BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

By Friedrich Nietzsche
 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. First published in 1886.
Translation by Helen Zimmern first published in 1906.

The Exaltation of Friedrich Nietzsche by Otto Heller. From Prophets of Dissent: Essays on Maeterlinck,
Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy by Otto Heller, first published in 1918.

Published by Enhanced Media, 2016.

 Table of Contents
PREFACE
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?
The Exaltation of Friedrich Nietzsche
By Otto Heller
IMAGE GALLERY
 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 ego-superstition, 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.
 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, however, 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 niaiserie, 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. 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!
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 auto-biography; 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 lick-spittles; 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 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 garden-god 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 tyrannical 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!
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,
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 three-
fourths 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 designate 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, 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
determined 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 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 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 well-constructed 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 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 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 self-contempt, 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 interpreter 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 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.
 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, granite-like 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 truthfulness 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 trellis-work! 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-tribune-bawler).
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, 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?
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.
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?
 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, 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.
 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
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 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 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 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 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 significance 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-more-laughing 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 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 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 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, self-equalizing disposition, the mediocrity of desires,
attains to moral distinction and honour. Finally, under very peaceful circumstances, 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," "herd-instincts," 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 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."
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 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!
 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 self-conceitedness 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 frequently, 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 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, 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 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 gliding-past 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 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 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 ascendancy 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; 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,
weak-willed, 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!"
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 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 law-givers; 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? ...
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
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, 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....
 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 formula 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. 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, other-worldly 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 instance, 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 prepared 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 semi-barbarity, 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 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 super-abundance 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 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 slave-classes 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, 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 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, 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 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 re-underlines, 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 "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-the-way 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, 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 bird-catchers, 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 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 counter-arguments 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 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 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 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 shallow-pates), 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 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"!
 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 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 soil-attachment, 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, 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.
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 defined 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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
"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 half-way 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 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 nationality-craze 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 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 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!
 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 out-looking 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 prerogatives 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 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 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-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. Slave-morality 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 slave-morals 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 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 self-conceit, 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" 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 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 self-deliverance. 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!
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 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 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 different 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 self-destruction—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 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 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.
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 self-distrustful and henceforth for ever useless.—In the domain of genius, may not the
"Raphael without hands" (taking the expression 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 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.
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 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 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 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 counter-current... 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 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 novelty, 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!
The Exaltation of Friedrich Nietzsche
 By Otto Heller
IN these embattled times it is perfectly natural to expect from any discourse on Nietzsche's philosophy first of all a
statement concerning the relation of that troublesome genius to the origins of the war; and this demand prompts a
few candid words on that aspect of the subject at the start.
For more than three years the public has been persistently taught by the press to think of Friedrich Nietzsche
mainly as the powerful promoter of a systematic national movement of the German people for the conquest of the
world. But there is strong and definite internal evidence in the writings of Nietzsche against the assumption that he
intentionally aroused a spirit of war or aimed in any way at the world-wide preponderance of Germany's type of
civilization. Nietzsche had a temperamental loathing for everything that is brutal, a loathing which was greatly
intensified by his personal contact with the horrors of war while serving as a military nurse in the campaign of 1870.
If there were still any one senseless enough to plead the erstwhile popular cause of Pan-Germanism, he would be
likely to find more support for his argument in the writings of the de-gallisized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
Gobineau, or of the germanized Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, than in those of the "hermit of Maria-
Sils," who does not even suggest, let alone advocate, German world-predominance in a single line of all his writings.
To couple Friedrich Nietzsche with Heinrich von Treitschke as the latter' s fellow herald of German ascendancy is
truly preposterous. Treitschke himself was bitterly and irreconcilably set against the creator of Zarathustra,[1] in
whom ever since "Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen" he had divined "the good European," — which to the author of the
Deutsche Geschichte meant the bad Prussian, and by consequence the bad German. As a consummate individualist
and by the same token a cosmopolite to the full, Nietzsche was the last remove from national, or strictly speaking
even from racial, jingoism. Even the imputation of ordinary patriotic sentiments would have been resented by him as
an insult, for such sentiments were to him a sure symptom of that gregarious disposition which was so utterly
abhorrent to his feelings. In his German citizenhood he took no pride whatsoever. On every occasion that offered he
vented in mordant terms his contempt for the country of his birth, boastfully proclaiming his own derivation from
alien stock. He bemoaned his fate of having to write for Germans; averring that people who drank beer and smoked
pipes were hopelessly incapable of understanding him. Of this extravagance in denouncing his countrymen the
following account by one of his keenest American interpreters gives a fair idea. "No epithet was too outrageous, no
charge was too farfetched, no manipulation or interpretation of evidence was too daring to enter into his ferocious
indictment. He accused the Germans of stupidity, superstitiousness, and silliness; of a chronic weakness of dodging
issues, a fatuous 'barn-yard' and 'green-pasture' contentment, of yielding supinely to the commands and exactions of
a clumsy and unintelligent government; of degrading education to the low level of mere cramming and examination
passing; of a congenital inability to understand and absorb the culture of other peoples, and particularly the culture
of the French; of a boorish bumptiousness, and an ignorant, ostrichlike complacency; of a systematic hostility to
men of genius, whether in art, science, or philosophy; of a slavish devotion to the two great European narcotics,
alcohol and Christianity; of a profound beeriness, a spiritual dyspepsia, a puerile mysticism, an old-womanish
pettiness, and an ineradicable liking for the obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shrouded."[2]
It certainly requires a violent twist of logic to hold this catalogue of invectives responsible for the transformation
of a sluggish and indolent bourgeoisie into a "Volk in Waffen" unified by an indomitable and truculent rapacity.
Neither should Nietzsche's general condemnation of mild and tender forbearance — on the ground that it blocks
the purpose of nature — be interpreted as a call to universal militancy. By his ruling it is only supermen that are
privileged to carry their will through. But undeniably he does teach that the world belongs to the strong. They may
grab it at any temporary loss to the common run of humanity and, if need be, with sanguinary force, since their will
is, ulteriorly, identical with the cosmic purpose.
Of course this is preaching war of some sort, but Nietzsche was not in favor of war on ethnic or ethical grounds,
like that fanatical militarist, General von Bernhardi, whom the great mass of his countrymen in the time before the
war would have bluntly rejected as their spokesman. Anyway, Nietzsche did not mean to encourage Germany to
subjugate the rest of the world. He even deprecated her victory in the bloody contest of 1870, because he thought
that it had brought on a form of material prosperity of which internal decay and the collapse of intellectual and
spiritual ideals were the unfortunate concomitants. At the same time, the universal decreptitude prevented the
despiser of his own people from conceiving a decided preference for some other country. He held that all European
nations were progressing in the wrong direction, — the deadweight of exaggerated and misshapen materialism
dragged them back and down. English life he deemed almost irredeemably clogged by utilitarianism. Even France,
the only modern commonwealth credited by Nietzsche with an indigenous culture, was governed by what he
stigmatizes as the life philosophy of the shopkeeper. Nietzsche is destitute of national ideals. In fact he never thinks
in terms of politics. He aims to be "a good European, not a good German." In his aversion to the extant order of
society he never for a moment advocates, like Rousseau or Tolstoy, a breach with civilization. Cataclysmic changes
through anarchy, revolution, and war were repugnant to his ideals of culture. For two thousand years the races of
Europe had toiled to humanize themselves, school their character, equip their minds, refine their tastes. Could any
sane reformer have calmly contemplated the possible engulfment in another Saturnian age of the gains purchased by
that enormous expenditure of human labor? According to Nietzsche's conviction, the new dispensation could not be
entered in a book of blank pages. A higher civilization could only be reared upon a lower. So it seems that he is
quite wrongly accused of having been an "accessory before the deed," in any literal or legal sense, to the stupendous
international struggle witnessed to-day. And we may pass on to consider in what other way he was a vital factor of
modern social development. For whatever we may think of the political value of his teachings, it is impossible to
deny their arousing and inspiriting effect upon the intellectual, moral, and artistic faculties of his epoch and ours.
It should be clearly understood that the significance of Nietzsche for our age is not to be ex- plained by any
weighty discovery in the realm of knowledge. Nietzsche's merit consists not in any unriddling of the universe by a
metaphysical key to its secrets, but rather in the diffusion of a new intellectual light elucidating human
consciousness in regard to the purpose and the end of existence. Nietzsche has no objective truths to teach, indeed he
acknowledges no truth other than subjective. Nor does he put any faith in bare logic, but on the contrary pronounces
it one of mankind's greatest misfortunes. His argumentation is not sustained and progressive, but desultory,
impressionistic, and freely repetitional; slashing aphorism is its most effective tool. And so, in the sense of the
schools, he is not a philosopher at all; quite the contrary, an implacable enemy of the métier. And yet the formative
and directive influence of his vaticinations, enunciated with tremendous spiritual heat and lofty gesture, has been
very great. His conception of life has acted upon the generation as a moral intoxicant of truly incalculable strength.
Withal his published work, amounting to eighteen volumes, though flagrantly irrational, yet does contain a
perfectly coherent doctrine. Only, it is a doctrine to whose core mere peripheric groping will never negotiate the
approach. Its essence must be caught by flashlike seizure and cannot be conveyed except to minds of more than the
average imaginative sensibility. For its central ideas relate to the remotest ultimates, and its dominant prepossession,
the Overman, is, in the final reckoning, the creature of a Utopian fancy. To be more precise, Nietzsche extorts from
the Darwinian theory of selection a set of amazing connotations by means of the simultaneous shift from the
biological to the poetic sphere of thought and from the averagely socialized to an uncompromisingly self-centred
attitude of mind. This doubly eccentric position is rendered feasible for him by a whole-souled indifference to exact
science and an intense contempt for the practical adjustments of life. He is, first and last, an imaginative schemer,
whose visions are engendered by inner exuberance; the propelling power of his philosophy being an intense
temperamental enthusiasm at one and the same time lyrically sensitive and dramatically impassioned. It is these
qualities of soul that made his utterance ring with the force of a high moral challenge. All the same, he was not any
more original in his ethics than in his theory of knowledge. In this field also his receptive mind threw itself wide
open to the flow of older influences which it encountered. The religion of personal advantage had had many a
prophet before Nietzsche. Among the older writers, Machiavelli was its weightiest champion. In Germany,
Nietzsche's immediate predecessor was "Max Stirner,"[3] and as regards foreign thinkers, Nietzsche declared as late
as 1888 that to no other writer of his own century did he feel himself so closely allied by the ties of congeniality as
to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The most superficial acquaintance with these writers shows that Nietzsche is held responsible for certain
revolutionary notions of which he by no means was the originator. Of the connection of his doctrine with the
maxims of "The Prince" and of "The Ego and His Own" (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum)[4] nothing further need be
said than that to them Nietzsche owes, directly or indirectly, the principle of "non-morality." However, he does not
employ the same strictly intellectual methods. They were logicians rather than moralists, and their ruler-man is in
the main a construction of cold reasoning, while the ruler-man of Nietzsche is the vision of a genius whose eye looks
down a much longer perspective than is accorded to ordinary mortals. That a far greater affinity of temper should
have existed between Nietzsche and Emerson than between him and the two classic non-moralists, must bring
surprise to the many who have never recognized the Concord Sage as an exponent of unfettered individualism. Yet
in fact Emerson goes to such an extreme of individualism that the only thing that has saved his memory from
anathema is that he has not many readers in his after-times, and these few do not always venture to understand him.
And Emerson, though in a different way from Nietzsche's, was also a rhapsodist. In his poetry, where he articulates
his meaning with far greater unrestraint than in his prose, we find without any difficulty full corroboration of his
spiritual kinship with Nietzsche. For instance, where may we turn in the works of the latter for a stronger statement
of the case of Power versus Pity than is contained in "The World Soul"?
"He serveth the servant,
The brave he loves amain,
He kills the cripple and the sick,
And straight begins again;
For gods delight in gods,
And thrust the weak aside, —
To him who scorns their charities
Their arms fly open wide."
From such a world-view what moral could proceed more logically than that of Zarathustra: "And him whom ye
do not teach to fly, teach — how to fall quicker"?
But after all, the intellectual origin of Nietzsche's ideas matters but little. Wheresoever they were derived from,
he made them strikingly his own by raising them to the splendid elevation of his thought. And if nevertheless he has
failed to take high rank and standing among the sages of the schools, this shortage in his professional prestige is
more than counterbalanced by the wide reach of his influence among the laity. What might the re-classification, or
perchance even the re-interpretation, of known facts about life have signified beside Nietzsche's lofty apprehension
of the sacredness of life itself? For whatever may be the social menace of his reasoning, his commanding
proclamation to an expectant age of the doctrine that Progress means infinite growth towards ideals of perfection has
resulted in a singular reanimation of the individual sense of dignity, served as a potent remedy of social dry-rot, and
furthered our gradual emergence from the impenetrable darkness of ancestral traditions.
In seeking an adequate explanation of his power over modern minds we readily surmise that his philosophy
draws much of its vitality from the system of science that underlies it. And yet while it is true enough that
Nietzsche's fundamental thesis is an offshoot of the Darwinian theory, the violent individualism which is the driving
principle of his entire philosophy is rather opposed to the general orientation of Darwinism, since that is social. Not
to the author of the "Descent of Man" directly is the modern ethical glorification of egoism indebted for its measure
of scientific sanction, but to one of his heterodox disciples, namely to the bio-philosopher W. H. Rolph, who in a
volume named "Biologic Problems," with the subtitle, "An Essay in Rational Ethics," [5] deals definitely with the
problem of evolution in its dynamical bearings. The question is raised, Why do the extant types of life ascend
toward higher goals, and, on reaching them, progress toward still higher goals, to the end of time? Under the reason
as explained by Darwin, should not evolution stop at a definite stage, namely, when the object of the competitive
struggle for existence has been fully attained? Self-preservation naturally ceases to act as an incentive to further
progress, so soon as the weaker contestants are beaten off the field and the survival of the fittest is abundantly
secured. From there on we have to look farther for an adequate causation of the ascent of species. Unless we assume
the existence of an absolutistic teleological tendency to perfection, we are logically bound to connect upward
development with fa- vorable external conditions. By substituting for the Darwinian "struggle for existence" a new
formula : "struggle for surplus," Rolph advances a new fruitful hypothesis. In all creatures the acquisitive cravings
exceed the limit of actual necessity. Under Darwin's interpretation of nature, the struggle between individuals of the
same species would give way to pacific equilibrium as soon as the bare subsistence were no longer in question. Yet
we know that the struggle is unending. The creature appetites are not appeased by a normal sufficiency; on the
contrary, "l'appetit vient en mangeant" ; the possessive instinct, if not quite insatiable, is at least coextensive with its
opportu- nities for gratification. Whether or not it be true — as Carlyle claims — that, after all, the fundamental
question between any two human beings is, "Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill me?" — at any rate in civilized human
society the contest is not waged merely for the naked existence, but mainly for life's increments in the form of
comforts, pleasures, luxuries, and the accumulation of power and influence; and the excess of acquisition over
immediate need goes as a residuum into the structure of civilization. In plain words, then, social progress is pushed
on by individual greed and ambition. At this point Rolph rests the case, without entering into the moral implicates of
the subject, which would seem to obtrude themselves upon the attention.
Now to a believer in progressive evolution with a strong ethical bent such a theory brings home man's ulterior
responsibility for the betterment of life, and therefore acts as a call to his supreme duty of preparing the ground for
the arrival of a higher order of beings. The argument seems simple and clinching. Living nature through a long file
of species and genera has at last worked up to the homo sapiens who as yet does not even approach the perfection of
his own type. Is it a legitimate ambition of the race to mark time on the stand which it has reached and to entrench
itself impregnably in its present mediocrity? Nietzsche did not shrink from any of the inferential conclusions
logically to be drawn from the biologic argument. If growth is in the purpose of nature, then once we have accepted
our chief office in life, it becomes our task to pave the way for a higher genus of man. And the only force that makes
with directness for that object is the Will to Power. To foreshadow the resultant human type, Nietzsche resurrected
from Goethe's vocabulary the convenient word Übermensch — "Overman."
Any one regarding existence in the light of a stern and perpetual combat is of necessity driven at last to the
alternative between making the best of life and making an end of it; he must either seek lasting deliverance from the
evil of living or endeavor to wrest from the world by any means at his command the greatest sum of its
gratifications. It is serviceable to describe the two frames of mind respectively as the optimistic and the pessimistic.
But it would perhaps be hasty to conclude that the first of these attitudes necessarily betokens the greater strength of
character.
Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy sprang from pessimism, yet issued in an optimism of unheard-of exaltation;
carrying, however, to the end its plainly visible birthmarks. He started out as an enthusiastic disciple of Arthur
Schopenhauer; unquestionably the adherence was fixed by his own deep-seated contempt for the complacency of the
plebs. But he was bound soon to part company with the grandmaster of pessimism, because he discovered the root of
the philosophy of renunciation in that same detestable debility of the will which he deemed responsible for the
bovine lassitude of the masses; both pessimism and philistinism came from a lack of vitality, and were symptoms of
racial degeneracy. But before Nietzsche finally rejected Schopenhauer and gave his shocking counterblast to the
undermining action of pessimism, he succumbed temporarily to the spell of another gigantic personality. We are not
concerned with Richard Wagner's musical influence upon Nietzsche, who was himself a musician of no mean
ability; what is to the point here is the prime principle of Wagner's art theory. The key to the Wagnerian theory is
found, also, in Schopenhauer's philosophy. Wagner starts from the pessimistic thesis that at the bottom of the well of
life lies nothing but suffering, — hence living is utterly undesirable. In one of his letters to Franz Liszt he names as
the duplex root of his creative genius the longing for love and the yearning for death. On another occasion, he
confesses his own emotional nihilism in the following summary of Tristan und Isolde: "Sehnsucht, Sehnsucht,
unstillbares, ewig neu sich gebärendes Verlangen — Schmachten und Dursten; einzige Erlösung: Tod, Sterben,
Untergehen, — Nichtmehrerwachen."[6]
But from the boundless ocean of sorrow there is a refuge. It was Wagner's fundamental dogma that through the
illusions of art the individual is enabled to rise above the hopelessness of the realities into a new cosmos replete with
supreme satisfactions. Man's mundane salvation therefore depends upon the ministrations of art and his own artistic
sensitiveness. The glorification of genius is a natural corollary of such a belief.
Nietzsche in one of his earliest works examines Wagner's theory and amplifies it by a rather casuistic
interpretation of the evolution of art. After raising the question, How did the Greeks contrive to dignify and ennoble
their national existence? he points, by way of an illustrative answer, not perchance to the Periclean era, but to a far
more primitive epoch of Hellenic culture, when a total oblivion of the actual world and a transport into the realm of
imagination was universally possible. He explains the trance as the effect of intoxication, — primarily in the current
literal sense of the word. Such was the significance of the cult of Dionysos. "Through singing and dancing," claims
Nietzsche, "man manifests himself as member of a higher community. Walking and talking he has unlearned, and is
in a fair way to dance up into the air." That this supposititious Dionysiac phase of Hellenic culture was in turn
succeeded by more rational stages, in which the impulsive flow of life was curbed and dammed in by operations of
the intellect, is not permitted by Nietzsche to invalidate the argument. By his arbitrary reading of ancient history he
was, at first, disposed to look to the forthcoming Universal-Kunstwerk[7] as the complete expression of a new
religious spirit and as the adequate lever of a general uplift of man- kind to a state of bliss. But the typical disparity
between Wagner and Nietzsche was bound to alienate them. Wagner, despite all appearance to the contrary, is
inherently democratic in his convictions, — his earlier political vicissitudes amply confirm this view, — and fastens
his hope for the elevation of humanity through art upon the sort of genius in whom latent popular forces might
combine to a new summit. Nietzsche on the other hand represents the extreme aristocratic type, both in respect of
thought and of sentiment. "I do not wish to be confounded with and mistaken for these preachers of equality," says
he. "For within me justice saith: men are not equal." His ideal is a hero of coercive personality, dwelling aloft in
solitude, despotically bending the gregarious instincts of the common crowd to his own higher purposes by the
dominating force of his Will to Might.
The concept of the Overman rests, as has been shown, upon a fairly solid substructure of plausibility, since at the
bottom of the author's reasoning lies the notion that mankind is destined to outgrow its current status; the thought of
a humanity risen to new and wondrous heights of power over nature is not necessarily unscientific for being
supremely imaginative. The Overman, however, cannot be produced ready made, by any instantaneous process ; he
must be slowly and persistently willed into being, through love of the new ideal which he is to embody: "All great
Love," speaketh Zarathustra, "seeketh to create what it loveth. Myself I sacrifice into my love, and my neighbor as
myself, thus runneth the speech of all creators." Only the fixed conjoint purpose of many generations of aspiring
men will be able to create the Overman. "Could you create a God? — Then be silent concerning all gods ! But ye
could very well create Beyond-man. Not yourselves perhaps, my brethren! But ye could create yourselves into
fathers and fore-fathers of Beyond-man; and let this be your best creating. But all creators are hard."
Nietzsche's startlingly heterodox code of ethics coheres organically with the Overman hypothesis, and so
understood is certain to lose some of its aspect of absurdity. The racial will, as we have seen, must be taught to aim
at the Overman. But the volitional faculty of the generation, according to Nietzsche, is so debilitated as to be utterly
inadequate to its office. Hence, advisedly to stimulate and strengthen the enfeebled will power of his fellow men is
the most imperative and immediate task of the radical reformer. Once the power of willing, as such, shall have been,
— regardless of the worthiness of its object, — brought back to active life, it will be feasible to give the Will to
Might a direction towards objects of the highest moral grandeur.
Unfortunately for the race as a whole, the throng is ineligible for partnership in the auspicious scheme of co-
operative procreation; which fact necessitates a segregative method of breeding. The Overman can only be evolved
by an ancestry of master-men, who must be secured to the race by a rigid application of eugenic standards,
particularly in the matter of mating. Of marriage, Nietzsche has this definition: "Marriage, so call I the will of two to
create one who is more than they who created him." For the bracing of the weakened will-force of the human breed
it is absolutely essential that master-men, the potential progenitors of the superman, be left unhampered to the
impulse of "living themselves out" (sich auszuleben), — an opportunity of which under the regnant code of morals
they are inconsiderately deprived. Since, then, existing dictates and conven- tions are a serious hindrance to the
requisite au- tonomy of the master-man, their abolishment might be well. Yet on the other hand, it is convenient that
the Vielzuviele, the "much-too-many," i. e. the despised generality of people, should continue to be governed and
controlled by strict rules and regulations, so that the will of the master-folk might the more expeditiously be
wrought. Would it not, then, be an efficacious compromise to keep the canon of morality in force for the general
run, but suspend it for the special benefit of master-men, prospective or full-fledged? From the history of the race
Nietzsche draws a warrant for the distinction. His contention is that masters and slaves have never lived up to a
single code of conduct. Have not civilizations risen and fallen according as they were shaped by this or that class of
nations? History also teaches what disastrous consequences follow the loss of caste. In the case of the Jewish people,
the domineering type or morals gave way to the servile as a result of the Babylonian captivity. So long as the Jews
were strong, they extolled all manifestations of strength and energy. The collapse of their own strength turned them
into apologists of the so-called "virtues" of humility, long-suffering, forgiveness, — until, according to the Judaeo-
Christian code of ethics, being good came to mean being weak. So races may justly be classified into masters and
slaves, and history proves that to the strong goes the empire. The ambitions of a nation are a sure criterion of its
worth.
"I walk through these folk and keep mine eyes open. They have become smaller and are becoming ever smaller. And the reason of that is their doctrine
of happiness and virtue.
For they are modest even in their virtue; for they are desirous of ease. But with ease only modest virtue is compatible.
True, in their fashion they learn how to stride and to stride forward. That I call their hobbling. Thereby they become an offense unto every one who is
in a hurry. And many a one strideth on and in doing so looketh backward, with a stiffened neck. I rejoice to run against the stomachs of such.
Foot and eyes shall not lie, nor reproach each other for lying. But there is much lying among small folk.
Some of them will, but most of them are willed merely. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors.
There are unconscious actors among them, and involuntary actors. The genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.
Here is little of man; therefore women try to make themselves manly. For only he who is enough of a man will save the woman in woman.
And this hypocrisy I found to be worst among them, that even those who command feign the virtues of those who serve.
'I serve, thou servest, we serve.' Thus the hypocrisy of the rulers prayeth. And, alas, if the highest lord be merely the highest servant!
Alas! the curiosity of mine eye strayed even unto their hypocrisies, and well I divined all their fly-happiness and their humming round window panes in
the sunshine.
So much kindness, so much weakness see I. So much justice and sympathy, so much weakness.
Round, honest, and kind are they towards each other, as grains of sand are round, honest, and kind unto grains of sand.
Modestly to embrace a small happiness — they call 'sub- mission'! And therewith they modestly look sideways after a new small happiness.
At bottom they desire plainly one thing most of all: to be hurt by nobody. Thus they oblige all and do well unto them.
But this is cowardice; although it be called 'virtue.'
And if once they speak harshly, these small folk, — I hear therein merely their hoarseness. For every draught of air maketh them hoarse.
Prudent are they; their virtues have prudent fingers. But they are lacking in clenched fists; their fingers know not how to hide themselves behind fists.
For them virtue is what maketh modest and tame. Thereby they have made the wolf a dog and man him- self man's best domestic animal.
'We put our chair in the midst' — thus saith their simpering unto me — 'exactly as far from dying gladiators as from happy swine.'
This is mediocrity; although it be called moderation." [8]
The only law acknowledged by him who would be a master is the bidding of his own will. He makes short work
of every other law. Whatever clogs the flight of his indomitable ambition must be ruthlessly swept aside. Obviously,
the enactment of this law that would render the individual supreme and absolute would strike the death-knell for all
established forms and institutions of the social body. But such is quite within Nietzsche's intention. They are noxious
agencies, ingeniously devised for the enslavement of the will, and the most pernicious among them is the Christian
religion, because of the alleged divine sanction conferred by it upon subserviency. Christianity would thwart the
supreme will of nature by curbing that lust for domination which the laws of nature as revealed by science sanction,
nay prescribe. Nietzsche's ideas on this subject are loudly and over-loudly voiced in Der Antichrist ("The Anti-
Christ"), written in September 1888 as the first part of a planned treatise in four instalments, entitled Der Wille zur
Macht. Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte. ("The Will to Power. An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values".)
The master-man's will, then, is his only law. That is the essence of Herrenmoral. And so the question arises,
Whence shall the conscience of the ruler-man derive its distinctions between the Right and the Wrong? The arch-
iconoclast brusquely stifles this naive query beforehand by assuring us that such distinctions in their accepted sense
do not exist for personages of that grander stamp. Heedless of the time-hallowed concepts that all men share in
common, he enjoins mastermen to take their position uncompromisingly outside the confining area of conventions,
in the moral independence that dwells "beyond good and evil." Good and Evil are mere denotations, devoid of any
real significance. Right and Wrong are not ideals immutable through the ages, nor even the same at any time in all
states of society. They are vague and general notions, varying more or less with the practical exigencies under which
they were conceived. What was right for my great- grandfather is not ipso facto right for myself. Hence, the older
and better established a law, the more inapposite is it apt to be to the living demands. Why should the ruler-man bow
down to outworn statutes or stultify his self-dependent moral sense before the artificial and stupidly uni- form moral
relics of the dead past? Good is whatever conduces to the increase of my power, — evil is whatever tends to
diminish it! Only the weakling and the hypocrite will disagree.
Unmistakably this is a straightout application of the "pragmatic" criterion of truth. Nietzsche's unconfessed and
cautious imitators, who call themselves pragmatists, are not bold enough to follow their own logic from the
cognitive sphere to the moral. They stop short of the natural conclusion to which their own premises lead. Morality
is necessarily predicated upon specific notions of truth. So if Truth is an alterable and shifting concept, must not
morality likewise be variable? The pragmatist might just as well come out at once into the broad light and frankly
say: your Laws do not interest me in the abstract, or for the sake of their general beneficence; they interest me only
in so far as they affect me. Therefore I will make, interpret, and abolish them to suit my- self." To Nietzsche the
"quest of truth" is a palpable evasion. Truth is merely a means for the enhancement of my subjective satisfaction. It
makes not a whit of difference whether an opinion or a judgment satisfies this or that scholastic definition. I call true
and good that which furthers my welfare and intensifies my joy in living; and, — to vindicate my self-gratification
as a form, indeed the highest, of "social service," — the desirable thing is that which matters for the improvement of
the human stock and thereby speeds the advent of the Superman. "Oh," exclaims Zarathustra, "that ye would
understand my word: Be sure to do whatever ye like, — but first of all be such as can will! Be sure to love your
neighbor as yourself, — but first of all be such as love themselves, — as love themselves with great love, with
contempt. Thus speaketh Zarathustra, the ungodly."
By way of throwing some light upon this phase of Nietzsche's moral philosophy, it may be added that ever since
1876 he was an assiduous student of Herbert Spencer, with whose theory of social evolution he was first made
acquainted by his friend, Paul Ree, who in two works of his own, "Psychologic Observations," (1875), and "On the
Origin of Moral Sentiments," (1877), had elaborated upon the Spencerian theory about the genealogy of morals. The
best known among all of Nietzsche's works, Also Sprach Zarathustra ("Thus Spake Zarathustra"), is the Magna
Charta of the new moral emancipation. It was composed during a sojourn in southern climes between 1883 and
1885, during the convalescence from a nervous collapse, when after a long and critical depression his spirit was
recovering its accustomed resilience. Nietzsche wrote his magnum opus in solitude, in the mountains and by the sea.
His mind always was at its best in settings of vast proportions, and in this particular work there breathes an
exaltation that has scarcely its equal in the world's literature. Style and diction in their supreme elation suit the lofty
fervor of the sentiment. From the feelings, as a fact, this great rhapsody flows, and to the feelings it makes its appeal
; its extreme fascination must be lost upon those who only know how to "listen to reason." The wondrous plastic
beauty of the language, along with the high emotional pitch of its message, render "Zarathustra" a priceless poetic
monument; indeed its practical effect in chastening and rejuvenating German literary diction can hardly be
overestimated. Its value as a philosophic document is much slighter. It is not even organized on severely logical
lines. On the contrary, the four component parts are but brilliant variations upon a single generic theme, each in a
different clef, but harmoniously united by the incremental ecstasy of the movement. The composition is free from
monotony, for down to each separate aphorism every part of it has its special lyric nuance. The whole purports to
convey in the form of discourse the prophetic message of Zarathustra, the hermit sage, an idealized self-portrayal of
the author.
In the first book the tone is calm and temper- ate. Zarathustra exhorts and instructs his disciples, rails at his
adversaries, and discloses his superiority over them. In the soliloquies and dialogues of the second book he reveals
himself more fully and freely as the Superman. The third book contains the meditations and rhapsodies of
Zarathustra now dwelling wholly apart from men, his mind solely occupied with thought about the Eternal Return of
the Present. In the fourth book he is found in the company of a few chosen spirits whom he seeks to imbue with his
perfected doctrine. In this final section of the work the deep lyric current is already on the ebb; it is largely
supplanted by irony, satire, sarcasm, even buffoonery, all of which are resorted to for the pitiless excoriation of our
type of humanity, deemed decrepit by the Sage. The author's intention to present in a concluding fifth division the
dying Zarathustra pronouncing his benedictions upon life in the act of quitting it was not to bear fruit.
 "Zarathustra"' — Nietzsche's terrific assault upon the fortifications of our social structure — is too easily
mistaken by facile cavilers for the ravings of an unsound and desperate mind. To a narrow and superficial reading, it
exhibits itself as a wholesale repudiation of all moral responsibility and a maniacal attempt to subvert human
civilization for the exclusive benefit of the "glorious blonde brute, rampant with greed for victory and spoil." Yet
those who care to look more deeply will detect beneath this chimerical contempt of conventional regulations no
want of a highminded philanthropic purpose, provided they have the vision necessary to comprehend a love of man
oriented by such extremely distant perspectives. At all events they will discover that in this rebellious propaganda an
advancing line of life is firmly traced out. The indolent and thoughtless may indeed be horrified by the appalling
dangers of the gospel according to Zarathustra. But in reality there is no great cause for alarm. Society may amply
rely upon its agencies, even in these stupendous times of universal war, for protection from any disastrous organic
dislocations incited by the teachings of Zarathustra, at least so far as the immediate future is concerned — in which
alone society appears to be interested. Moreover, our apprehensions are appeased by the sober reflection that by its
plain unfeasibleness the whole super-social scheme of Nietzsche is reduced to colossal absurdity. Its limitless
audacity defeats any formulation of its "war aims." For what compels an ambitious imagination to arrest itself at the
goal of the superman? Why should it not run on beyond that first terminal? In one of Mr. G. K. Chesterton's labored
extravaganzas a grotesque sort of super-overman succeeds in going beyond unreason when he contrives this lucid
self-definition: "I have gone where God has never dared to go. I am above the silly supermen as they are above mere
men. Where I walk in the Heavens, no man has walked before me, and I am alone in a garden." It is enough to make
one gasp and then perhaps luckily recall Goethe's consoling thought that under the care of Providence the trees will
not grow into the heavens. ("Es ist dafür gesorgt, dass die Bäume nicht in den Friedrich Nietzsche Himmel
wachsen.") As matter of fact, the ideas promulgated in Also Sprach Zarathustra need inspire no fear of their winning
the human race from its venerable idols, despite the fact that the pull of natural laws and of elemental appetites
seems to be on their side. The only effect to be expected of such a philosophy is that it will act as an anti- dote for
moral inertia which inevitably goes with the flock-instinct and the lazy reliance on the accustomed order of things.
Nietzsche's ethics are not easy to valuate, since none of their standards are derived from the orthodox canon. His
being a truly personalized form of morality, his principles are strictly cognate to his temperament. To his professed
ideals there attaches a definite theory of society. And since his philosophy is consistent in its sincerity, its message is
withheld from the man-in-the-street, deemed unworthy of notice, and delivered only to the élite that shall beget the
superman. To Nietzsche the good of the greatest number is no valid consideration. The great stupid mass exists only
for the sake of an oligarchy by whom it is duly exploited under nature's decree that the strong shall prey upon the
weak. Let, then, this favored set further the design of nature by systematically encouraging the elevation of their
own type.
We have sought to dispel the fiction about the shaping influence of Nietzsche upon the thought and conduct of
his nation, and have accounted for the miscarriage of his ethics by their fantastic impracticability. Yet it has been
shown also that he fostered in an unmistakable fashion the class- consciousness of the aristocrat, born or self-
appointed. To that extent his influence was certainly malign. Yet doubtless he did perform a service to our age. The
specific nature of this service, stated in the fewest words, is that to his great divinatory gift are we indebted for an
unprecedented strengthening of our hold upon reality. In order to make this point clear we have to revert once more
to Nietzsche's transient intellectual relation to pessimism.
We have seen that the illusionism of Schopenhauer and more particularly of Wagner exerted a strong attraction
on his high-strung artistic temperament.
Nevertheless a certain realistic counter-drift to the ultra-romantic tendency of Wagner's theory caused him in the
long run to reject the faith in the power of Art to save man from evil. Almost abruptly, his personal affection for the
"Master," to whom in his eventual mental eclipse he still referred tenderly at lucid moments, changed to bitter
hostility. Henceforth he classes the glorification of Art as one of the three most despicable attitudes of life:
Philistinism, Pietism, and Estheticism, all of which have their origin in cowardice, represent three branches of the
ignominious road of escape from the terrors of living. In three extended diatribes Nietzsche denounces Wagner as
the archetype of modern decadence; the most violent attack of all is delivered against the point of juncture in which
Wagner's art gospel and the Christian religion culminate: the promise of redemption through pity. To Nietzsche's
way of thinking pity is merely the coward's acknowledgment of his weakness. For only insomuch as a man is devoid
of fortitude in bearing his own sufferings is he unable to contemplate with equanimity the sufferings of his fellow
creatures. Since religion enjoins compassion with all forms of human misery, we should make war upon religion.
And for the reason that Wagner's crowning achievement, his Parsifal, is a veritable sublimation of Mercy, there can
be no truce between its creator and the giver of the counsel: "Be hard!" Perhaps this notorious advice is after all not
as ominous as it sounds. It merely expresses rather abruptly Nietzsche's confidence in the value of self- control as a
means of discipline. If you have learned calmly to see others suffer, you are yourself able to endure distress with
manful composure. "Therefore I wash the hand which helped the sufferer; therefore I even wipe my soul." But,
unfortunately, such is the frailty of human nature that it is only one step from indifference about the sufferings of
others to an inclination to exploit them or even to inflict pain upon one's neighbors for the sake of personal gain of
one sort or another.
Why so hard? said once the charcoal unto the diamond, are we not near relations?
Why so soft? O my brethren, thus I ask you. Are ye not my brethren?
Why so soft, so unresisting, and yielding? Why is there so much disavowal and abnegation in your hearts? Why
is there so little fate in your looks?
And if ye are not willing to be fates, and inexorable, how could ye conquer with me someday?
And if your hardness would not glance, and cut, and chip into pieces — how could ye create with me some day?
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness unto you to press your hand upon millenniums as upon
wax, — Blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass, — harder than brass, nobler than brass.
The noblest only is perfectly hard. This new table, O my brethren, I put over you: Become hard![9]
The repudiation of Wagner leaves a tremendous void in Nietzsche's soul by depriving his enthusiasm of its
foremost concrete object. He loses his faith in idealism. When illusions can bring a man like Wagner to such an
odious outlook upon life, they must be obnoxious in themselves; and so, after being subjected to pitiless analysis,
they are disowned and turned into ridicule. And now, the pendulum of his zeal having swung from one emotional
extreme to the other, the great rhapsodist finds himself temporarily destitute of an adequate theme. However, his
fervor does not long remain in abeyance, and soon it is absorbed in a new object. Great as is the move it is logical
enough. Since illusions are only a hindrance to the fuller grasp of life which behooves all free spirits, Nietzsche
energetically turns from self-deception to its opposite, self-realization. In this new spiritual endeavor he relies far
more on intuition than on scientific and metaphysical speculation. From his own stand he is certainly justified in
doing this. Experimentation and ratiocination at the best are apt to disassociate individual realities from their
complex setting and then proceed to palm them off as illustrations of life, when in truth they are lifeless, artificially
preserved specimens.
"Encheiresin naturae nennt's die Chemie, Spottet ihrer selbst und weiss nicht wie."[10]
Nietzsche's realism, by contrast, goes to the very quick of nature, grasps all the gifts of life, and from the
continuous flood of phenomena extracts a rich, full-flavored essence. It is from a sense of gratitude for this boon that
he becomes an idolatrous worshiper of experience, "der grosse Jasager" — the great sayer of Yes, — and the most
stimulating optimist of all ages. To Nietzsche reality is alive as perhaps never to man before. He plunges down to
the very heart of things, absorbs their vital qualities and meanings, and having himself learned to draw supreme
satisfaction from the most ordinary facts and events, he makes the common marvelous to others, which, as was said
by James Russell Lowell, is a true test of genius. No wonder that deification of reality becomes the dominant motif
in his philosophy. But again that onesided aristocratic strain perverts his ethics. To drain the intoxicating cup at the
feast of life, such is the divine privilege not of the common run of mortals but only of the elect. They must not let
this or that petty and artificial convention, nor yet this or that moral command or prohibition, restrain them from the
exercise of that higher sense of living, but must fully abandon themselves to its joys. "Since man came into existence
he hath had too little joy. That alone, my brethren, is our original sin."[11] The "much- too-many" are doomed to
inanity by their lack of appetite at the banquet of life:
Such folk sit down unto dinner and bring nothing with them, not even a good hunger. And now they backbite:
"All is vanity!"
But to eat well and drink well, O my brethren, is, verily, no vain art ! Break, break the tables of those who are
never joyful![12]
The Will to Live holds man's one chance of this-worldly bliss, and supersedes any care for the remote felicities
of any problematic future state. Yet the Nietzschean cult of life is not to be understood by any means as a banal
devotion to the pleasurable side of life alone. The true disciple finds in every event, be it happy or adverse, exalting
or crushing, the factors of supreme" spiritual satisfaction: joy and pain are equally implied in experience, the Will to
Live encompasses jointly the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. It may even be paradoxically said that since man owes
some of his greatest and most beautiful achievements to sorrow, it must be a joy and a blessing to suffer. The
unmistakable sign of heroism is amor fati, a fierce delight in one's destiny, hold what it may.
Consequently, the precursor of the superman will be possessed, along with his great sensibility to pleasure, of a
capacious aptitude for suffering. "Ye would perchance abolish suffering," exclaims Nietzsche, "and we, — it seems
that we would rather have it even greater and worse than it has ever been. The discipline of suffering, — tragical
suffering, — know ye not that only this discipline has heretofore brought about every elevation of man?" "Spirit is
that life which cutteth into life. By one's own pain one's own knowledge in- creaseth; — knew ye that before? And
the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and consecrated by tears as a sacrificial animal; — knew ye that
before?" And if, then, the tragical pain inherent in life be no argument against Joyfulness, the zest of living can be
obscured by nothing save the fear of total extinction. To the disciple of Nietzsche, by whom every moment of his
existence is realized as a priceless gift, the thought of his irrevocable separation from all things is unbearable. " Was
this life?' I shall say to Death. 'Well, then, once more!' " And — to paraphrase Nietzsche's own simile — the
insatiable witness of the great tragi-comedy, spectator and participant at once, being loath to leave the theatre, and
eager for a repetition of the performance, shouts his endless encore, praying fervently that in the constant repetition
of the performance not a single detail of the action be omitted. The yearning for the endlessness not of life at large,
not of life on any terms, but of this my life with its ineffable wealth of rapturous moments, works up the extreme
optimism of Nietzsche to its stupendous a priori notion of infinity, expressed in the name die ewige Wiederkehr
("Eternal Recurrence"). It is a staggeringly imaginative concept, formed apart from any evidential grounds, and yet
fortified with a fair amount of logical armament. The universe is imagined as endless in time, although its material
contents are not equally conceived as limitless. Since, consequently, there must be a limit to the possible variety in
the arrangement and sequence of the sum total of data, even as in the case of a kaleidoscope, the possibility of
variegations is not infinite. The particular co-ordination of things in the universe, say at this particular moment, is
bound to recur again and again in the passing of the eons. But under the nexus of cause and effect the resurgence of
the past from the ocean of time is not accidental nor is the configuration of things haphazard, as is true in the case of
the kaleidoscope; rather, history, in the most inclusive acceptation of the term, is predestined to repeat itself; this
happens through the perpetual progressive resurrection of its particles. It is then to be assumed that any aspect which
the world has ever presented must have existed innumerable millions of times before, and must recur with eternal
periodicity. That the deterministic strain in this tremendous Vorstellung of a cyclic rhythm throbbing in the universe
entangles its author's fanatical belief in evolution in a rather serious self-contradiction, does not detract from its
spiritual lure, nor from its wide suggestiveness, however incapable it may be of scientific demonstration.
From unfathomed depths of feeling wells up the paean of the prophet of the life intense.
O Mensch! Gib Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
Ich schlief, ich schlief —,
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—
Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
Tief ist ihr Weh — ,
Lust — tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit —
Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit![13]
A timid heart may indeed recoil from the iron necessity of reliving ad infinitum its woeful terrestrial fate. But the
prospect can hold no terror for the heroic soul by whose fiat all items of experience have assumed important
meanings and
O man ! Lose not sight!
What saith the deep midnight?
"I lay in sleep, in sleep;
From deep dream I woke to light.
The world is deep,
And deeper than ever day thought it might.
Deep is its woe, —
And deeper still than woe — delight."
Saith woe: "Pass, go!
Eternity's sought by all delight, —
Eternity deep — by all delight.
values. He who has cast in his lot with Destiny in spontaneous submission to all its designs, cannot but revere
and cherish his own fate as an integral part of the grand unalterable fatality of things.
If this crude presentment of Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine has not entirely failed of its purpose, the leitmotifs of
that doctrine will have been readily referred by the reader to their origin; they can be subsumed under that
temperamental category which is more or less accurately defined as the romantic. Glorification of violent passion,
— quest of innermost mysteries, — boundless expansion of self-consciousness, — visions of a future of
transcendent magnificence, and notwithstanding an ardent worship of reality a quixotically impracticable
detachment from the concrete basis of civic life, — these outstanding characteristics of the Nietzschean philosophy
give unmistakable proof of a central, driving, romantic inspiration: Nietzsche shifts the essence and principle of
being to a new center of gravity, by substituting the Future for the Present and relying on the untrammeled
expansion of spontaneous forces which upon closer examination are found to be without definite aim or practical
goal.
For this reason, critically to animadvert upon Nietzsche as a social reformer would be utterly out of place; he is
simply too much of a poet to be taken seriously as a statesman or politician. The weakness of his philosophy before
the forum of Logic has been referred to before. Nothing can be easier than to prove the incompatibility of some of
his theorems. How, for instance, can the absolute determinism of the belief in Cyclic Recurrence be reconciled with
the power vested in superman to deflect by his autonomous will the straight course of history? Or, to touch upon a
more practical social aspect of his teaching, — if in the order of nature all men are unequal, how can we ever bring
about the right selection of leaders, how indeed can we expect to secure the due ascendancy of character and
intellect over the gregarious grossness of the demos?
Again, it is easy enough to controvert Nietzsche almost at any pass by demonstrating his unphilosophic
onesidedness. Were Nietzsche not stubbornly onesided, he would surely have conceded — as any sane-minded
person must concede in these times of suffering and sacrifice — that charity, self- abnegation, and self-immolation
might be viewed, not as conclusive proofs of degeneracy, but on the contrary as signs of growth towards perfection.
Besides, philosophers of the métier are sure to object to the haziness of Nietzsche's idea of Vitality which in truth is
oriented, as is his philosophy in general, less by thought than by sentiment.
Notwithstanding his obvious connection with significant contemporaneous currents, the author of "Zarathustra"
is altogether too much sui generis to be amenable to any crude and rigid classification. He may plausibly be labelled
an anarchist, yet no definition of anarchism will wholly take him in. Anarchism stands for the demolition of the
extant social apparatus of restraint. Its battle is for the free determination of personal happiness. Nietzsche's prime
concern, contrarily, is with internal self-liberation from the obsessive desire for personal happiness in any accepted
connotation of the term; such happiness to him does not constitute the chief object of life.
The cardinal point of Nietzsche's doctrine is missed by those who, arguing retrospectively, expound the gist of
his philosophy as an incitation to barbarism. Nothing can be more remote from his intentions than the transformation
of society into a horde of ferocious brutes. His impeachment of mercy, notwithstanding an appearance of reckless
impiety, is in the last analysis no more and no less than an expedient in the truly romantic pursuit of a new ideal of
Love. Compassion, in his opinion, hampers the progress towards forms of living that shall be pregnant with a new
and superior type of perfection. And in justice to Nietzsche it should be borne in mind that among the various
manifestations of that human failing there is none he scorns so deeply as cowardly and petty commiseration of self.
It also deserves to be emphasized that he nowhere endorses selfishness when exercised for small or sordid objects. "I
love the brave. But it is not enough to be a swordsman, one must also know against whom to use the sword. And
often there is more bravery in one's keeping quiet and going past, in order to spare one's self for a worthier enemy:
Ye shall have only enemies who are to be hated, but not enemies who are to be despised."[14] Despotism must justify
itself by great and worthy ends. And no man must be permitted to be hard towards others who lacks the strength of
being even harder towards himself. At all events it must serve a better purpose to appraise the practical importance
of Nietzsche's speculations than blankly to denounce their immoralism. Nietzsche, it has to be repeated, was not on
the whole a creator of new ideas. His extraordinary influence in the recent past is not due to any supreme originality
or fertility of mind; it is predominantly due to his eagle-winged imagination. In him the emotional urge of utterance
was, accordingly, incomparably more potent than the purely intellectual force of opinion: in fact the texture of his
philosophy is woven of sensations rather than of ideas, hence its decidedly ethical trend.
The latent value of Nietzsche's ethics in their application to specific social problems it would be extremely
difficult to determine. Their successful application to general world problems, if it were possible, would mean the
ruin of the only form of civilization that signifies to us. His philosophy, if swallowed in the whole, poisons; in large
potations, intoxicates; but in reasonable doses, strengthens and stimulates. Such danger as it harbors has no relation
to grossness. His call to the Joy of Living and Doing is no encouragement of vulgar hedonism, but a challenge to
persevering effort. He urges the supreme importance of vigor of body and mind and force of will. "O my brethren, I
consecrate you to be, and show unto you the way unto a new nobility. Ye shall be- come procreators and breeders
and sowers of the future. — Not whence ye come be your honor in future, but whither ye go ! Your will, and your
foot that longeth to get beyond yourselves, be that your new honor!"[15]
It would be a withering mistake to advocate the translation of Nietzsche's poetic dreams into the prose of reality.
Unquestionably his Utopia if it were to be carried into practice would doom to utter extinction the world it is devised
to regenerate. But it is generally acknowledged that "prophets have a right to be unreasonable," and so, if we would
square ourselves with Friedrich Nietzsche in a spirit of fairness, we ought not to forget that the daring champion of
reckless unrestraint is likewise the inspired apostle of action, power, enthusiasm, and aspiration, in fine, a prophet of
Vitality and a messenger of Hope.

FOOTNOTES

1. As is convincingly pointed out in a footnote of J. A. Cramb's "Germany and England."

 2. L. Mencken, "The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet." Atlantic Monthly, November, 1914.
3. His real name was Kaspar Schmidt; he lived from 1806-1856.
4. By Machiavelli and Stirner, respectively.
5. Biologische Probleme, zugleich ah Versuch einer rationellen Ethik. Leipzig, 1882.
6. "Longing, longing, unquenchable desire, reproducing itself forever anew — thirst and drought; sole
deliverance: death, dissolution, extinction, — and no awaking."
7. Work of all arts.
8. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," pp. 243-245.
9. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 399, sec. 29.
10. Goethe's Faust, II, 11. 1940-1. Bayard Taylor translates: Encheiresin naturae, this Chemistry names, nor knows
how herself she banters and blames!
11. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 120.
12. Ibid., p. 296, sec. 13.
13. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," The Drunken Song, p. 174. — The translation but faintly suggests the poetic appeal
of the original.
14. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 304.
15. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 294.
 IMAGE GALLERY

PHOTOGRAPH OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (CIRCA 1875) IN BASEL BY F. HARTMANN.

NIETZSCHE IN 1861.
GERMAN PHILOSOPHER ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788 – 1860). SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY
STRONGLY INFLUENCED NIETZSCHE'S EARLIEST PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT.
PORTRAIT OF SCHOPENHAUER IN 1855, BY JULES LUNTESCHÜTZ (1822–1893).
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE IN 1869.
PORTRAIT OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE BY EDVARD MUNCH, 1906.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 1882 (PHOTOGRAPHIE VON GUSTAV ADOLF SCHULTZE).
NIETZSCHE AGE 18, IN 1862.
NIETZSCHE IN MILITARY GARB, 1868.
TITLE PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF NIETZSCHE’S THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA.
DRAWING BY HANS OLDE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES, THE ILL NIETZSCHE, LATE-1899.
 Did you love Beyond Good and Evil? Then you should read On The Shortness of Life: De Brevitate Vitae by
Seneca!

Life is long if you know how to use it.

From the author of Letters From A Stoic (Epistulae Moralis), comes another brilliant, timeless guide to living
well.
Written as a moral essay to his friend Paulinus, Seneca’s biting words still pack a powerful punch two thousand
years later. With its brash rejection of materialism, conventional lifestyles and group-think, ‘On The Shortness of
Life’ is as relevant as ever. Seneca anticipates the modern world. It’s a unique expose of how people get caught up
in the rat race and how for those stuck in this mindset, enough is never enough. The ‘busy’ individuals of Rome
Seneca makes reference to, those people who are too preoccupied with their careers and maintaining social
relationships to fully examine the quality of their lives, sound a lot like ourselves.
The message is simple: Life is long if you live it wisely. Don’t waste time worrying about how you look. Don’t
be lazy. Don’t over indulge in entertainment and vice. Everything in moderation.
Seneca defends Nature and attacks the lazy. Materialism and a love of trivial knowledge are exposed as key time
wasters, along with excess ambition, networking and worrying too much.
In this new non-verbatim translation by Damian Stevenson, Seneca’s essay comes alive for the modern reader.
Seneca’s formality of language has been preserved but the wording is more attuned to a contemporary ear. This is a
rare treat for students of Stoicism and for anyone interested in seeking an answer to the eternal question, “How
should I best use my time?”
Includes biographical sketch ‘Seneca The Stoic’ and Seneca image gallery.