "shape"
itself thereto--for the most part a man without frame and content,
a "selfless" man. Consequently, also, nothing for women,
IN PARENTHESI.
208. When a philosopher nowadays makes known that he is not
a skeptic--I hope that has been gathered from the foregoing
description of the objective spirit?--people all hear it impatiently;
they regard him on that account with some apprehension, they
would like to ask so many, many questions . . . indeed among
timid hearers, of whom there are now so many, he is henceforth
said to be dangerous. With his repudiation of skepticism, it
seems to them as if they heard some evil- threatening sound in
the distance, as if a new kind of explosive were being tried
somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered
Russian NIHILINE, a pessimism BONAE VOLUNTATIS, that not
only denies, means denial, but--dreadful thought! PRACTISES
denial. Against this kind of "good-will"--a will to the veritable,
actual negation of life--there is, as is generally acknowledged
nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism, the
mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism; and Hamlet himself is
now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an antidote to the
"spirit," and its underground noises. "Are not our ears already
full of bad sounds?" say the skeptics, as lovers of repose, and
almost as a kind of safety police; "this subterranean Nay is terrible!
Be still, ye pessimistic moles!" The skeptic, in effect, that
delicate creature, is far too easily frightened; his conscience is
schooled so as to start at every Nay, and even at that sharp,
decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby. Yea! and
Nay!--they seem to him opposed to morality; he loves, on the
contrary, to make a festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness,
while perhaps he says with Montaigne: "What do I know?" Or
with Socrates: "I know that I know nothing." Or: "Here I do not
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trust myself, no door is open to me." Or: "Even if the door were
open, why should I enter immediately?" Or: "What is the use of
any hasty hypotheses? It might quite well be in good taste to
make no hypotheses at all. Are you absolutely obliged to
straighten at once what is crooked? to stuff every hole with some
kind of oakum? Is there not time enough for that? Has not the
time leisure? Oh, ye demons, can ye not at all WAIT? The uncertain
also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a Circe, and Circe,
too, was a philosopher."--Thus does a skeptic console himself;
and in truth he needs some consolation. For skepticism is the
most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological
temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility
and sickliness; it arises whenever races or classes which
have been long separated, decisively and suddenly blend with
one another. In the new generation, which has inherited as it
were different standards and valuations in its blood, everything
is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and tentativeness; the best
powers operate restrictively, the very virtues prevent each other
growing and becoming strong, equilibrium, ballast, and perpendicular
stability are lacking in body and soul. That, however,
which is most diseased and degenerated in such nondescripts is
the WILL; they are no longer familiar with independence of decision,
or the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing--they are
doubtful of the "freedom of the will" even in their dreams Our
present-day Europe, the scene of a senseless, precipitate attempt
at a radical blending of classes, and CONSEQUENTLY of
races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths, sometimes
exhibiting the mobile skepticism which springs impatiently
and wantonly from branch to branch, sometimes with gloomy
aspect, like a cloud over-charged with interrogative signs--and
often sick unto death of its will! Paralysis of will, where do we
not find this cripple sitting nowadays! And yet how bedecked
oftentimes' How seductively ornamented! There are the finest
gala dresses and disguises for this disease, and that, for instance,
most of what places itself nowadays in the show-cases as
"objectiveness," "the scientific spirit," "L'ART POUR L'ART," and
"pure voluntary knowledge," is only decked-out skepticism and
paralysis of will--I am ready to answer for this diagnosis of the
European disease--The disease of the will is diffused unequally
over Europe, it is worst and most varied where civilization has
longest prevailed, it decreases according as "the barbarian" still--
or again--asserts his claims under the loose drapery of Western
culture It is therefore in the France of today, as can be readily
disclosed and comprehended, that the will is most infirm, and
France, which has always had a masterly aptitude for converting
even the portentous crises of its spirit into something charming
and seductive, now manifests emphatically its intellectual ascen-
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dancy over Europe, by being the school and exhibition of all the
charms of skepticism The power to will and to persist, moreover,
in a resolution, is already somewhat stronger in Germany, and
again in the North of Germany it is stronger than in Central
Germany, it is considerably stronger in England, Spain, and
Corsica, associated with phlegm in the former and with hard
skulls in the latter--not to mention Italy, which is too young yet
to know what it wants, and must first show whether it can exercise
will, but it is strongest and most surprising of all in that
immense middle empire where Europe as it were flows back to
Asia--namely, in Russia There the power to will has been long
stored up and accumulated, there the will--uncertain whether to
be negative or affirmative--waits threateningly to be discharged
(to borrow their pet phrase from our physicists) Perhaps not only
Indian wars and complications in Asia would be necessary to free
Europe from its greatest danger, but also internal subversion,
the shattering of the empire into small states, and above all the
introduction of parliamentary imbecility, together with the obligation
of every one to read his newspaper at breakfast I do not
say this as one who desires it, in my heart I should rather prefer
the contrary--I mean such an increase in the threatening attitude
of Russia, that Europe would have to make up its mind to
become equally threatening--namely, TO ACQUIRE ONE WILL, by
means of a new caste to rule over the Continent, a persistent,
dreadful will of its own, that can set its aims thousands of years
ahead; so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-statism,
and its dynastic as well as its democratic many-willed-ness,
might finally be brought to a close. The time for petty politics is
past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion of
the world--the COMPULSION to great politics.
209. As to how far the new warlike age on which we Europeans
have evidently entered may perhaps favour the growth of another
and stronger kind of skepticism, I should like to express
myself preliminarily merely by a parable, which the lovers of
German history will already understand. That unscrupulous enthusiast
for big, handsome grenadiers (who, as King of Prussia,
brought into being a military and skeptical genius--and
therewith, in reality, the new and now triumphantly emerged
type of German), the problematic, crazy father of Frederick the
Great, had on one point the very knack and lucky grasp of the
genius: he knew what was then lacking in Germany, the want of
which was a hundred times more alarming and serious than any
lack of culture and social form--his ill-will to the young Frederick
resulted from the anxiety of a profound instinct. MEN WERE
LACKING; and he suspected, to his bitterest regret, that his own
son was not man enough. There, however, he deceived himself;
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but who would not have deceived himself in his place? He saw
his son lapsed to atheism, to the ESPRIT, to the pleasant frivolity
of clever Frenchmen--he saw in the background the great bloodsucker,
the spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable
wretchedness of a heart no longer hard enough either for evil or
good, and of a broken will that no longer commands, is no longer
ABLE to command. Meanwhile, however, there grew up in his
son that new kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism--
who knows TO WHAT EXTENT it was encouraged just by his
father's hatred and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to
solitude?--the skepticism of daring manliness, which is closely
related to the genius for war and conquest, and made its first
entrance into Germany in the person of the great Frederick. This
skepticism despises and nevertheless grasps; it undermines and
takes possession; it does not believe, but it does not thereby
lose itself; it gives the spirit a dangerous liberty, but it keeps
strict guard over the heart. It is the GERMAN form of skepticism,
which, as a continued Fredericianism, risen to the highest spirituality,
has kept Europe for a considerable time under the dominion
of the German spirit and its critical and historical distrust
Owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine character
of the great German philologists and historical critics (who,
rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction and
dissolution), a NEW conception of the German spirit gradually
established itself--in spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy--
in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was
decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness of
gaze, as courage and sternness of the dissecting hand, or as
resolute will to dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized
North Pole expeditions under barren and dangerous skies. There
may be good grounds for it when warm-blooded and superficial
humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit, CET ESPRIT
FATALISTE, IRONIQUE, MEPHISTOPHELIQUE, as Michelet calls it,
not without a shudder. But if one would realize how characteristic
is this fear of the "man" in the German spirit which awakened
Europe out of its "dogmatic slumber," let us call to mind the
former conception which had to be overcome by this new one--
and that it is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman
could dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans
to the interest of Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weakwilled,
and poetical fools. Finally, let us only understand profoundly
enough Napoleon's astonishment when he saw Goethe it
reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the "German
spirit" "VOILA UN HOMME!"--that was as much as to say "But
this is a MAN! And I only expected to see a German!"
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210. Supposing, then, that in the picture of the philosophers of
the future, some trait suggests the question whether they must
not perhaps be skeptics in the last-mentioned sense, something
in them would only be designated thereby--and not they themselves.
With equal right they might call themselves critics, and
assuredly they will be men of experiments. By the name with
which I ventured to baptize them, I have already expressly emphasized
their attempting and their love of attempting is this
because, as critics in body and soul, they will love to make use
of experiments in a new, and perhaps wider and more dangerous
sense? In their passion for knowledge, will they have to go further
in daring and painful attempts than the sensitive and pampered
taste of a democratic century can approve of?--There is no
doubt these coming ones will be least able to dispense with the
serious and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic
from the skeptic I mean the certainty as to standards of worth,
the conscious employment of a unity of method, the wary courage,
the standing-alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility,
indeed, they will avow among themselves a DELIGHT in denial
and dissection, and a certain considerate cruelty, which knows
how to handle the knife surely and deftly, even when the heart
bleeds They will be STERNER (and perhaps not always towards
themselves only) than humane people may desire, they will not
deal with the "truth" in order that it may "please" them, or "elevate"
and "inspire" them--they will rather have little faith in
"TRUTH" bringing with it such revels for the feelings. They will
smile, those rigorous spirits, when any one says in their presence
"That thought elevates me, why should it not be true?" or
"That work enchants me, why should it not be beautiful?" or
"That artist enlarges me, why should he not be great?" Perhaps
they will not only have a smile, but a genuine disgust for all that
is thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic, and if
any one could look into their inmost hearts, he would not easily
find therein the intention to reconcile "Christian sentiments" with
"antique taste," or even with "modern parliamentarism" (the
kind of reconciliation necessarily found even among philosophers
in our very uncertain and consequently very conciliatory century).
Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces to purity
and rigour in intellectual matters, will not only be demanded
from themselves by these philosophers of the future, they may
even make a display thereof as their special adornment-- nevertheless
they will not want to be called critics on that account. It
will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have it
decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that "philosophy itself is
criticism and critical science--and nothing else whatever!"
Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of all
the Positivists of France and Germany (and possibly it even
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flattered the heart and taste of KANT: let us call to mind the
titles of his principal works), our new philosophers will say, notwithstanding,
that critics are instruments of the philosopher, and
just on that account, as instruments, they are far from being
philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Konigsberg
was only a great critic.
211. I insist upon it that people finally cease confounding philosophical
workers, and in general scientific men, with philosophers--
that precisely here one should strictly give "each his
own," and not give those far too much, these far too little. It
may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher that
he himself should have once stood upon all those steps upon
which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy, remain
standing, and MUST remain standing he himself must perhaps
have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and besides,
poet, and collector, and traveler, and riddle-reader, and moralist,
and seer, and "free spirit," and almost everything, in order to
traverse the whole range of human values and estimations, and
that he may BE ABLE with a variety of eyes and consciences to
look from a height to any distance, from a depth up to any
height, from a nook into any expanse. But all these are only
preliminary conditions for his task; this task itself demands
something else--it requires him TO CREATE VALUES. The philosophical
workers, after the excellent pattern of Kant and Hegel,
have to fix and formalize some great existing body of valuations-
-that is to say, former DETERMINATIONS OF VALUE, creations of
value, which have become prevalent, and are for a time called
"truths"--whether in the domain of the LOGICAL, the POLITICAL
(moral), or the ARTISTIC. It is for these investigators to make
whatever has happened and been esteemed hitherto, conspicuous,
conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten everything
long, even "time" itself, and to SUBJUGATE the entire past:
an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying out of which all
refined pride, all tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. THE
REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAWGIVERS;
they say: "Thus SHALL it be!" They determine first the
Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the
previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators
of the past--they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and
whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an
instrument, and a hammer. Their "knowing" is CREATING, their
creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is--WILL TO POWER. --
Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been
such philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some
day? . . .
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212. It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a
man INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow,
has ever found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find
himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy
has always been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary
furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers--who
rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as
disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found their
mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end,
however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience
of their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the breast
of the very VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their
own secret; it has been for the sake of a NEW greatness of man,
a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They have always
disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and
self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most
venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was
OUTLIVED, they have always said "We must remove hence to
where YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern
ideas," which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a
"specialty," a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays,
would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the
conception of "greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness
and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine
worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that
which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the
EXTENT to which a man could stretch his responsibility Nowadays
the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the
will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of
will consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will,
sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially
be included in the conception of "greatness", with as good a right
as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing,
humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age--such
as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated
energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness
In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out
instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go--"for
the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as
their conduct indicated--and who had continually on their lips the
old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by
the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of
soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and
plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh
and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do
not dissemble before me! here--we are equal!" At present, on
the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding- animal alone
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attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of
right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong--I
mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange,
and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the
higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence
and lordliness--at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness"
to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being
different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative,
and the philosopher will betray something of his own 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, and of super-abundance
of will; precisely this shall be called GREATNESS: as diversified
as can be entire, as ample as can be full." And to ask once more
the question: Is greatness POSSIBLE-- nowadays?
213. It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot
be taught: one must "know" it by experience--or one should
have the pride NOT to know it. The fact that at present people all
talk of things of which they CANNOT have any experience, is true
more especially and unfortunately as concerns the philosopher
and philosophical matters:--the very few know them, are permitted
to know them, and all popular ideas about them are false.
Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical combination of a bold,
exuberant spirituality which runs at presto pace, and a dialectic
rigour and necessity which makes no false step, is unknown to
most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and
therefore, should any one speak of it in their presence, it is
incredible to them. They conceive of every necessity as troublesome,
as a painful compulsory obedience and state of constraint;
thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and hesitating,
almost as a trouble, and often enough as "worthy of the
SWEAT of the noble"--but not at all as something easy and divine,
closely related to dancing and exuberance! "To think" and
to take a matter "seriously," "arduously"--that is one and the
same thing to them; such only has been their "experience."--
Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only
too well that precisely when they no longer do anything "arbitrarily,"
and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of
subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping,
reaches its climax--in short, that necessity and "freedom of will"
are then the same thing with them. There is, in fine, a gradation
of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the
problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly
every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined
for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality.
Of what use is it for nimble, everyday intellects, or clumsy,
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honest mechanics and empiricists to press, in their plebeian
ambition, close to such problems, and as it were into this "holy
of holies"--as so often happens nowadays! But coarse feet must
never tread upon such carpets: this is provided for in the primary
law of things; the doors remain closed to those intruders,
though they may dash and break their heads thereon. People
have always to be born to a high station, or, more definitely,
they have to be BRED for it: a person has only a right to philosophy--
taking the word in its higher significance--in virtue of his
descent; the ancestors, the "blood," decide here also. Many
generations must have prepared the way for the coming of the
philosopher; each of his virtues must have been separately acquired,
nurtured, transmitted, and embodied; not only the bold,
easy, delicate course and current of his thoughts, but above all
the readiness for great responsibilities, the majesty of ruling
glance and contemning look, the feeling of separation from the
multitude with their duties and virtues, the kindly patronage and
defense of whatever is misunderstood and calumniated, be it
God or devil, the delight and practice of supreme justice, the art
of commanding, the amplitude of will, the lingering eye which
rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves. . . .
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CHAPTER VII - OUR VIRTUES

214. OUR Virtues?--It is probable that we, too, have still our
virtues, although naturally they are not those sincere and massive
virtues on account of which we hold our grandfathers in
esteem and also at a little distance from us. We Europeans of the
day after tomorrow, we firstlings of the twentieth century--with
all our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness and art of disguising,
our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense
and spirit--we shall presumably, IF we must have virtues, have
those only which have come to agreement with our most secret
and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements:
well, then, let us look for them in our labyrinths!--where, as we
know, so many things lose themselves, so many things get quite
lost! And is there anything finer than to SEARCH for one's own
virtues? Is it not almost to BELIEVE in one's own virtues? But
this "believing in one's own virtues"--is it not practically the
same as what was formerly called one's "good conscience," that
long, respectable pigtail of an idea, which our grandfathers used
to hang behind their heads, and often enough also behind their
understandings? It seems, therefore, that however little we may
imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned and grandfatherly respectable
in other respects, in one thing we are nevertheless the
worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers, we last Europeans
with good consciences: we also still wear their pigtail.--Ah! if you
only knew how soon, so very soon--it will be different!
215. As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns
which determine the path of one planet, and in certain cases
suns of different colours shine around a single planet, now with
red light, now with green, and then simultaneously illumine and
flood it with motley colours: so we modern men, owing to the
complicated mechanism of our "firmament," are determined by
DIFFERENT moralities; our actions shine alternately in different
colours, and are seldom unequivocal--and there are often cases,
also, in which our actions are MOTLEY-COLOURED.
216. To love one's enemies? I think that has been well learnt: it
takes place thousands of times at present on a large and small
scale; indeed, at times the higher and sublimer thing takes
place:--we learn to DESPISE when we love, and precisely when
we love best; all of it, however, unconsciously, without noise,
without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness,
which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the for-
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mula of virtue. Morality as attitude--is opposed to our taste
nowadays. This is ALSO an advance, as it was an advance in our
fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to
their taste, including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness
against religion (and all that formerly belonged to freethinker-
pantomime). It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our
spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody-
goodness won't chime.
217. Let us be careful in dealing with those who attach great
importance to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in
moral discernment! They never forgive us if they have once
made a mistake BEFORE us (or even with REGARD to us)--they
inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and detractors,
even when they still remain our "friends."--Blessed are the forgetful:
for they "get the better" even of their blunders.
218. The psychologists of France--and where else are there still
psychologists nowadays?--have never yet exhausted their bitter
and manifold enjoyment of the betise bourgeoise, just as though
. . . in short, they betray something thereby. Flaubert, for instance,
the honest citizen of Rouen, neither saw, heard, nor
tasted anything else in the end; it was his mode of self-torment
and refined cruelty. As this is growing wearisome, I would now
recommend for a change something else for a pleasure--namely,
the unconscious astuteness with which good, fat, honest mediocrity
always behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they
have to perform, the subtle, barbed, Jesuitical astuteness, which
is a thousand times subtler than the taste and understanding of
the middle-class in its best moments--subtler even than the
understanding of its victims:--a repeated proof that "instinct" is
the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto
been discovered. In short, you psychologists, study the
philosophy of the "rule" in its struggle with the "exception":
there you have a spectacle fit for Gods and godlike malignity! Or,
in plainer words, practise vivisection on "good people," on the
"homo bonae voluntatis," ON YOURSELVES!
219. The practice of judging and condemning morally, is the
favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are
less so, it is also a kind of indemnity for their being badly endowed
by nature, and finally, it is an opportunity for acquiring
spirit and BECOMING subtle--malice spiritualises. They are glad
in their inmost heart that there is a standard according to which
those who are over-endowed with intellectual goods and privileges,
are equal to them, they contend for the "equality of all
before God," and almost NEED the belief in God for this purpose.
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It is among them that the most powerful antagonists of atheism
are found. If any one were to say to them "A lofty spirituality is
beyond all comparison with the honesty and respectability of a
merely moral man"--it would make them furious, I shall take
care not to say so. I would rather flatter them with my theory
that lofty spirituality itself exists only as the ultimate product of
moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all qualities attributed to
the "merely moral" man, after they have been acquired singly
through long training and practice, perhaps during a whole series
of generations, that lofty spirituality is precisely the spiritualising
of justice, and the beneficent severity which knows that it is
authorized to maintain GRADATIONS OF RANK in the world, even
among things--and not only among men.
220. Now that the praise of the "disinterested person" is so
popular one must--probably not without some danger--get an
idea of WHAT people actually take an interest in, and what are
the things generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern
ordinary men--including the cultured, even the learned, and
perhaps philosophers also, if appearances do not deceive. The
fact thereby becomes obvious that the greater part of what
interests and charms higher natures, and more refined and fastidious
tastes, seems absolutely "uninteresting" to the average
man--if, notwithstanding, he perceive devotion to these interests,
he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how it is possible to
act "disinterestedly." There have been philosophers who could
give this popular astonishment a seductive and mystical, otherworldly
expression (perhaps because they did not know the
higher nature by experience?), instead of stating the naked and
candidly reasonable truth that "disinterested" action is very
interesting and "interested" action, provided that. . . "And
love?"--What! Even an action for love's sake shall be "unegoistic"?
But you fools--! "And the praise of the self- sacrificer?"--But
whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and
obtained something for it--perhaps something from himself for
something from himself; that he relinquished here in order to
have more there, perhaps in general to be more, or even feel
himself "more." But this is a realm of questions and answers in
which a more fastidious spirit does not like to stay: for here truth
has to stifle her yawns so much when she is obliged to answer.
And after all, truth is a woman; one must not use force with her.
221. "It sometimes happens," said a moralistic pedant and trifle-
retailer, "that I honour and respect an unselfish man: not, however,
because he is unselfish, but because I think he has a right
to be useful to another man at his own expense. In short, the
question is always who HE is, and who THE OTHER is. For in-
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stance, in a person created and destined for command, self-
denial and modest retirement, instead of being virtues, would be
the waste of virtues: so it seems to me. Every system of unegoistic
morality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to
every one, not only sins against good taste, but is also an incentive
to sins of omission, an ADDITIONAL seduction under the
mask of philanthropy--and precisely a seduction and injury to
the higher, rarer, and more privileged types of men. Moral systems
must be compelled first of all to bow before the GRADATIONS
OF RANK; their presumption must be driven home to their
conscience--until they thoroughly understand at last that it is
IMMORAL to say that 'what is right for one is proper for another.'"--
So said my moralistic pedant and bonhomme. Did he
perhaps deserve to be laughed at when he thus exhorted systems
of morals to practise morality? But one should not be too
much in the right if one wishes to have the laughers on ONE'S
OWN side; a grain of wrong pertains even to good taste.
222. Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays--
and, if I gather rightly, no other religion is any longer
preached--let the psychologist have his ears open through all the
vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these preachers
(as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine
note of SELF-CONTEMPT. It belongs to the overshadowing and
uglifying of Europe, which has been on the increase for a century
(the first symptoms of which are already specified documentarily
in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to Madame d'Epinay)--IF IT IS
NOT REALLY THE CAUSE THEREOF! The man of "modern ideas,"
the conceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself--this is
perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity wants him only "to
suffer with his fellows."
223. The hybrid European--a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in
all--absolutely requires a costume: he needs history as a storeroom
of costumes. To be sure, he notices that none of the costumes
fit him properly--he changes and changes. Let us look at
the nineteenth century with respect to these hasty preferences
and changes in its masquerades of style, and also with respect to
its moments of desperation on account of "nothing suiting" us. It
is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or classical, or Christian,
or Florentine, or barocco, or "national," in moribus et
artibus: it does not "clothe us"! But the "spirit," especially the
"historical spirit," profits even by this desperation: once and
again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested, put
on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied--we are the first
studious age in puncto of "costumes," I mean as concerns morals,
articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we are pre-
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pared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand
style, for the most spiritual festival--laughter and arrogance, for
the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic
ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still discovering the domain
of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be
original, probably as parodists of the world's history and as God's
Merry-Andrews,--perhaps, though nothing else of the present
have a future, our laughter itself may have a future!
224. The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the
order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a
community, or an individual has lived, the "divining instinct" for
the relationships of these valuations, for the relation of the authority
of the valuations to the authority of the operating
forces),--this historical sense, which we Europeans claim as our
specialty, has come to us in the train of the enchanting and mad
semi-barbarity into which Europe has been plunged by the democratic
mingling of classes and races--it is only the nineteenth
century that has recognized this faculty as its sixth sense. Owing
to this mingling, the past of every form and mode of life, and of
cultures which were formerly closely contiguous and superimposed
on one another, flows forth into us "modern souls"; our
instincts now run back in all directions, we ourselves are a kind
of chaos: in the end, as we have said, the spirit perceives its
advantage therein. By means of our semi-barbarity in body and
in desire, we have secret access everywhere, such as a noble
age never had; we have access above all to the labyrinth of
imperfect civilizations, and to every form of semi-barbarity that
has at any time existed on earth; and in so far as the most considerable
part of human civilization hitherto has just been semibarbarity,
the "historical sense" implies almost the sense and
instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything:
whereby it immediately proves itself to be an IGNOBLE sense.
For instance, we enjoy Homer once more: it is perhaps our happiest
acquisition that we know how to appreciate Homer, whom
men of distinguished culture (as the French of the seventeenth
century, like Saint- Evremond, who reproached him for his ESPRIT
VASTE, and even Voltaire, the last echo of the century)
cannot and could not so easily appropriate--whom they scarcely
permitted themselves to enjoy. The very decided Yea and Nay of
their palate, their promptly ready disgust, their hesitating reluctance
with regard to everything strange, their horror of the bad
taste even of lively curiosity, and in general the averseness of
every distinguished and self-sufficing culture to avow a new
desire, a dissatisfaction with its own condition, or an admiration
of what is strange: all this determines and disposes them unfavourably
even towards the best things of the world which are not
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their property or could not become their prey--and no faculty is
more unintelligible to such men than just this historical sense,
with its truckling, plebeian curiosity. The case is not different
with Shakespeare, that marvelous Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis
of taste, over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of
AEschylus would have half-killed himself with laughter or irritation:
but we--accept precisely this wild motleyness, this medley
of the most delicate, the most coarse, and the most artificial,
with a secret confidence and cordiality; we enjoy it as a refinement
of art reserved expressly for us, and allow ourselves to be
as little disturbed by the repulsive fumes and the proximity of
the English populace in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives,
as perhaps on the Chiaja of Naples, where, with all our senses
awake, we go our way, enchanted and voluntarily, in spite of the
drain-odour of the lower quarters of the town. That as men of
the "historical sense" we have our virtues, is not to be disputed:-
- we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to
self-control and self-renunciation, very grateful, very patient,
very complaisant--but with all this we are perhaps not very
"tasteful." Let us finally confess it, that what is most difficult for
us men of the "historical sense" to grasp, feel, taste, and love,
what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is
precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture
and art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment of
smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and
coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves.
Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary
contrast to GOOD taste, at least to the very bad taste; and we
can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly, and with
compulsion the small, short, and happy godsends and glorifications
of human life as they shine here and there: those moments
and marvelous experiences when a great power has voluntarily
come to a halt before the boundless and infinite,--when a superabundance
of refined delight has been enjoyed by a sudden
checking and petrifying, by standing firmly and planting oneself
fixedly on still trembling ground. PROPORTIONATENESS is
strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves; our itching is really
the itching for the infinite, the immeasurable. Like the rider on
his forward panting horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite,
we modern men, we semi- barbarians--and are only in OUR
highest bliss when we--ARE IN MOST DANGER.
225. Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism,
all those modes of thinking which measure the
worth of things according to PLEASURE and PAIN, that is, according
to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations,
are plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which
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every one conscious of CREATIVE powers and an artist's conscience
will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy.
Sympathy for you!--to be sure, that is not sympathy as
you understand it: it is not sympathy for social "distress," for
"society" with its sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious
and defective who lie on the ground around us; still less is
it sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slaveclasses
who strive after power--they call it "freedom." OUR sympathy
is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy:--we see how
MAN dwarfs himself, how YOU dwarf him! and there are moments
when we view YOUR sympathy with an indescribable
anguish, when we resist it,--when we regard your seriousness as
more dangerous than any kind of levity. You want, if possible--
and there is not a more foolish "if possible" --TO DO AWAY WITH
SUFFERING; and we?--it really seems that WE would rather have
it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being,
as you understand it--is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an
END; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible--
and makes his destruction DESIRABLE! The discipline
of suffering, of GREAT suffering--know ye not that it is only THIS
discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto?
The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it
its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness
and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and
exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise,
spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul--
has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline
of great suffering? In man CREATURE and CREATOR are
united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay,
mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the
hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the
seventh day--do ye understand this contrast? And that YOUR
sympathy for the "creature in man" applies to that which has to
be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed,
refined--to that which must necessarily SUFFER, and IS MEANT
to suffer? And our sympathy--do ye not understand what our
REVERSE sympathy applies to, when it resists your sympathy as
the worst of all pampering and enervation?--So it is sympathy
AGAINST sympathy!--But to repeat it once more, there are
higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and
sympathy; and all systems of philosophy which deal only with
these are naivetes.
226. WE IMMORALISTS.--This world with which WE are concerned,
in which we have to fear and love, this almost invisible,
inaudible world of delicate command and delicate obedience, a
world of "almost" in every respect, captious, insidious, sharp,
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and tender--yes, it is well protected from clumsy spectators and
familiar curiosity! We are woven into a strong net and garment
of duties, and CANNOT disengage ourselves--precisely here, we
are "men of duty," even we! Occasionally, it is true, we dance in
our "chains" and betwixt our "swords"; it is none the less true
that more often we gnash our teeth under the circumstances,
and are impatient at the secret hardship of our lot. But do what
we will, fools and appearances say of us: "These are men WITHOUT
duty,"-- we have always fools and appearances against us!
227. Honesty, granting that it is the virtue of which we cannot
rid ourselves, we free spirits--well, we will labour at it with all
our perversity and love, and not tire of "perfecting" ourselves in
OUR virtue, which alone remains: may its glance some day overspread
like a gilded, blue, mocking twilight this aging civilization
with its dull gloomy seriousness! And if, nevertheless, our honesty
should one day grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs,
and find us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter, easier,
and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us remain HARD, we
latest Stoics, and let us send to its help whatever devilry we
have in us:--our disgust at the clumsy and undefined, our "NITIMUR
IN VETITUM," our love of adventure, our sharpened and
fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, intellectual Will
to Power and universal conquest, which rambles and roves avidiously
around all the realms of the future--let us go with all our
"devils" to the help of our "God"! It is probable that people will
misunderstand and mistake us on that account: what does it
matter! They will say: "Their 'honesty'--that is their devilry, and
nothing else!" What does it matter! And even if they were right--
have not all Gods hitherto been such sanctified, re-baptized
devils? And after all, what do we know of ourselves? And what
the spirit that leads us wants TO BE CALLED? (It is a question of
names.) And how many spirits we harbour? Our honesty, we free
spirits--let us be careful lest it become our vanity, our ornament
and ostentation, our limitation, our stupidity! Every virtue inclines
to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; "stupid to the point
of sanctity," they say in Russia,-- let us be careful lest out of
pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores! Is not life
a hundred times too short for us-- to bore ourselves? One would
have to believe in eternal life in order to . . .
228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy
hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific
appliances--and that "virtue," in my opinion, has been MORE
injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything
else; at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook
their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as
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possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very
desirable that morals should not some day become interesting!
But let us not be afraid! Things still remain today as they have
always been: I see no one in Europe who has (or DISCLOSES) an
idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be
conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner--that
CALAMITY might be involved therein. Observe, for example, the
indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously
and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor
expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had
already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius! (no,
he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE,
to use an expression of Galiani). No new thought,
nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an
old thought, not even a proper history of what has been previously
thought on the subject: an IMPOSSIBLE literature, taking it
all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief.
In effect, the old English vice called CANT, which is MORAL TARTUFFISM,
has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom
one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one MUST
read them), concealed this time under the new form of the scientific
spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a secret
struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race of
former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering
with morals. (Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan?
That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable,
as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem? Is moralizing
not-immoral?) In the end, they all want English morality
to be recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or the
"general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest number,"--no!
the happiness of ENGLAND, will be best served thereby. They
would like, by all means, to convince themselves that the striving
after English happiness, I mean after COMFORT and FASHION
(and in the highest instance, a seat in Parliament), is at the
same time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so far as there
has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just consisted in
such striving. Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken
herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism
as conducive to the general welfare) wants to have any
knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general welfare" is no
ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a
nostrum,--that what is fair to one MAY NOT at all be fair to another,
that the requirement of one morality for all is really a
detriment to higher men, in short, that there is a DISTINCTION
OF RANK between man and man, and consequently between
morality and morality. They are an unassuming and fundamentally
mediocre species of men, these utilitarian Englishmen, and,
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as already remarked, in so far as they are tedious, one cannot
think highly enough of their utility. One ought even to ENCOURAGE
them, as has been partially attempted in the following
rhymes:--
Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,
"Longer--better," aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee;
Unenraptured, never jesting,
Mediocre everlasting,
SANS GENIE ET SANS ESPRIT!
229. In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity,
there still remains so much fear, so much SUPERSTITION of the
fear, of the "cruel wild beast," the mastering of which constitutes
the very pride of these humaner ages--that even obvious truths,
as if by the agreement of centuries, have long remained unuttered,
because they have the appearance of helping the finally
slain wild beast back to life again. I perhaps risk something when
I allow such a truth to escape; let others capture it again and
give it so much "milk of pious sentiment" [FOOTNOTE: An expression
from Schiller's William Tell, Act IV, Scene 3.] to drink,
that it will lie down quiet and forgotten, in its old corner.--One
ought to learn anew about cruelty, and open one's eyes; one
ought at last to learn impatience, in order that such immodest
gross errors--as, for instance, have been fostered by ancient and
modern philosophers with regard to tragedy--may no longer
wander about virtuously and boldly. Almost everything that we
call "higher culture" is based upon the spiritualising and intensifying
of CRUELTY--this is my thesis; the "wild beast" has not
been slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been-- transfigured.
That which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is
cruelty; that which operates agreeably in so-called tragic sympathy,
and at the basis even of everything sublime, up to the highest
and most delicate thrills of metaphysics, obtains its
sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty.
What the Roman enjoys in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies
of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the faggot and
stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day Japanese who presses
his way to the tragedy, the workman of the Parisian suburbs who
has a homesickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne
who, with unhinged will, "undergoes" the performance of "Tristan
and Isolde"--what all these enjoy, and strive with mysterious
ardour to drink in, is the philtre of the great Circe "cruelty."
Here, to be sure, we must put aside entirely the blundering
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psychology of former times, which could only teach with regard
to cruelty that it originated at the sight of the suffering of OTHERS:
there is an abundant, super-abundant enjoyment even in
one's own suffering, in causing one's own suffering--and wherever
man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in
the RELIGIOUS sense, or to self-mutilation, as among the Phoenicians
and ascetics, or in general, to desensualisation, decarnalisation,
and contrition, to Puritanical repentance-spasms, to
vivisection of conscience and to Pascal- like SACRIFIZIA DELL'
INTELLETO, he is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his
cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of cruelty TOWARDS HIMSELF.--
Finally, let us consider that even the seeker of knowledge operates
as an artist and glorifier of cruelty, in that he compels his
spirit to perceive AGAINST its own inclination, and often enough
against the wishes of his heart:--he forces it to say Nay, where
he would like to affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance
of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an
intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit, which
instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,--even in
every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty.
230. Perhaps what I have said here about a "fundamental will of
the spirit" may not be understood without further details; I may
be allowed a word of explanation.--That imperious something
which is popularly called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally
and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a
multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and
essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities here, are
the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything that
lives, grows, and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate
foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate
the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook
or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily reunderlines,
makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits
and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the "outside
world." Its object thereby is the incorporation of new "experiences,"
the assortment of new things in the old arrangements--
in short, growth; or more properly, the FEELING of growth, the
feeling of increased power--is its object. This same will has at its
service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly
adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a
closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition
to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is
knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in
horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which
is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating
power, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively (and in fact
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"the spirit" resembles a stomach more than anything else). Here
also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be
deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and
so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty
and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-theway
narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground,
of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified--
an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of
power. Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous
readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble
before them-- the constant pressing and straining of a creating,
shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness
and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of
security therein--it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best
protected and concealed!--COUNTER TO this propensity for appearance,
for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short,
for an outside--for every outside is a cloak--there operates the
sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and
INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly;
as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste,
which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself,
provided, as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and hardened
his eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed to
severe discipline and even severe words. He will say: "There is
something cruel in the tendency of my spirit": let the virtuous
and amiable try to convince him that it is not so! In fact, it would
sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our "extravagant
honesty" were talked about, whispered about, and glorified--we
free, VERY free spirits--and some day perhaps SUCH will actually
be our--posthumous glory! Meanwhile-- for there is plenty of
time until then--we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out
in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work
has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance.
They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty,
love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of
the truthful-- there is something in them that makes one's heart
swell with pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago
persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience,
that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the
old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious
human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and
repainting, the terrible original text HOMO NATURA must again
be recognized. In effect, to translate man back again into nature;
to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and
subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and
daubed over the eternal original text, HOMO NATURA; to bring it
about that man shall henceforth stand before man as he now,
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hardened by the discipline of science, stands before the OTHER
forms of nature, with fearless Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-
ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical birdcatchers,
who have piped to him far too long: "Thou art more!
thou art higher! thou hast a different origin!"--this may be a
strange and foolish task, but that it is a TASK, who can deny!
Why did we choose it, this foolish task? Or, to put the question
differently: "Why knowledge at all?" Every one will ask us about
this. And thus pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question
a hundred times, have not found and cannot find any better
answer. . . .
231. Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that
does not merely "conserve"--as the physiologist knows. But at
the bottom of our souls, quite "down below," there is certainly
something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined
decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions.
In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable "I am
this"; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for
instance, but can only learn fully--he can only follow to the end
what is "fixed" about them in himself. Occasionally we find certain
solutions of problems which make strong beliefs for us;
perhaps they are henceforth called "convictions." Later on--one
sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge, guide-posts to the
problem which we ourselves ARE--or more correctly to the great
stupidity which we embody, our spiritual fate, the UNTEACHABLE
in us, quite "down below."--In view of this liberal compliment
which I have just paid myself, permission will perhaps be more
readily allowed me to utter some truths about "woman as she
is," provided that it is known at the outset how literally they are
merely--MY truths.
232. Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins
to enlighten men about "woman as she is"--THIS is one of the
worst developments of the general UGLIFYING of Europe. For
what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and
self- exposure bring to light! Woman has so much cause for
shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality,
schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion
concealed--study only woman's behaviour towards children!--
which has really been best restrained and dominated
hitherto by the FEAR of man. Alas, if ever the "eternally tedious
in woman"--she has plenty of it!--is allowed to venture forth! if
she begins radically and on principle to unlearn her wisdom and
art-of charming, of playing, of frightening away sorrow, of alleviating
and taking easily; if she forgets her delicate aptitude for
agreeable desires! Female voices are already raised, which, by
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Saint Aristophanes! make one afraid:--with medical explicitness
it is stated in a threatening manner what woman first and last
REQUIRES from man. Is it not in the very worst taste that
woman thus sets herself up to be scientific? Enlightenment hitherto
has fortunately been men's affair, men's gift--we remained
therewith "among ourselves"; and in the end, in view of all that
women write about "woman," we may well have considerable
doubt as to whether woman really DESIRES enlightenment about
herself--and CAN desire it. If woman does not thereby seek a
new ORNAMENT for herself--I believe ornamentation belongs to
the eternally feminine?--why, then, she wishes to make herself
feared: perhaps she thereby wishes to get the mastery. But she
does not want truth--what does woman care for truth? From the
very first, nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more
hostile to woman than truth--her great art is falsehood, her chief
concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: we
honour and love this very art and this very instinct in woman:
we who have the hard task, and for our recreation gladly seek
the company of beings under whose hands, glances, and delicate
follies, our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity appear almost
like follies to us. Finally, I ask the question: Did a woman
herself ever acknowledge profundity in a woman's mind, or
justice in a woman's heart? And is it not true that on the whole
"woman" has hitherto been most despised by woman herself,
and not at all by us?--We men desire that woman should not
continue to compromise herself by enlightening us; just as it was
man's care and the consideration for woman, when the church
decreed: mulier taceat in ecclesia. It was to the benefit of
woman when Napoleon gave the too eloquent Madame de Stael
to understand: mulier taceat in politicis!--and in my opinion, he
is a true friend of woman who calls out to women today: mulier
taceat de mulierel.
233. It betrays corruption of the instincts--apart from the fact
that it betrays bad taste--when a woman refers to Madame
Roland, or Madame de Stael, or Monsieur George Sand, as
though something were proved thereby in favour of "woman as
she is." Among men, these are the three comical women as they
are--nothing more!--and just the best involuntary counterarguments
against feminine emancipation and autonomy.
234. Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible
thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the
master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand
what food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had
been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands
of years, have discovered the most important physiological
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facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art!
Through bad female cooks--through the entire lack of reason in
the kitchen--the development of mankind has been longest
retarded and most interfered with: even today matters are very
little better. A word to High School girls.
235. There are turns and casts of fancy, there are sentences,
little handfuls of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society
suddenly crystallises itself. Among these is the incidental remark
of Madame de Lambert to her son: "MON AMI, NE VOUS PERMETTEZ
JAMAIS QUE DES FOLIES, QUI VOUS FERONT GRAND
PLAISIR"--the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way, that
was ever addressed to a son.
236. I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what
Dante and Goethe believed about woman--the former when he
sang, "ELLA GUARDAVA SUSO, ED IO IN LEI," and the latter
when he interpreted it, "the eternally feminine draws us ALOFT";
for THIS is just what she believes of the eternally masculine.
237.
SEVEN APOPHTHEGMS FOR WOMEN
How the longest ennui flees, When a man comes to our knees!
Age, alas! and science staid, Furnish even weak virtue aid.
Sombre garb and silence meet: Dress for every dame--discreet.
Whom I thank when in my bliss? God!--and my good tailoress!
Young, a flower-decked cavern home; Old, a dragon thence doth
roam.
Noble title, leg that's fine, Man as well: Oh, were HE mine!
Speech in brief and sense in mass--Slippery for the jenny-ass!
237A. Woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds,
which, losing their way, have come down among them from an
elevation: as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet,
and animating- -but as something also which must be cooped up
to prevent it flying away.
238. To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of "man and
woman," to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the
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necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps
of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that
is a TYPICAL sign of shallow-mindedness; and a thinker who has
proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot--shallow in instinct!--
may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as
betrayed, as discovered; he will probably prove too "short" for all
fundamental questions of life, future as well as present, and will
be unable to descend into ANY of the depths. On the other hand,
a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also
the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness,
and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman
as ORIENTALS do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as
confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing
her mission therein--he must take his stand in this
matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority
of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did formerly; those best
heirs and scholars of Asia--who, as is well known, with their
INCREASING culture and amplitude of power, from Homer to the
time of Pericles, became gradually STRICTER towards woman, in
short, more Oriental. HOW necessary, HOW logical, even HOW
humanely desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves!
239. The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so
much respect by men as at present--this belongs to the tendency
and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as
disrespectfulness to old age--what wonder is it that abuse should
be immediately made of this respect? They want more, they
learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be
well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself,
would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. And let
us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is unlearning
to FEAR man: but the woman who "unlearns to fear" sacrifices
her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture
forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man--or more definitely,
the MAN in man--is no longer either desired or fully developed,
is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough; what
is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby-- woman
deteriorates. This is what is happening nowadays: let us not
deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has
triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives
for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: "woman as
clerkess" is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which
is in course of formation. While she thus appropriates new rights,
aspires to be "master," and inscribes "progress" of woman on
her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible
obviousness: WOMAN RETROGRADES. Since the French
Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has DECLINED in
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proportion as she has increased her rights and claims; and the
"emancipation of woman," insofar as it is desired and demanded
by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallowpates),
thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased
weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts.
There is STUPIDITY in this movement, an almost
masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman--who is always
a sensible woman--might be heartily ashamed. To lose the
intuition as to the ground upon which she can most surely
achieve victory; to neglect exercise in the use of her proper
weapons; to let-herself-go before man, perhaps even "to the
book," where formerly she kept herself in control and in refined,
artful humility; to neutralize with her virtuous audacity man's
faith in a VEILED, fundamentally different ideal in woman, something
eternally, necessarily feminine; to emphatically and loquaciously
dissuade man from the idea that woman must be
preserved, cared for, protected, and indulged, like some delicate,
strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animal; the clumsy
and indignant collection of everything of the nature of servitude
and bondage which the position of woman in the hitherto existing
order of society has entailed and still entails (as though
slavery were a counter- argument, and not rather a condition of
every higher culture, of every elevation of culture):--what does
all this betoken, if not a disintegration of womanly instincts, a
defeminising? Certainly, there are enough of idiotic friends and
corrupters of woman among the learned asses of the masculine
sex, who advise woman to defeminize herself in this manner,
and to imitate all the stupidities from which "man" in Europe,
European "manliness," suffers,--who would like to lower woman
to "general culture," indeed even to newspaper reading and
meddling with politics. Here and there they wish even to make
women into free spirits and literary workers: as though a woman
without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious or
ludicrous to a profound and godless man;--almost everywhere
her nerves are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous
kind of music (our latest German music), and she is daily being
made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first
and last function, that of bearing robust children. They wish to
"cultivate" her in general still more, and intend, as they say, to
make the "weaker sex" STRONG by culture: as if history did not
teach in the most emphatic manner that the "cultivating" of
mankind and his weakening--that is to say, the weakening,
dissipating, and languishing of his FORCE OF WILL--have always
kept pace with one another, and that the most powerful and
influential women in the world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon)
had just to thank their force of will--and not their schoolmasters--
for their power and ascendancy over men. That which
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inspires respect in woman, and often enough fear also, is her
NATURE, which is more "natural" than that of man, her genuine,
carnivora-like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the
glove, her NAIVETE in egoism, her untrainableness and innate
wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her
desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one's
sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is that
she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of
love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other
creature. Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man
has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one
foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights--What? And
all that is now to be at an end? And the DISENCHANTMENT of
woman is in progress? The tediousness of woman is slowly
evolving? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which
was always most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever
again threatening thee! Thy old fable might once more become
"history"--an immense stupidity might once again overmaster
thee and carry thee away! And no God concealed beneath it--no!
only an "idea," a "modern idea"!
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CHAPTER VIII - PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

240. I HEARD, once again for the first time, Richard Wagner's
overture to the Mastersinger: it is a piece of magnificent, gorgeous,
heavy, latter-day art, which has the pride to presuppose
two centuries of music as still living, in order that it may be
understood:--it is an honour to Germans that such a pride did
not miscalculate! What flavours and forces, what seasons and
climes do we not find mingled in it! It impresses us at one time
as ancient, at another time as foreign, bitter, and too modern, it
is as arbitrary as it is pompously traditional, it is not infrequently
roguish, still oftener rough and coarse--it has fire and courage,
and at the same time the loose, dun- coloured skin of fruits
which ripen too late. It flows broad and full: and suddenly there
is a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a gap that opens
between cause and effect, an oppression that makes us dream,
almost a nightmare; but already it broadens and widens anew,
the old stream of delight--the most manifold delight,--of old and
new happiness; including ESPECIALLY the joy of the artist in
himself, which he refuses to conceal, his astonished, happy
cognizance of his mastery of the expedients here employed, the
new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested expedients of art which
he apparently betrays to us. All in all, however, no beauty, no
South, nothing of the delicate southern clearness of the sky,
nothing of grace, no dance, hardly a will to logic; a certain clumsiness
even, which is also emphasized, as though the artist
wished to say to us: "It is part of my intention"; a cumbersome
drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring
of learned and venerable conceits and witticisms; something
German in the best and worst sense of the word, something in
the German style, manifold, formless, and inexhaustible; a certain
German potency and super-plenitude of soul, which is not
afraid to hide itself under the RAFFINEMENTS of decadence--
which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a real, genuine
token of the German soul, which is at the same time young and
aged, too ripe and yet still too rich in futurity. This kind of music
expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the
day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow-- THEY HAVE
AS YET NO TODAY.
241. We "good Europeans," we also have hours when we allow
ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a plunge and relapse into
old loves and narrow views--I have just given an example of it--
hours of national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all other
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sorts of old-fashioned floods of sentiment. Duller spirits may
perhaps only get done with what confines its operations in us to
hours and plays itself out in hours--in a considerable time: some
in half a year, others in half a lifetime, according to the speed
and strength with which they digest and "change their material."
Indeed, I could think of sluggish, hesitating races, which even in
our rapidly moving Europe, would require half a century ere they
could surmount such atavistic attacks of patriotism and soilattachment,
and return once more to reason, that is to say, to
"good Europeanism." And while digressing on this possibility, I
happen to become an ear-witness of a conversation between two
old patriots--they were evidently both hard of hearing and consequently
spoke all the louder. "HE has as much, and knows as
much, philosophy as a peasant or a corps-student," said the one-
- "he is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is
the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything
that is massive. And so also in politicis. A statesman who rears
up for them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire
and power, they call 'great'--what does it matter that we more
prudent and conservative ones do not meanwhile give up the old
belief that it is only the great thought that gives greatness to an
action or affair. Supposing a statesman were to bring his people
into the position of being obliged henceforth to practise 'high
politics,' for which they were by nature badly endowed and prepared,
so that they would have to sacrifice their old and reliable
virtues, out of love to a new and doubtful mediocrity;-- supposing
a statesman were to condemn his people generally to 'practise
politics,' when they have hitherto had something better to do
and think about, and when in the depths of their souls they have
been unable to free themselves from a prudent loathing of the
restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings of the essentially
politics-practising nations;--supposing such a statesman were to
stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities of his people,
were to make a stigma out of their former diffidence and delight
in aloofness, an offence out of their exoticism and hidden permanency,
were to depreciate their most radical proclivities,
subvert their consciences, make their minds narrow, and their
tastes 'national'--what! a statesman who should do all this,
which his people would have to do penance for throughout their
whole future, if they had a future, such a statesman would be
GREAT, would he?"--"Undoubtedly!" replied the other old patriot
vehemently, "otherwise he COULD NOT have done it! It was mad
perhaps to wish such a thing! But perhaps everything great has
been just as mad at its commencement!"-- "Misuse of words!"
cried his interlocutor, contradictorily-- "strong! strong! Strong
and mad! NOT great!"--The old men had obviously become
heated as they thus shouted their "truths" in each other's faces,
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but I, in my happiness and apartness, considered how soon a
stronger one may become master of the strong, and also that
there is a compensation for the intellectual superficialising of a
nation--namely, in the deepening of another.
242. Whether we call it "civilization," or "humanising," or "progress,"
which now distinguishes the European, whether we call it
simply, without praise or blame, by the political formula the
DEMOCRATIC movement in Europe--behind all the moral and
political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense
PHYSIOLOGICAL PROCESS goes on, which is ever extending the
process of the assimilation of Europeans, their increasing detachment
from the conditions under which, climatically and hereditarily,
united races originate, their increasing independence
of every definite milieu, that for centuries would fain inscribe
itself with equal demands on soul and body,--that is to say, the
slow emergence of an essentially SUPER-NATIONAL and nomadic
species of man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a
maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his typical distinction.
This process of the EVOLVING EUROPEAN, which can be
retarded in its TEMPO by great relapses, but will perhaps just
gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depth--the still-raging
storm and stress of "national sentiment" pertains to it, and also
the anarchism which is appearing at present--this process will
probably arrive at results on which its naive propagators and
panegyrists, the apostles of "modern ideas," would least care to
reckon. The same new conditions under which on an average a
levelling and mediocrising of man will take place--a useful, industrious,
variously serviceable, and clever gregarious man--are
in the highest degree suitable to give rise to exceptional men of
the most dangerous and attractive qualities. For, while the capacity
for adaptation, which is every day trying changing conditions,
and begins a new work with every generation, almost with
every decade, makes the POWERFULNESS of the type impossible;
while the collective impression of such future Europeans will
probably be that of numerous, talkative, weak-willed, and very
handy workmen who REQUIRE a master, a commander, as they
require their daily bread; while, therefore, the democratising of
Europe will tend to the production of a type prepared for SLAVERY
in the most subtle sense of the term: the STRONG man will
necessarily in individual and exceptional cases, become stronger
and richer than he has perhaps ever been before--owing to the
unprejudicedness of his schooling, owing to the immense variety
of practice, art, and disguise. I meant to say that the democratising
of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement
for the rearing of TYRANTS--taking the word in all its meanings,
even in its most spiritual sense.
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243. I hear with pleasure that our sun is moving rapidly towards
the constellation Hercules: and I hope that the men on this earth
will do like the sun. And we foremost, we good Europeans!
244. There was a time when it was customary to call Germans
"deep" by way of distinction; but now that the most successful
type of new Germanism is covetous of quite other honours, and
perhaps misses "smartness" in all that has depth, it is almost
opportune and patriotic to doubt whether we did not formerly
deceive ourselves with that commendation: in short, whether
German depth is not at bottom something different and worse--
and something from which, thank God, we are on the point of
successfully ridding ourselves. Let us try, then, to relearn with
regard to German depth; the only thing necessary for the purpose
is a little vivisection of the German soul.--The German soul
is above all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated and super-
imposed, rather than actually built: this is owing to its origin. A
German who would embolden himself to assert: "Two souls, alas,
dwell in my breast," would make a bad guess at the truth, or,
more correctly, he would come far short of the truth about the
number of souls. As a people made up of the most extraordinary
mixing and mingling of races, perhaps even with a preponderance
of the pre-Aryan element as the "people of the centre" in
every sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more
ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable,
more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are
to themselves:--they escape DEFINITION, and are thereby 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 jubilantly to him--but Sand also thought
he knew them. Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he
declared himself incensed at Fichte's lying but patriotic flatteries
and exaggerations,--but it is probable that Goethe thought differently
about Germans from Jean Paul, even though he acknowledged
him to be right with regard to Fichte. It is a question
what Goethe really thought about the Germans?--But about
many things around him he never spoke explicitly, and all his life
he knew how to keep an astute silence--probably he had good
reason for it. It is certain that it was not the "Wars of Independence"
that made him look up more joyfully, any more than it was
the French Revolution,--the event on account of which he RECONSTRUCTED
his "Faust," and indeed the whole problem of
"man," was the appearance of Napoleon. There are words of
Goethe in which he condemns with impatient severity, as from a
foreign land, that which Germans take a pride in, he once de-
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fined the famous German turn of mind as "Indulgence towards
its own and others' weaknesses." Was he wrong? it is characteristic
of Germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them.
The German soul has passages and galleries in it, there are
caves, hiding- places, and dungeons therein, its disorder has
much of the charm of the mysterious, the German is well acquainted
with the bypaths to chaos. And as everything loves its
symbol, so the German loves the clouds and all that is obscure,
evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shrouded, it seems to him that
everything uncertain, undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing
is "deep". The German himself does not EXIST, he is BECOMING,
he is "developing himself". "Development" is therefore the essentially
German discovery and hit in the great domain of philosophical
formulas,-- a ruling idea, which, together with German
beer and German music, is labouring to Germanise all Europe.
Foreigners are astonished and attracted by the riddles which the
conflicting nature at the basis of the German soul propounds to
them (riddles which Hegel systematised and Richard Wagner has
in the end set to music). "Good-natured and spiteful"--such a
juxtaposition, preposterous in the case of every other people, is
unfortunately only too often justified in Germany one has only to
live for a while among Swabians to know this! The clumsiness of
the German scholar and his social distastefulness agree alarmingly
well with his physical rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of
which all the Gods have learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to
see the "German soul" demonstrated ad oculos, let him only look
at German taste, at German arts and manners what boorish
indifference to "taste"! How the noblest and the commonest
stand there in juxtaposition! How disorderly and how rich is the
whole constitution of this soul! The German DRAGS at his soul,
he drags at everything he experiences. He digests his events
badly; he never gets "done" with them; and German depth is
often only a difficult, hesitating "digestion." And just as all
chronic invalids, all dyspeptics like what is convenient, so the
German loves "frankness" and "honesty"; it is so CONVENIENT to
be frank and honest!--This confidingness, this complaisance, this
showing-the-cards of German HONESTY, is probably the most
dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up
to nowadays: it is his proper Mephistophelean art; with this he
can "still achieve much"! The German lets himself go, and
thereby gazes with faithful, blue, empty German eyes--and other
countries immediately confound him with his dressing-gown!--I
meant to say that, let "German depth" be what it will--among
ourselves alone we perhaps take the liberty to laugh at it--we
shall do well to continue henceforth to honour its appearance
and good name, and not barter away too cheaply our old reputation
as a people of depth for Prussian "smartness," and Berlin wit
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and sand. It is wise for a people to pose, and LET itself be regarded,
as profound, clumsy, good-natured, honest, and foolish:
it might even be--profound to do so! Finally, we should do honour
to our name--we are not called the "TIUSCHE VOLK" (deceptive
people) for nothing. . . .
245. The "good old" time is past, it sang itself out in Mozart--
how happy are WE that his ROCOCO still speaks to us, that his
"good company," his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in
the Chinese and its flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing
for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his
belief in the South, can still appeal to SOMETHING LEFT in us!
Ah, some time or other it will be over with it!--but who can doubt
that it will be over still sooner with the intelligence and taste for
Beethoven! For he was only the last echo of a break and transition
in style, and NOT, like Mozart, the last echo of a great European
taste which had existed for centuries. Beethoven is the
intermediate event between an old mellow soul that is constantly
breaking down, and a future over-young soul that is always
COMING; there is spread over his music the twilight of eternal
loss and eternal extravagant hope,--the same light in which
Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it
danced round the Tree of Liberty of the Revolution, and finally
almost fell down in adoration before Napoleon. But how rapidly
does THIS very sentiment now pale, how difficult nowadays is
even the APPREHENSION of this sentiment, how strangely does
the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sound to
our ear, in whom COLLECTIVELY the same fate of Europe was
able to SPEAK, which knew how to SING in Beethoven!--
Whatever German music came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism,
that is to say, to a movement which, historically considered,
was still shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than
that great interlude, the transition of Europe from Rousseau to
Napoleon, and to the rise of democracy. Weber--but what do WE
care nowadays for "Freischutz" and "Oberon"! Or Marschner's
"Hans Heiling" and "Vampyre"! Or even Wagner's "Tannhauser"!
That is extinct, although not yet forgotten music. This whole
music of Romanticism, besides, was not noble enough, was not
musical enough, to maintain its position anywhere but in the
theatre and before the masses; from the beginning it was second-
rate music, which was little thought of by genuine musicians.
It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon
master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul,
quickly acquired admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten:
as the beautiful EPISODE of German music. But with regard to
Robert Schumann, who took things seriously, and has been
taken seriously from the first--he was the last that founded a
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school,--do we not now regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a
deliverance, that this very Romanticism of Schumann's has been
surmounted? Schumann, fleeing into the "Saxon Switzerland" of
his soul, with a half Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like nature
(assuredly not like Beethoven! assuredly not like Byron!)--his
MANFRED music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the
extent of injustice; Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally
a PETTY taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity--
doubly dangerous among Germans--for quiet lyricism and intoxication
of the feelings), going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing
and retiring, a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but
anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning a sort of girl and
NOLI ME TANGERE--this Schumann was already merely a GERMAN
event in music, and no longer a European event, as Beethoven
had been, as in a still greater degree Mozart had been;
with Schumann 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 torture are books written in German to a reader
who has a THIRD ear! How indignantly he stands beside the
slowly turning swamp of sounds without tune and rhythms without
dance, which Germans call a "book"! And even the German
who READS books! How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he
reads! How many Germans know, and consider it obligatory to
know, that there is ART in every good sentence--art which must
be divined, if the sentence is to be understood! If there is a
misunderstanding about its TEMPO, for instance, the sentence
itself is misunderstood! That one must not be doubtful about the
rhythm-determining syllables, that one should feel the breaking
of the too-rigid symmetry as intentional and as a charm, that
one should lend a fine and patient ear to every STACCATO and
every RUBATO, that one should divine the sense in the sequence
of the vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they
can be tinted and retinted in the order of their arrangement--
who among book-reading Germans is complaisant enough to
recognize such duties and requirements, and to listen to so much
art and intention in language? After all, one just "has no ear for
it"; and so the most marked contrasts of style are not heard, and
the most delicate artistry is as it were SQUANDERED on the
deaf.--These were my thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and
unintuitively two masters in the art of prose- writing have been
confounded: one, whose words drop down hesitatingly and
coldly, as from the roof of a damp cave--he counts on their dull
sound and echo; and another who manipulates his language like
a flexible sword, and from his arm down into his toes feels the
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dangerous bliss of the quivering, over-sharp blade, which wishes
to bite, hiss, and cut.
247. How little the German style has to do with harmony and
with the ear, is shown by the fact that precisely our good musicians
themselves write badly. The German does not read aloud,
he does not read for the ear, but only with his eyes; he has put
his ears away in the drawer for the time. In antiquity when a
man read-- which was seldom enough--he read something to
himself, and in a loud voice; they were surprised when any one
read silently, and sought secretly the reason of it. In a loud
voice: that is to say, with all the swellings, inflections, and variations
of key and changes of TEMPO, in which the ancient PUBLIC
world took delight. The laws of the written style were then the
same as those of the spoken style; and these laws depended
partly on the surprising development and refined requirements of
the ear and larynx; partly on the strength, endurance, and
power of the ancient lungs. In the ancient sense, a period is
above all a physiological whole, inasmuch as it is comprised in
one breath. Such periods as occur in Demosthenes and Cicero,
swelling twice and sinking twice, and all in one breath, were
pleasures to the men of ANTIQUITY, who knew by their own
schooling how to appreciate the virtue therein, the rareness and
the difficulty in the deliverance of such a period;--WE have really
no right to the BIG period, we modern men, who are short of
breath in every sense! Those ancients, indeed, were all of them
dilettanti in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently
critics--they thus brought their orators to the highest pitch; in
the same manner as in the last century, when all Italian ladies
and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song (and
with it also the art of melody) reached its elevation. In Germany,
however (until quite recently when a kind of platform eloquence
began shyly and awkwardly enough to flutter its young wings),
there was properly speaking only one kind of public and APPROXIMATELY
artistical discourse--that delivered from the pulpit.
The preacher was the only one in Germany who knew the weight
of a syllable or a word, in what manner a sentence strikes,
springs, rushes, flows, and comes to a close; he alone had a
conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience: for reasons
are not lacking why proficiency in oratory should be especially
seldom attained by a German, or almost always too late.
The masterpiece of German prose is therefore with good reason
the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the BIBLE has hitherto
been the best German book. Compared with Luther's Bible,
almost everything else is merely "literature"--something which
has not grown in Germany, and therefore has not taken and
does not take root in German hearts, as the Bible has done.
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248. There are two kinds of geniuses: one which above all engenders
and seeks to engender, and another which willingly lets
itself be fructified and brings forth. And similarly, among the
gifted nations, there are those on whom the woman's problem of
pregnancy has devolved, and the secret task of forming, maturing,
and perfecting--the Greeks, for instance, were a nation of
this kind, and so are the French; and others which have to fructify
and become the cause of new modes of life--like the Jews,
the Romans, and, in all modesty be it asked: like the Germans?-
- nations tortured and enraptured by unknown fevers and irresistibly
forced out of themselves, amorous and longing for foreign
races (for such as "let themselves be fructified"), and withal
imperious, like everything conscious of being full of generative
force, and consequently empowered "by the grace of God."
These two kinds of geniuses seek each other like man and
woman; but they also misunderstand each other--like man and
woman.
249. Every nation has its own "Tartuffery," and calls that its
virtue.--One does not know--cannot know, the best that is in
one.
250. What Europe owes to the Jews?--Many things, good and
bad, and above all one thing of the nature both of the best and
the worst: the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty
of infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole
Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness--and
consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring, and exquisite
element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in the
aftersheen of which the sky of our European culture, its evening
sky, now glows--perhaps glows out. For this, we artists among
the spectators and philosophers, are--grateful to the Jews.
251. It must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and
disturbances--in short, slight attacks of stupidity--pass over the
spirit of a people that suffers and WANTS to suffer from national
nervous fever and political ambition: for instance, among present-
day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the
anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly, the Christian-romantic
folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly, the Prussian folly
(just look at those poor historians, the Sybels and Treitschkes,
and their closely bandaged heads), and whatever else these little
obscurations of the German spirit and conscience may be called.
May it be forgiven me that I, too, when on a short daring sojourn
on very infected ground, did not remain wholly exempt from the
disease, but like every one else, began to entertain thoughts
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about matters which did not concern me--the first symptom of
political infection. About the Jews, for instance, listen to the
following:--I have never yet met a German who was favourably
inclined to the Jews; and however decided the repudiation of
actual anti-Semitism may be on the part of all prudent and political
men, this prudence and policy is not perhaps directed
against the nature of the sentiment itself, but only against its
dangerous excess, and especially against the distasteful and
infamous expression of this excess of sentiment; --on this point
we must not deceive ourselves. That Germany has amply SUFFICIENT
Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood, has
difficulty (and will long have difficulty) in disposing only of this
quantity of "Jew"--as the Italian, the Frenchman, and the Englishman
have done by means of a stronger digestion:--that is the
unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct, to
which one must listen and according to which one must act. "Let
no more Jews come in! And shut the doors, especially towards
the East (also towards Austria)!"--thus commands the instinct of
a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain, so that it
could be easily wiped out, easily extinguished, by a stronger
race. The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest,
toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe, they know
how to succeed even under the worst conditions (in fact better
than under favourable ones), by means of virtues of some sort,
which one would like nowadays to label as vices--owing above all
to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before
"modern ideas", they alter only, WHEN they do alter, in the same
way that the Russian Empire makes its conquest--as an empire
that has plenty of time and is not of yesterday--namely, according
to the principle, "as slowly as possible"! A thinker who has
the future of Europe at heart, will, in all his perspectives concerning
the future, calculate upon the Jews, as he will calculate
upon the Russians, as above all the surest and likeliest factors in
the great play and battle of forces. That which is at present
called a "nation" in Europe, and is really rather a RES FACTA
than NATA (indeed, sometimes confusingly similar to a RES
FICTA ET PICTA), is in every case something evolving, young,
easily displaced, and not yet a race, much less such a race AERE
PERENNUS, as the Jews are such "nations" should most carefully
avoid all hot-headed rivalry and hostility! It is certain that the
Jews, if they desired--or if they were driven to it, as the anti-
Semites seem to wish--COULD now have the ascendancy, nay,
literally the supremacy, over Europe, that they are NOT working
and planning for that end is equally certain. Meanwhile, they
rather wish and desire, even somewhat importunely, to be insorbed
and absorbed by Europe, they long to be finally settled,
authorized, and respected somewhere, and wish to put an end to
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the nomadic life, to the "wandering Jew",--and one should certainly
take account of this impulse and tendency, and MAKE
ADVANCES to it (it possibly betokens a mitigation of the Jewish
instincts) for which purpose it would perhaps be useful and fair
to banish the anti-Semitic bawlers out of the country. One should
make advances with all prudence, and with selection, pretty
much as the English nobility do It stands to reason that the more
powerful and strongly marked types of new Germanism could
enter into relation with the Jews with the least hesitation, for
instance, the nobleman officer from the Prussian border it would
be interesting in many ways to see whether the genius for
money and patience (and especially some intellect and intellectuality--
sadly lacking in the place referred to) could not in addition
be annexed and trained to the hereditary art of commanding
and obeying--for both of which the country in question has now
a classic reputation But here it is expedient to break off my festal
discourse and my sprightly Teutonomania for I have already
reached my SERIOUS TOPIC, the "European problem," as I understand
it, the rearing of a new ruling caste for Europe.
252. They are not a philosophical race--the English: Bacon
represents an ATTACK on the philosophical spirit generally,
Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of
the idea of a "philosopher" for more than a century. It was
AGAINST Hume that Kant uprose and raised himself; it was
Locke of whom Schelling RIGHTLY said, "JE MEPRISE LOCKE"; in
the struggle against the English mechanical stultification of the
world, Hegel and Schopenhauer (along with Goethe) were of one
accord; the two hostile brother-geniuses in philosophy, who
pushed in different directions towards the opposite poles of
German thought, and thereby wronged each other as only brothers
will do.--What is lacking in England, and has always been
lacking, that half-actor and rhetorician knew well enough, the
absurd muddle-head, Carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate
grimaces what he knew about himself: namely, what was
LACKING in Carlyle--real POWER of intellect, real DEPTH of intellectual
perception, in short, philosophy. It is characteristic of
such an unphilosophical race to hold on firmly to Christianity--
they NEED its discipline for "moralizing" and humanizing. The
Englishman, more gloomy, sensual, headstrong, and brutal than
the German--is for that very reason, as the baser of the two,
also the most pious: he has all the MORE NEED of Christianity.
To finer nostrils, this English Christianity itself has still a characteristic
English taint of spleen and alcoholic excess, for which,
owing to good reasons, it is used as an antidote--the finer poison
to neutralize the coarser: a finer form of poisoning is in fact a
step in advance with coarse-mannered people, a step towards
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spiritualization. The English coarseness and rustic demureness is
still most satisfactorily disguised by Christian pantomime, and by
praying and psalm-singing (or, more correctly, it is thereby
explained and differently expressed); and for the herd of drunkards
and rakes who formerly learned moral grunting under the
influence of Methodism (and more recently as the "Salvation
Army"), a penitential fit may really be the relatively highest
manifestation of "humanity" to which they can be elevated: so
much may reasonably be admitted. That, however, which offends
even in the humanest Englishman is his lack of music, to
speak figuratively (and also literally): he has neither rhythm nor
dance in the movements of his soul and body; indeed, not even
the desire for rhythm and dance, for "music." Listen to him
speaking; look at the most beautiful Englishwoman WALKING--in
no country on earth are there more beautiful doves and swans;
finally, listen to them singing! But I ask too much . . .
253. There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre
minds, because they are best adapted for them, there are truths
which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre
spirits:--one is pushed to this probably unpleasant conclusion,
now that the influence of respectable but mediocre Englishmen--
I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer--
begins to gain the ascendancy in the middle-class region of
European taste. Indeed, who could doubt that it is a useful thing
for SUCH minds to have the ascendancy for a time? It would be
an error to consider the highly developed and independently
soaring minds as specially qualified for determining and collecting
many little common facts, and deducing conclusions from
them; as exceptions, they are rather from the first in no very
favourable position towards those who are "the rules." After all,
they have more to do than merely to perceive:--in effect, they
have to BE something new, they have to SIGNIFY something
new, they have to REPRESENT new values! The gulf between
knowledge and capacity is perhaps greater, and also more mysterious,
than one thinks: the capable man in the grand style, the
creator, will possibly have to be an ignorant person;--while on
the other hand, for scientific discoveries like those of Darwin, a
certain narrowness, aridity, and industrious carefulness (in short,
something English) may not be unfavourable for arriving at
them.--Finally, let it not be forgotten that the English, with their
profound mediocrity, brought about once before a general depression
of European intelligence.
What is called "modern ideas," or "the ideas of the eighteenth
century," or "French ideas"--that, consequently, against which
the GERMAN mind rose up with profound disgust--is of English
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origin, there is no doubt about it. The French were only the apes
and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, and likewise, alas!
their first and profoundest VICTIMS; for owing to the diabolical
Anglomania of "modern ideas," the AME FRANCAIS has in the
end become so thin and emaciated, that at present one recalls
its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate
strength, its inventive excellency, almost with disbelief. One
must, however, maintain this verdict of historical justice in a
determined manner, and defend it against present prejudices
and appearances: the European NOBLESSE--of sentiment, taste,
and manners, taking the word in every high sense--is the work
and invention of FRANCE; the European ignobleness, the plebeianism
of modern ideas--is ENGLAND'S work and invention.
254. Even at present France is still the seat of the most intellectual
and refined culture of Europe, it is still the high school of
taste; but one must know how to find this "France of taste." He
who belongs to it keeps himself well concealed:--they may be a
small number in whom it lives and is embodied, besides perhaps
being men who do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part
fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids, in part persons over- indulged,
over-refined, such as have the AMBITION to conceal
themselves.
They have all something in common: they keep their ears closed
in presence of the delirious folly and noisy spouting of the democratic
BOURGEOIS. In fact, a besotted and brutalized France
at present sprawls in the foreground--it recently celebrated a
veritable orgy of bad taste, and at the same time of self- admiration,
at the funeral of Victor Hugo. There is also something else
common to them: a predilection to resist intellectual Germanizing--
and a still greater inability to do so! In this France of intellect,
which is also a France of pessimism, Schopenhauer has
perhaps become more at home, and more indigenous than he
has ever been in Germany; not to speak of Heinrich Heine, who
has long ago been re-incarnated in the more refined and fastidious
lyrists of Paris; or of Hegel, who at present, in the form of
Taine--the FIRST of living historians--exercises an almost tyrannical
influence. As regards Richard Wagner, however, the more
French music learns to adapt itself to the actual needs of the
AME MODERNE, the more will it "Wagnerite"; one can safely
predict that beforehand,--it is already taking place sufficiently!
There are, however, three things which the French can still boast
of with pride as their heritage and possession, and as indelible
tokens of their ancient intellectual superiority in Europe, in spite
of all voluntary or involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing of
taste. FIRSTLY, the capacity for artistic emotion, for devotion to
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"form," for which the expression, L'ART POUR L'ART, along with
numerous others, has been invented:--such capacity has not
been lacking in France for three centuries; and owing to its reverence
for the "small number," it has again and again made a
sort of chamber music of literature possible, which is sought for
in vain elsewhere in Europe.--The SECOND thing whereby the
French can lay claim to a superiority over Europe is their ancient,
many-sided, MORALISTIC culture, owing to which one finds on
an average, even in the petty ROMANCIERS of the newspapers
and chance BOULEVARDIERS DE PARIS, a psychological sensitiveness
and curiosity, of which, for example, one has no conception
(to say nothing of the thing itself!) in Germany. The
Germans lack a couple of centuries of the moralistic work requisite
thereto, which, as we have said, France has not grudged:
those who call the Germans "naive" on that account give them
commendation for a defect. (As the opposite of the German
inexperience and innocence IN VOLUPTATE PSYCHOLOGICA,
which is not too remotely associated with the tediousness of
German intercourse,--and as the most successful expression of
genuine French curiosity and inventive talent in this domain of
delicate thrills, Henri Beyle may be noted; that remarkable anticipatory
and forerunning man, who, with a Napoleonic TEMPO,
traversed HIS Europe, in fact, several centuries of the European
soul, as a surveyor and discoverer thereof:--it has required two
generations to OVERTAKE him one way or other, to divine long
afterwards some of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured
him--this strange Epicurean and man of interrogation, the last
great psychologist of France).--There is yet a THIRD claim to
superiority: in the French character there is a successful halfway
synthesis of the North and South, which makes them comprehend
many things, and enjoins upon them other things, which
an Englishman can never comprehend. Their temperament,
turned alternately to and from the South, in which from time to
time the Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves
them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless
conceptual-spectrism and from poverty of blood--our GERMAN
infirmity of taste, for the excessive prevalence of which at the
present moment, blood and iron, that is to say "high politics,"
has with great resolution been prescribed (according to a dangerous
healing art, which bids me wait and wait, but not yet
hope).--There is also still in France a pre-understanding and
ready welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men, who are
too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any kind of fatherlandism,
and know how to love the South when in the North and the
North when in the South--the born Midlanders, the "good Europeans."
For them BIZET has made music, this latest genius, who
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has seen a new beauty and seduction,--who has discovered a
piece of the SOUTH IN MUSIC.
255. I hold that many precautions should be taken against German
music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it--as a
great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most
sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence
which o'erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself--well,
such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against
German music, because, in injuring his taste anew, it will also
injure his health anew. Such a Southerner, a Southerner not by
origin but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of music,
must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the
North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier,
and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-
German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all
German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the
Mediterranean clearness of sky--a super-European music, which
holds its own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert,
whose soul is akin to the palm-tree, and can be at home
and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey . . . I
could imagine a music of which the rarest charm would be that it
knew nothing more of good and evil; only that here and there
perhaps some sailor's home-sickness, some golden shadows and
tender weaknesses might sweep lightly over it; an art which,
from the far distance, would see the colours of a sinking and
almost incomprehensible MORAL world fleeing towards it, and
would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive
such belated fugitives.
256. Owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationalitycraze
has induced and still induces among the nations of Europe,
owing also to the short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians,
who with the help of this craze, are at present in power, and do
not suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue
must necessarily be only an interlude policy--owing to all this
and much else that is altogether unmentionable at present, the
most unmistakable signs that EUROPE WISHES TO BE ONE, are
now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted. With all
the more profound and large-minded men of this century, the
real general tendency of the mysterious labour of their souls was
to prepare the way for that new SYNTHESIS, and tentatively to
anticipate the European of the future; only in their simulations,
or in their weaker moments, in old age perhaps, did they belong
to the "fatherlands"--they only rested from themselves when
they became "patriots." I think of such men as Napoleon,
Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: it
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must not be taken amiss if I also count Richard Wagner among
them, about whom one must not let oneself be deceived by his
own misunderstandings (geniuses like him have seldom the right
to understand themselves), still less, of course, by the unseemly
noise with which he is now resisted and opposed in France: the
fact remains, nevertheless, that Richard Wagner and the LATER
FRENCH ROMANTICISM of the forties, are most closely and intimately
related to one another. They are akin, fundamentally
akin, in all the heights and depths of their requirements; it is
Europe, the ONE Europe, whose soul presses urgently and longingly,
outwards and upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous
art--whither? into a new light? towards a new sun? But who
would attempt to express accurately what all these masters of
new modes of speech could not express distinctly? It is certain
that the same storm and stress tormented them, that they
SOUGHT in the same manner, these last great seekers! All of
them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears--the first artists
of universal literary culture--for the most part even themselves
writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the arts and the
senses (Wagner, as musician is reckoned among painters, as
poet among musicians, as artist generally among actors); all of
them fanatics for EXPRESSION "at any cost"--I specially mention
Delacroix, the nearest related to Wagner; all of them great discoverers
in the realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome and
dreadful, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art
of the show-shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius,
out and out VIRTUOSI, with mysterious accesses to all that
seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic
and of the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic,
the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory; as men,
Tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves
to be incapable of a noble TEMPO or of a LENTO in life and action--
think of Balzac, for instance,--unrestrained workers, almost
destroying themselves by work; antinomians and rebels in
manners, ambitious and insatiable, without equilibrium and
enjoyment; all of them finally shattering and sinking down at the
Christian cross (and with right and reason, for who of them
would have been sufficiently profound and sufficiently original for
an ANTI- CHRISTIAN philosophy?);--on the whole, a boldly daring,
splendidly overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging
class of higher men, who had first to teach their century--and it
is the century of the MASSES--the conception "higher man." . . .
Let the German friends of Richard Wagner advise together as to
whether there is anything purely German in the Wagnerian art,
or whether its distinction does not consist precisely in coming
from SUPER- GERMAN sources and impulses: in which connection
it may not be underrated how indispensable Paris was to the
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development of his type, which the strength of his instincts made
him long to visit at the most decisive time--and how the whole
style of his proceedings, of his self-apostolate, could only perfect
itself in sight of the French socialistic original. On a more subtle
comparison it will perhaps be found, to the honour of Richard
Wagner's German nature, that he has acted in everything with
more strength, daring, severity, and elevation than a nineteenth-
century Frenchman could have done--owing to the circumstance
that we Germans are as yet nearer to barbarism than the
French;-- perhaps even the most remarkable creation of Richard
Wagner is not only at present, but for ever inaccessible, incomprehensible,
and inimitable to the whole latter-day Latin race:
the figure of Siegfried, that VERY FREE man, who is probably far
too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too ANTI-CATHOLIC
for the taste of old and mellow civilized nations. He may even
have been a sin against Romanticism, this anti-Latin Siegfried:
well, Wagner atoned amply for this sin in his old sad days, when-
-anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into politics--
he began, with the religious vehemence peculiar to him, to
preach, at least, THE WAY TO ROME, if not to walk therein.--That
these last words may not be misunderstood, I will call to my aid
a few powerful rhymes, which will even betray to less delicate
ears what I mean --what I mean COUNTER TO the "last Wagner"
and his Parsifal music:--
--Is this our mode?--From German heart came this vexed ululating?
From German body, this self-lacerating? Is ours this priestly
hand-dilation, This incense-fuming exaltation? Is ours this faltering,
falling, shambling, This quite uncertain ding-dong- dangling?
This sly nun-ogling, Ave-hour-bell ringing, This wholly false
enraptured heaven-o'erspringing?--Is this our mode?--Think
well!--ye still wait for admission--For what ye hear is ROME--
ROME'S FAITH BY INTUITION!
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CHAPTER IX - 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
believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of
worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form
or other. Without the PATHOS OF DISTANCE, such as grows out
of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant outlooking
and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and
instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying
and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance--
that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the
longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul
itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended,
more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation
of the type "man," the continued "self-surmounting of man," to
use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. To be sure, one
must not resign oneself to any humanitarian illusions about the
history of the origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of
the preliminary condition for the elevation of the type "man"):
the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every
higher civilization hitherto has ORIGINATED! Men with a still
natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word,
men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and
desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral,
more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities),
or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force
was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At
the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian
caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical,
but in their psychical power--they were more COMPLETE men
(which at every point also implies the same as "more complete
beasts").
258. Corruption--as the indication that anarchy threatens to
break out among the instincts, and that the foundation of the
emotions, called "life," is convulsed--is something radically different
according to the organization in which it manifests itself.
When, for instance, an aristocracy like that of France at the
beginning of the Revolution, flung away its privileges with sublime
disgust and sacrificed itself to an excess of its moral sentiments,
it was corruption:--it was really only the closing act of
the corruption which had existed for centuries, by virtue of which
that aristocracy had abdicated step by step its lordly preroga-
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tives and lowered itself to a FUNCTION of royalty (in the end
even to its decoration and parade-dress). The essential thing,
however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not
regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth,
but as the SIGNIFICANCE and highest justification
thereof--that it should therefore accept with a good conscience
the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, FOR ITS SAKE, must
be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and
instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely that society
is NOT allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation
and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of
beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties,
and in general to a higher EXISTENCE: like those sun- seeking
climbing plants in Java--they are called Sipo Matador,-- which
encircle an oak so long and so often with their arms, until at last,
high above it, but supported by it, they can unfold their tops in
the open light, and exhibit their happiness.
259. To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation,
and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may
result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals
when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual
similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of
worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon,
however, as one wished to take this principle more generally,
and if possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIETY,
it would immediately disclose what it really is--namely, a
Will to the DENIAL of life, a principle of dissolution and decay.
Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all
sentimental weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation,
injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity,
obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least,
putting it mildest, exploitation;--but why should one for ever use
precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose
has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was
previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal--it
takes place in every healthy aristocracy--must itself, if it be a
living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other
bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each
other it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour
to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire
ascendancy-- not owing to any morality or immorality, but because
it LIVES, and because life IS precisely Will to Power. On no
point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more
unwilling to be corrected than on this matter, people now rave
everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming
conditions of society in which "the exploiting character" is to be
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absent--that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a
mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions.
"Exploitation" does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and
primitive society it belongs to the nature of the living being as a
primary organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will
to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life--Granting that as a
theory this is a novelty--as a reality it is the FUNDAMENTAL FACT
of all history let us be so far honest towards ourselves!
260. In a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities
which have hitherto prevailed or still prevail on the earth, I found
certain traits recurring regularly together, and connected with
one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves
to me, and a radical distinction was brought to light. There is
MASTER-MORALITY and SLAVE-MORALITY,--I would at once add,
however, that in all higher and mixed civilizations, there are also
attempts at the reconciliation of the two moralities, but one finds
still oftener the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of them,
indeed sometimes their close juxtaposition--even in the same
man, within one soul. The distinctions of moral values have
either originated in a ruling caste, pleasantly conscious of being
different from the ruled--or among the ruled class, the slaves
and dependents of all sorts. In the first case, when it is the rulers
who determine the conception "good," it is the exalted, proud
disposition which is regarded as the distinguishing feature, and
that which determines the order of rank. The noble type of man
separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this
exalted, proud disposition displays itself he despises them. Let it
at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis
"good" and "bad" means practically the same as "noble" and
"despicable",--the antithesis "good" and "EVIL" is of a different
origin. The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those
thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also,
the distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self- abasing,
the dog-like kind of men who let themselves be abused, the
mendicant flatterers, and above all the liars:--it is a fundamental
belief of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful.
"We truthful ones"--the nobility in ancient Greece called themselves.
It is obvious that everywhere the designations of moral
value were at first applied to MEN; and were only derivatively
and at a later period applied to ACTIONS; it is a gross mistake,
therefore, when historians of morals start with questions like,
"Why have sympathetic actions been praised?" The noble type of
man regards HIMSELF as a determiner of values; he does not
require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: "What is
injurious to me is injurious in itself;" he knows that it is he himself
only who confers honour on things; he is a CREATOR OF
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VALUES. He honours whatever he recognizes in himself: such
morality equals self-glorification. In the foreground there is the
feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness
of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which
would fain give and bestow:--the noble man also helps the unfortunate,
but not--or scarcely--out of pity, but rather from an
impulse generated by the super-abundance of power. The noble
man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has
power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep
silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and
hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard.
"Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast," says an old Scandinavian
Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud
Viking. Such a type of man is even proud of not being made for
sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: "He
who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one." The
noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from
the morality which sees precisely in sympathy, or in acting for
the good of others, or in DESINTERESSEMENT, the characteristic
of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical enmity
and irony towards "selflessness," belong as definitely to noble
morality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in presence of
sympathy and the "warm heart."--It is the powerful who KNOW
how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention. The
profound reverence for age and for tradition--all law rests on this
double reverence,-- the belief and prejudice in favour of ancestors
and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of
the powerful; and if, reversely, men of "modern ideas" believe
almost instinctively in "progress" and the "future," and are more
and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of
these "ideas" has complacently betrayed itself thereby. A morality
of the ruling class, however, is more especially foreign and
irritating to present-day taste in the sternness of its principle
that one has duties only to one's equals; that one may act towards
beings of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign, just as
seems good to one, or "as the heart desires," and in any case
"beyond good and evil": it is here that sympathy and similar
sentiments can have a place. The ability and obligation to exercise
prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge--both only
within the circle of equals,-- artfulness in retaliation, RAFFINEMENT
of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies
(as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness,
arrogance--in fact, in order to be a good FRIEND): all these are
typical characteristics of the noble morality, which, as has been
pointed out, is not the morality of "modern ideas," and is therefore
at present difficult to realize, and also to unearth and disclose.--
It is otherwise with the second type of morality, SLAVE-
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MORALITY. Supposing that the abused, the oppressed, the suffering,
the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of
themselves should moralize, what will be the common element in
their moral estimates? Probably a pessimistic suspicion with
regard to the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps
a condemnation of man, together with his situation. The
slave has an unfavourable eye for the virtues of the powerful; he
has a skepticism and distrust, a REFINEMENT of distrust of everything
"good" that is there honoured--he would fain persuade
himself that the very happiness there is not genuine. On the
other hand, THOSE qualities which serve to alleviate the existence
of sufferers are brought into prominence and flooded with
light; it is here that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm
heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain to
honour; for here these are the most useful qualities, and almost
the only means of supporting the burden of existence. Slavemorality
is essentially the morality of utility. Here is the seat of
the origin of the famous antithesis "good" and "evil":--power and
dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain
dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of
being despised. According to slave-morality, therefore, the "evil"
man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely
the "good" man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while
the bad man is regarded as the despicable being. The contrast
attains its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences
of slave-morality, a shade of depreciation--it may be
slight and well-intentioned--at last attaches itself to the "good"
man of this morality; because, according to the servile mode of
thought, the good man must in any case be the SAFE man: he is
good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un bonhomme.
Everywhere that slave- morality gains the ascendancy,
language shows a tendency to approximate the significations of
the words "good" and "stupid."- -A last fundamental difference:
the desire for FREEDOM, the instinct for happiness and the refinements
of the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slavemorals
and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence and
devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of
thinking and estimating.-- Hence we can understand without
further detail why love AS A PASSION--it is our European specialty--
must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its
invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant,
ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so
much, and almost owes itself.
261. Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most difficult
for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted to deny it,
where another kind of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The
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problem for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek to
arouse a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do
not possess--and consequently also do not "deserve,"--and who
yet BELIEVE in this good opinion afterwards. This seems to him
on the one hand such bad taste and so self-disrespectful, and on
the other hand so grotesquely unreasonable, that he would like
to consider vanity an exception, and is doubtful about it in most
cases when it is spoken of. He will say, for instance: "I may be
mistaken about my value, and on the other hand may nevertheless
demand that my value should be acknowledged by others
precisely as I rate it:--that, however, is not vanity (but selfconceit,
or, in most cases, that which is called 'humility,' and
also 'modesty')." Or he will even say: "For many reasons I can
delight in the good opinion of others, perhaps because I love and
honour them, and rejoice in all their joys, perhaps also because
their good opinion endorses and strengthens my belief in my
own good opinion, perhaps because the good opinion of others,
even in cases where I do not share it, is useful to me, or gives
promise of usefulness:--all this, however, is not vanity." The
man of noble character must first bring it home forcibly to his
mind, especially with the aid of history, that, from time immemorial,
in all social strata in any way dependent, the ordinary
man WAS only that which he PASSED FOR:--not being at all
accustomed to fix values, he did not assign even to himself any
other value than that which his master assigned to him (it is the
peculiar RIGHT OF MASTERS to create values). It may be looked
upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that the ordinary
man, even at present, is still always WAITING for an opinion
about himself, and then instinctively submitting himself to it; yet
by no means only to a "good" opinion, but also to a bad and
unjust one (think, for instance, of the greater part of the self-
appreciations and self-depreciations which believing women
learn from their confessors, and which in general the believing
Christian learns from his Church). In fact, conformably to the
slow rise of the democratic social order (and its cause, the blending
of the blood of masters and slaves), the originally noble and
rare impulse of the masters to assign a value to themselves and
to "think well" of themselves, will now be more and more encouraged
and extended; but it has at all times an older, ampler,
and more radically ingrained propensity opposed to it--and in the
phenomenon of "vanity" this older propensity overmasters the
younger. The vain person rejoices over EVERY good opinion
which he hears about himself (quite apart from the point of view
of its usefulness, and equally regardless of its truth or falsehood),
just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he subjects
himself to both, he feels himself subjected to both, by that oldest
instinct of subjection which breaks forth in him.--It is "the slave"
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in the vain man's blood, the remains of the slave's craftiness--
and how much of the "slave" is still left in woman, for instance!--
which seeks to SEDUCE to good opinions of itself; it is the slave,
too, who immediately afterwards falls prostrate himself before
these opinions, as though he had not called them forth.--And to
repeat it again: vanity is an atavism.
262. A SPECIES originates, and a type becomes established and
strong in the long struggle with essentially constant UNFAVOURABLE
conditions. On the other hand, it is known by the experience
of breeders that species which receive super-abundant
nourishment, and in general a surplus of protection and care,
immediately tend in the most marked way to develop variations,
and are fertile in prodigies and monstrosities (also in monstrous
vices). Now look at an aristocratic commonwealth, say an ancient
Greek polis, or Venice, as a voluntary or involuntary contrivance
for the purpose of REARING human beings; there are
there men beside one another, thrown upon their own resources,
who want to make their species prevail, chiefly because they
MUST prevail, or else run the terrible danger of being exterminated.
The favour, the super-abundance, the protection are
there lacking under which variations are fostered; the species
needs itself as species, as something which, precisely by virtue
of its hardness, its uniformity, and simplicity of structure, can in
general prevail and make itself permanent in constant struggle
with its neighbours, or with rebellious or rebellion-threatening
vassals. The most varied experience teaches it what are the
qualities to which it principally owes the fact that it still exists, in
spite of all Gods and men, and has hitherto been victorious:
these qualities it calls virtues, and these virtues alone it develops
to maturity. It does so with severity, indeed it desires severity;
every aristocratic morality is intolerant in the education of youth,
in the control of women, in the marriage customs, in the relations
of old and young, in the penal laws (which have an eye
only for the degenerating): it counts intolerance itself among the
virtues, under the name of "justice." A type with few, but very
marked features, a species of severe, warlike, wisely silent,
reserved, and reticent men (and as such, with the most delicate
sensibility for the charm and nuances of society) is thus established,
unaffected by the vicissitudes of generations; the constant
struggle with uniform UNFAVOURABLE conditions is, as
already remarked, the cause of a type becoming stable and hard.
Finally, however, a happy state of things results, the enormous
tension is relaxed; there are perhaps no more enemies among
the neighbouring peoples, and the means of life, even of the
enjoyment of life, are present in superabundance. With one
stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline severs: it is
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no longer regarded as necessary, as a condition of existence--if
it would continue, it can only do so as a form of LUXURY, as an
archaizing TASTE. Variations, whether they be deviations (into
the higher, finer, and rarer), or deteriorations and monstrosities,
appear suddenly on the scene in the greatest exuberance and
splendour; the individual dares to be individual and detach himself.
At this turning-point of history there manifest themselves,
side by side, and often mixed and entangled together, a magnificent,
manifold, virgin-forest-like up-growth and up-striving, a
kind of TROPICAL TEMPO in the rivalry of growth, and an extraordinary
decay and self- destruction, owing to the savagely
opposing and seemingly exploding egoisms, which strive with
one another "for sun and light," and can no longer assign any
limit, restraint, or forbearance for themselves by means of the
hitherto existing morality. It was this morality itself which piled
up the strength so enormously, which bent the bow in so threatening
a manner:--it is now "out of date," it is getting "out of
date." The dangerous and disquieting point has been reached
when the greater, more manifold, more comprehensive life IS
LIVED BEYOND the old morality; the "individual" stands out, and
is obliged to have recourse to his own law-giving, his own arts
and artifices for self-preservation, self-elevation, and selfdeliverance.
Nothing but new "Whys," nothing but new "Hows,"
no common formulas any longer, misunderstanding and disregard
in league with each other, decay, deterioration, and the
loftiest desires frightfully entangled, the genius of the race overflowing
from all the cornucopias of good and bad, a portentous
simultaneousness of Spring and Autumn, full of new charms and
mysteries peculiar to the fresh, still inexhausted, still unwearied
corruption. Danger is again present, the mother of morality,
great danger; this time shifted into the individual, into the
neighbour and friend, into the street, into their own child, into
their own heart, into all the most personal and secret recesses of
their desires and volitions. What will the moral philosophers who
appear at this time have to preach? They discover, these sharp
onlookers and loafers, that the end is quickly approaching, that
everything around them decays and produces decay, that nothing
will endure until the day after tomorrow, except one species
of man, the incurably MEDIOCRE. The mediocre alone have a
prospect of continuing and propagating themselves--they will be
the men of the future, the sole survivors; "be like them! become
mediocre!" is now the only morality which has still a significance,
which still obtains a hearing.--But it is difficult to preach this
morality of mediocrity! it can never avow what it is and what it
desires! it has to talk of moderation and dignity and duty and
brotherly love--it will have difficulty IN CONCEALING ITS IRONY!
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263. There is an INSTINCT FOR RANK, which more than anything
else is already the sign of a HIGH rank; there is a DELIGHT in
the NUANCES of reverence which leads one to infer noble origin
and habits. The refinement, goodness, and loftiness of a soul are
put to a perilous test when something passes by that is of the
highest rank, but is not yet protected by the awe of authority
from obtrusive touches and incivilities: something that goes its
way like a living touchstone, undistinguished, undiscovered, and
tentative, perhaps voluntarily veiled and disguised. He whose
task and practice it is to investigate souls, will avail himself of
many varieties of this very art to determine the ultimate value of
a soul, the unalterable, innate order of rank to which it belongs:
he will test it by its INSTINCT FOR REVERENCE. DIFFERENCE
ENGENDRE HAINE: the vulgarity of many a nature spurts up
suddenly like dirty water, when any holy vessel, any jewel from
closed shrines, any book bearing the marks of great destiny, is
brought before it; while on the other hand, there is an involuntary
silence, a hesitation of the eye, a cessation of all gestures,
by which it is indicated that a soul FEELS the nearness of what is
worthiest of respect. The way in which, on the whole, the reverence
for the BIBLE has hitherto been maintained in Europe, is
perhaps the best example of discipline and refinement of manners
which Europe owes to Christianity: books of such profoundness
and supreme significance require for their protection an
external tyranny of authority, in order to acquire the PERIOD of
thousands of years which is necessary to exhaust and unriddle
them. Much has been achieved when the sentiment has been at
last instilled into the masses (the shallow-pates and the boobies
of every kind) that they are not allowed to touch everything, that
there are holy experiences before which they must take off their
shoes and keep away the unclean hand--it is almost their highest
advance towards humanity. On the contrary, in the so-called
cultured classes, the believers in "modern ideas," nothing is
perhaps so repulsive as their lack of shame, the easy insolence
of eye and hand with which they touch, taste, and finger everything;
and it is possible that even yet there is more RELATIVE
nobility of taste, and more tact for reverence among the people,
among the lower classes of the people, especially among peasants,
than among the newspaper-reading DEMIMONDE of intellect,
the cultured class.
264. It cannot be effaced from a man's soul what his ancestors
have preferably and most constantly done: whether they were
perhaps diligent economizers attached to a desk and a cash-box,
modest and citizen-like in their desires, modest also in their
virtues; or whether they were accustomed to commanding from
morning till night, fond of rude pleasures and probably of still
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ruder duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, at one time
or another, they have sacrificed old privileges of birth and possession,
in order to live wholly for their faith--for their "God,"--as
men of an inexorable and sensitive conscience, which blushes at
every compromise. It is quite impossible for a man NOT to have
the qualities and predilections of his parents and ancestors in his
constitution, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary.
This is the problem of race. Granted that one knows something
of the parents, it is admissible to draw a conclusion about the
child: any kind of offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid
envy, or of clumsy self-vaunting--the three things which together
have constituted the genuine plebeian type in all times--
such must pass over to the child, as surely as bad blood; and
with the help of the best education and culture one will only
succeed in DECEIVING with regard to such heredity.--And what
else does education and culture try to do nowadays! In our very
democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, "education" and "culture"
MUST be essentially the art of deceiving--deceiving with
regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body
and soul. An educator who nowadays preached truthfulness
above everything else, and called out constantly to his pupils:
"Be true! Be natural! Show yourselves as you are!"--even such a
virtuous and sincere ass would learn in a short time to have
recourse to the FURCA of Horace, NATURAM EXPELLERE: with
what results? "Plebeianism" USQUE RECURRET. [FOOTNOTE:
Horace's "Epistles," I. x. 24.]
265. At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I submit that egoism
belongs to the essence of a noble soul, I mean the unalterable
belief that to a being such as "we," other beings must
naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves. The
noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without question, and
also without consciousness of harshness, constraint, or arbitrariness
therein, but rather as something that may have its basis in
the primary law of things:--if he sought a designation for it he
would say: "It is justice itself." He acknowledges under certain
circumstances, which made him hesitate at first, that there are
other equally privileged ones; as soon as he has settled this
question of rank, he moves among those equals and equally
privileged ones with the same assurance, as regards modesty
and delicate respect, which he enjoys in intercourse with himself--
in accordance with an innate heavenly mechanism which all
the stars understand. It is an ADDITIONAL instance of his egoism,
this artfulness and self-limitation in intercourse with his
equals--every star is a similar egoist; he honours HIMSELF in
them, and in the rights which he concedes to them, he has no
doubt that the exchange of honours and rights, as the ESSENCE
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of all intercourse, belongs also to the natural condition of things.
The noble soul gives as he takes, prompted by the passionate
and sensitive instinct of requital, which is at the root of his nature.
The notion of "favour" has, INTER PARES, neither significance
nor good repute; there may be a sublime way of letting
gifts as it were light upon one from above, and of drinking them
thirstily like dew-drops; but for those arts and displays the noble
soul has no aptitude. His egoism hinders him here: in general,
he looks "aloft" unwillingly--he looks either FORWARD, horizontally
and deliberately, or downwards--HE KNOWS THAT HE IS ON
A HEIGHT.
266. "One can only truly esteem him who does not LOOK OUT
FOR himself."--Goethe to Rath Schlosser.
267. The Chinese have a proverb which mothers even teach their
children: "SIAO-SIN" ("MAKE THY HEART SMALL"). This is the
essentially fundamental tendency in latter-day civilizations. I
have no doubt that an ancient Greek, also, would first of all
remark the self-dwarfing in us Europeans of today--in this respect
alone we should immediately be "distasteful" to him.
268. What, after all, is ignobleness?--Words are vocal symbols
for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols
for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for
groups of sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same words in
order to understand one another: we must also employ the same
words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the
end have experiences IN COMMON. On this account the people of
one nation understand one another better than those belonging
to different nations, even when they use the same language; or
rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions
(of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there ORIGINATES
therefrom an entity that "understands itself"--namely, a
nation. In all souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences
have gained the upper hand over those occurring more
rarely: about these matters people understand one another
rapidly and always more rapidly--the history of language is the
history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of this quick
comprehension people always unite closer and closer. The
greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly
and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one
another in danger--that is what cannot at all be dispensed with
in intercourse. Also in all loves and friendships one has the experience
that nothing of the kind continues when the discovery
has been made that in using the same words, one of the two
parties has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears differ-
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ent from those of the other. (The fear of the "eternal misunderstanding":
that is the good genius which so often keeps persons
of different sexes from too hasty attachments, to which sense
and heart prompt them--and NOT some Schopenhauerian "genius
of the species"!) Whichever groups of sensations within a
soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of
command--these decide as to the general order of rank of its
values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. A
man's estimates of value betray something of the STRUCTURE of
his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic
needs. Supposing now that necessity has from all time drawn
together only such men as could express similar requirements
and similar experiences by similar symbols, it results on the
whole that the easy COMMUNICABILITY of need, which implies
ultimately the undergoing only of average and COMMON experiences,
must have been the most potent of all the forces which
have hitherto operated upon mankind. The more similar, the
more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the
advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and
difficultly comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; they succumb
to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves.
One must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to
thwart this natural, all-too-natural PROGRESSUS IN SIMILE, the
evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the average, the
gregarious --to the IGNOBLE!--
269. The more a psychologist--a born, an unavoidable psychologist
and soul-diviner--turns his attention to the more select
cases and individuals, the greater is his danger of being suffocated
by sympathy: he NEEDS sternness and cheerfulness more
than any other man. For the corruption, the ruination of higher
men, of the more unusually constituted souls, is in fact, 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 once, and then discovers ALMOST repeatedly
throughout all history, this universal inner "desperateness"
of higher men, this eternal "too late!" in every sense--may
perhaps one day be the cause of his turning with bitterness
against his own lot, and of his making an attempt at selfdestruction--
of his "going to ruin" himself. One may perceive in
almost every psychologist a tell-tale inclination for delightful
intercourse with commonplace and well-ordered men; the fact is
thereby disclosed that he always requires healing, that he needs
a sort of flight and forgetfulness, away from what his insight and
incisiveness--from what his "business"--has laid upon his conscience.
The fear of his memory is peculiar to him. He is easily
silenced by the judgment of others; he hears with unmoved
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countenance how people honour, admire, love, and glorify,
where he has PERCEIVED--or he even conceals his silence by
expressly assenting to some plausible opinion. Perhaps the paradox
of his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely where he
has learnt GREAT SYMPATHY, together with great CONTEMPT,
the multitude, the educated, and the visionaries, have on their
part learnt great reverence--reverence for "great men" and
marvelous animals, for the sake of whom one blesses and honours
the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of mankind, and one's
own self, to whom one points the young, and in view of whom
one educates them. And who knows but in all great instances
hitherto just the same happened: that the multitude worshipped
a God, and that the "God" was only a poor sacrificial animal!
SUCCESS has always been the greatest liar--and the "work"
itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer,
are disguised in their creations until they are unrecognizable;
the "work" of the artist, of the philosopher, only invents
him who has created it, is REPUTED to have created it; the
"great men," as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions
composed afterwards; in the world of historical values spurious
coinage PREVAILS. Those great poets, for example, such as
Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I do not venture to
mention much greater names, but I have them in my mind), as
they now appear, and were perhaps obliged to be: men of the
moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, and childish, light- minded and
impulsive in their trust and distrust; with souls in which usually
some flaw has to be concealed; often taking revenge with their
works for an internal defilement, often seeking forgetfulness in
their soaring from a too true memory, often lost in the mud and
almost in love with it, until they become like the Will-o'-the-
Wisps around the swamps, and PRETEND TO BE stars--the people
then call them idealists,--often struggling with protracted
disgust, with an ever-reappearing phantom of disbelief, which
makes them cold, and obliges them to languish for GLORIA and
devour "faith as it is" out of the hands of intoxicated adulators:--
what a TORMENT these great artists are and the so-called higher
men in general, to him who has once found them out! It is thus
conceivable that it is just from woman--who is clairvoyant in the
world of suffering, and also unfortunately eager to help and save
to an extent far beyond her powers--that THEY have learnt so
readily those outbreaks of boundless devoted SYMPATHY, which
the multitude, above all the reverent multitude, do not understand,
and overwhelm with prying and self-gratifying interpretations.
This sympathizing invariably deceives itself as to its
power; woman would like to believe that love can do EVERYTHING--
it is the SUPERSTITION peculiar to her. Alas, he who
knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and
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blundering even the best and deepest love is--he finds that it
rather DESTROYS than saves!--It is possible that under the holy
fable and travesty of the life of Jesus there is hidden one of the
most painful cases of the martyrdom of KNOWLEDGE ABOUT
LOVE: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most craving
heart, that never had enough of any human love, that DEMANDED
love, that demanded inexorably and frantically to be
loved and nothing else, with terrible outbursts against those who
refused him their love; the story of a poor soul insatiated and
insatiable in love, that had to invent hell to send thither those
who WOULD NOT love him--and that at last, enlightened about
human love, had to invent a God who is entire love, entire CAPACITY
for love--who takes pity on human love, because it is so
paltry, so ignorant! He who has such sentiments, he who has
such KNOWLEDGE about love--SEEKS for death!--But why
should one deal with such painful matters? Provided, of course,
that one is not obliged to do so.
270. The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who
has suffered deeply--it almost determines the order of rank HOW
deeply men can suffer--the chilling certainty, with which he is
thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering
he KNOWS MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know,
that he has been familiar with, and "at home" in, many distant,
dreadful worlds of which "YOU know nothing"!--this silent intellectual
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 from contact with
officious and sympathizing hands, and in general from all that is
not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble: it
separates.--One of the most refined forms of disguise is Epicurism,
along with a certain ostentatious boldness of taste, which
takes suffering lightly, and puts itself on the defensive against all
that is sorrowful and profound. They are "gay men" who make
use of gaiety, because they are misunderstood on account of it--
they WISH to be misunderstood. There are "scientific minds"
who make use of science, because it gives a gay appearance,
and because scientificness leads to the conclusion that a person
is superficial--they WISH to mislead to a false conclusion. There
are free insolent minds which would fain conceal and deny that
they are broken, proud, incurable hearts (the cynicism of Hamlet--
the case of Galiani); and occasionally folly itself is the mask
of an unfortunate OVER- ASSURED knowledge.--From which it
follows that it is the part of a more refined humanity to have
reverence "for the mask," and not to make use of psychology
and curiosity in the wrong place.
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271. That which separates two men most profoundly is a different
sense and grade of purity. What does it matter about all their
honesty and reciprocal usefulness, what does it matter about all
their mutual good-will: the fact still remains--they "cannot smell
each other!" The highest instinct for purity places him who is
affected with it in the most extraordinary and dangerous isolation,
as a saint: for it is just holiness--the highest spiritualization
of the instinct in question. Any kind of cognizance of an indescribable
excess in the joy of the bath, any kind of ardour or
thirst which perpetually impels the soul out of night into the
morning, and out of gloom, out of "affliction" into clearness,
brightness, depth, and refinement:--just as much as such a
tendency DISTINGUISHES--it is a noble tendency--it also SEPARATES.--
The pity of the saint is pity for the FILTH of the human,
all-too-human. And there are grades and heights where pity
itself is regarded by him as impurity, as filth.
272. Signs of nobility: never to think of lowering our duties to
the rank of duties for everybody; to be unwilling to renounce or
to share our responsibilities; to count our prerogatives, and the
exercise of them, among our DUTIES.
273. A man who strives after great things, looks upon every one
whom he encounters on his way either as a means of advance,
or a delay and hindrance--or as a temporary resting-place. His
peculiar lofty BOUNTY to his fellow-men is only possible when he
attains his elevation and dominates. Impatience, and the consciousness
of being always condemned to comedy up to that
time--for even strife is a comedy, and conceals the end, as every
means does--spoil all intercourse for him; this kind of man is
acquainted with solitude, and what is most poisonous in it.
274. THE PROBLEM OF THOSE WHO WAIT.--Happy chances are
necessary, and many incalculable elements, in order that a
higher man in whom the solution of a problem is dormant, may
yet take action, or "break forth," as one might say--at the right
moment. On an average it DOES NOT happen; and in all corners
of the earth there are waiting ones sitting who hardly know to
what extent they are waiting, and still less that they wait in vain.
Occasionally, too, the waking call comes too late--the chance
which gives "permission" to take action--when their best youth,
and strength for action have been used up in sitting still; and
how many a one, just as he "sprang up," has found with horror
that his limbs are benumbed and his spirits are now too heavy!
"It is too late," he has said to himself--and has become selfdistrustful
and henceforth for ever useless.--In the domain of
genius, may not the "Raphael without hands" (taking the expres-
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sion in its widest sense) perhaps not be the exception, but the
rule?--Perhaps genius is by no means so rare: but rather the five
hundred HANDS which it requires in order to tyrannize over the
[GREEK INSERTED HERE], "the right time"--in order to take
chance by the forelock!
275. He who does not WISH to see the height of a man, looks all
the more sharply at what is low in him, and in the foreground--
and thereby betrays himself.
276. In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is
better off than the nobler soul: the dangers of the latter must be
greater, the probability that it will come to grief and perish is in
fact immense, considering the multiplicity of the conditions of its
existence.--In a lizard a finger grows again which has been lost;
not so in man.--
277. It is too bad! Always the old story! When a man has finished
building his house, he finds that he has learnt unawares
something which he OUGHT absolutely to have known before he-
- began to build. The eternal, fatal "Too late!" The melancholia of
everything COMPLETED!--
278.--Wanderer, who art thou? I see thee follow thy path without
scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes, wet and sad as
a plummet which has returned to the light insatiated out of every
depth--what did it seek down there?--with a bosom that never
sighs, with lips that conceal their loathing, with a hand which
only slowly grasps: who art thou? what hast thou done? Rest
thee here: this place has hospitality for every one--refresh thyself!
And whoever thou art, what is it that now pleases thee?
What will serve to refresh thee? Only name it, whatever I have I
offer thee! "To refresh me? To refresh me? Oh, thou prying one,
what sayest thou! But give me, I pray thee---" What? what?
Speak out! "Another mask! A second mask!"
279. Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are
happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though
they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know
only too well that it will flee from them!
280. "Bad! Bad! What? Does he not--go back?" Yes! But you
misunderstand him when you complain about it. He goes back
like every one who is about to make a great spring.
281.--"Will people believe it of me? But I insist that they believe
it of me: I have always thought very unsatisfactorily of myself
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and about myself, only in very rare cases, only compulsorily,
always without delight in 'the subject,' ready to digress from
'myself,' and always without faith in the result, owing to an
unconquerable distrust of the POSSIBILITY of self- knowledge,
which has led me so far as to feel a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO
even in the idea of 'direct knowledge' which theorists allow
themselves:--this matter of fact is almost the most certain thing
I know about myself. There must be a sort of repugnance in me
to BELIEVE anything definite about myself.--Is there perhaps
some enigma therein? Probably; but fortunately nothing for my
own teeth.--Perhaps it betrays the species to which I belong?--
but not to myself, as is sufficiently agreeable to me."
282.--"But what has happened to you?"--"I do not know," he
said, hesitatingly; "perhaps the Harpies have flown over my
table."--It sometimes happens nowadays that a gentle, sober,
retiring man becomes suddenly mad, breaks the plates, upsets
the table, shrieks, raves, and shocks everybody--and finally
withdraws, ashamed, and raging at himself--whither? for what
purpose? To famish apart? To suffocate with his memories?--To
him who has the desires of a lofty and dainty soul, and only
seldom finds his table laid and his food prepared, the danger will
always be great--nowadays, however, it is extraordinarily so.
Thrown into the midst of a noisy and plebeian age, with which he
does not like to eat out of the same dish, he may readily perish
of hunger and thirst--or, should he nevertheless finally "fall to,"
of sudden nausea.--We have probably all sat at tables to which
we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual of us, who
are most difficult to nourish, know the dangerous DYSPEPSIA
which originates from a sudden insight and disillusionment about
our food and our messmates--the AFTER-DINNER NAUSEA.
283. If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the
same time a noble self-control, to praise only where one DOES
NOT agree--otherwise in fact one would praise oneself, which is
contrary to good taste:--a self-control, to be sure, which offers
excellent opportunity and provocation to constant MISUNDERSTANDING.
To be able to allow oneself this veritable luxury of
taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles,
but rather among men whose misunderstandings and
mistakes amuse by their refinement--or one will have to pay
dearly for it!--"He praises me, THEREFORE he acknowledges me
to be right"--this asinine method of inference spoils half of the
life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into our neighbourhood
and friendship.
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284. To live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyond . . .
To have, or not to have, one's emotions, one's For and Against,
according to choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to SEAT
oneself on them as upon horses, and often as upon asses:--for
one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as of
their fire. To conserve one's three hundred foregrounds; also
one's black spectacles: for there are circumstances when nobody
must look into our eyes, still less into our "motives." And to
choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice, politeness.
And to remain master of one's four virtues, courage, insight,
sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a
sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact
of man and man--"in society"--it must be unavoidably impure.
All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime--
"commonplace."
285. The greatest events and thoughts--the greatest thoughts,
however, are the greatest events--are longest in being comprehended:
the generations which are contemporary with them do
not EXPERIENCE such events--they live past them. Something
happens there as in the realm of stars. The light of the furthest
stars is longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man
DENIES--that there are stars there. "How many centuries does a
mind require to be understood?"--that is also a standard, one
also makes a gradation of rank and an etiquette therewith, such
as is necessary for mind and for star.
286. "Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted." [FOOTNOTE:
Goethe's "Faust," Part II, Act V. The words of Dr. Marianus.]--
But there is a reverse kind of man, who is also upon a height,
and has also a free prospect--but looks DOWNWARDS.
287. What is noble? What does the word "noble" still mean for us
nowadays? How does the noble man betray himself, how is he
recognized under this heavy overcast sky of the commencing
plebeianism, by which everything is rendered opaque and
leaden?-- It is not his actions which establish his claim--actions
are always ambiguous, always inscrutable; neither is it his
"works." One finds nowadays among artists and scholars plenty
of those who betray by their works that a profound longing for
nobleness impels them; but this very NEED of nobleness is radically
different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and is in
fact the eloquent and dangerous sign of the lack thereof. It is not
the works, but the BELIEF which is here decisive and determines
the order of rank--to employ once more an old religious formula
with a new and deeper meaning--it is some fundamental certainty
which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not
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to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be
lost.--THE NOBLE SOUL HAS REVERENCE FOR ITSELF.--
288. There are men who are unavoidably intellectual, let them
turn and twist themselves as they will, and hold their hands
before their treacherous eyes--as though the hand were not a
betrayer; it always comes out at last that they have something
which they hide--namely, intellect. One of the subtlest means of
deceiving, at least as long as possible, and of successfully representing
oneself to be stupider than one really is--which in everyday
life is often as desirable as an umbrella,--is called
ENTHUSIASM, including what belongs to it, for instance, virtue.
For as Galiani said, who was obliged to know it: VERTU EST
ENTHOUSIASME.
289. In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of
the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones
and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in
his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of
silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from
year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord
and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-
seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave--it may be
a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine--his ideas themselves
eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour,
as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative
and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. The
recluse does not believe that a philosopher--supposing that a
philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse--ever
expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not
books written precisely to hide what is in us?--indeed, he will
doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual"
opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not,
and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler,
stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every
bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground
philosophy--this is a recluse's verdict: "There is something
arbitrary in the fact that the PHILOSOPHER came to a
stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he HERE
laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper--there is also
something suspicious in it." Every philosophy also CONCEALS a
philosophy; every opinion is also a LURKING-PLACE, every word
is also a MASK.
290. Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than
of being misunderstood. The latter perhaps wounds his vanity;
but the former wounds his heart, his sympathy, which always
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says: "Ah, why would you also have as hard a time of it as I
have?"
291. Man, a COMPLEX, mendacious, artful, and inscrutable animal,
uncanny to the other animals by his artifice and sagacity,
rather than by his strength, has invented the good conscience in
order finally to enjoy his soul as something SIMPLE; and the
whole of morality is a long, audacious falsification, by virtue of
which generally enjoyment at the sight of the soul becomes
possible. From this point of view there is perhaps much more in
the conception of "art" than is generally believed.
292. A philosopher: that is a man who constantly experiences,
sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things;
who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from the
outside, from above and below, as a species of events and lightning-
flashes PECULIAR TO HIM; who is perhaps himself a storm
pregnant with new lightnings; a portentous man, around whom
there is always rumbling and mumbling and gaping and something
uncanny going on. A philosopher: alas, a being who often
runs away from himself, is often afraid of himself--but whose
curiosity always makes him "come to himself" again.
293. A man who says: "I like that, I take it for my own, and
mean to guard and protect it from every one"; a man who can
conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain true to an opinion,
keep hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence; a man
who has his indignation and his sword, and to whom the weak,
the suffering, the oppressed, and even the animals willingly
submit and naturally belong; in short, a man who is a MASTER
by nature-- when such a man has sympathy, well! THAT sympathy
has value! But of what account is the sympathy of those who
suffer! Or of those even who preach sympathy! There is nowadays,
throughout almost the whole of Europe, a sickly irritability
and sensitiveness towards pain, and also a repulsive irrestrainableness
in complaining, an effeminizing, which, with the aid of
religion and philosophical nonsense, seeks to deck itself out as
something superior--there is a regular cult of suffering. The
UNMANLINESS of that which is called "sympathy" by such groups
of visionaries, is always, I believe, the first thing that strikes the
eye.--One must resolutely and radically taboo this latest form of
bad taste; and finally I wish people to put the good amulet, "GAI
SABER" ("gay science," in ordinary language), on heart and
neck, as a protection against it.
294. THE OLYMPIAN VICE.--Despite the philosopher who, as a
genuine Englishman, tried to bring laughter into bad repute in all
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thinking minds--"Laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature,
which every thinking mind will strive to overcome" (Hobbes),--I
would even allow myself to rank philosophers according to the
quality of their laughing--up to those who are capable of
GOLDEN laughter. And supposing that Gods also philosophize,
which I am strongly inclined to believe, owing to many reasons--
I have no doubt that they also know how to laugh thereby in an
overman-like and new fashion--and at the expense of all serious
things! Gods are fond of ridicule: it seems that they cannot
refrain from laughter even in holy matters.
295. The genius of the heart, as that great mysterious one possesses
it, the tempter-god and born rat-catcher of consciences,
whose voice can descend into the nether-world of every soul,
who neither speaks a word nor casts a glance in which there may
not be some motive or touch of allurement, to whose perfection
it pertains that he knows how to appear,--not as he is, but in a
guise which acts as an ADDITIONAL constraint on his followers to
press ever closer to him, to follow him more cordially and thoroughly;--
the genius of the heart, which imposes silence and
attention on everything loud and self-conceited, which smoothes
rough souls and makes them taste a new longing--to lie placid as
a mirror, that the deep heavens may be reflected in them;--the
genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and too hasty
hand to hesitate, and to grasp more delicately; which scents the
hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet
spirituality under thick dark ice, and is a divining- rod for every
grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned in mud and sand; the
genius of the heart, from contact with which every one goes
away richer; not favoured or surprised, not as though gratified
and oppressed by the good things of others; but richer in himself,
newer than before, broken up, blown upon, and sounded by
a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more
fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names,
full of a new will and current, full of a new ill-will and countercurrent
. . . but what am I doing, my friends? Of whom am I
talking to you? Have I forgotten myself so far that I have not
even told you his name? Unless it be that you have already
divined of your own accord who this questionable God and spirit
is, that wishes to be PRAISED in such a manner? For, as it happens
to every one who from childhood onward has always been
on his legs, and in foreign lands, I have also encountered on my
path many strange and dangerous spirits; above all, however,
and again and again, the one of whom I have just spoken: in
fact, no less a personage than the God DIONYSUS, the great
equivocator and tempter, to whom, as you know, I once offered
in all secrecy and reverence my first-fruits--the last, as it seems
- 144 -
to me, who has offered a SACRIFICE to him, for I have found no
one who could understand what I was then doing. In the meantime,
however, I have learned much, far too much, about the
philosophy of this God, and, as I 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, as far as I am allowed,
a little taste of this philosophy? In a hushed voice, as is
but seemly: for it has to do with much that is secret, new,
strange, wonderful, and uncanny. The very fact that Dionysus is
a philosopher, and that therefore Gods also philosophize, seems
to me a novelty which is not unensnaring, and might perhaps
arouse suspicion precisely among philosophers;--among you, my
friends, there is less to be said against it, except that it comes
too late and not at the right time; for, as it has been disclosed to
me, you are loth nowadays to believe in God and gods. It may
happen, too, that in the frankness of my story I must go further
than is agreeable to the strict usages of your ears? Certainly the
God in question went further, very much further, in such dialogues,
and was always many paces ahead of me . . . Indeed, if
it were allowed, I should have to give him, according to human
usage, fine ceremonious tides of lustre and merit, I should have
to extol his courage as investigator and discoverer, his fearless
honesty, truthfulness, and love of wisdom. But such a God does
not know what to do with all that respectable trumpery and
pomp. "Keep that," he would say, "for thyself and those like
thee, and whoever else require it! I--have no reason to cover my
nakedness!" One suspects that this kind of divinity and philosopher
perhaps lacks shame?--He once said: "Under certain circumstances
I love mankind"--and referred thereby to Ariadne,
who was present; "in my opinion man is an agreeable, brave,
inventive animal, that has not his equal upon earth, he makes
his way even through all labyrinths. I like man, and often think
how I can still further advance him, and make him stronger,
more evil, and more profound."--"Stronger, more evil, and more
profound?" I asked in horror. "Yes," he said again, "stronger,
more evil, and more profound; also more beautiful"--and thereby
the tempter-god smiled with his halcyon smile, as though he had
just paid some charming compliment. One here sees at once that
it is not only shame that this divinity lacks;--and in general there
are good grounds for supposing that in some things the Gods
could all of them come to us men for instruction. We men are--
more human.--
296. Alas! what are you, after all, my written and painted
thoughts! Not long ago you were so variegated, young and malicious,
so full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me
sneeze and laugh--and now? You have already doffed your nov-
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elty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so
immortal do they look, so pathetically honest, so tedious! And
was it ever otherwise? What then do we write and paint, we
mandarins with Chinese brush, we immortalisers of things which
LEND themselves to writing, what are we alone capable of painting?
Alas, only that which is just about to fade and begins to lose
its odour! Alas, only exhausted and departing storms and belated
yellow sentiments! Alas, only birds strayed and fatigued by
flight, which now let themselves be captured with the hand--with
OUR hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer,
things only which are exhausted and mellow! And it is only for
your AFTERNOON, you, my written and painted thoughts, for
which alone I have colours, many colours, perhaps, many variegated
softenings, and fifty yellows and browns and greens and
reds;-- but nobody will divine thereby how ye looked in your
morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you,
my old, beloved-- EVIL thoughts!
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FROM THE HEIGHTS
By F W Nietzsche
Translated by L A Magnus

1.
MIDDAY of Life! Oh, season of delight!
My summer's park! Uneaseful joy to look, to lurk, to
hark-- I peer for friends, am ready day and night,-- Where linger
ye, my friends? The time is right!
2.
Is not the glacier's grey today for you
Rose-garlanded? The brooklet seeks you, wind,
cloud, with longing thread And thrust themselves yet higher to
the blue, To spy for you from farthest eagle's view.
3.
My table was spread out for you on high--
Who dwelleth so Star-near, so near the grisly pit
below?-- My realm--what realm hath wider boundary? My honey-
-who hath sipped its fragrancy?
4.
Friends, ye are there! Woe me,--yet I am not
He whom ye seek? Ye stare and stop--better your
wrath could speak! I am not I? Hand, gait, face, changed? And
what I am, to you my friends, now am I not?
5.
Am I an other? Strange am I to Me?
Yet from Me sprung? A wrestler, by himself too oft
self-wrung? Hindering too oft my own self's potency, Wounded
and hampered by self-victory?
6.
I sought where-so the wind blows keenest. There
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I learned to dwell Where no man dwells, on lonesome
ice-lorn fell, And unlearned Man and God and curse and prayer?
Became a ghost haunting the glaciers bare?
7.
Ye, my old friends! Look! Ye turn pale, filled o'er
With love and fear! Go! Yet not in wrath. Ye could
ne'er live here. Here in the farthest realm of ice and scaur, A
huntsman must one be, like chamois soar.
8.
An evil huntsman was I? See how taut
My bow was bent! Strongest was he by whom such
bolt were sent-- Woe now! That arrow is with peril fraught, Perilous
as none.--Have yon safe home ye sought!
9.
Ye go! Thou didst endure enough, oh, heart;--
Strong was thy hope; Unto new friends thy portals
widely ope, Let old ones be. Bid memory depart! Wast thou
young then, now--better young thou art!
10.
What linked us once together, one hope's tie--
(Who now doth con Those lines, now fading, Love once
wrote thereon?)-- Is like a parchment, which the hand is shy To
touch--like crackling leaves, all seared, all dry.
11.
Oh! Friends no more! They are--what name for those?--
Friends' phantom-flight Knocking at my heart's window-
pane at night, Gazing on me, that speaks "We were" and
goes,-- Oh, withered words, once fragrant as the rose!
12.
Pinings of youth that might not understand!
For which I pined, Which I deemed changed with
me, kin of my kind: But they grew old, and thus were doomed
and banned: None but new kith are native of my land!
13.
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Midday of life! My second youth's delight!
My summer's park! Unrestful joy to long, to lurk, to
hark! I peer for friends!--am ready day and night, For my new
friends. Come! Come! The time is right!
14.
This song is done,--the sweet sad cry of rue
Sang out its end; A wizard wrought it, he the timely
friend, The midday-friend,--no, do not ask me who; At midday
'twas, when one became as two.
15.
We keep our Feast of Feasts, sure of our bourne,
Our aims self-same: The Guest of Guests, friend
Zarathustra, came! The world now laughs, the grisly veil was
torn, And Light and Dark were one that wedding-morn.