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 February 2008]
Part
Six
We Scholars
204
At the risk that moralizing here
also will show itself to be what it always has been—that is, an unabashed montrer
ses plais [display of one’s wounds], as Balzac says—I’d like to dare to
stand up against an unreasonable and harmful shift in rank ordering which
nowadays, quite unnoticed and, as if with the clearest conscience, threatens to
establish itself between science and philosophy. I think that we must on the
basis of our experience—experience means, as I see it, always bad
experience?—have a right to discuss such a higher question of rank, so that we
do not speak like blind men about colour or as women and artists do against
science (“Oh, this nasty science!” their instinct and embarrassment sigh, “it
always finds out what’s behind things”—). The declaration of
independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of
the subtler effects of the order and confusion in democracy: today the
self-glorification and self-exaltation of the scholar stand in full bloom
everywhere and in their finest spring—but that is still not intended to mean
that in this case self-praise smells very nice. “Away with all masters!”—that’s
what the instinct of the rabble wants here, too, and once science enjoyed its
happiest success in pushing away theology, whose “handmaiden” it was for so
long, now it has the high spirits and stupidity to set about making laws for
philosophy and to take its turn playing the “master” for once—what am I
saying?—playing the philosopher. My memory—the memory of a scientific
man, if you’ll permit me to say so!—is full to bursting with the naivete in the
arrogance I have heard in remarks about philosophy and philosophers from young
natural scientists and old doctors (not to mention from the most educated and
most conceited of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both of
these thanks to their profession—). Sometimes it was a specialist and man who
hangs around in corners, who generally instinctively resists all synthetic
tasks and capabilities; sometimes the industrious worker, who had taken a whiff
of the otium [leisure] and of the noble opulence within the spiritual
household of the philosopher and, as he did so, felt himself restricted and
diminished. Sometimes it was that colour blindness of the utilitarian man, who
sees nothing in philosophy other than a series of refuted systems and an
extravagant expense from which no one “receives any benefit.” Sometimes the
fear of disguised mysticism and of an adjustment to the boundaries of knowledge
sprang up; sometimes the contempt for particular philosophers had unwittingly
been generalized into a contempt for philosophy. Finally, among the young
scholars I most frequently found behind the arrogant belittlement of philosophy
the pernicious effect of a philosopher himself, a man whom people had in
general refused to follow but without escaping the spell of his value judgments
rejecting other philosophers —something which brought about a collective
irritation with all philosophy. (For example, Schopenhauer’s effect on the most
modern Germany seems to me to be something like this: with his unintelligent
anger against Hegel he created a situation in which the entire last generation
of Germans broke away from their connection with German culture, and this
culture, all things well considered, was a high point in and a prophetic
refinement of the historical sense.* But Schopenhauer himself in this very matter was impoverished to
the point of genius—unreceptive, un-German.) From a general point of view, it
may well have been more than anything else the human, all-too-human, in short,
the paltriness of the newer philosophy itself which most fundamentally damaged
respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the instincts of the rabble. We
should nonetheless confess the extent to which, in our modern world, the whole
style of Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and of whatever all those royal and
splendid hermits of the spirit were called is disappearing. Considering the
sort of representatives of philosophy who nowadays, thanks to fashion, are just
as much on top as on the very bottom—in Germany, for example, the two lions of
Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann—an
honest man of science is entitled to feel with some justice that he is
of a better sort, with a better descent.*
In particular, the sight of these mish-mash philosophers who call themselves
“reality philosophers” or “positivists” is capable of throwing a dangerous
mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young scholar: they are, in the best of
cases, scholars and specialists themselves—that’s clear enough—they are, in
fact, collectively defeated, brought back under the rule of science. At
some time or other they wanted more from themselves, without having any
right to this “more” and to its responsibilities—and now, in word and deed,
they represent in a respectable, angry, vengeful way the lack of faith
in the ruling task and masterfulness of philosophy. But finally—how could it be
anything different? Science nowadays is in bloom, and its face is filled with
good conscience, while what all new philosophy has gradually sunk to—this
remnant of philosophy today—is busy generating suspicion and ill humour against
itself, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to “theory of knowledge”
is, in fact, nothing more than a tentative division of philosophy into epochs
and a doctrine of abstinence: a philosophy which does not venture a step over
the threshold and awkwardly denies itself the right to enter—that is
philosophy at death’s door, an end, an agony, something pitiful! How could such
a philosophy—rule!
205
To tell the truth, there are so many
varied dangers for the development of a philosopher today that we may well
doubt whether this fruit can, in general, still grow ripe. The scope and the
fortress building of the sciences have grown into something monstrous, and with
these the probability that the philosopher has already grown tired while he is
still learning or has stopped somewhere and allowed himself to “specialize,” so
that he no longer reaches his full height, that is, high enough for an
overview, for looking round, for looking down. Or else he reaches that
point too late, when his best time and power are already over, or he’s become
damaged, coarsened, degenerate, so that his glance, his comprehensive value
judgment, means little any more. The very refinement of his intellectual
conscience perhaps allows him to hesitate along the way and to delay. He’s
afraid of being seduced into being a dilettante, a millipede, something with a
thousand antennae. He knows too well that a man who has lost respect for
himself may no longer give orders as a man of knowledge, may no longer lead.
At that point, he would have to be willing to become a great actor, philosophical
Cagliostro and a spiritual Pied Piper, in short, a seducer. In the end it’s a
question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Moreover, by
way of doubling once again the difficulty for the philosopher, it comes to
this: he demands from himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences
but about life and the worth of living—he learns with reluctance to believe
that he has a right or even a duty toward this judgment and must seek his own
path to that right and that belief only through the most extensive—perhaps the
most disturbing, the most destructive—experiences, often hesitating, doubting,
saying nothing. As a matter of fact, the masses have for a long time mistaken
and misidentified the philosopher, whether with the man of science and ideal scholar,
or with the religiously elevated, desensitized, “unworldly” enthusiast drunk on
God. If we hear anyone praised at all nowadays on the ground he lives “wisely”
or “like a philosopher,” that means almost nothing other than “prudently and on
the sidelines.” Wisdom: that seems to the rabble to be some kind of escape, a
means and a trick to pull oneself well out of a nasty game. But the real
philosopher—as we see it, my friends?—lives “unphilosophically” and
“unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of
a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he always puts himself at
risk. He plays the wicked game. . . .
206
In comparison with a genius, that
is, with a being who either engenders or gives birth, taking both
words in their highest sense—the scholar, the average scientific man, always
has something of the old maid about him, for, like the old maid, he doesn’t
understand the two most valuable things men do. In fact, for both scholars and
old maids we concede, as if by way of compensation, that they are respectable—in
their cases we stress respectability—and yet having to make this concession
gives us the same sense of irritation. Let’s look more closely: What is the
scientific man? To begin with, a man who is not a noble type. He has the
virtues of a man who is not distinguished, that is, a type of person who is not
a ruler, not authoritative, and also not self-sufficient. He has diligence, a
patient endorsement of position and rank, equanimity about and moderation in
his abilities and needs. He has an instinct for people like him and for what
people like him require, for example, that bit of independence and green
meadows without which there is no peace in work, that demand for honour and
acknowledgement (which assumes, first and foremost, recognition and the ability
to be recognized—), that sunshine of a good name, that constant stamp of
approval of his value and his utility, which is necessary to overcome again and
again the inner suspicion at the bottom of the hearts of all dependent
men and herd animals. The scholar also has, as stands to reason, the illnesses
and bad habits of a non-noble variety: he is full of petty jealousy and has a
lynx eye for the baseness in those natures whose heights are impossible for him
to attain. He is trusting, only, however, as an individual who lets himself go
but does not let himself flow. With a person who is like a great stream
he just stands there all the colder and more enclosed—his eye is then like a
smooth, reluctant lake in which there is no longer any ripple of delight or
sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable he
gets from his instinctive sense of the mediocrity of his type, from that Jesuitry
of mediocrity, which spontaneously works for the destruction of the uncommon
man and seeks to break every arched bow or—even better!—to relax it. That is,
to unbend it, with consideration, of course, naturally with a flattering hand—to
unbend it with trusting sympathy: that is the essential art of Jesuitry,
which has always understood how to introduce itself as a religion of pity.—
207
No matter how gratefully we may
accommodate ourselves to the objective spirit—and who has never been
sick to death of everything subjective and its damnably excessive obsession
with itself [Ipsissimosität]!—we must ultimately also learn caution
concerning this gratitude and stop the exaggeration with which in recent years
we have celebrated the depersonalizing
of the spirit, emptying the self from the spirit, as if that were the goal in
itself, redemption and transfiguration. That’s what tends to happen, for
example, in the pessimism school, which, for its part, has good reasons for
awarding highest honour to “disinterested knowledge.” The objective man who no
longer curses and grumbles like the pessimist, the ideal scholar, in
whom the scientific instinct after thousands of total and partial failures all
of a sudden comes into bloom and keeps flowering to the end, is surely one of
the most valuable of implements there are, but he belongs in the hands of
someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we say. He is a mirror—he is
no “end in himself.” The objective man is, in fact, a mirror: accustomed to
submit before everything which wishes to be known, without any delight other
than that available in knowing and “mirroring back”—he waits until something
comes along and then spreads himself out tenderly so that light footsteps and
the spiritual essences slipping past are not lost on his surface and skin. What
is still left of his “person” seems to him accidental, often a matter of
chance, even more often disruptive, so much has he become a conduit and
reflection for strange shapes and experiences. He reflects about “himself” with
effort and is not infrequently wrong. He readily gets himself confused with
others. He makes mistakes concerning his own needs, and it’s only here that he
is coarse and careless. Perhaps he gets anxious about his health or about the
pettiness and stifling atmosphere of wife and friend or about the lack of
companions and society—indeed, he forces himself to think about his anxieties:
but it’s no use! His thoughts have already wandered off to some more general
example, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday about how he
might be helped. He has lost seriousness for himself—as well as time. He is
cheerful, not from any lack of need, but from a lack of fingers and
handles for his own needs. His habitual concessions concerning all
things and all experiences, the sunny and uninhibited hospitality with which he
accepts everything which runs into him, his kind of thoughtless good will and
dangerous lack of concern about Yes and No—alas, there are enough cases where
he must atone for these virtues of his!— and as a human being he generally
becomes far too easily the caput mortuum [worthless residue] of these
virtues. If people want love and hate from him—I mean love and hate the way
God, women, and animals understand the terms—he’ll do what he can and give what
he can. But we should not be amazed when it doesn’t amount to much—when he
reveals himself in these very matters as inauthentic, fragile, questionable,
and rotten. His love is forced, his hate artificial, more a tour de force,
a tiny vanity and exaggeration. He is genuine only as long as he is permitted
to be objective: only in his cheerful comprehensiveness [Totalismus] is
he still “Nature” and “natural.” His mirror soul, always smoothing itself out,
no longer knows how to affirm or to deny. He does not command, and he does not
destroy. “Je ne méprise presque rien” [there is almost nothing I
despise] —he says with Leibnitz: We should not fail to hear and should not
underestimate that presque [almost]!* Moreover, he is no model human being. He does not go ahead of
anyone or behind. He places himself in general too far away to have a reason to
take sides between good and evil. When people confused him for such a long time
with the philosopher, with the Caesar-like breeder and cultural power
house, they held him in much too high honour and overlooked the most essential
thing about him—he is an instrument, something of a slave, although certainly
the most sublime form of slave, but in himself nothing—presque rien [almost
nothing]! The objective man is an instrument, an expensive, easily damaged
and blunted tool for measurement and an artful arrangement of mirrors,
something we should take care of and respect. But he is no goal, no way out or
upward, no complementary human being in whom the rest of existence is
justified, no conclusion—and even less a beginning, a procreation and first
cause. He is nothing strong, powerful, self-assured, something which wants to
be master. He is much rather merely a delicate, finely blown mobile pot for
forms, which must first wait for some content and meaning or other, in order to
“give himself a shape” consistent with it—usually a man without form and
content, a “selfless” man. And thus also nothing for women, in parenthesi [in
parenthesis].—
208
When a philosopher nowadays lets us
know he’s not a sceptic—I hope people have sensed this from the description of
the objective spirit immediately above?—the whole world is unhappy to hear
that. People look at him with some awe and would like to ask so much, to
question . . . in fact, among timid listeners, and there are hordes of them
today, from that point on he is considered dangerous. For them it is as if in
his rejection of scepticism they heard coming from far away some evil
threatening noise, as if a new explosive was being tested somewhere, spiritual
dynamite, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilin, a pessimism bonae
voluntatis [of good will], which does not merely say No and will No
but—terrible to imagine!—acts No!* Against
this form of “good will”—a will to a truly active denial of life—there is
today, by general agreement, no better sleeping pill and sedative than
scepticism, the peaceful, gentle, soporific poppy of scepticism, and even Hamlet
is prescribed these days by contemporary doctors against the “spirit” and its
underground rumblings. “Aren’t people’s ears all full enough already of wicked
noises?” says the sceptic, as a friend of peace, almost as a sort of security
police: “This subterranean No is terrifying! Be quiet at last, you pessimistic
moles!” For the sceptic, this tender creature, is frightened all too easily.
His conscience has been trained to twitch with every No, even with every hard,
decisive Yes—to respond as if it had been bitten. Yes! And No!—that contradicts
his morality. Conversely, he loves to celebrate his virtue with a noble
abstinence, by saying with Montaigne, “What do I know?”*
Or with Socrates, “I know that I know nothing.” Or “Here I don’t
trust myself. There is no door open to me here.” Or “Suppose the door was open,
why go in right away?” Or “What use are all rash hypotheses? Not to make any
hypotheses at all could easily be part of good taste. Must you be so keen
immediately to bend back something crooked? Or stopping up every hole with some
piece of oakum? Isn’t there time for that? Doesn’t time have time? O you
devilish fellows, can’t you wait, even for a bit? What is unknown also
has its attraction—the Sphinx is a Circe, too, and Circe also was a
philosopher.”* In this way a sceptic
consoles himself, and he certainly needs some consolation. For scepticism is
the spiritual expression of a certain multifaceted physiological condition
which in everyday language is called weak nerves and infirmity. It arises every
time races or classes which have been separated from each other a long time
suddenly and decisively cross breed. In the new generation, which has inherited
in its blood, as it were, different standards and values, everything is
restlessness, disturbance, doubt, experiment; the best forces have an
inhibiting effect; even the virtues do not allow each other to grow and become
strong; the body and soul lack equilibrium, a main focus, a perpendicular
self-assurance. But what is most profoundly sick and degenerates in such
mixtures is the will. These people no longer know the independence in
decision making, the bold sense of pleasure in willing—they have doubts about
the “freedom of the will,” even in their dreams. Our Europe today, the scene of
an insanely sudden attempt at radical mixing of classes and consequently
mixing of races, is as a result sceptical in all heights and depths, sometimes
with that flexible scepticism which leaps impatiently and greedily from one
branch to another, sometimes gloomy, like a cloud overloaded with question
marks, and often sick to death of its will! Paralysis of the will —where
nowadays do we not find this cripple sitting! And often how well dressed! In
such a seductive outfit! This illness has the most beautifully splendid and
deceitful clothing. For example, most of what presents itself in the display
windows today as “objectivity,” “the practice of science,” “l’art pour
l’art”[art for art’s sake], “purely disinterested knowledge” is only
dressed up scepticism and paralysis of the will—I’ll stand by this diagnosis of
the European sickness. The sickness of the will has spread unevenly across
Europe. It appears in its greatest and most varied form where the culture has
already been indigenous for the longest time, and it disappears to the extent
that the “barbarian” still—or again—achieves his rights under the baggy
clothing of Western culture. Thus, in contemporary France, we can conclude as
easily as we can grasp it in our hands that the will is most seriously ill, and
France, which has always had a masterful skill in transforming even the fateful
changes in its spirit into something attractive and seductive, truly displays
its cultural dominance over Europe today as the school and exhibition place for
all the magical tricks of scepticism. The power to will and, indeed, to desire
a will that lasts a long time, is somewhat stronger in Germany, and in the
north of Germany even more so than in the middle, but it’s significantly stronger
in England, Spain, and Corsica. In Germany it’s bound up with apathy, and in
those other places with hard heads—to say nothing of Italy, which is too young
to know yet what it wants and which first must demonstrate whether it can will.* —But it’s strongest and most amazing in that immense
empire in between, where Europe, so to speak, flows back into Asia, that is, in
Russia. There the power to will has for a long time lain dormant and built up,
there the will waits menacingly—uncertain whether, to borrow a favourite phrase
of our physicists today, it will be discharged as a will to negate or a will to
affirm. It may require more than Indian wars and developments in Asia for
Europe to be relieved of its greatest danger; it will require inner
revolutions, too, the breaking up of the empire into small bodies and, above
all, the introduction of the parliamentary nonsense, along with every man’s
duty to read his newspaper at breakfast. I’m not saying this because it’s what
I want. The opposite would be closer to my heart—I mean such an increase in the
Russian danger, that Europe would have to decide to become equally a threat,
that is, it would have to acquire a will, by means of a new caste which
would rule Europe, a long, fearful, individual will, which could set itself
goals for thousands of years from now—so that finally the long spun-out comic
plot of its small states, together with
its multiple dynastic and democratic petty wills, would come to an end.
The time for small politics is over. The next century is already bringing on
the battle for the mastery of the earth—the compulsion to grand
politics.
209
The extent to which the new warlike
age into which we Europeans have evidently entered may perhaps also be
favourable to the development of another and stronger variety of scepticism—on
that point I’d like to state my views only provisionally through a comparison
which friends of German history will understand easily enough. That unthinking
enthusiast for good-looking, excessively tall grenadiers, who as King of
Prussia, brought into being a military and sceptical genius—and in the process
basically created that new type of German who has just recently emerged
victorious—the questionable and mad father of Frederick the Great—in one
respect himself had the grip and lucky claw of genius.*
He knew what Germany then needed, a lack which was a hundred times more
worrisome and more urgent than some deficiency in culture and social style. His
aversion to the young Frederick emerged from the anxiety of a profound
instinct. What was missing was men. And he suspected to his most bitter
annoyance that his own son might not be man enough. On that point he was
deceived, but who in his place would not have been deceived? He saw his son
decline into atheism, esprit, the luxurious frivolousness of witty
Frenchmen:—he saw in the background the great blood sucker, the spider of
scepticism. He suspected the incurable misery of a heart that is no longer hard
enough for evil and for good, of a fractured will, which no longer commands, no
longer can command. But in the meantime there grew up in his son that
more dangerous and harder new form of scepticism—who knows how much it
was encouraged by that very hate of his father’s and by the icy melancholy of a
will pushed into solitude?—the scepticism of the daring masculinity, which is
closely related to the genius for war and conquest and which, in the shape of
Frederick the Great, first gained entry into Germany. This scepticism despises
and nonetheless grabs hold. It undermines and takes possession. It does not
believe, but in so doing does not lose itself. It gives the spirit a dangerous
freedom, but it is hard on the heart. It is the German form of
scepticism, which, as a constant Frederickanism intensified into the highest
spirituality, has brought Europe for some time under the dominion of the German
spirit and its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks to the invincibly
strong and tenacious masculine character of the great German philologists and
critical historians (who, if we see them properly, were collectively also
artists of destruction and subversion), gradually a new idea of the
German spirit established itself, in spite of all the Romanticism in music and
philosophy, an idea in which the characteristic of manly scepticism stepped
decisively forward: it could be, for example, a fearlessness in the gaze,
courage and hardness in the destroying hand, a tough will for dangerous voyages
of discovery, for expeditions to the spiritual North Pole under arid and dangerous
skies. There may well be good reasons why warm-blooded and superficial
humanitarian people cross themselves when confronted with this particular
spirit: Michelet, not without a shudder, called it cet esprit fataliste,
ironique, méphistophélique [this fatal and ironic Mephistophelean spirit].* But if we want to feel how distinctive this
fear of the “man” in the German spirit is, through which Europe was roused out
of its “dogmatic slumber,” we might remember the earlier idea which had to be
overthrown by it— and how it is still not so long ago that a masculine woman
could dare, with unrestrained presumption, to recommend the Germans to the
sympathy of Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, poetical idiots.* Finally we should understand with sufficient
profundity Napoleon’s surprise when he came to visit Goethe: that reveals what
people had thought about the “German spirit” for centuries. “Voilá un homme!”
[There’s a man!]—which is, in effect, saying: That is really a man!
And I had expected only a German!—
210
Assuming, then, that in the image of
the philosophers of the future there is some characteristic which raises the
question whether they would not perhaps have to be sceptics, in the sense
indicated immediately above, that would, nonetheless, indicate only one thing
about them—and not what they themselves were. With just as much
justification they could be called critics, and it’s certain they will be men
who experiment. In the names with which I have ventured to christen them, I
have already particularly emphasized the attempting and the enjoyment in making
attempts. Did I do this because, as critics in body and soul, they love to use
experiments in a new, perhaps broader, perhaps more dangerous sense? In their
passion for knowledge, would they have to go further with daring and painful
experiments, than could be considered appropriate by the soft-hearted and
mollycoddled taste of a democratic century? There is no doubt that these coming
philosophers will at least be able to rid themselves of those serious and not
unobjectionable characteristics which separate the critic from the sceptic—I
mean the certainty in the measure of value, the conscious use of a unity of
method, the shrewd courage, the standing alone, and the ability to answer for
themselves. In fact, they will confess that they take delight in saying
No and in dismantling things and in a certain thought-out cruelty which knows
how to guide the knife surely and precisely, even when the heart is still
bleeding. They will be harder (and perhaps not always only on
themselves) than humane people might wish; they will not get involved with the
“truth,” so that the truth can “please” them or “elevate” them and “inspire”
them:—by contrast, they will have little faith that the truth in particular
brings with it such emotional entertainment. They will smile, these strict
spirits, if someone should declare in front of them, “That idea elevates me:
how could it not be true?” or “That work delights me: how could it not be
beautiful?” or, “That artist enlarges me; how could he not be great?”—Perhaps
they are prepared not only to smile at but also to feel a genuine disgust for
everything enthusiastic, idealistic, feminine, hermaphroditic in such matters.
Anyone who knew how to follow them right into the secret chambers of their
hearts would hardly find there any intention to reconcile “Christian feelings”
with “the taste of antiquity” or even with “modern parliamentarianism” (a reconciliation
which is said to be taking place even among philosophers in our very uncertain
and therefore very conciliatory century). These philosophers of the future will
demand not only of themselves critical discipline and every habit which leads
to purity and strictness in things of
the spirit: they could show them off as their own kind of
jewellery—nonetheless, for all that they still don’t wish to be called critics.
It seems to them no small insult inflicted on philosophy when people decree, as
happens so commonly today, “Philosophy itself is criticism and critical
science—and nothing else!” This evaluation of philosophy may enjoy the applause
of all French and German positivists (—and it’s possible that it would have
flattered even the heart and taste of Kant: we should remember the title
of his major works—): our new philosophers will nonetheless affirm that critics
are the tools of the philosopher and for that very reason, the fact that they
are tools, still a great way from being philosophers themselves! Even the great
Chinese citizen of Königsberg was only a great critic.*
211
I insist on the following point:
people should finally stop confusing philosophical labourers and scientific
people in general with philosophers—that in this particular matter we strictly
assign “to each his due” and do not give too much to the former and much too
little to the latter. It may be that the education of a real philosopher
requires that he himself has stood for a while on all of those steps where his
servants, the scientific labourers in philosophy, remain—and must
remain. Perhaps he must himself have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and
historian and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and solver of riddles
and moralist and prophet and “free spirit” and almost everything, in order to
move through the range of human worth and feelings of value and to be able
to look with a variety of different eyes and consciences from the heights
into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into
every expanse. But all these things are only pre-conditions for his task: the
task itself seeks something different—it demands that he create values.
Those philosophical labourers on the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to
establish some large collection of facts or other concerning estimates of
value—that is, earlier statements of
value, creations of value which have become dominant and for a while have been
called “truths.” They have to press these into formulas, whether in the realm
of logic or politics (morality) or art. The task of these
researchers is to make everything that has happened and which has been valued
up to now clear, easy to imagine, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten
everything lengthy, even “time” itself, and to overpower the entire
past, a huge and marvellous task, in whose service every sophisticated pride
and every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. But the real
philosophers are commanders and lawgivers: they say “That is how it should
be!” They determine first the “Where to?” and the “What for?” of human
beings, and, as they do this, they have at their disposal the preliminary work
of all philosophical labourers, all those who have overpowered the past—they
reach with their creative hands to grasp the future. In that process,
everything which is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a
hammer. Their “knowing” is creating; their creating is establishing
laws; their will to truth is—will to power.—Are there such philosophers
nowadays? Have there ever been such philosophers? Is it not necessary
that there be such philosophers? . . . .
212
It is increasingly apparent to me
that the philosopher, who is necessarily a man of tomorrow and the day
after, has in every age found and had to find himself in contradiction
to his today: his enemy every time was the ideal of the day. Up to now all
these extraordinary promoters of humanity whom we call philosophers and who
themselves seldom felt that they were friends of wisdom but rather embarrassing
fools and dangerous question marks have found their work, their hard, unsought
for, inescapable task—but finally the greatness of their work—was for them to
be the bad consciences of their age. By applying the knife of vivisection to
the chest of the virtues of the day, they revealed what their own secret
was—to know a new greatness for man, to know a new untrodden path to
increasing his greatness. Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, laziness,
letting oneself go, letting oneself fall, how many lies lay hidden under the
most highly honoured type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was
out of date; every time they said, “We must go there, out there, where you
nowadays are least at home.” Faced with a world of “modern ideas” which would
like to banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if
there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the
greatness of mankind, the idea of “greatness,” on the basis of his own
particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of
diversity. He would even determine value and rank according to how much and how
many different things one could endure and take upon oneself, how far
one could extend one’s own responsibility. Today contemporary taste and virtue
weaken and dilute the will; nothing is as topical as the weakness of the will.
Thus, in the ideal of the philosopher it is precisely the strength of will, the
hardness and ability to make long-range decisions that must be part of the idea
“greatness”—with just as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the
ideal of a stupid, denying, humble, selfless humanity was appropriate to an
opposite age, one which suffered, like the sixteenth century, from the bottled
up energy of its will and the wildest waters and storm tides of selfishness. At
the time of Socrates, among nothing but men of exhausted instincts, among
conservative old Athenians, who allowed themselves to go “for happiness,” as
they said, and for pleasure, as they did, and who, in the process, still kept
mouthing the old splendid words to which their lives no longer gave them any
right, perhaps irony was essential for greatness in the soul, that
malicious Socratic confidence of the old doctor and member of the rabble, who
sliced ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the “noble
man,” with a look which spoke intelligibly enough “Don’t play act in front of
me! Here—we are the same!” By contrast, today, when the herd animal in Europe
is the only one who attains and distributes honours, when “equality of rights”
all too easily can get turned around into equality of wrongs—what I mean is
into a common war against everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man,
the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative
fullness of power and mastery—these days the sense of being noble, of willing
to be for oneself, of being able to be different, of standing alone, and of
having to live by one’s own initiative—these are part of the idea “greatness,”
and the philosopher will reveal something of his own ideal if he proposes “The
man who is to be the greatest is the one who can be the most solitary, the most
hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a
man lavishly endowed with will—this is simply what greatness is to be
called: capable of being as much a totality as something multifaceted, as wide
as it is full.” And to ask the question again: today—is greatness possible?
213
What a philosopher is, that’s
difficult to learn because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it out of
experience—or one should have the pride not to know it. But the fact
that these days the whole world talks of things about which they cannot
have any experience holds true above all and in the worst way for philosophers
and philosophical situations:—very few people are acquainted with them and are
allowed to know them, and all popular opinions about them are false. And so,
for example, that genuine philosophical association of a bold, exuberant
spirituality, which speeds along presto, with a dialectical strictness
and necessity which takes no false steps are unknown to most thinkers and
scholars from their own experience, and hence, if someone wishes to talk about
it in front of them, they find it implausible. They take the view that every
necessity is a need, an awkward requirement to follow and to be compelled, and
for them thinking itself is considered something slow, hesitant, almost
labourious, and often enough “worth the sweat of the noble”—but under no
circumstances something light, divine, closely related to dancing and high
spirits! “Thinking” and “taking an issue seriously,” “considering it
gravely”—among them these belong together: that’s the only way they have
“experienced” thinking.—In such matters artists may have a more subtle sense of
smell. They know only too well that at the very moment when they no longer
create “arbitrarily” and make everything by necessity, their sense of freedom,
refinement, authority, of creative setting up, disposing, and shaping is at its
height—in short, that necessity and the “freedom of the will” are then one
thing for them. Ultimately there is a rank ordering of spiritual conditions,
with which the rank ordering of problems is consistent, and the highest
problems shove back without mercy anyone who dares to approach them without
having been predestined to solve them with the loftiness and power of his
spirituality. What help is it if nimble heads of nondescript people or, as
happens so often these days, clumsy honest mechanics and empiricists with their
plebeian ambition press forward into the presence of such problems and, as it
were, up to the “court of courts”! But on such a carpet crude feet may never
tread: there’s still a primeval law of things to look after that: the doors
remain closed to these people who push against them, even if they bang or crush
their heads against them! One must be born for every lofty world: to put the
matter more clearly, one must be cultivated for it: one has a right to
philosophy—taking the word in its grand sense—only thanks to one’s descent,
one’s ancestors; here, as well, “blood” decides. For a philosopher to arise,
many generations must have done the preparatory work. Every single one of his
virtues must have been acquired, cared for, passed on, assimilated, and not
just the bold, light, delicate walking and running of his thoughts, but above
all the willingness to take on great responsibilities, the loftiness of the
look which dominates and gazes down, the feeling of standing apart from the
crowd and its duties and virtues, the affable protecting and defending what is
misunderstood and slandered, whether that is God or the devil, the desire for
and practice of great justice, the art of commanding, the breadth of will, the
slow eye that seldom admires, seldom looks upward, seldom loves. . . .
Notes
. . . Hegel: Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), important German idealist philosopher. [Back
to Text]
. . . Eugen Dühring (1833-1921)
and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906): two well-known philosophers in
Nietzsche’s day. [Back to Text]
. . . Leibnitz:
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), German philosopher, diplomat, and
mathematician. [Back to Text]
nihilin: a word
Nietzsche invents to designate some new form of strong pessimism discovered
like some as yet unknown chemical. [Back to Text]
. . . Montaigne:
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French diplomat and writer. [Back
to Text]
. . . Circe: a goddess
in the Odyssey who has magical powers to turn men into swine. [Back
to Text]
. . . Italy: Italy was
not unified completely as an independent country until the mid-nineteenth
century. [Back to Text]
. . . Frederick the Great (1712-1786), son of Frederick William I, King of Prussia. Through his
military and political skill he greatly enlarged Prussian territory. [Back
to Text]
. . . Michelet: Jules
Michelet (1798-1874), a French historian. Mephistopheles is the chief agent of
the Devil in Goethe’s Faust. [Back to Text]
The woman is Madame de Staël, a French writer who produced a book about
German and the Germans in 1810. [Back to Text]
. . . great Chinese citizen of Königsberg: a reference to Immanuel Kant. [Back
to Text]
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