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, 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.
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 long-winded 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, wantonest 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 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 self-concealment 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
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 self-knowledge 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 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 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, 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"?
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
good-natured 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, 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, heavily-hooped 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.
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 glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the
democratic taste and its "modern ideas" all of them men without
solitude, without 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" "free-thinkers," 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 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?
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 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 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 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 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
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
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 laboriousness 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 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 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
obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with
something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of
justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all
the semi-animal 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 above-mentioned 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 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 broken-hearted 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 self-destruction;
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.
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.
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.
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---"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
