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Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

by Parker · 141 things on Twos

Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Introduction
Nietzsche’s life is surely not a success story; on the contrary, it is a rather sad story of misery and failure. It is the story of a man who from the beginning of his adult life, until the sudden and catastrophic end of his productive period, was confronted with embarrassing and humiliating experiences. This is true of his private life as well as of his relations with the intellectual community of his time. He was plagued by ill health, a psychosomatic wreck, suffering from all sorts of diseases ranging from chronic nervous ailments and severe eye problems, which left him almost blind, to extremely exhausting states of prolonged migraine. These conditions made life tolerable for him only in a few places in northern Italy (in the winter) and the Swiss Engadine (in the summer), and it is in these places that he spent most of his time in the 1880s. His social relations were always, to put it mildly, somewhat complicated. Those who apparently cared most about him, his mother and his sister, he found oppressive and distasteful because they represented a type of personality he deeply despised. Though he prided himself on being comfortable with women, he does not seem to have been very successful in establishing emotionally satisfying relationships with them, which is hardly surprising given his views on women and on femininity (Weiblichkeit) in general. Things did not go much better with his friends. The people whom he called “friends” he quite often spoke of with great resentment: he charged all of them with a lack of sensitivity toward him, he complained that none of them ever bothered to study his works, and he accused them of failing to defend him against public neglect. In short, he suffered deeply from a sense of solitude and isolation, from not being appropriately acknowledged because of the supposed imperfections of the people around him.
Think of his judgments as narratives that he invites us to listen to, without really obliging us to believe them if we are not the right kind of person.
This book (1886) is in every essential a critique of modernity; modern sciences, modern arts, even modern politics are not excluded. Besides this, it is an indication of an opposing type, which is as un-modern as possible, a noble, yes-saying type.
The starting point for almost everything Nietzsche is interested in throughout his entire intellectual career can be nicely summarized in the form of the question “how are we to live?” or, more poignantly, “how are we to endure life?” He considered this question to be of the utmost importance, because of three interconnected convictions that he treated virtually as facts. His first conviction was that life is best conceived of as a chaotic dynamic process without any stability or direction. The second is articulated in the claim that we have no reason whatsoever to believe in any such thing as the “sense” or the “value” of life, insofar as these terms imply the idea of an “objective” or “natural” purpose of life. The third is that human life is value-oriented in its very essence – that is, without adherence to some set of values or other, human life would be virtually impossible.
The general tendency of the book is to claim that at the base of the most deeply habitualized normative evaluations that modern people take for granted, their most fundamental judgments about what has to be considered “good” or “bad” in almost every sphere of human activity, there ultimately lies a mixture of appalling character traits, ranging from weakness and fear to wishful thinking and self-betrayal, and all these find their symptomatic expression in the modern condition.
Part 1: On the prejudices of philosophers
Things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own, – they cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this mad chaos of confusion and desire. Look instead to the lap of being, the everlasting, the hidden God, the ‘thing-in-itself ’ – this is where their ground must be, and nowhere else!” – This way of judging typifies the prejudices by which metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized: this type of valuation lies behind all their logical procedures. From these “beliefs” they try to acquire their “knowledge,” to acquire something that will end up being solemnly christened as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not occurred to even the most cautious of them to start doubting right here at the threshold, where it is actually needed the most.
Whatever value might be attributed to truth, truthfulness, and selflessness, it could be possible that appearance, the will to deception, and craven self-interest should be accorded a higher and more fundamental value for all life. It could even be possible that whatever gives value to those good and honorable things has an incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they are even essentially the same. Perhaps! – But who is willing to take charge of such a dangerous Perhaps! For this we must await the arrival of a new breed of philosophers, ones whose taste and inclination are somehow the reverse of those we have seen so far – philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps in every sense. – And in all seriousness: I see these new philosophers approaching.
Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power –: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.
For once and for all, we should free ourselves from the seduction of words! Let the people believe that knowing means knowing to the very end; the philosopher has to say: “When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,’ I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an ‘I,’ and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is. Because if I had not already made up my mind what thinking is, how could I tell whether what had just happened was not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? Enough: this ‘I think’ presupposes that I compare my present state with other states that I have seen in myself, in order to determine what it is: and because of this retrospective comparison with other types of ‘knowing,’ this present state has absolutely no ‘immediate certainty’ for me.” – In place of that “immediate certainty” which may, in this case, win the faith of the people, the philosopher gets handed a whole assortment of metaphysical questions, genuinely probing intellectual questions of conscience, such as: “Where do I get the concept of thinking from? Why do I believe in causes and effects? What gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that matter, about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts?” Whoever dares to answer these metaphysical questions right away with an appeal to a sort of intuitive knowledge, like the person who says: “I think and know that at least this is true, real, certain” – he will find the philosopher of today ready with a smile and two question-marks. “My dear sir,” the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, “it is improbable that you are not mistaken: but why insist on the truth?”
As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that “thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is active, therefore –.” Following the same basic scheme, the older atomism looked behind every “force” that produces effects for that little lump of matter in which the force resides, and out of which the effects are produced, which is to say: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned how to make do without that bit of “residual earth,” and perhaps one day even logicians will get used to making do without this little “it” (into which the honest old I has disappeared).
Let us say: in every act of willing there is, to begin with, a plurality of feelings, namely: the feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the state towards which, and the feeling of this “away from” and “towards” themselves. But this is accompanied by a feeling of the muscles that comes into play through a sort of habit as soon as we “will,” even without our putting “arms and legs” into motion. Just as feeling – and indeed many feelings – must be recognized as ingredients of the will, thought must be as well. In every act of will there is a commandeering thought, – and we really should not believe this thought can be divorced from the “willing,” as if some will would then be left over! Third, the will is not just a complex of feeling and thinking; rather, it is fundamentally an affect: and specifically the affect of the command. What is called “freedom of the will” is essentially the affect of superiority with respect to something that must obey: “I am free, ‘it’ must obey” – this consciousness lies in every will, along with a certain straining of attention, a straight look that fixes on one thing and one thing only, an unconditional evaluation “now this is necessary and nothing else,” an inner certainty that it will be obeyed, and whatever else comes with the position of the commander. A person who wills –, commands something inside himself that obeys, or that he believes to obey.
Suppose someone sees through the boorish naivet´ e of this famous concept of “free will” and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will,” which is basically an abuse of cause and effect. We should not erroneously objectify “cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects” something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like “causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There, the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law.” We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity, compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we project and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an “in-itself,” then this is the way we have always done things, namely mythologically. The “un-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in a thinker when he senses some compulsion, need, having-to-follow, pressure, un-freedom in every “causal connection” and “psychological necessity.” It is very telling to feel this way – the person tells on himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, “un-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem by two completely opposed parties, but always in a profoundly personal manner. The one party would never dream of relinquishing their “responsibility,” a belief in themselves, a personal right to their own merit (the vain races belong to this group –). Those in the other party, on the contrary, do not want to be responsible for anything or to be guilty of anything; driven by an inner self-contempt, they long to be able to shift the blame for themselves to something else. When they write books these days, this latter group tends to side with the criminal; a type of socialist pity is their most attractive disguise. And, in fact, the fatalism of the weak of will starts to look surprisingly attractive when it can present itself as “la religion de la souffrance humaine”: this is its “good taste.”
A genuine physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious resistances in the heart of the researcher, it has “the heart” against it. Even a doctrine of the reciprocal dependence of the “good” and the “bad” drives will (as a refined immorality) cause distress and aversion in a strong and sturdy conscience – as will, to an even greater extent, a doctrine of the derivation of all the good drives from the bad. But suppose somebody considers even the affects of hatred, envy, greed, and power-lust as the conditioning affects of life, as elements that fundamentally and essentially need to be present in the total economy of life, and consequently need to be enhanced where life is enhanced, – this person will suffer from such a train of thought as if from sea-sickness.
Part 2: The free spirit
What a strange simplification and falsification people live in! The wonders never cease, for those who devote their eyes to such wondering. How we have made everything around us so bright and easy and free and simple! How we have given our senses a carte blanche for everything superficial, given our thoughts a divine craving for high-spirited leaps and false inferences! – How we have known from the start to hold on to our ignorance in order to enjoy a barely comprehensible freedom, thoughtlessness, recklessness, bravery, and joy in life; to delight in life itself ! And, until now, science could arise only on this solidified, granite foundation of ignorance, the will to know rising up on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will to not know, to uncertainty, to untruth!
It is intended for those who are most serious. Stand tall, you philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering “for the sake of truth”! Even of defending yourselves! You will ruin the innocence and fine objectivity of your conscience, you will be stubborn towards objections and red rags, you will become stupid, brutish, bullish if, while fighting against danger, viciousness, suspicion, ostracism, and even nastier consequences of animosity, you also have to pose as the worldwide defenders of truth. As if “the Truth” were such a harmless and bungling little thing that she needed defenders! And you of all people, her Knights of the Most Sorrowful Countenance, my Lord Slacker and Lord Webweaver of the Spirit! In the end, you know very well that it does not matter whether you, of all people, are proved right, and furthermore, that no philosopher so far has ever been proved right. You also know that every little question-mark you put after your special slogans and favorite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) might contain more truth than all the solemn gestures and trump cards laid before accusers and courts of law! So step aside instead! Run away and hide! And be sure to have your masks and your finesse so people will mistake you for something else, or be a bit scared of you! And do not forget the garden, the garden with golden trelliswork! And have people around you who are like a garden, – or like music over the waters when evening sets and the day is just a memory. Choose the good solitude, the free, high-spirited, light-hearted solitude that, in some sense, gives you the right to stay good yourself ! How poisonous, how cunning, how bad you become in every long war that cannot be waged out in the open! How personal you become when you have been afraid for a long time, keeping your eye on enemies, on possible enemies! These outcasts of society (the long-persecuted, the badly harassed, as well as those forced to become hermits, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos): they may work under a spiritual guise, and might not even know what they are doing, but they will always end up subtly seeking vengeance and mixing their poisons ( just try digging up the foundation of Spinoza’s ethics and theology!). Not to mention the absurd spectacle of moral indignation, which is an unmistakable sign that a philosopher has lost his philosophical sense of humor. The philosopher’s martyrdom, his “self-sacrifice for the truth,” brings to light the agitator and actor in him; and since we have only ever regarded him with artistic curiosity, it is easy to understand the dangerous wish to see many of these philosophers in their degeneration for once (degenerated into “martyrs” or loud-mouths on their stage or soap-box). It’s just that, with this sort of wish we have to be clear about what we will be seeing: – only a satyr-play, only a satirical epilogue, only the continuing proof that the long, real tragedy has come to an end (assuming that every philosophy was originally a long tragedy – ).
Every choice human being strives instinctively for a citadel and secrecy where he is rescued from the crowds, the many, the vast majority; where, as the exception, he can forget the human norm. The only exception is when he is driven straight towards this norm by an even stronger instinct, in search of knowledge in the great and exceptional sense. Anybody who, in dealing with people, does not occasionally glisten in all the shades of distress, green and gray with disgust, weariness, pity, gloominess, and loneliness – he is certainly not a person of higher taste. But if he does not freely take on all this effort and pain, if he keeps avoiding it and remains, as I said, placid and proud and hidden in his citadel, well then one thing is certain: he is not made for knowledge, not predestined for it. Because if he were, he would eventually have to say to himself: “To hell with good taste! The norm is more interesting than the exception – than me, the exception!” – and he would wend his way downwards, and, above all, “inwards.” The long and serious study of the average man requires a great deal of disguise, self-overcoming, confidentiality, bad company (all company is bad company except with your equals); still, this is all a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the least pleasant, most foul-smelling part and the one richest in disappointments.
Cynicism is the only form in which base souls touch upon that thing which is genuine honesty. And the higher man needs to open his ears to all cynicism, crude or refined, and congratulate himself every time the buffoon speaks up without shame, or the scientific satyr is heard right in front of him.
And wherever even one person is speaking about man without any bitterness but instead quite innocuously, describing him as a stomach with dual needs and a head with one; wherever someone sees and seeks and wants to see only hunger, sex-drive and vanity, as if these were the sole and genuine motivating forces of human action; in short, wherever somebody is speaking “badly” of people – and not even wickedly – this is where the lover of knowledge should listen with subtle and studious attention. He should keep his ears open wherever people are speaking without anger. Because the angry man, and anyone who is constantly tearing and shredding himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, or God, or society), may very well stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, considered morally. But considered in any other way, he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, less instructive case. And nobody lies as much as the angry man. –
Independence is an issue that concerns very few people: – it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: – and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again! – –
“To be a good philosopher you have to be dry, clear, and without illusions.”
We have to test ourselves to see whether we are destined for independence and command, and we have to do it at the right time. We should not sidestep our tests, even though they may well be the most dangerous game we can play, and, in the last analysis, can be witnessed by no judge other than ourselves. Not to be stuck to any person, not even somebody we love best – every person is a prison and a corner. Not to be stuck in any homeland, even the neediest and most oppressed – it is not as hard to tear your heart away from a victorious homeland. Not to be stuck in some pity: even for higher men, whose rare torture and helplessness we ourselves have accidentally glimpsed. Not to be stuck in some field of study: however much it tempts us with priceless discoveries, reserved, it seems, for us alone. Not to be stuck in our own detachment, in the ecstasy of those foreign vistas where birds keep flying higher so that they can keep seeing more below them: – the danger of those who fly. Not to be stuck to our own virtues and let our whole self be sacrificed for some one of our details, our “hospitality,” for instance: this is the danger of dangers for rich souls of a higher type, who spend themselves extravagantly, almost indifferently, pushing the virtue of liberality to the point of vice. We must know to conserve ourselves: the greatest test of independence.
We must do away with the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with the majority. “Good” is no longer good when it comes from your neighbor’s mouth. And how could there ever be a “common good”! The term is self-contradictory: whatever can be common will never have much value. In the end, it has to be as it is and has always been: great things are left for the great, abysses for the profound, delicacy and trembling for the subtle, and, all in all, everything rare for those who are rare themselves. –
In all the countries of Europe, and in America as well, there is now something that abuses this name: a very narrow, restricted, chained-up type of spirit whose inclinations are pretty much the opposite of our own intentions and instincts (not to mention the fact that this restricted type will be a fully shut window and bolted door with respect to these approaching new philosophers). In a word (but a bad one): they belong to the levelers, these misnamed “free spirits” – as eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern ideas.” They are all people without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy, solid folks whose courage and honest decency cannot be denied – it’s just that they are un-free and ridiculously superficial, particularly given their basic tendency to think that all human misery and wrongdoing is caused by traditional social structures: which lands truth happily on its head! What they want to strive for with all their might is the universal, green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety, contentment, and an easier life for all. Their two most well-sung songs and doctrines are called: “equal rights” and “sympathy for all that suffers” – and they view suffering itself as something that needs to be abolished. We, who are quite the reverse, have kept an eye and a conscience open to the question of where and how the plant “man” has grown the strongest, and we think that this has always happened under conditions that are quite the reverse. We think that the danger of the human condition has first had to grow to terrible heights, its power to invent and dissimulate (its “spirit” –) has had to develop under prolonged pressure and compulsion into something refined and daring, its life-will has had to be intensified to an unconditional power-will. We think that harshness, violence, slavery, danger in the streets and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, the art of experiment, and devilry of every sort; that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and snakelike in humanity serves just as well as its opposite to enhance the species “humanity.”
Part 3: The religious character
In the end, you have to do everything yourself if you want to know anything: which means you have a lot to do! – But a curiosity like mine is still the most pleasant vice of all; – oh sorry! I meant to say: the love of truth finds its reward in heaven and even on earth. –
From the beginning, Christian faith has been sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, of all pride, of all self-confidence of the spirit; it is simultaneously enslavement and self-derision, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is expected of a worn-down, many-sided, badly spoiled conscience.
So we strongly affirm that religion is a product of the normal man, that man is most in the right when he is most religious and most assured of an infinite destiny. . . It is when he is good that he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order, it is when he contemplates things in a disinterested manner that he finds death revolting and absurd. How could we fail to suppose that these are the moments when man sees best?
Anyone who has looked deeply into the world will probably guess the wisdom that lies in human superficiality. An instinct of preservation has taught people to be flighty, light, and false. We occasionally find both philosophers and artists engaging in a passionate and exaggerated worship of “pure forms.” Let there be no doubt that anyone who needs the cult of the surface this badly has at some point reached beneath the surface with disastrous results. Perhaps there is even an order of rank for these wounded children, the born artists, who find pleasure in life only by intending to falsify its image, in a sort of prolonged revenge against life –. We can infer the degree to which life has been spoiled for them from the extent to which they want to see its image distorted, diluted, deified, and cast into the beyond – considered as artists, the homines religiosi would belong to the highest rank. Entire millennia sink their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence, driven by a deep, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism; this fear comes from an instinct which senses that we could get hold of the truth too soon, before people have become strong enough, hard enough, artistic enough. . . Seen in this light, piety – the “life in God” – appears as the last and most subtle monstrosity produced by fear of the truth; it appears as the artists’ worship and intoxication before the most consistent of all falsifications, as the will to invert the truth, the will to untruth at any price. Perhaps piety has been the most potent method yet for the beautification of humanity: it can turn people into art, surface, plays of colors, benevolence, and to such an extent that we can finally look at them without suffering.
To love humanity for the sake of God – that has been the noblest and most bizarre feeling people have attained so far. That the love of humanity, in the absence of any sanctifying ulterior motive, is one more stupidity and abomination; that the tendency to love humanity like this can only get its standard, its subtlety, its grain of salt and pinch of ambergris from a higher tendency: – whoever it was that first felt and “experienced” all this, however much his tongue might have stumbled as it tried to express such a tenderness, let him be forever holy and admirable to us as the man who has flown the highest so far and has got the most beautifully lost!
The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits –, as the man with the most comprehensive responsibility, whose conscience bears the weight of the overall development of humanity, this philosopher will make use of religion for his breeding and education work, just as he will make use of the prevailing political and economic situation. The influence that can be exerted over selection and breeding with the help of religions (and this influence is always just as destructive as it is creative and formative) varies according to the type of person who falls under their spell and protection. For people who are strong, independent, prepared, and predestined for command, people who come to embody the reason and art of a governing race, religion is an additional means of overcoming resistances, of being able to rule. It binds the ruler together with the ruled, giving and handing the consciences of the ruled over to the rulers – which is to say: handing over their hidden and most interior aspect, and one which would very much like to escape obedience. And if individuals from such a noble lineage are inclined, by their high spirituality, towards a retiring and contemplative life, reserving for themselves only the finest sorts of rule (over exceptional young men or monks), then religion can even be used as a means of securing calm in the face of the turmoil and tribulations of the cruder forms of government, and purity in the face of the necessary dirt of politics. This is how the Brahmins, for instance, understood the matter. With the help of a religious organization, they assumed the power to appoint kings for the people, while they themselves kept and felt removed and outside, a people of higher, over-kingly tasks. Meanwhile, religion also gives some fraction of the ruled the instruction and opportunity they need to prepare for eventual rule and command. This is particularly true for that slowly ascending class and station in which, through fortunate marriage practices, the strength and joy of the will, the will to self-control is always on the rise. Religion tempts and urges them to take the path to higher spirituality and try out feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence, and of solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race that wants to gain control over its origins among the rabble, and work its way up to eventual rule. Finally, as for the common people, the great majority, who exist and are only allowed to exist to serve and to be of general utility, religion gives them an invaluable sense of contentment with their situation and type; it puts their hearts greatly at ease, it glorifies their obedience, it gives them (and those like them) one more happiness and one more sorrow, it transfigures and improves them, it provides something of a justification for everything commonplace, for all the lowliness, for the whole half-bestial poverty of their souls. Religion, and the meaning religion gives to life, spreads sunshine over such eternally tormented people and makes them bearable even to themselves. It has the same effect that an Epicurean philosophy usually has on the suffering of higher ranks: it refreshes, refines, and makes the most of suffering, as it were. In the end it even sanctifies and justifies. Perhaps there is nothing more venerable about Christianity and Buddhism than their art of teaching even the lowliest to use piety in order to situate themselves in an illusory higher order of things, and in so doing stay satisfied with the actual order, in which their lives are hard enough (in which precisely this hardness is necessary!).
Finally, to show the downside of these religions as well and throw light on their uncanny dangers: there is a high and horrible price to pay when religions do not serve as means for breeding and education in the hands of a philosopher, but instead serve themselves and become sovereign, when they want to be the ultimate goal instead of a means alongside other means. With humans as with every other type of animal, there is a surplus of failures and degenerates, of the diseased and infirm, of those who necessarily suffer. Even with humans, successful cases are always the exception and, since humans are the still undetermined animals, the infrequent exception. But it gets worse: people who represent more nobly bred types are less likely to turn out well. Chance, that law of nonsense in the overall economy of mankind, is most terribly apparent in its destructive effect on the higher men, whose conditions of life are subtle, multiple, and difficult to calculate. So how is this surplus of failures treated by the two greatest religions, those mentioned above? They try to preserve, to keep everything living that can be kept in any way alive. In fact, they take sides with the failures as a matter of principle, as religions of the suffering. They give rights to all those who suffer life like a disease, and they want to make every other feeling for life seem wrong and become impossible. Whatever merit we might find in this indulgent, preserving care, which was and is meant for the highest types of people (since these are the ones that, historically, have almost always suffered the most), along with everyone else – nevertheless, in the final analysis, the religions that have existed so far (which have all been sovereign) have played a principal role in keeping the type “man” on a lower level. They have preserved too much of what should be destroyed. They have done invaluable service, these religions, and who is so richly endowed with gratitude not to grow poor in the face of everything that, for instance, the “spiritual men” of Christianity have done for Europe so far! And yet, after they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the dependent, after they found people who were inwardly destroyed or had grown wild and lured them away from society, into cloisters and spiritual prisons: what else did they have to do, to work in good conscience and conviction for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which really means working in word and in deed for the deterioration of the European race? Stand all valuations on their head– that is what they had to do! And crush the strong, strike down the great hopes, throw suspicion on the delight in beauty, skew everything self-satisfied, manly, conquering, domineering, every instinct that belongs to the highest and best-turned-out type of “human,” twist them into uncertainty, crisis of conscience, self-destruction; at the limit, invert the whole love of the earth and of earthly dominion into hatred against earth and the earthly – that is the task the church set and needed to set for itself until, in its estimation, “unworldly,” “unsensuous,” and “higher man” finally melted together into a single feeling. If you could survey the strangely painful, crude yet subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and disinterested eye of an Epicurean god, I think you would find it to be a constant source of amazement and laughter. Doesn’t it seem as if, for eighteen centuries, Europe was dominated by the single will to turn humanity into a sublime abortion? But if somebody with opposite needs were to approach the almost willful degeneration and atrophy of humanity that the Christian European (Pascal for instance) has become, somebody whose manner is no longer Epicurean, but has instead some divine hammer in hand; wouldn’t he have to yell out in rage, in pity, in horror: “Oh you fools, you presumptuous, pitying fools, what have you done here! Was that work meant for your hands! Look how you’ve wrecked and ruined my most beautiful stone! Who gave you the right to do such a thing!” – What I mean is: Christianity has been the most disastrous form of arrogance so far. People who were not high and hard enough to give human beings artistic form; people who were not strong or far-sighted enough, who lacked the sublime self-discipline to give free reign to the foreground law of ruin and failure by the thousands; people who were not noble enough to see the abysmally different orders of rank and chasms in rank between different people. People like this, with their “equality before God” have prevailed over the fate of Europe so far, until a stunted, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something well-meaning, sickly, and mediocre has finally been bred: the European of today. . .
Part 4: Epigrams and entr’actes
Knowledge would have little charm if there were not so much shame to be overcome in order to reach it.
People are at their least honest when it comes to their God: he is not allowed to sin!
The tendency to let oneself be debased, robbed, lied to, and exploited could be the shame of a god among men.
If you have character, you also have a typical experience that always comes back.
The sage as astronomer. – If you still experience the stars as something “over you,” you still don’t have the eyes of a knower.
It is not the strength but the duration of high feelings that makes for high men.
Precisely by attaining an ideal, we surpass it.
A man with genius is insufferable if he doesn’t have at least two more things: gratitude and cleanliness.
In peaceful conditions, the warlike man will attack himself.
Women learn how to hate in the same proportion that they unlearn how to charm.
Behind all their personal vanity, women always have an impersonal contempt – for “woman.”
Bound heart, free spirit. – If someone binds up his heart and takes it captive, he can give his spirit considerable freedom: I have said this once already. But nobody will believe me if they do not already know. . .
You start to mistrust very clever people when they get embarrassed.
Human maturity: this means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play when we were children.
What? A great man? I can only see an actor of his own ideal.
We all pretend to ourselves that we are more naive than we are: this is how we relax from other people.
Music allows the passions to enjoy themselves.
Whenever you reach a decision, close your ears to even the best objections: this is the sign of a strong character. Which means: an occasional will to stupidity.
There are absolutely no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of the phenomena. . .
Our vanity is at its strongest precisely when our pride has been wounded.
Any sense of perspective is ruined for women from the very start by enormous expectations about sexual love and by the shame these expectations bring.
There is an innocence in admiration: it is found in people who do not realize that they themselves might also be admired some day.
Sensuality often hurries the growth of love so that the root stays weak and is easy to tear up.
What someone is begins to reveal itself when his talent diminishes – when he stops showing what he can do. So talent is also a piece of finery; and finery is also a hiding place.
Someone who does not know how to find the path to his ideal lives more carelessly and impudently than someone without an ideal.
All credibility, good conscience, and evidence of truth first come from the senses.
When we are awake we do the same thing as when we are dreaming: we first invent and create the people we are dealing with – and then forget it immediately.
In revenge and in love, woman is more barbaric than man.
The chastest saying I ever have heard: “Dans le v´ eritable amour c’est l’ˆ ame qui enveloppe le corps.” “In true love, it is the soul that envelops the body.”
When a woman has scholarly inclinations, there is usually something wrong with her sexuality. Even sterility makes her prone to a certain masculinity of taste; man is, if you will, “the sterile animal.”
Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.
It is not enough to have a talent: we also need to have your permission for it, – right? my friends?
Whatever is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.
Objections, minor infidelities, cheerful mistrust, a delight in mockery – these are symptoms of health. Everything unconditional belongs to pathology.
Madness is rare in the individual – but with groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule.
The thought of suicide is a strong means of comfort: it helps get us through many an evil night.
We have to repay good and bad: but why do we have to repay precisely those people who did us the good or bad?
You do not love your knowledge enough anymore, as soon as you communicate it.
Lies come through our mouths – but the face that accompanies them tells the truth.
Talking frequently about yourself can also be a way of hiding.
There is more intrusiveness in praise than in censure.
We do not hate what we accord little value, but only what we consider equal or superior.
In the end, we love our desires and not the thing desired.
Other people’s vanity offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.
The consequences of our acts grab us by the hair, regardless of the fact that we have “improved” ourselves in the meantime.
There is an innocence in lying that is the sign of good faith in a cause.
“I’m not upset because you lied to me, I’m upset because I don’t believe you any more.” –
Part 5: On the natural history of morals
The industrious races find it extremely difficult to tolerate idleness: it was a stroke of genius on the part of the English instinct to spend Sundays in tedium with a te deum so that the English people would unconsciously lust for their week- and workdays.
“Nobody wants to harm himself, and therefore everything bad happens involuntarily. The bad man brings harm to himself, and he would not do so if he knew badness was bad. Accordingly, people are bad only through error; if the error is removed, they will necessarily become – good.”
Even our senses greet everything novel with reluctance and hostility; and affects like fear, love, and hate, as well as passive affects of laziness, will be dominant during even the “simplest” processes of sensibility.
We are, from the bottom up and across the ages, used to lying. Or, to put the point more virtuously, more hypocritically and, in short, more pleasantly: people are much more artistic than they think. – In the middle of a lively conversation I will often see the other person’s face expressing his thoughts (or the thoughts I attribute to him) with a degree of clarity and detail that far exceeds the power of my visual ability: – such subtlety of muscle movement and ocular expression must have come from my own imagination. In all likelihood the person had an entirely different expression, or none at all.
What we experience in dreams, as long as we experience it often enough, ends up belonging to the total economy of our soul just as much as anything we have “really” experienced. Such experiences make us richer or poorer, we have one need more or less, and finally, in the bright light of day and even in the clearest moments when minds are wide awake, we are coddled a little by the habits of our dreams.
Among helpful and charitable people you typically discover that clumsy piece of deceit that makes somebody ready before helping him: for instance, acting as if he “deserves” help, requires precisely their help, and will prove to be deeply grateful, devoted, and obsequious for any help they give him, – with these fantasies they treat the needy like their own property, since they are helpful and charitable out of a desire for property. You will find them jealous if you cross them while they are being charitable, or beat them to it. Parents involuntarily make children into something similar to themselves and call it “bringing them up.” No mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that, in the child, she has given birth to a piece of property; no father questions his right to subject the child to his own ideas and valuations. In fact, there was a time (among the ancient Germans, for instance) when it seemed fair that the father should dispose of the life and death of the newborn as he saw fit. And now it is the teacher, the social class, the priest, and the prince who, like the father, see every new person as an incontrovertible opportunity for a new possession. And it follows from this. . .
In an age of disintegration where the races are mixed together, a person will have the legacy of multiple lineages in his body, which means conflicting (and often not merely conflicting) drives and value standards that fight with each other and rarely leave each other alone. A man like this, of late cultures and refracted lights, will typically be a weaker person: his most basic desire is for an end to the war that he is. His notion of happiness corresponds to that of a medicine and mentality of pacification (for instance the Epicurean or Christian); it is a notion of happiness as primarily rest, lack of disturbance, repletion, unity at last and the “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to speak with the holy rhetorician Augustine, who was himself this sort of person.
Part 6: We scholars
Someone who has lost his self-respect will no longer command or lead, even in the field of knowledge: unless he wants to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and rabble-rouser of spirits, in short, a seducer.
The objective man who no longer swears or complains like the pessimist does, the ideal scholar who expresses the scientific instinct as it finally blossoms and blooms all the way (after things have gone partly or wholly wrong a thousand times over) – he is certainly one of the most expensive tools there is: but he belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we will say: he is a mirror, – he is not an “end in himself.” The objective man is really a mirror: he is used to subordinating himself in front of anything that wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that of knowing, of “mirroring forth.” He waits until something comes along and then spreads himself gently towards it, so that even light footsteps and the passing by of a ghostly being are not lost on his surface and skin. He has so thoroughly become a passageway and reflection of strange shapes and events, that whatever is left in him of a “person” strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, and still more often as disruptive. It takes an effort for him to think back on “himself,” and he is not infrequently mistaken when he does. He easily confuses himself with others, he is wrong about his own basic needs, and this is the only respect in which he is crude and careless. Maybe his health is making him suffer, or the pettiness and provincial airs of a wife or a friend, or the lack of companions and company, – all right then, he makes himself think about his sufferings: but to no avail! His thoughts have already wandered off, towards more general issues, and by the next day he does not know how to help himself any more than he knew the day before. He has lost any serious engagement with the issue as well as the time to spend on it: he is cheerful, not for lack of needs but for lack of hands to grasp his neediness. The obliging manner in which he typically approaches things and experiences, the sunny and natural hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes at him, his type of thoughtless goodwill, of dangerous lack of concern for Yeses and Noes: oh, there are plenty of times when he has to pay for these virtues of his! – and being human, he all too easily becomes the worthless residue of these virtues. If you want him to love or hate (I mean love and hate as a god, woman, or animal would understand the terms –) he will do what he can and give what he can. But do not be surprised if it is not much, – if this is where he comes across as fake, fragile, questionable, and brittle. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and more like un tour de force, a little piece of vanity and exaggeration. He is sincere only to the extent that he is allowed to be objective: he is “nature” and “natural” only in his cheerful totality. His mirror-like soul is forever smoothing itself out; it does not know how to affirm or negate any more. He does not command; and neither does he destroy. “I despise almost anothing,” he says with Leibniz: that presque should not be overlooked or underestimated! He is no paragon of humanity; he does not go in front of anyone or behind. In general, he puts himself at too great a distance to have any basis for choosing between good or evil. If people have mistaken him for a philosopher for so long, for a Caesar-like man who cultivates and breeds, for the brutal man of culture – then they have paid him much too high an honor and overlooked what is most essential about him, – he is a tool, a piece of slave (although, without a doubt, the most sublime type of slave) but nothing in himself, – presque rien! The objective person is a tool, an expensive measuring instrument and piece of mirror art that is easily injured and spoiled and should be honored and protected; but he is not a goal, not a departure or a fresh start, he is not the sort of complementary person in which the rest of existence justifies itself. He is not a conclusion – and still less a beginning, begetter or first cause; there is nothing tough, powerful or self-supporting that wants to dominate. Rather, he is only a gentle, brushed-off, refined, agile pot of forms, who first has to wait for some sort of content or substance in order “to shape” himself accordingly, – he is generally a man without substance or content, a “selfless” man. And consequently, in parenthesi, nothing for women.
Critics are tools of philosophy and that is precisely why, being tools, they are so far from being philosophers!
True philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say “That is how it should be!” they are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people, which puts at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all those who overwhelm the past. True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is – will to power. – Are there philosophers like this today? Have there ever been philosophers like this? Won’t there have to be philosophers like this?. . .
The philosopher, being necessarily a person of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has, in every age, been and has needed to be at odds with his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today.
All these extraordinary patrons of humanity who are called philosophers (and who have seldom felt like friends of wisdom, but like disagreeable fools and dangerous question-marks instead –) have found that their task, their harsh, unwanted, undeniable task (though in the end, the greatness of their task) lay in being the bad conscience of their age. In applying a vivisecting knife directly to the chest of the virtues of the age, they gave away their own secret: to know a new greatness in humanity, a new, untraveled path to human greatness. Every time they have done this, they have shown how much hypocrisy and laziness, how much letting yourself go and letting go of yourself, how many lies are hidden beneath the most highly honored type of their present-day morality, and how much virtue is out of date. Every time, they have said: “We need to go there, out there, out where you feel least at home today.” When encountering a world of “modern ideas” which would gladly banish everyone into a corner and “specialization,” a philosopher (if there could be philosophers today) would be compelled to locate the greatness of humanity, the concept of “greatness,” in the very scope and variety of humanity, in its unity in multiplicity. He would determine even value and rank according to how much and how many things someone could carry and take upon himself, how far someone could stretch his responsibility. Today, the will is weakened and diluted by the tastes and virtues of the times, and nothing is as timely as weakness of will: this is why precisely strength of will and the hardness and capacity for long-term resolutions must belong to the concept of “greatness,” in the philosopher’s ideal. With equal justice, the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a stupid, self-abnegating, humble, selfless humanity was suited to an opposite age, to an age like the sixteenth century that suffered from its accumulated energy of the will and from the most savage floods and storm tides of egoism.
These days, the concept of “greatness” will include: being noble, wanting to be for yourself, the ability to be different, standing alone and needing to live by your own fists. And the philosopher will be revealing something of his own ideal when he proposes: “Greatest of all is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most different, the person beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the one with an abundance of will. Only this should be called greatness: the ability to be just as multiple as whole, just as wide as full.”
“Thinking” and “treating an issue seriously,” “with gravity” – these belong together, according to most thinkers and scholars: that is the only way they have “experienced” it –. Artists might have a better sense of smell even in this matter: they are the ones who know only too well that their feeling of freedom, finesse and authority, of creation, formation, and control only reaches its apex when they have stopped doing anything “voluntarily” and instead do everything necessarily, – in short, they know that inside themselves necessity and “freedom of the will” have become one.
Part 7: Our virtues
Watch out for people who put a high value on being credited with moral tact and with subtlety in making moral distinctions! They will never forgive us if they ever make a mistake in front of us (or especially about us), – they will inevitably become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if they still remain our “friends.” Blessed are the forgetful: for they will “have done” with their stupidities too.
Anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return, – perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself – that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more in general, or just to feel like “more.”
Moderation is foreign to us, let us admit this to ourselves; our thrill is precisely the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like the rider on a steed snorting to go further onward, we let the reins drop before the infinite, we modern men, we half-barbarians – and we feel supremely happy only when we are in the most – danger.
Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudamonianism: these are all ways of thinking that measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, which is to say according to incidental states and trivialities. They are all foreground ways of thinking and naivetés, and nobody who is conscious of both formative powers and an artist’s conscience will fail to regard them with scorn as well as pity.
You want, if possible (and no “if possible” is crazier) to abolish suffering. And us? – it looks as though we would prefer it to be heightened and made even worse than it has ever been! Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal; it looks to us like an end ! – a condition that immediately renders people ridiculous and despicable – that makes their decline into something desirable! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – don’t you know that this discipline has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far? The tension that breeds strength into the unhappy soul, its shudder at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, surviving, interpreting, and exploiting unhappiness, and whatever depth, secrecy, whatever masks, spirit, cunning, greatness it has been given: – weren’t these the gifts of suffering, of the disciple of great suffering?
Women have so much cause for shame; they contain so much that is pedantic, superficial, and schoolmarmish as well as narrowmindedly arrogant, presumptuous, and lacking in restraint (just think about their interactions with children!), all of which has been most successfully restrained and kept under control by their fear of men.
Nothing is so utterly foreign, unfavorable, hostile for women from the very start than truth, – their great art is in lying, their highest concern is appearance and beauty.
Let us admit that we men love and honor precisely this art and this instinct in women: we have a rough time of it, and gladly seek relief by attaching ourselves to a being in whose hands, eyes, and gentle stupidities our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity look almost stupid to us.
“My friend, only allow yourself the follies that will give you great pleasure.” – which, by the way, is the most motherly and astute remark that has ever been addressed to a son.
Black gowns and a silent guise make any woman look quite – wise.
His name is good, his figure’s fine, a man as well – if only mine!
So far, men have been treating women like birds that have lost their way and flown down to them from some height or another: like something finer, more vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, more soulful, – but also like something that has to be locked up to keep it from flying away.
Almost everywhere, women’s nerves are being ruined by the most pathological and dangerous of all types of music (our most recent German music) and women are being made more hysterical by the day, and less capable of performing their first and last profession, the bearing of strong children.
People want women to be more “cultivated” in general and want, as they say, to make the “weaker sex” strong through culture: as if history did not teach as vividly as possible that “cultivating” human beings and weakening – in particular, weakening, dissipating, afflicting the strength of the will – have always kept pace with each other, and that the most powerful and influential women in the world (recently even Napoleon’s mother) owed their power and their dominance over men precisely to the strength of their will – and not to schoolteachers.
What inspires respect and, often enough, fear of women is their nature (which is “more natural” than that of men), their truly predatory and cunning agility, their tiger’s claws inside their glove, the naivet´ e of their egoism, their inner wildness and inability to be trained, the incomprehensibility, expanse, and rambling character of their desires and virtues. . . What inspires pity, in spite of all the fear, for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is that she seems to suffer more, be more vulnerable, need more love, and be condemned to more disappointments than any animal. Fear and pity: these are the feelings with which men have stood before women so far, always with one foot in tragedy which tears you apart even as it delights you –.
Part 8: Peoples and fatherlands
There are two types of genius: one that fundamentally begets and wants to beget, and another that is happy to be impregnated and give birth. Similarly with peoples of genius, there are those who inherit the female problem of pregnancy and the secret task of forming, ripening, and bringing to completion – the Greeks, for instance, were this type of people as well as the French –; and others who need to impregnate and be the cause of new orders of life, – like the Jews, the Romans, and, to pose a modest question, the Germans? – peoples tortured and delighted by unknown fevers who irresistibly leave themselves, loving and lusting after foreign races (after ones who “let themselves be impregnated” –) and also domineering, like everything that knows itself to be full of creative forces and consequently knows of “God’s grace.” These two types of genius look for each other like men and women; but they also misunderstand each other, – like men and women.
Every people has its own tartufferies, and calls them its virtues. You do not know – you cannot know – what is best about yourself.
Part 9: What is noble?
The noble and brave types of people who think this way are the furthest removed from a morality that sees precisely pity, actions for others, and d´ esint´ eressement as emblematic of morality. A faith in yourself, pride in yourself, and a fundamental hostility and irony with respect to “selflessness” belong to a noble morality just as certainly as does a slight disdain and caution towards sympathetic feelings and “warm hearts.” – The powerful are the ones who know how to honor; it is their art, their realm of invention.
The vain take pleasure in every good opinion they hear about themselves (abstracted entirely from the point of view of utility, and just as much removed from truth or falsity), just as they suffer from every bad opinion. This is because they submit – they feel submissive – to both good and bad opinions out of that oldest instinct of submissiveness which erupts within them. – This is “the slave” in the blood of the vain, a remnant of the mischief of the slave – and how much “slave” is still left over in women, for instance! –, they try to seduce people into having good opinions of them. By the same token, it is the slave who submits to these opinions immediately afterwards, as if he were not the one who had just called for them. – And to say it again: vanity is an atavism.
These sharp observers and layabouts discover that everything is rapidly coming to an end, that everything around them is ruined and creates ruin, that nothing lasts as long as the day after tomorrow except one species of person, the hopelessly mediocre. Only the mediocre have prospects for continuing on, for propagating – they are the people of the future, the only survivors: “Be like them! Be mediocre!” is the only morality that still makes sense, that still finds ears. But this morality of mediocrity is difficult to preach! It can never admit what it is and what it wants! It has to talk about moderation and dignity and duty and loving your neighbors, – it will have a hard time hiding its irony!–
What a man’s forefathers liked doing the most, and the most often, cannot be wiped from his soul: whether they were diligent savers and accessories of some writing desk or cash box, modest and middle-class in their wants and modest in their virtues as well; or whether they lived their lives giving orders from morning to night, fond of rough pleasures and perhaps of even rougher duties and responsibilities; or whether they finally sacrificed old privileges of birth and belongings in order to live entirely for their faith – their “god” –, being people of a tender and unyielding conscience, embarrassed by any compromise. It is utterly impossible that a person might fail to have the qualities and propensities of his elders and ancestors in his body: however much appearances might speak against it. This is the problem of race. If you know anything about the ancestors, you can draw conclusions about the child.
“One can only truly admire those who do not seek themselves.” – Goethe to Rat Schlosser.
The greater the danger, the greater the need to agree quickly and easily about necessities.
Oh, those who know hearts can guess how impoverished, stupid, helpless, presumptuous, and mistaken even the best and deepest love really is – how much more likely it is to destroy than to rescue!
The thing that separates two people the most is a difference in their sense and degree of cleanliness. All the good behavior, mutual utility, and goodwill in the world will not help: what matters, in the end, is that they “can’t stand the smell of each other!”
Signs of nobility: never thinking about debasing our duties into duties for everyone, not wanting to relinquish, not wanting to share your own responsibility; considering privileges and the exercise of these privileges as a duty.
Someone who strives for greatness will regard everyone he comes across as either a means or a delay and obstacle – or as a temporary resting place. His distinctive and superior graciousness towards his fellow creatures is only possible when he is at his best, at his height, and dominating. Impatience and his awareness of being condemned to comedy until then (since even war is a comedy and concealment, just as every means conceals the end) ruins all company for him. This type of person knows solitude and what is most poisonous about it.
The problem of those who wait. Strokes of luck and many unpredictable factors are needed for a higher person, who contains the dormant solution to a problem, to go into action at the right time, “into explosion” you might say. This does not usually happen, and in every corner of the earth people sit waiting, hardly knowing how much they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. And every once in a while, the alarm call will come too late, the chance event that gives them “permission” to act, – just when the prime of youth and strength for action has already been depleted by sitting still. And how many people have realized in horror, just as they “jump up,” that their limbs have gone to sleep and their spirit is already too heavy! “It’s too late” – they say, having lost faith in themselves and being useless from this point on. – What if in the realm of genius, the “Raphael without hands” (taking that phrase in the broadest sense) is not the exception but, perhaps, the rule? Perhaps genius is not rare at all: what is rare is the five hundred hands that it needs to tyrannize the καιϱ´ oς, “the right time,” in order to seize hold of chance!
People who do not want to see someone’s height will look all the more closely at everything about him that is low and in the foreground – in so doing, they show themselves for what they really are.
Bad enough! The same old story! When you have finished building your house, you suddenly notice that you have learned something in the process that you absolutely needed to know before you started building. The eternal, tiresome “too late!” – The melancholy of everything finished !. . .
People with deep sorrows reveal this fact about themselves when they are happy: they have a way of grasping hold of happiness, as if they wanted to crush or suffocate it, out of jealousy. Oh, they know only too well that it will run away from them!
The noble soul has reverence for itself.
One of the most subtle ways of deceiving people (at least for as long as this is possible), and successfully pretending to be more stupid than you really are (a skill that is as handy as an umbrella, in day-to-day life), is enthusiasm: including what belongs to it – virtue, for instance. Because, as Galiani said, and he must have known –: virtue is enthusiasm.
Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter might hurt his vanity; but the former hurts his heart and his sympathy which always says: “Oh, why do you want things to be as hard for you as they are for me?”
The human being is a diverse, hypocritical, artificial, and opaque animal, uncanny to other animals more because of his cunning and cleverness than his strength; the human being invented good conscience so that he could enjoy his soul as something simple, for once; and the whole of morality is a brave and lengthy falsification that makes it possible to look at the soul with anything like pleasure.
A philosopher: this is a person who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from outside, from above and below, as if by his type of events and lightning bolts; who is perhaps a storm himself, pregnant with new lightning; a fatal person in whose vicinity things are always rumbling, growling, gaping, and acting in uncanny ways. A philosopher: oh, a being who is frequently running away from himself, frequently afraid of himself, – but too curious not to always come back to himself. . .
A man who says: “I like that, I’ll take it for my own and protect it and defend it against everyone”; a man who can conduct business, carry out a resolution, be faithful to a thought, hold on to a woman, punish and defeat someone for being insolent; a man who has his anger and his sword, and whom the weak, the suffering, the distressed, and even the animals like to come to and, by nature, belong to; in short, a man who is naturally master, – if a man like this has pity, well then! this pity is worth something! But what good is the pity of the sufferer! Or particularly, the pity of those who preach it! Almost everywhere in Europe today, there is a morbid over-sensitivity and susceptibility to pain, as well as an excessive amount of complaining and an increased tenderness that wants to dress itself up as something higher, using religion as well as bits and pieces of philosophy, – there is a real cult of suffering. The unmanliness of what is christened “pity” in the circles of these enthusiasts is always, I think, the first thing that strikes your eye.
Gods like to make fun of things: it seems as if they cannot stop laughing, even during holy rites.