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Title: Beyond Good and Evil

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Translator: Helen Zimmern

Release Date: December 7, 2009 [EBook #4363]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

By Friedrich Nietzsche

Translated by Helen Zimmern

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE 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."

Contents
PREFACE
CHAPTER I. PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS
CHAPTER II. THE FREE SPIRIT
CHAPTER III. THE RELIGIOUS MOOD
CHAPTER IV. APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES
CHAPTER V. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS
CHAPTER VI. WE SCHOLARS
CHAPTER VII. OUR VIRTUES
CHAPTER VIII. PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
CHAPTER IX. WHAT IS NOBLE?
FROM THE HEIGHTS

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.
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