Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
[This document, which
has been prepared by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC,
has certain copyright restrictions. For information, please consult Copyright.
Editorial comments and translations in square brackets and italics are by Ian
Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from Nietzsche's text. Last
revised in January 2009
Part Two
The Free Spirit
24
O sancta
simplicitas [blessed simplicity]! Human beings live in such a peculiarly
simple and counterfeit way! Once a man develops eyes to see this wonder, he
cannot check his amazement! How bright and free and light and simple we have
made everything around us! How we have learned to give our senses free license
for everything superficial, our thinking a divine craving for wanton leaps and
erroneous conclusions! How we have learned ways, right from the start, to
maintain our ignorance in order to enjoy a hardly conceivable freedom, safety,
carelessness, heartiness, and merriment in life—in order to enjoy life. And only on this now firm granite foundation
of ignorance could scientific knowledge up to now rise up, the will to know on
the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will not to know, to
uncertainty, to what is not true! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement!
For if language, here as elsewhere, does not cast off its clumsiness and
continues to speak about opposites, where there are only degrees and many
subtleties of gradation, and similarly if inveterate Tartufferie [hypocrisy]
in morality, which nowadays belongs to our invincible “flesh and blood,” turns
the words even of us knowledgeable people around in our mouths, here and there
we understand that and laugh about how it’s precisely the best scientific
knowledge that most wants to hold us in this simplified, completely
artificial, appropriately created, and appropriately falsified world, how it
loves error, voluntarily and involuntarily, because, as something alive—it
loves life!
25
After such a
cheerful start, I’d like you to not to miss hearing a serious word: it’s
directed at the most serious people. Be careful, you philosophers and friends,
of knowledge—protect yourself from martyrdom! From suffering “for the sake of
the truth”! Even from defending yourselves! That corrupts all the innocence and
refined neutrality in your consciences. It makes you stubborn against
objections and red rags; it dulls your minds, brutalizes you, and puts you in a
daze when, in the struggle with danger, malice, suspicion, expulsion, and even
dirtier consequences of your hostility, you finally have to play out your role
as the defenders of truth on earth, as though “the truth” were such a harmless
and clumsy character as to require defenders! And as for you, you knights with
the sorrowful countenances, my good gentlemen, you spiritual loafers and cobweb
spinners! Ultimately you yourselves know well enough that it really doesn’t
matter if you are the ones who are right. You also know that up to now
no philosopher has been right and that a more praiseworthy truthfulness could
lie in every small question mark which you set after your favourite words and
cherished doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves), than in all the ceremonial
gestures and trump cards before prosecutors and courts of justice! Better to
stand aside! Run off to some secluded place! And retain your mask and your
subtlety, so that people confuse you with someone else—or fear you a little!
And for my sake don’t forget the garden, the garden with the golden trellis!
And have people around you who are like a garden—or like music over water in
the evening, when the day is already becoming a memory. Choose good
solitude, the free, high-spirited, easy solitude, which gives you also a right
to remain, in some sense or other, still good yourselves! How poisonous, how
crafty, how bad every long war makes us, when it does not let us fight with
open force! How personal a long fear makes us, a long attention on our
enemies, on potential enemies! These social outcasts, these men long persecuted
and wickedly hunted down—as well as the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or
Giordano Brunos*—in the end always become, maybe under a spiritual
masquerade and perhaps without realizing it themselves, sophisticated avengers
and makers of poisons (just dig into the foundation of Spinoza’s ethics and
theology)—to say nothing of the foolishness of moral indignation, which in a
philosopher is the unmistakable sign that his philosophical humour has run away
from him. The martyrdom of a philosopher, his “sacrifice for the truth,” brings
forcefully to light how much of the agitator and actor he contains within
himself. And if people have looked at him with only an artistic curiosity up to
this point, then, in the case of several philosophers, we can naturally
understand the dangerous wish to see him also in his degeneration (degenerated
into a “martyr,” into a brawler on the stage and in tribunals). But with such a
wish, people must be clear about what they are going to see in every
case—only a satyr play, only a farcical epilogue, only continuing proof that
the long, real tragedy is over, assuming that every philosophy in its
origin was a long tragedy.
26
Every special
human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is
saved from the crowd, the many, the majority, where he can forget the
rule-bound “people,” for he is an exception to them—but for the single case
where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these rules,
as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense. Anyone who,
in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer
with all the colours of distress—green and gray with disgust, surfeit,
sympathy, gloom, and loneliness—is certainly not a man of higher taste. But
provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon
himself, always keeps away from it, and stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and
proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not
destined for, knowledge. For if he were, he would one day have to say to
himself, “The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting
than the exception—than I am, the exception!”—and he would make his way down,
above all, “inside.” The study of the average man—long, serious, and
requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company—all company is
bad company except with one’s peers—that constitutes a necessary part of the life
story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part,
the richest in disappointments. But if he’s lucky, as is appropriate for a
fortunate child of knowledge, he encounters real short cuts and ways of making
his task easier—I’m referring to the so-called cynics, those who, as cynics,
simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the “rule-bound man” in themselves
and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge
to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses;—now
and then they even wallow in books, as if in their very own dung. Cynicism is
the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the
higher man should open his ears to every cruder and more refined cynicism and
think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr
announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where
enchantment gets mixed into the disgust: for example, in those places where, by
some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat
and ape—as in the Abbé Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted, and perhaps
also the foulest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and
consequently a good deal quieter.* More
frequently it happens that, as I’ve intimated, the scientific head is set on an
ape’s body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul—among
doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that’s not an uncommon
occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of
men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere someone
constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual
desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in
human actions, in short, wherever people speak “badly” of human beings—not even
in a nasty way—there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent
attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk
without indignation. For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own
teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that,
the world, or God, or society) may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than
the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more
ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies
as much as the indignant man.
27
It is difficult
to be understood, particularly when one thinks and lives gangastrotogati
[like the flow of the river Ganges], among nothing but people who think and
live differently, namely kurmagati [like the movements of a tortoise]
or, in the best cases “following the gait of frogs” mandeikagati—I’m
simply doing everything to make myself difficult to be understood?—and people
should appreciate from their hearts the good will in some subtlety of
interpretation. But so far as “good friends” are concerned, those who are
always too comfortable and believe they have a particular right as friends to a
life of comfort, one does well to start by giving them a recreation room and
playground of misunderstanding:—so one has to laugh—or else to get rid of them
altogether, these good friends—and also to laugh!
28
The most
difficult thing about translating from one language into another is the tempo
of its style, which is rooted in the character of the race—physiologically
speaking, in the average tempo of its “metabolism.” There are honestly intended
translations which, as involuntarily coarse versions of the original, are
almost misrepresentations, simply because its brave and cheerful tempo, which
springs over and neutralizes everything dangerous in things and words, cannot
be translated. A German is almost incapable of presto [quick tempo] in
his language and thus, as you can reasonably infer, is also incapable of many
of the most delightful and most daring nuances of free and free-spirited
thinking. Just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him, in body and
conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him.
Everything solemn, slow moving, ceremonially massive, all lengthy and boring
varieties in style are developed among the Germans in a lavish diversity. You
must forgive me for the fact that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of
stiffness and daintiness, is no exception, as a mirror image of the “good old
time” to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste in an age when
there still was a “German taste,” a rococo taste in moribus et artibus [in
customs and the arts].* Lessing is
an exception, thanks to his play-actor’s nature, which understood a great deal
and knew how to do many things. He was not the translator of Bayle for nothing
and was happy to take refuge in Diderot’s or Voltaire’s company—and even
happier among the Roman writers of comic drama. In tempo, Lessing also loved
free-spiritedness, the flight from Germany. But how could the German
language—even in the prose of a Lessing—imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who
in his Prince allows one to breathe the fine dry air of Florence and
cannot not help presenting the most serious affairs in a boisterous allegrissimo
[very quick tempo], perhaps not without a malicious artistic feeling about
what a contrast he was risking—long, difficult, hard, dangerous ideas, and a
galloping tempo and the very best, most high-spirited of moods.*
Finally, who could even venture a German translation of
Petronius, who was the master of the presto—more so than any great
musician so far—in invention, ideas, words. Ultimately what is so important
about all the swamps of the sick, nasty world, even “the ancient world,” when
someone like him has feet of wind, drive, and breath, the liberating scorn of a
wind which makes everything healthy, as he makes everything run! And so
far as Aristophanes is concerned, that transfiguring, complementary spirit for
whose sake we excuse all Hellenism for having existed, provided that we
have understood in all profundity everything that needs to be forgiven
and transfigured;—I don’t know what allows me to dream about Plato’s
secrecy and sphinx-like nature more than that petit fait [small fact],
which fortunately has been preserved, that under the pillow on his death bed
people found no “Bible,” nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but
something by Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek
life, to which he said no—without an Aristophanes!—
29
It’s the
business of very few people to be independent:—that is a right of the strong.
And whoever attempts it—even with the best right to it, but without being
compelled to—shows by that action that he is probably not only strong but
exuberantly daring. He is entering a labyrinth; he is increasing a
thousand-fold the dangers which life already brings with it, not the least of
which is the fact that no one’s eyes see how and where he goes astray, gets
isolated, and is torn to pieces by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience.* Suppose such a person comes to a bad end, that happens
so far away from men’s understanding that they feel nothing and have no
sympathy:—and he cannot go back any more! He cannot even go back to human
pity!—
30
Our loftiest
insights must—and should!—ring out like foolishness, under some circumstances
like crimes, when in some forbidden way they come to the ears of those for whom
they are not suitable and who are not predestined to hear them. The exoteric
and the esoteric views, as people earlier differentiated them among
philosophers, with Indians as with Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short,
wherever people believed in a hierarchy and not in equality and equal
rights—this differentiation does not arise so much from the fact that the
exoteric view stands outside and looks, assesses, measures, and judges from the
outside, not from the inside: the more essential point is that the exoteric
view sees the matter looking up from underneath, but the esoteric sees it looking
down from above! There are heights of the soul viewed from which even
tragedy ceases to work its tragic effect, and if we gathered all the sorrow of
the world into one sorrow, who could dare to decide if a glance at it would necessarily
seduce and compel us to pity and thus to a doubling of that sorrow? . . . What
serves the higher kind of men as nourishment or refreshment must be almost
poison to a very different and lower kind of man. The virtues of the common man
would perhaps amount to vices and weaknesses in a philosopher; it could be
possible that a higher kind of person, if he is degenerating and nearing his
end, only then acquires characteristics for whose sake people in the lower
world, into which he has sunk, would find it necessary to honour him as a saint
from now on. There are books which have an opposite value for the soul and for
health, depending on whether the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher
and more powerful soul makes use of them: with the first group, the books are
dangerous, shattering, disintegrating; with the second group, they are a
herald’s summons which provokes the bravest to show their courage. Books
for the whole world always smell foul: the stink of small people clings to them.
Where the folk eat and drink, even where they worship, the place usually
stinks. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe clean
air.
31
In their young
years, people worship and despise still without that art of subtlety which
constitutes the greatest gain in life. And it’s reasonable enough that they
must atone, with some difficulty, for having bombarded men and things in such a
way with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of all tastes,
the taste for the absolute, will be terribly parodied and misused until people
learn to put some art into their feelings and even prefer risking an attempt
with artificiality, as the real artists of life do. The anger and reverence
typical of the young do not seem to ease up until they have sufficiently
distorted men and things so that they can vent themselves on them.—Youth is in
itself already something fraudulent and deceptive. Later, when the young soul,
tortured by nothing but disappointments, finally turns back against itself
suspiciously, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of
conscience, how it rages against itself from this point on, how it tears itself
apart impatiently, how it takes revenge for its lengthy self-deception, just as
if it had been a voluntary blindness! In this transition people punish
themselves through their mistrust of their own feeling; they torment their
enthusiasm with doubt; indeed, they already feel good conscience as a danger,
as a veiling of the self, so to speak, and exhaustion of their finer honesty.
Above all, people take sides, basically the side against “the young.”—A
decade later, they understand that all this was also still—youth!
32
Throughout the
lengthiest period of human history—we call it the prehistoric age—the value or
the lack of value in an action was derived from its consequences. The action in
itself was thus considered just as insignificant as its origin, but, in
somewhat the same way as even today in China an honour or disgrace reaches back
from the child to the parents, so then it was the backward working power of
success or lack of success which taught people to consider an action good or
bad. Let’s call this period the pre-moralistic period of humanity: the
imperative “Know thyself!” was then still unknown. In the last ten millennia,
by contrast, in a few large regions of the earth people have come, step by
step, a great distance in allowing the value of an action to be determined, no
longer by its consequences, but by its origin. As a whole, this was a great
event, a considerable improvement in vision and standards, the unconscious
influence of the ruling power of aristocratic values and of faith in “origins,”
the sign of a period which one can designate moralistic in a narrower
sense: with it the first attempt at self- knowledge was undertaken. Instead of
the consequences, the origin: what a reversal of perspective! And this reversal
was surely attained only after lengthy battles and variations! Of course, in
the process a disastrous new superstition, a peculiar narrowing of
interpretation, gained control. People interpreted the origin of an action in
the most particular sense as an origin from an intention. People became
unanimous in believing that the value of an action lay in the value of the
intention behind it. The intention as the entire origin and prehistory of an
action: in accordance with this bias people on earth have, almost right up to
the most recent times, given moral approval, criticized, judged, and also
practised philosophy. But today shouldn’t we have reached the point where we
must once again make up our minds about a reversal and fundamental shift in
values, thanks to a further inward contemplation and profundity in human
beings? Are we not standing on the threshold of a period which we might at
first designate negatively as beyond morality, today, when, at least
among us immoralists, the suspicion stirs that the decisive value of an action
may lie precisely in what is unintentional in it and that all its
intentionality, everything which we can see in it, know, “become conscious of,”
still belongs to its surface layer and skin,—which, like every skin, indicates
something but conceals even more? In short, we believe that the
intention is only a sign and a symptom, something which still needs
interpretation, and furthermore a sign which carries too many meanings and,
thus, by itself alone means almost nothing. We think that morality, in the
earlier sense, that is, a morality based on intentions, has been a prejudice,
something rash and perhaps provisional, something along the lines of astrology
and alchemy, but, in any case, something that must be overcome. The
overpowering of morality, in a certain sense even the self-conquering of
morality: let that be the name for that long secret work which remains reserved
for the finest and most honest, and also the most malicious, consciences
nowadays, as the living touchstones of the soul.
33
That is the
only way: we must mercilessly put in question and bring before the court
feelings of devotion, sacrificing for one’s neighbour, the entire morality of
self-renunciation, and, in exactly the same way, the aesthetic of
“disinterested contemplation,” according to which the castration of art
seductively enough tries these days to create a good conscience for itself. There
is much too much magic and sweetness in those feelings “for others,” “not
for myself,” for us not to find it necessary to grow doubly mistrustful here
and to ask, “Are these not perhaps—seductions?”—The fact that those
feelings please—the person who has them and the one who enjoys their
fruits, as well as the one who merely looks on—this still provides no argument for
them. On the contrary, that demands immediate caution. So let’s be cautious!
34
No matter what
philosophical standpoint people may adopt nowadays, from every point of view
the falsity of the world in which we think we live is the most certain
and firmest thing which our eyes are still capable of apprehending:—for that we
find reason after reason, which would like to entice us into conjectures about
a fraudulent principle in the “essence of things.” But anyone who makes our
very thinking, that is, “the spirit,” responsible for the falsity of the
world—an honourable solution which every conscious or unconscious advocatus
dei [pleader for god] uses—: whoever takes this world, together with space,
time, form, and movement as a false inference, such a person would at
least have good ground finally to learn to be distrustful of all thinking
itself. Wouldn’t it be the case that thinking has played the greatest of all
tricks on us up to this point? And what guarantee would there be that thinking
would not continue to do what it has always done? In all seriousness: the
innocence of thinkers has something touching, something inspiring reverence,
which permits them even today still to present themselves before consciousness
with the request that it give them honest answers: for example, to the
question whether it is “real,” and why it really keeps itself so absolutely
separate from the outer world, and similar sorts of questions. The belief in
“immediate certainties” is a moral naivete which brings honour to us
philosophers—but we should not be “merely moral” men! Setting aside
morality, this belief is a stupidity, which brings us little honour! It may be
the case that in bourgeois life the constant willingness to suspect is
considered a sign of a “bad character” and thus belongs among those things
thought unwise. Here among us, beyond the bourgeois world and its affirmations
and denials—what is there to stop us from being unwise and saying the
philosopher has an absolute right to a “bad character,” as the being who
up to this point on earth has always been fooled the best—today he has the duty
to be suspicious, to glance around maliciously from every depth of suspicion.
Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and way of expressing myself. For a
long time ago I myself learned to think very differently about and make
different evaluations of deceiving and being deceived, and I keep ready at
least a couple of digs in the ribs for the blind anger with which philosophers
themselves resist being deceived. Why not? It is nothing more than a
moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance. That claim is even
the most poorly demonstrated assumption there is in the world. People should at
least concede this much: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of
appearances and assessments from perspectives. And if people, with the virtuous
enthusiasm and foolishness of some philosophers, wanted to do away entirely
with the “apparent world,” assuming, of course, you could do that, well
then at least nothing would remain any more of your “truth” either! In fact,
what compels us generally to the assumption that there is an essential
opposition between “true” and “false”? Is it not enough to assume degrees of appearance
and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and tones for the way things
appear—different valeurs [values], to use the language of painters?
Why could the world about which we have some concern—not be a fiction?
And if someone then asks “But doesn’t an author belong to a fiction?” could he
not be fully answered with Why? Doesn’t this “belong to” perhaps belong
to the fiction? Is it then forbidden to be a little ironic about the subject as
well as about the predicate and the object? Is the philosopher not permitted to
rise above a faith in grammar? All due respect to governesses, but might it not
be time for philosophy to renounce faith in governesses?—
35
O Voltaire! O
humanity! O nonsense! There’s something about the “truth,” about the search
for truth. And when someone goes after it in far too human a way—“il ne
cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien” [he seeks the truth only to do
good]—I’ll wager he comes up with nothing!
36
If we assume
that nothing is “given” as real other than our world of desires and passions
and that we cannot access from above or below any “reality” other than the
direct reality of our drives—for thinking is only a relationship of these
drives to each other—: are we not allowed to make the attempt and to ask the
question whether this given is not a sufficient basis also for
understanding the so-called mechanical (or “material”) world on the basis of
things like this given. I don’t mean to understand it as an illusion, an
“appearance,” an “idea” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer*), but as having the same degree of reality as our
affects themselves have—as a more primitive form of the world of affects in which
everything is still combined in a powerful unity, something which then branches
off and develops in the organic process (also, as is reasonable, gets softer
and weaker—), as a form of instinctual life in which the collective organic
functions, along with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion,
and metabolism, are still synthetically bound up with one another—as an early
form of life? In the end making this attempt is not only permitted but is
also demanded by the conscience of the method. Not to assume various
forms of causality as long as the attempt to manage with a single one has been
pushed to its furthest limit (—all the way to nonsense, if I may say so): that
is one moral of the method which people nowadays may not evade; —as a
mathematician would say, it is a consequence “of its definition.” In the end
the question is whether we acknowledge the will as something really
efficient, whether we believe in the causal properties of the will. If we
do—and basically our faith in this is
simply our faith in causality itself—then we must make the
attempt to set up hypothetically the causality of the will as the single
causality. Of course, “will” can work only on “will”—and not on “stuff” (not,
for example, on “nerves”—). Briefly put, we must venture the hypothesis whether
in general, wherever we recognize “effects,” will is not working on will—and
whether every mechanical event, to the extent that a force is active in it, is
not force of will, an effect of the will.—Suppose finally that we were to
succeed in explaining our entire instinctual life as a development and
branching off of a single fundamental form of the will—that is, of the will to
power, as my principle asserts—and suppose we could trace back all
organic functions to this will to power and also locate in it the solution to
the problem of reproduction and nourishment—that is one problem—then in so
doing we would have earned the right to designate all efficient force
unambiguously as will to power. Seen from inside, the world defined and
described according to its “intelligible character” would be simply “will to
power” and nothing else.—
37
“What’s that?
Doesn’t that mean in popular language that God is disproved, but the devil is
not—?” To the contrary, to the contrary, my friends! And in the devil’s name,
who is forcing you to speak such common language?
38
What happened
only very recently, in all the brightness of modern times, with the French
Revolution, that ghastly and, considered closely, superfluous farce, which,
however, noble and rapturous observers from all Europe have interpreted from a
distance for so long and so passionately according to their own outrage and
enthusiasm until the text disappeared under the interpretation, in the
same way a noble posterity could once again misunderstand all the past and only
by doing that perhaps make looking at that past tolerable.—Or rather, hasn’t
this already happened? Were we ourselves not—this “noble posterity”? And, to
the extent that we understand this point, is not this the very moment when—it
is over?
39
No one will
readily consider a doctrine true simply because it makes us happy or virtuous,
except perhaps the gentle “idealists,” who go into raptures about the good, the
true, and the beautiful and allow all sorts of colourful, clumsy, and
good-natured desirable things to swim around in confusion in their pond.
Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people, even prudent people, do like
to forget that causing unhappiness and evil are by the same token no counterarguments.
Something could well be true, although it is at the same time harmful and
dangerous to the highest degree. In fact, it could even be part of the
fundamental composition of existence that people are destroyed when they fully
recognize this point—so that the strength of a spirit might be measured by how
much it could still endure of the “truth,” or put more clearly, by the degree
it would have to have the truth diluted, sweetened, muffled, or
falsified. But there is no doubt about the fact that evil and unhappy people
are more favoured and have a greater probability of success in discovering
certain parts of the truth, to say nothing of the evil people who are
happy—a species which moralists are silent about. Perhaps toughness and cunning
provide more favourable conditions for the development of the strong,
independent spirit and the philosopher than that gentle, refined, conciliatory
good nature and that art of taking things lightly which people value in a
scholar , and value rightly. If we assume, first of all, that the notion of a
“philosopher” is not restricted to the philosopher who writes books—or even
puts his own philosophy into books! —A final characteristic in the
picture of the free-spirited philosopher is provided by Stendhal. Because of
German taste I don’t wish to overlook emphasizing him:—for he goes against
German taste. This last great psychologist states the following: “To be a good
philosopher it is necessary to be dry, clear, without illusions. A banker who
has made a fortune has one part of the character required to make discoveries
in philosophy, that is to say, to see clearly into what is.”*
40
Everything
profound loves masks. The most profound things of all even have a hatred for
images and allegories. Shouldn’t the right disguise in which the shame of a god
walks around be something exactly opposite? A questionable question: it
would be strange if some mystic or other had not already ventured something
like that on his own. There are processes of such a delicate sort that people
do well to bury them in something crude and make them unrecognizable. There are
actions of love and of extravagant generosity, after which there is nothing
more advisable than to grab a stick and give an eyewitness a good thrashing:—in
so doing we cloud his memory. Some people know how to befuddle or batter their
own memories in order at least to take revenge on this single witness:—shame is
resourceful. It is not the worst things that make people feel the worst shame.
Behind a mask there is not only malice—there is so much goodness in cunning. I
could imagine that a person who had something valuable and vulnerable to hide
might roll through his life as coarse and round as an old green wine barrel
with strong hoops. The delicacy of his shame wants it that way. For a person
whose shame is profound runs into his fate and delicate decisions on pathways
which few people ever reach and of whose existence those closest to him and his
most intimate associates are not permitted to know. His mortal danger hides
itself from their eyes, just as much as his confidence in life does, once he
regains it. A person who is concealed in this way, who from instinct uses
speaking for silence and keeping quiet and who is tireless in avoiding
communication, wants and demands that, instead of him, a mask of him
wanders around in the hearts and heads of his friends. And suppose he does not
want that mask: one day his eyes will open to the fact that nonetheless there
is a mask of him there—and that that’s a good thing. Every profound spirit
needs a mask; even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continuously
growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is, shallow interpretation
of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.—
41
A person has to
test himself, to see that he is meant for independence and command—and he must
do this at the right time. He should not evade his tests, although they are
perhaps the most dangerous game he can play, tests which in the end are made
only with ourselves as witnesses and with no other judges. Not to get stuck on
a single person: —not even on the someone one loves the most. Every person is a
prison —a cranny as well. And don’t remain stuck on one’s fatherland:—not even
if it is enduring the greatest suffering and in the greatest need of
assistance—it is less difficult to disentangle one’s heart from a victorious
fatherland. Don’t get stuck on pity, even in the case of higher men whose rare
torment and helplessness some fortuitous circumstance has allowed us to see.
Don’t get stuck on a science, not even if it tempts us with the most precious
discoveries apparently reserved explicitly for us. Don’t get stuck on
one’s own detachment, on that sensual distancing and strangeness of a bird
which constantly flies further up into the heights in order always to see more
beneath it:—the danger of man in flight. Don’t get stuck on our own virtues and
let our totality become a sacrifice to some particular detail in us, for
example, our “hospitality,” the danger of dangers for lofty and rich souls, who
spread themselves around lavishly, almost indifferently, and push the virtue of
liberality into a vice. One must know how to preserve oneself: the
sternest test of independence.
42
A new sort of
philosopher is emerging: I venture to baptize them with a name which is not
without danger. As I figure them out—to the extent that they let themselves be
figured out, for it belongs to their type to want to remain something of
an enigma—these philosophers of the future may have a right, perhaps also a
wrong, to be described as attempters. This name itself is finally merely
an attempt and, if you will, a temptation.
43
Are they new
friends of the “truth,” these emerging philosophers? That seems plausible
enough: for all philosophers up to this point have loved their truths. But they
certainly will not be dogmatists. It must go against their pride as well as
their taste if their truth is still supposed to be some truth for everyman: and
that’s been the secret wish and deeper meaning of all dogmatic efforts up to
now. “My opinion is my opinion: someone else has no casual right to
it”—that’s what such a philosopher of the future will perhaps say. One must rid
oneself of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer
good when one’s neighbour utters it. And how could there even be a “common
good”! That expression contradicts itself: what can be common always has only
little value. In the end things must stand as they stand and have always stood:
great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies
and shudders for the refined, and, to sum up all this in brief, everything rare
for the rare.—
44
Do I need after
all that still expressly to state that they will also be free, very free
spirits, these philosophers of the future—although it’s also certain that they
will not be merely free spirits but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally
different that does not wish to be misunderstood and confused with something
else? But as I say this, I feel a duty almost as much to them as to us who are
their heralds and precursors, we free spirits!—the duty to blow away an
old stupid prejudice and misunderstanding about us both, something which for
too long has made the idea “free spirit” as impenetrable as a fog. In all the
countries of Europe and in America as well there is now something which drives
people to misuse this name, a very narrow, confined, chained-up type of spirit
which wants something rather like the opposite to what lies in our intentions
and instincts—to say nothing of the fact that, so far as those emerging new
philosophers are concerned, such spirits definitely must be closed windows and
bolted doors. To put the matter briefly and seriously, they belong with the levellers,
these falsely named “free spirits”—as eloquent and prolific writing slaves of
democratic taste and its “modern ideas”: collectively people without solitude,
without their own solitude, coarse brave lads whose courage or respectable
decency should not be denied. But they are simply unfree and ridiculously
superficial, above all with their basic tendency to see in the forms of old
societies up to now the cause for almost all human misery and failure, a
process which turns the truth happily on its head! What they would like to
strive for with all their powers is the universal, green, pasture-happiness of
the herd, with security, absence of danger, comfort, an easing of life for
everyone. The two songs and doctrines they sing most frequently are called
“Equality of Rights” and “pity for all things that suffer”—and they assume that
suffering itself is something we must do away with. We who are their
opposites, we who have opened our eyes and consciences for the question
where and how up to now the plant “Man” has grown most powerfully to the
heights, we think that this has happened every time under the opposite conditions,
that for that to happen the danger of his situation first had to grow
enormously, his power of invention and pretence (his “spirit”—) had to develop
under lengthy pressure and compulsion into something refined and audacious, his
will for living had to intensify into an unconditional will for power:—we think
that hardness, violence, slavery, danger in the alleys and in the hearts,
seclusion, stoicism, the art of attempting, and devilry of all kinds, that
everything evil, fearful, tyrannical, predatory, snake-like in human beings
serves well for the ennobling of the species “Man,” as much as its opposite
does:—in fact, when we say only this much we have not said enough, and we find
ourselves at any rate with our speaking and silence at a point at the other
end of all modern ideology and things desired by the herd, perhaps as their
exact opposites? Is it any wonder that we “free spirits” are not the most
talkative spirits? That we do not want to give away every detail of what
a spirit can free itself and in what direction it may then perhaps be
driven? And so far as the meaning of the dangerous formula “beyond good and
evil” is concerned, with which we at least protect ourselves from being
confused with others, we are something quite different from “libres-penseurs,”
“liberi pensatori,” “Freidenker,” and whatever else all these
good advocates of “modern ideas” love to call themselves.*
Having been at home in many countries of the spirit, or at least
a guest, having slipped away again and again from the musty comfortable corners
into which preference and prejudice, youth, descent, contingencies of men and
books, or even exhaustion from wandering around seem to have banished us, full
of malice against the enticement of dependency, which lies hidden in honours,
or gold, or offices, or sensuous enthusiasm, thankful even for poverty and
richly changing sickness, because they always free us from some rule or other
and its “prejudice,” thankful to god, devil, sheep, and worm in us, curious to
a fault, researchers all the way to cruelty, with fingers spontaneously working
for the unimaginable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible things,
ready for any job which demands astuteness and keen senses, ready for any
exploit, thanks to an excess of “free will,” with front-souls and back-souls
whose final intentions no one can
easily see, with foregrounds and backgrounds which no foot may move through to
the end, hidden under a cloak of light, conquerors, whether we appear like
heirs and spendthrifts, stewards and collectors from dawn to dusk, miserly with
our wealth and our crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting,
resourceful in coming up with schemes, sometimes proud of tables of categories,
sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls at work, even in broad daylight, in
fact, when necessary, even scarecrows—and nowadays that’s necessary: that is,
to the extent that we are born the sworn jealous friends of loneliness,
of our own most profound midnight and noon loneliness:—we are that kind of men,
we free spirits! And perhaps you also are something like that, you who
are coming, you new philosophers?
Notes
. . . Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), an Italian
philosopher who defended the theories of Copernicus (among other things), was
burned at the stake for heresy. Spinoza: Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677),
a Dutch philosopher, was constantly attacked for his heretical views. [Back to Text]
. . . Galiani: Ferdinand Galiani (1728-1787), an Italian philosopher. Voltaire:
pen name of Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1778), a very important and famous
French Enlightenment writer. [Back to Text]
Aristophanes (456-386 BC), foremost writer of Old Comedy in classical
Athens; Petronius (27-66 AD), a famous Roman satirist. Goethe:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Germany’s greatest man of letters and
literary artist. [Back to Text]
. . . Lessing: Gotthold Ehraim Lessing
(1729-1781), an important German dramatist. Bayle: Marie Henri Bayle
(1783-1842), a well-known French novelist who wrote under the pen name
Stendhal. Diderot: Denis Diderot (1713-1784), French philosopher and
writer, a major figure in the Enlightenment. Machiavelli: Niccolo
Machiavelli (1469-1527), Italian diplomat, dramatist, and political
philosopher. [Back to Text]
. . . Minotaur: In Greek mythology a monster, part man, part bull,
living in the middle of the Labyrinth in Cnossus in Crete. [Back to Text]
. . . Berkeley: George Berkeley (1685-1753), Irish bishop and
philosopher. [Back to Text]
. . . Stendhal: The pen name of the French novelist Marie Henri Bayle
(1783-1842). Nietzsche quotes from the
French: “Pour être bon philosophe, il faut être sec, clair, sans illusion. Un
banquier, qui a fait fortune, a une partie du caractère requis pour faire des
découvertes en philosophie, c’est-á-dire pour voir clair dans ce qui est.” [Back to Text]
These
phrases all mean “free thinkers.” [Back to Text]
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