BEYOND

GOOD AND EVIL

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(HELEN ZIMMERN TRANSLATION)
INFORMATION ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION

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 FROM THE HEIGHTS
INFORMATION ABOUT

THIS E-TEXT EDITION

The following is a reprint of the Helen Zimmern translation from German
into English of "Beyond Good and Evil," as published in The Complete
Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909-1913). Some adaptations from the
original text were made to format it into an e-text. Italics in the original
book are capitalized in this e-text, except for most foreign language phrases
that were italicized. Original footnotes are put in brackets "[]" at the points
where they are cited in the text. Some spellings were altered. "To-day" and
"To-morrow" are spelled "today" and "tomorrow."

Some words containing the letters "ise" in the original text, such as
"idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such as "idealize." "Sceptic"
was changed to "skeptic."
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!
FROM THE HEIGHTS

By F W Nietzsche

Translated by L A Magnus

1.
MIDDAY of Life! Oh, season of delight!

My summer's park! Uneaseful joy to look, to lurk, to hark-- I peer for

friends, am ready day and night,-- Where linger ye, my friends? The time is
right!

2.
Is not the glacier's grey today for you

Rose-garlanded? The brooklet seeks you, wind, cloud, with longing thread
And thrust themselves yet higher to the blue, To spy for you from farthest
eagle's view.

3.
My table was spread out for you on high--

Who dwelleth so Star-near, so near the grisly pit below?-- My realm--what

realm hath wider boundary? My honey--who hath sipped its fragrancy?

4.
Friends, ye are there! Woe me,--yet I am not

He whom ye seek? Ye stare and stop--better your wrath could speak! I am

not I? Hand, gait, face, changed? And what I am, to you my friends, now
am I not?

5.
Am I an other? Strange am I to Me?

Yet from Me sprung? A wrestler, by himself too oft self-wrung? Hindering

too oft my own self's potency, Wounded and hampered by self-victory?

6.
I sought where-so the wind blows keenest. There I learned to dwell Where
no man dwells, on lonesome ice-lorn fell, And unlearned Man and God and
curse and prayer? Became a ghost haunting the glaciers bare?

7.
Ye, my old friends! Look! Ye turn pale, filled o'er With love and fear! Go!
Yet not in wrath. Ye could ne'er live here. Here in the farthest realm of ice
and scaur, A huntsman must one be, like chamois soar.
8.
An evil huntsman was I? See how taut

My bow was bent! Strongest was he by whom such bolt were sent-- Woe
now! That arrow is with peril fraught, Perilous as none.--Have yon safe
home ye sought!

9.
Ye go! Thou didst endure enough, oh, heart;--

Strong was thy hope; Unto new friends thy portals widely ope, Let old ones
be. Bid memory depart! Wast thou young then, now--better young thou art!

10.
What linked us once together, one hope's tie--

(Who now doth con Those lines, now fading, Love once wrote thereon?)--
Is like a parchment, which the hand is shy To touch--like crackling leaves,
all seared, all dry.

11.
Oh! Friends no more! They are--what name for those?--

Friends' phantom-flight Knocking at my heart's window-pane at night,

Gazing on me, that speaks "We were" and goes,-- Oh, withered words, once
fragrant as the rose!

12.
Pinings of youth that might not understand!

For which I pined, Which I deemed changed with me, kin of my kind:
But they grew old, and thus were doomed and banned: None but new kith
are native of my land!

13.
Midday of life! My second youth's delight!

My summer's park! Unrestful joy to long, to lurk, to hark! I peer for

friends!--am ready day and night, For my new friends. Come! Come! The
time is right!

14.
This song is done,--the sweet sad cry of rue

Sang out its end; A wizard wrought it, he the timely friend, The midday-
friend,--no, do not ask me who; At midday 'twas, when one became as two.

15.
We keep our Feast of Feasts, sure of our bourne, Our aims self-same:

The Guest of Guests, friend Zarathustra, came! The world now laughs, the
grisly veil was torn, And Light and Dark were one that wedding-morn.