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 2009]
Part Seven
Our Virtues
214
Our virtues?
It’s probable that we also still have our virtues, although it’s reasonable to
think that they will not be those naive, four-square virtues for whose sake we
respect our grandfathers, at the same time holding them somewhat at arm’s length.
We Europeans of the day-after-tomorrow, we first-born of the twentieth century—with
all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity, and art of disguise, our tender
and, so to speak, sweetened cruelty in spirit and sense—if we’re to have virtues, we’ll presumably have only
those which have learned best how to tolerate our most secret and most
heartfelt inclinations, our most burning needs. So then let’s look for them in
our labyrinths!— where, as we know, so many different things get lost, so many
different things disappear for ever. And is there anything more beautiful than seeking
out one’s own virtues? Doesn’t this mean that one already almost believes
in one’s own virtues? But this phrase “believe in one’s own virtues”—isn’t that
basically the same thing people in earlier times used to call their “good
conscience,” that long worthy pigtail of an idea which our grandfathers hung
behind their heads and often enough behind their understanding as well? Thus,
it seems to follow that, no matter how little we may think ourselves as old
fashioned and as respectable as our grandfathers in other things, in one
respect we are nonetheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last
Europeans with good consciences: we, too, still carry their pigtail.—Alas, if
you knew how soon, how very soon—things will be otherwise! . . .
215
Just as it
sometimes happens in the realm of the stars that two suns determine the orbit
of a planet, and in some cases suns of different colours cast their lights
around a single planet, sometimes red light, sometimes green light, and then
again lighting it both at once, flooding it with colours, in the same way we
modern men, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our “starry heaven,” are
determined by different moralities; our actions change their lights into
different colours. They are rarely unambiguous—and there are enough cases where
we carry out actions with many colours.
216
Love one’s
enemies? I think that has been well learned. These days it happens thousands of
times, in small and big things. In fact, now and then something even higher and
more sublime takes place—we learn to despise when we love, and precisely
when we love best: but all this is unconscious, without any fuss, without any
pomp and circumstance, rather with that modesty and secret goodness which
prohibit solemn words and virtuous formulas. Morality as a pose—that offends
our taste nowadays. This is also a step forward, just as it was a step forward
for our fathers when religion as a pose finally offended their taste, including
hostility to and a Voltairean bitterness against religion (and everything that
formerly went along with the sign language of free thinkers). It’s the music in
our conscience, the dance in our spirit, which wants to make all Puritan
litanies, all moral sermons, and petty bourgeois respectability sound out of
tune.
217
Be careful of
those who set a high value on people’s ascribing to them moral tact and
refinement in drawing moral distinctions! They never forgive us if they ever
make a mistake in front of us (or even against us) —inevitably they
become people who instinctively slander and damage us, even when they still
remain our “friends.”—Blessed are the forgetful, for they are “done” with their
stupidities as well.
218
Psychologists
in France—and where else nowadays are there still any psychologists?—have not
yet stopped enjoying the bitter and manifold pleasure they get from bêtise
bourgoise [bourgeois stupidity]. It’s as if—but enough, by doing that they are
revealing something. For example, Flaubert, that decent citizen of Rouen,
finished up by seeing, hearing, and tasting nothing else any more. That was his
kind of self-torture and more refined cruelty.*
Now, for a change—since this is becoming tedious—I recommend something else for
our delight, and that is the unconscious shiftiness with which all good, thick,
well-behaved, average spirits react to higher spirits and their works, that
subtle complicated Jesuitical shiftiness, which is a thousand times more subtle
than the understanding and taste of these average people in their best
moments—or even than the understanding of their victims as well. This is
repeated evidence for the fact that “Instinct” is the most intelligent of all
forms of intelligence which have been discovered so far. Briefly put, you
psychologists should study the philosophy of the “norm” in its war against the
“exception.” There you’ll see a drama good enough for the gods and divine
maliciousness! Or to put the matter still more clearly: practise vivisection on
the “good people,” on the “homo bonae voluntatis” [man of good will]
. . . on yourselves!
219
Moral judgment
and condemnation are the favourite revenge of the spiritually limited against
those who are less limited, as well as a form of compensation for the fact that
Nature has thought ill of them, and finally a chance to acquire some spirit and
become refined:—spiritualized malice. Deep in their hearts they feel
good that there is a standard before which even those plentifully endowed with
spiritual wealth and privilege stand, just like them:—they fight for the
“equality of all before God” and almost require a faith in God just for
that purpose. Among them are the most powerful opponents of atheism. Anyone who
said to them “A high spirituality cannot be compared with any of the solidity
and respectability of a man who is merely moral” would make them furious:—I’ll
be careful about doing this. I’d much prefer to flatter them with my principle
that a high spirituality itself arises only as the final offspring of moral
qualities, that it is a synthesis of all those conditions which are ascribed to
the “merely moral” man, after they have been acquired one by one through long
discipline and practice, perhaps through an entire chain of generations, that the
high spirituality is simply the spiritualization of justice and that kind
severity which knows that its task is to maintain the order of rank in
the world, not only among human beings, but even among things.
220
Given the
present popular praise of “disinterestedness,” we must bring to mind, perhaps
not without a certain danger, what it is that really interests the
populace, and what, in general, are those things about which the common man is
fundamentally and deeply concerned, including educated people, even scholars,
and, unless all appearances deceive, perhaps philosophers as well. From that
fact it turns out that the vast majority of what interests and charms more
refined and more discriminating tastes and every higher nature appears
completely “uninteresting” to the average man. Nonetheless, when he notices a
devotion to these things, he calls it “désintéressé” [disinterested]
and wonders to himself how it is possible to act “without interest.” There have
been philosophers who have known how to confer a seductive and mystically
transcendental form of expression upon this popular wonder (perhaps because in
their own experience they knew nothing of higher nature?)—instead of presenting
what’s reasonable—the honest naked truth that the “disinterested” action is a very
interesting and interested action, provided . . . . “And love?”—What’s that! Is
even an action done from love supposed to be “unegoistic”? You idiots—! “What
about the praise for those who make sacrifices?” —But anyone who has really
made a sacrifice knows that he wanted and got something for it—perhaps
something of himself in exchange for something of himself—he gave up here in
order to have more there, perhaps in general to be more or at least to feel
himself as “more.” But this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more
discriminating spirit does not like to remain, for here even truth already
finds it necessary to suppress her yawns if she must answer. In the last
analysis, Truth is a woman: we should not treat her with force.
221
It so happens,
said a moralistic pedant and pettifogger, that I respect and honour a selfless
man, not because he is selfless but because he seems to me to have a right to
be of use to another man at his own expense. All right, but it’s always a
question of who he is and who the other is. For example, in a man
who is marked out and made to command, self-denial and modest holding back
would not be a virtue but a waste of virtue: that’s what it seems like to me.
Every unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and applies itself
to everyone not only sins against taste; it also provokes sins of omission, one
more seduction under the guise of philanthropy—and, in particular, a
seduction for and injury to the higher, rarer, and privileged people. We must
compel moralities first and foremost to give way before the order of rank.
We must force into the conscience of moralities an awareness of their own
presumption—until they finally are collectively clear about the fact that it is
immoral to say “What’s right for one man is fair to another.” As for my
moralistic pedant and fine fellow: does he deserve it when people laugh at him
as he advises moralities in this way to become moral? But people should not be
too much in the right if they want those who laugh on their side. A
small grain of wrong is even a part of good taste.
222
Nowadays
wherever people preach pity—and, if one listens correctly, is there any other
religion preached any more?—the psychologist should keep his ears open: through
all the vanity, through all the noise characteristic of these preachers (like
all preachers), he’ll hear a hoarser, moaning, genuine sound of self-contempt.
It’s part of that process of making Europe dark and ugly which has been growing
now for a hundred years (and whose first symptoms were already placed in the
documentary record in a thoughtful letter from Galiani to Madame d’Epinay): unless
it’s the cause of this development! The man of “modern ideas,” this proud
ape, is uncontrollably dissatisfied with himself—that’s established. He’s
suffering. And his vanity wants him only to suffer “with others”*
. . .
223
At any rate,
the hybrid European man—a reasonably ugly plebeian, all in all—needs a costume.
He needs history as a pantry for costumes. Naturally, he then notices that none
of them fits his body properly— he changes and changes. Just take a look at the
nineteenth century, at the rapid preferences and changes in the masquerade of
style, along with the moments of despair over the fact that “nothing suits
us”—. It’s no use presenting oneself romantically or classically or in a
Christian or Florentine or Baroque or “national” manner in moribus et
artibus [in customs and the arts]—“it doesn’t suit us”! But the “spirit,”
in particular the “historical spirit,” still sees an advantage for itself even
in this despair: over and over again a new piece of pre-history and a foreign
country are explored, put on, set aside, packed away, and above all studied:—we
are the first age with a real training in “costume”: I mean in moralities,
articles of faith, tastes in art, and religions , prepared as no other time
ever was for a carnival in the grand style, for a spiritual revelry of laughter
and high spirits, for a transcendental height of the loftiest nonsense and
Aristophanic mockery of the world.*
Perhaps this is the very place where we’ll still discover the realm of our own inventiveness,
that realm where we too can still be original as some sort of satirists of
world history and God’s clowns—perhaps when nothing else today has a future,
perhaps it’s our laughter that still has one!
224
The historical
sense (or the capability to make quick guesses about the rank ordering of
value judgments according to which a people, a society, or a person has lived,
the “instinct for divination” concerning the relations between these value
judgments, for the connections between the authority of value and the authority
of effective forces)—this historical sense which we Europeans claim as our
distinctive characteristic, came to us as a consequence of the enchanting and
wild semi-barbarianism into which Europe was plunged through the
democratic intermixing of the classes and races—the nineteenth century knew
about this sense for the first time as its sixth sense. The past of every form
and manner of living, of cultures which earlier lay right alongside each other
or over each other, flows, thanks to this intermixing, out into us “modern
souls”; our instincts now run back all over the place; we ourselves are a kind
of chaos. Finally “the spirit,” as I have said, sees an advantage for itself in
all this. Because of our semi-barbarism in body and desires we have secret
entrances in all directions, in a way no noble age ever possessed, above all
the entrances to the labyrinth of unfinished cultures and to every
semi-barbarism which has ever been present on earth. Inasmuch as the most
considerable part of human culture up to now has been semi-barbarism, the
“historical sense” almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the
taste and tongue for everything. And that establishes right away that it’s an ignoble
sense. For example, we enjoy Homer again. It’s perhaps our happiest asset
that we understand how to appreciate Homer, something which men of a noble
culture don’t know and didn’t know how to appropriate so easily and which they
hardly allowed themselves to enjoy (for example, the French of the seventeenth
century, like Saint Evremond, who criticized him for his esprit vaste [vast
and all- encompassing spirit], and even Voltaire, their final chorus).* That very emphatic Yes and No of their palate, their
easy disgust, their hesitant holding back with respect to everything strange,
their fear of bad taste, even of lively curiosity, and, in general, that
reluctance of every noble and self-satisfied culture to acknowledge a new
desire, a dissatisfaction with what is its own, an admiration for something
foreign; all this disposes and makes them hostile even to the best things of
the world which are not their own property or could not become a trophy
of theirs—and no sense is more incomprehensible to such people than the
historical sense and its obsequious plebeian curiosity. The situation is no
different with Shakespeare, this amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of
taste, who would have made an old Athenian, one of Aeschylus’ friends, laugh
himself almost to death or irritated him. But we take up this wild display of
colours, this confusion of the most delicate, coarsest, and most artificial
things with a secret confidence and good will. We enjoy him as the very
refinement of art saved especially for us and, in the process, do not allow
ourselves to be disturbed at all by the unpleasant stink and the proximity of
the English rabble, in which Shakespeare’s art and taste lives, no more so than
on the Chiaja in Naples, where we go on our way with all our senses enchanted
and willing, no matter how much the sewers of the rabble’s quarter fill the
air.* We men of the “historical sense,” we have our
corresponding virtues. That’s beyond dispute. We are undemanding, selfless,
modest, brave, full of self-restraint, full of devotion, very grateful, very
patient, very obliging:—with all that we are perhaps not very “tasteful.” Let’s
finally admit it to ourselves: what’s hardest for us men of “historical sense”
to grasp, to feel, to taste again, to love again, what we’re basically
prejudiced about and almost hostile to is precisely the perfection and ultimate
maturity in every culture and art, what is really noble in works or in men, the
moment when their sea is smooth and they have halcyon self-sufficiency, the
gold and the coolness displayed by all things which have perfected themselves.
Perhaps the great virtue of the historical sense stands in a necessary
opposition to good taste, at least to the very best taste, and we can
reproduce in ourselves only with difficulty and hesitantly, only by forcing
ourselves, the small, short, and highest strokes of luck and transfigurations
of human life, as they suddenly shine out here and there: those moments and
miracles where a great force voluntarily remains standing before the boundless
and unlimited—where an excess of sophisticated pleasure was enjoyed in sudden
restraint and petrifaction, in standing firm and holding oneself steady on
still trembling ground. Restraint is strange to us. Let’s admit that to
ourselves. Our itch is the particular itch for the unlimited, the unmeasured.
Like the rider on a steed snorting its way forward we let the reins fall before
the infinite, we modern men, we half-barbarians—and only reach our bliss
in a place where we are most—in danger.
225
Whether
hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaimonianism*—all
these ways of thinking, which measure the value of things according to pleasure
and pain, that is, according to contingent circumstances and secondary
issues, are ways of thinking in the foreground and naivete, which everyone who
knows about creative forces and an artistic conscience will look down
on, not without ridicule and not without pity. Pity for you!—that is, of
course, not pity the way you mean the term: that is not pity for social “need,”
for “society” and its sick and unlucky people, with those depraved and broken
down from the start—they’re lying on the ground all around us—even less is it
pity for the grumbling oppressed, the rebellious slave classes, who strive for
mastery—they call it “Freedom.” Our pitying is a higher compassion which
sees further—we see how man is making himself smaller, how you
are making him smaller!—and there are moments when we look at your very
pity with an indescribable anxiety, where we defend ourselves against this
pity—where we find your seriousness more dangerous than any carelessness. You
want, if possible—and there is no more fantastic “if possible”—to do away with suffering. What about us? It
does seem that we would prefer it to be even higher and worse than it
ever was! Well being, the way you understand it—that is no goal. To us that
looks like an end, a condition which immediately makes human beings
laughable and contemptible—something which makes their destruction desirable!
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—don’t you realize that
up to this point it is only this suffering which has created every
enhancement in man up to now? That tension of a soul in misery which develops
its strength, its trembling when confronted with great destruction, its
inventiveness and courage in bearing, holding out against, interpreting, and
using unhappiness, and whatever has been conferred upon it by way of
profundity, secrecy, masks, spirit, cunning, and greatness—has that not been
given to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In
human beings, creature and creator are united. In man is material
stuff, fragments, excess, clay, mud, nonsense, chaos, but in man there is also
creator, artist, hammer hardness, the divinity of the spectator and the seventh
day—do you understand this contrast? And do you understand that your
pity for the “creature in man” is for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn
apart, burned, glow, purified—for what must necessarily suffer and should
suffer? And our pity—don’t you understand for whom our reverse
pity matters, when it protects itself against your pity as against the most
wretched of all mollycoddling and weakness?—And thus pity against
pity!—But, to say the point again, there are higher problems than all those of
enjoyment, suffering, and pity, and every philosophy that leads only to these
is something naive.—
226
We immoral ones!—This world
which we’re concerned with, in which we have to fear and love,
this almost invisible and inaudible world of sophisticated commanding,
sophisticated obeying, a world of “almost” from every way of looking at
it—entangled, embarrassing, cutting, and tender—yes, this world is well
defended against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We have been woven
into a strict yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of it—in that
respect we are simply “men of duty,” we as well! Now and then, it’s true, we
dance happily in our “chains” and between our “swords.” More often, it’s no
less true, we gnash our teeth about it and are impatient with all the secret
hardness of our fate. But we can do what we like: the fools and appearance
speak against us: “They are men without duty.”—We always have fools and
appearance against us!
227
If we assume
that honesty is a virtue of ours from which we cannot escape, we free
spirits—well, we’ll want to work on it with all our malice and love and not
grow tired of “making ourselves perfect” in our virtue, the only one
which remains ours: may its brilliance one day remain lying like a gilded,
blue, mocking evening light over this aging culture and its dull and dark
seriousness! And if nonetheless our honesty one day grows tired and sighs and
stretches its limbs and finds us too hard and would like to have things better,
lighter, more loving, like a pleasing vice, let us remain hard, we final
Stoics! And let us send her by way of help only what we have in us of
devilry—our disgust with what is crude and approximate, our “nitimur in
vetitum” [we seek what is forbidden], our courage as adventurers,
our shrewd and discriminating curiosity, our most refined, most disguised, and
most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the world which roams and swarms
greedily around all future realms—let us come to the aid of our “God” with all
our “devils”! It is likely that because of this people fail to recognize us and
get us confused with others. What does that matter? People will say “Your
‘honesty’—that’s your devilry, nothing more than that.” What does that matter?
Even if they were right! Haven’t all gods up to now been like that, devils who
became holy by being re-christened? And what finally do we know about
ourselves? And that spirit which guides us, what does it want to be called?
(It is a matter of names). And how many spirits are we hiding? Our honesty, we
free spirits—let’s take care that it does not become our vanity, our finery and
splendour, our boundary, our stupidity! Every virtue tends towards stupidity;
every stupidity tends towards virtue: “stupid all the way to holiness” people
say in Russia—let’s take care that we don’t end up becoming saints and bores
through honesty! Isn’t life a hundred times too short to get bored with it?
We’d already have to believe in eternal life, in order to. . . .
228
I hope people
forgive me the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and
has belonged among things which send us to sleep—and that, in my eyes, “virtue”
has been impaired by nothing so much as by this tediousness of its
advocates. In saying this I still don’t wish to deny their general utility. A
great deal rests on the fact that as few people as possible think about
morality—and so it’s very important
that morality does not one day become something interesting! But that’s
not something people should worry about! These days things still stand they way
they always have: I don’t see anyone in Europe who might have (or might
provide) some idea about how reflecting on morality could be conducted
dangerously, awkwardly, seductively— that there could be disaster in the
process. People should consider, for example, the tireless unavoidable English
utilitarians, how they wander around crudely and honourably in Bentham’s
footsteps, moving this way and that (a Homeric metaphor says it more clearly),
just as Bentham himself had already wandered in the footsteps of the honourable
Helvetius (this Helvetius—no, he was no dangerous man!).*
No new idea, nothing of a more refined expression and bending of
an old idea, not even a real history of an earlier idea: an impossible literature
in its totality, unless we understand how to spice it up with some malice. For
in these moralists as well (whom we really have to read with ulterior motives,
if we have to read them—) that old English vice called cant and moral
Tartufferie [hypocrisy], has inserted itself, this time hidden under a
new form of scientific thinking. Nor is there any lack of a secret resistance
against the pangs of a guilty conscience, something a race of former Puritans
justifiably will suffer from in all its scientific preoccupations with
morality. (Isn’t a moralist the opposite of a Puritan, namely, a thinker who
considers morality something questionable, worth raising questions about, in
short, as a problem? Shouldn’t moralizing be—immoral?). In the end they all want
English morality to be considered right, so that then mankind or
“general needs” or “the happiness of the greatest number”—no! England’s
good fortune—will be best served. They want to prove with all their might that
striving for English happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion
(and, as the highest priority, a seat in Parliament) is at the same time also
the right path to virtue, in fact, that all virtue which has existed in the
world so far has consisted of just such striving. Not one of all these ponderous
herd animals with uneasy consciences (who commit themselves to promoting egoism
as an issue of general welfare—) wants to know or catch a whiff of the fact
that the “general welfare” is no ideal, no goal, not even a concept one can
somehow grasp, but is only an emetic—that what is right for one man cannot
in any way also be right for another man, that the demand for a single morality
for everyone is a direct restriction on the higher men, in short, that there is
a rank ordering between man and man, and thus, as a result, also between
morality and morality. These utilitarian Englishmen are a modest and thoroughly
mediocre kind of man and, as mentioned, insofar as they are boring, we cannot
think highly enough of their utility. We should even encourage them,
just as, to some extent, someone has tried to do in the following rhyme:
Hail to you,
brave working lout,
“It’s always better when drawn out.”
Always stiff in head and knee
Never funny, never keen,
Always sticking to the mean.
Sans genie et sans esprit.
[Without genius and without wit]
229
In those recent
ages which may be proud of their humanity, there remains so much residual fear,
so much superstitious fear of the “wild cruel beasts,” animals which
those more humane ages are particularly proud of having overcome, that even
palpable truths stay unspoken for hundreds of years, as if by some agreement,
because they look as if they might help those wild beasts, which have been
finally slaughtered, come back to life again. Perhaps I am daring something if
I allow one such truth to escape me: let others catch it again and give it so
much “milk of the devout ways of thinking” to drink until it lies still and
forgotten in its old corner.—People should learn to think differently about
cruelty and open their eyes. They should finally learn to get impatient, so
that such presumptuous, fat errors no longer brazenly wander around as virtues,
the way they’ve been fed to us, for example, by old and new philosophers in
connection with tragedy. Almost everything which we call “higher culture” rests
on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty—that’s my claim.
That “wild beast” hasn’t been killed at all: it’s alive, it’s flourishing. Only
it has turned itself into—a god. What constitutes the painful delight in
tragedy is cruelty. What has a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, and
basically even in everything awe-inspiring right up to the highest and most
delicate trembling of metaphysics, gets its sweetness only from the additional
ingredient of cruelty to the mixture. What the Roman in the arena, Christ in
the raptures of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of a burning at the stake
or a bull fight, the Japanese today who crowds into tragedies, the Parisian
suburban worker who feels nostalgic for a bloody revolution, the female fan of
Wagner who, with her will unhinged, lets herself “submit to” Tristan and
Isolde—what all these people enjoy and try to drink down with mysterious
enthusiasm is the spicy liquor of the great Circe, “cruelty.” In saying this,
we must of course chase off the foolish psychology of former times, which, so
far as cruelty is concerned, knew only how to teach us that it arose at the
sight of someone else’s suffering. There is a substantial over-abundant
enjoyment also with one’s own suffering, with making oneself suffer—and
wherever people let themselves be convinced about self-denial in a religious
sense or about self-mutilation, as with the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in
general about depriving themselves of sensual experience and the flesh, about
remorse, Puritan pangs of repentance, about a vivisection of the conscience,
and about a Pascalian sacrifizio dell’intelletto [sacrifice of the intellect],
they are secretly seduced and pushed on by cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of
cruelty turned against themselves. Finally, people should consider that
even the knowledgeable man, when he compels his spirit to acknowledge things against
his spirit’s inclinations and often enough also against his heart’s desires—that
is, to say No where he’d like to affirm something, to love, to worship—rules as
an artist and a transformer of cruelty. In fact, every attempt to be profound
and thorough is a forceful violation, a willingness to do harm to the basic
will of the spirit, which always wants what’s apparent and superficial—even in
that desire to know there is a drop of cruelty.
230
Perhaps people
don’t readily understand what I’ve said here about a “basic will of the
spirit.” So permit me to offer an explanation.—The something which commands,
which people call “the spirit,” wishes to be master in and around itself and to
feel that it’s the master. It possesses the will from multiplicity to
simplicity, a will which ties up, tames, desires to dominate, and truly does rule.
Its needs and capabilities are in this respect the same as those which
physiologists indicate belong to everything which lives, grows, and reproduces
itself. The power of the spirit to appropriate other things for itself is
revealed in its strong inclination to assimilate the new with the old, to
simplify what is diverse, to ignore or push away what is totally contradictory,
just as it arbitrarily and strongly emphasizes, brings out, and falsifies for
its own purposes certain characteristics and lines in what is foreign, in every
piece of the “outside world.” Its intention in so doing is the assimilation of
new “experiences,” the organization of new things in an old series—and also for
growth, or, to put the matter even more clearly, for the feeling of growth,
for the feeling of increased power. An apparently contradictory spiritual drive
serves this same will, a suddenly erupting decision in favour of ignorance, an
arbitrary shutting out, a slamming of its window, an inner cry of No to this or
that thing, a refusal to let something in, a kind of defensive condition
against much that can be known, a satisfaction with the darkness, with the
sealed-off horizon, an affirmation and endorsement of ignorance: and all this
is necessary in proportion to the degree of its appropriating power, its “power
of digestion,” to speak metaphorically—and “the spirit” is in fact most like a
stomach. With this also belongs the occasional will in the spirit to allow
itself to be deceived, perhaps with a high-spirited premonition that something
or other is not the case, that we simply allow something or other to be
valid, a joy in all uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of the
self in the capricious narrowness and secrecy of some corner, in what is all
too-near-at-hand, in the foreground, in what is magnified or made smaller, in
what has been shifted around or made more beautiful, a self-delight in the
arbitrariness of all these expressions of power. Finally with these belongs
that not unobjectionable willingness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and
to play act in front of them, that constant urge and pressure of a creative,
formative, changeable force: here the spirit enjoys its capacity for adopting
multiple masks and shiftiness; it also enjoys the feeling of its security in
this activity— precisely through its protean art is the spirit, in fact, best
defended and hidden!—Working against this will to appearances, to
simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface—for every surface
is a cloak—is that sublime tendency of the person looking for knowledge who
grasps and wants to grasp things thoroughly in their profundity and
multiplicity, as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste,
which every bold thinker will recognize in himself, provided that he, as is
appropriate, has hardened and sharpened his eye for himself long enough and has
grown accustomed to strict discipline and to stern language. He’ll say,
“There’s something cruel in my spiritual inclination”—let the virtuous and charming try to persuade
him that’s not so! In fact, it would sound better if, instead of cruelty,
people talked of or whispered about or credited us free, very free
spirits as having “excessive honesty”—and that’s perhaps one day how it
will really ring out—our posthumous reputation? In the meantime—for there is
plenty of time until then—we ourselves may well be the least inclined to dress
ourselves up in the finery of those kinds of moralistic word sequins and
fringes: our entire work so far spoils for us this very taste and its merry
opulence. These are the beautiful, sparkling, jingling, festive words: honesty,
love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the
truthful—there is something in them that makes the pride swell up in a man. But
we hermits and marmots, we persuaded ourselves long ago, with all the secrecy
of a hermit’s conscience, that this worthy verbal pomp also belongs with the
old lying finery, rubbish, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that
underneath such flattering colours and repainted surfaces we must once again
recognize the terrifying basic text of homo natura [natural man]. In
fact, to translate men back into nature, to master the many vain and effusive
interpretations and connoted meanings which so far have been scribbled and
painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura, to bring it about
that in future man stands before man in the same way he, grown hard in the discipline
of science, already stands these days before the rest of nature, with the
fearless eyes of Oedipus and the blocked ears of Odysseus, deaf to the tempting
sirens among the old metaphysical bird-catchers, who for far too long have been
piping at him, “You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!”—
that may be a peculiar and mad task, but it is a task—who will deny
that? Why did we choose it, this mad task? Or, to put the question differently,
“Why knowledge at all?”—Everyone will ask us about that. And we, pressured like
this, we, who have already asked ourselves that very question a hundred times,
we have found and find no better answer . . .
231
Learning
changes us. It achieves what all feeding does which doesn’t merely
“preserve,”—as a physiologist knows. But deep in us, really “down there,” is
naturally something uneducable, a granite of spiritual fate, of
predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. In every
cardinal problem a steadfast “That’s what I am” speaks out. About men and a
women, for example, a thinker cannot learn to think differently; he can only
complete his learning—only finally discover how things “stand with him” on this
question. Sometimes we find certain solutions to problems which create a strong
faith in us in particular. Perhaps from then on we call them our “convictions.”
Later we see in them mere footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem
which we are—or, better, to the great stupidity which we are, to our
spiritual fate, to the unteachable part way “down there.” After
this rich civility I have just displayed with respect to myself, perhaps
there’s a better chance that I’ll be allowed to speak out a few truths about
“woman as such,” so long as from now on people realize from the start just how
very much these are simply only my truths.
232
Woman wants to
become independent—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about
“woman as such”—that is among the most deleterious developments in the
general process of making Europe ugly. For what must these crude
attempts of female scholarship and self-exposure bring to light! Woman has so
many reasons for shame; hidden in women is so much pedantry, superficiality, so
many characteristics of the school teacher, petty arrogance, petty indulgence,
and immodesty—just look at the way she interacts with children!—Up to now
basically these qualities have best been kept repressed and controlled by fear
of man. Woe when the “eternally boring in woman”—she is rich in that!—is first
allowed to venture out, when she begins thoroughly and fundamentally to forget
her shrewdness and art, her qualities of grace, of play, of driving cares away,
of mitigating troubles and taking things lightly, and her delicate skill with
agreeable pleasures! Nowadays we can already hear women’s voices which—by holy
Aristophanes!—are frightening. They threaten with medical clarity what woman wants
from man, from start to finish. Isn’t it in the very worst taste for woman to
prepare like this to become scientific? So far, enlightening has fortunately
been a man’s business, a man’s talent—in the process we remained “among
ourselves.” In dealing with everything which women write about concerning
“woman,” we may finally retain a healthy mistrust whether woman really wants
enlightenment about herself—or is capable of wanting it. . . . Unless a
woman by doing this is seeking some new finery for herself—so I do think
that dressing herself up belongs to the eternally feminine?—well, by doing this
she does want to arouse fear of herself:—in that way perhaps she wants power.
But she does not want the truth. What does a woman have to do with
truth! From the very beginning nothing is stranger, more unfavourable, or more
hostile to women than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern
appearance and beauty. We men should admit it—we honour and love precisely this
art and this instinct in woman, we who have a hard time of it and are
happy to get our relief by associating with beings under whose hands, looks,
and tender foolishness our seriousness, our gravity and profundity seem almost
silly. Finally I put the question: has a woman ever herself conceded that a
woman’s head is profound, that a woman’s heart is just? And isn’t it true that,
speaking generally, “woman” up to this point has been held in contempt mostly
by woman herself—and not at all by us? We men want a woman not to continue to compromise
herself by enlightenment, just as it was masculine care and consideration for
woman that made the church decree mulier taceat in ecclesia [let a woman be
silent in church]! It was an advantage for woman, when Napoleon let the
all-too-loquacious Madame de Staël understand: mulier taceat in politicis
[let women be silent in politics]!—And I think that a true friend of women
is the man who nowadays shouts out to them: mulier taceat de muliere [let
woman be silent about women]!
233
It reveals a
corruption of instincts—quite apart from revealing bad taste—when a woman makes
a direct reference to Madame Roland or Madame de Staël or Mr. George Sand, as
if by doing so they had something to prove in favour of the “woman as
such.”* Among men those names are the three comical
woman as such—nothing more!—and the very best unintentional counter-arguments
against emancipation and female self-importance.
234
Stupidity in
the kitchen, woman as cook, the ghastly absence of intelligent thought in
taking care of the nourishment of the family and the man of the house! Woman
understands nothing about what food means, and she wants to be cook! If
woman were a thinking creature, then, as cook for thousands of years, she’d
surely have found out the most important physiological facts, while at the same
time she’d have had to take ownership of the art of healing! Because of bad
female cooks and the complete lack of reason in the kitchen, the development of
human beings has been held up for the longest time and suffered the worst
damage. Even today things are little better. A speech for fashionable young
ladies.
235
There are
expressions and successful projections of the spirit; there are aphorisms, a
small handful of words, in which an entire culture, an entire society, suddenly
crystallizes. Among these belongs that remark Madame de Lambert made at some
point to her son: “Mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que de folies, qui vous
feront grand plaisir” [My dear, never allow yourself anything but those
follies which will bring you great pleasure]—which is, by the way, the most
motherly and cleverest remark that has ever been directed to a son.
236
What Dante and
Goethe believed about women—the former when he sang “ella guardava suso, ed
io in lei” [she looked upward and I at her] and the latter when he
translated this passage as “the Eternally Feminine draws us upwards”—I
have no doubt that every more aristocratic woman will resist this faith, for
she believes the very same about the Eternally Masculine. . . .
237
Seven Short
Maxims About Women
How the longest
boredom flees—when man crawls to us on his knees!
Old age, alas,
and science, too, give strength to even weak virtue.
Dressed in
black and speaking never—every woman then looks clever.
When things go
well, my gratitude goes—to God and the woman who cuts my clothes.
When young, a
flowery cavern home—when old, a dragon on the roam.
A noble name,
legs are fine—a man as well—would he were mine!
Brief in
speech, the sense quite nice—a female ass on treacherous ice!
237a
Up to now women
have been treated by men like birds which have strayed down to them from some
high place or other, like something finer, more sensitive, wilder, stranger,
sweeter, and with more soul— but like something which man must lock up so that
it does not fly away.
238
To grasp
incorrectly the basic problem of “man and woman,” to deny the most profound
antagonism here and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps in
this matter to dream about equal rights, equal education, equal entitlements
and duties—that’s a typical sign of superficial thinking. And a thinker
who has shown that he’s shallow in this
dangerous place—shallow in his instincts!—may in general be considered
suspicious or, even worse, betrayed and exposed. Presumably he’ll be too
“short” for all the basic questions of life and of life in the future, and
he’ll be incapable of any profundity. By contrast, a man who does have
profundity in his spirit and in his desires as well, together with that
profundity of good will capable of severity and hardness and easily confused
with them, can think about woman only in an oriental way: he has to
grasp woman as a possession, as a property which he can lock up, as something
predetermined for service and reaching her perfection in that service. In this
matter he must take a stand on the immense reasoning of Asia, on the
instinctual superiority of Asia: just as the Greeks did in earlier times, the
best heirs and students of Asia, who, as is well known, from Homer to the time
of Pericles, as they advanced in culture and in the extent of their
power, also became step by step stricter against women, in short, more
oriental. How necessary, how logical, even how humanly
desirable this was: that’s something we’d do well to think about!
239
In no age has
the weak sex been treated with such respect on the part of men as in our
time—that’s part of the tendency and basic taste of democracy, just like the
disrespect for old age. Is it any wonder that this respect immediately leads to
abuse? People want more; people learn to make demands. They finally find this
toll of respect almost sickening and would prefer a competition for rights, in
fact, a completely genuine fight. Briefly put, woman is losing her shame. Let’s
add to that at once that she is also losing her taste. She is forgetting to be afraid
of man. But the woman who “forgets fear” abandons her most womanly
instincts. The fact that woman dares to come out when that part of men which
inspires fear—let’s say it more clearly—when the man in men—is no longer
wanted and widely cultivated—is reasonable enough, even understandable enough.
What’s more difficult to grasp is that in this very process—woman degenerates.
That’s happening today: let’s not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the
industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit,
woman now strives for the economic and legal independence of a shop assistant:
“woman as clerk” stands out on the door of the modern society which is now
developing. As she thus empowers herself with new rights and strives to become
“master” and writes the “progress” of woman on her banners and little flags, it
becomes terribly clear that the opposite is taking place: woman is
regressing. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe
has grown smaller in proportion to the increase in her rights and
demands, and the “Emancipation of Woman,” to the extent that that is desired
and demanded by women themselves (and not just by superficial men), has, as a
result, produced a peculiar symptom of the growing weakening and deadening of
the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this development, an
almost masculine stupidity, about which a successful woman—who is always an
intelligent woman—would have to feel thoroughly ashamed. To lose the instinct
for the ground on which one is surest to gain victory, to neglect to practice
the art of one’s own true weapons, to allow oneself to let go before men,
perhaps even “to produce a book,” where previously one used discipline and a refined
cunning humility, to work with a virtuous audacity against man’s faith in a
fundamentally different ideal concealed in woman, some eternally and
necessarily feminine, with constant chatter to talk men emphatically out of the
idea that woman, like a delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasing domestic
animal, must be maintained, cared for, protected, and looked after, the awkward
and indignant gathering up of everything slavish and serf-like, which has
inherently belonged to the position of women in the social order up to this
point and which still does (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not
rather a condition of every higher culture, every enhancement in culture)—what
does all this mean, if not a crumbling away of feminine instinct, a loss of femininity?
Of course, there are enough idiotic friends of women and corruptors of women
among the scholarly asses of the male sex who counsel woman to defeminize
herself in this manner and to imitate all the foolish things which make the
“man” in Europe and European “manliness” sick —people who want to bring woman
down to the level of a “common education,” perhaps even to reading the
newspapers and discussing politics. Here and there they want even to make women
into free spirits and literati: as if a woman without piety were not something
totally repulsive or ridiculous to a profound and godless man. Almost
everywhere people ruin woman’s nerves with the most sickly and most dangerous
of all forms of music (our most recent German music) and make her more hysterical
every day and more incapable of her first and last vocation, giving birth to
strong children. They want to make her in general even more “cultivated” and,
as they say, make the “weak sex” strong through culture, as if history
didn’t teach us as emphatically as possible that “cultivating” human beings and
making them weak—that is, enfeebling, fracturing, making the power of the
will sick—always go hand in hand
and that the most powerful and most influential women of the world (in most
recent times even Napoleon’s mother) can thank the power of their own
particular wills—and not their school masters!—for their power and superiority
over men. The thing in woman that arouses respect and often enough fear is her nature,
which is “more natural” than man’s nature, her genuine predatory and cunning
adaptability, her tiger’s claws under the glove, the naivete of her egotism,
her ineducable nature and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, breadth, and
roaming of her desires and virtues. . . . With all this fear, what creates
sympathy for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is that she appears to
suffer more, to be more vulnerable and in need of love, and to be condemned to
suffer disappointment more than any animal. Fear and pity: with these feelings
man has stood before woman up to this point, always with one foot already in
tragedy, which tears to pieces while it delights. How’s that? And is this now
to come to an end? Is the magic spell of woman now in the process of
being broken? Is the process of making woman boring slowly coming about? O
Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which has always been most attractive
to you. Its danger still constantly threatens you! Your old fable could still
at some point become “history”—once again a monstrous stupidity could gain
mastery of you and drag you away from it! And no god is hiding underneath it,
no, only an “idea,” a “modern idea”! . . .
Notes
. . . Flaubert: Gustave Flaubert (1820-1880), well known French
novelist. [Back to Text]
. . . Galiani: Abbé Ferdinand Glaini (1728-1787), an Italian cleric
and philosopher; Madame d’Épinay: Louise d’Épinay (1726-1783), a French
writer. [Back to Text]
. . . Aristophanic: Aristophanes (456-386 BC), a major dramatist in
classical Athens, the foremost writer of Old Comedy. [Back to Text]
. . . Saint Evremond: Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de Saint Evremond
(1610-1703), French soldier and writer. Voltaire: pen name of
Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), an enormously influential and popular French
philosopher and writer. [Back to Text]
. . . Chiaja: an urban district in central Naples. [Back to Text]
. . . eudaimonianism: the doctrine that our highest goal is happiness. [Back to Text]
. . . Bentham: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English utilitarian
philosopher and social reformer; Helvétius: Claude Helvétius
(1715-1771), French philosopher, condemned by the pope and the government for
his godlessness. [Back to
Text]
.
. . Madame Roland (1754-1793), French historian and writer; George Sand:
pen name for Amandine Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), French novelist. [Back to Text]
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