PART SIX


　　　　　　　　WE SCHOLARS112



　　　　　　　　　　　204



At the risk that moralizing will here, too, turn out to be what it as always been-namely,
according to Balzac, an intrepid montrer ses plaies 113 -I venture to speak out against an
unseemly and harmful shift in the respective ranks of sciences114 and philosophy, which is
now threatening to become established, quite unnoticed and as if it were accompanied by
a perfectly good conscience. I am of the opinion that only experience-experience always
seems to mean bad experience?-can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such
higher questions of rank, lest we talk like blind men about colors-against science the
way women and artists do ("Oh, this dreadful science!" sigh their instinct and embarrass-
ment; "it always gets to the bottom of things!").

The scholar's115 declaration of independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of
the more refined effects of the democratic order-and disorder: the self-glorification and
self-exaltation of scholars116 now stand in full bloom, in their finest spring, everywhere-
which is not meant to imply that in this case self-praise smells pleasant.117 "Freedom from
all masters!" that is what the instinct of the rabble wants in this case, too; and after
science has most happily rid itself of theology whose "handmaid" it was too long, it now
aims with an excess of high spirits and a lack of understanding to lay down laws for phil-
osophy and to play the "master" herself-what am I saying? the philosopher.

My memory-the memory of a scientific man, if you'll forgive me-is bulging with naivetes
of overbearing that I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from the lips of young
natural scientists and old physicians (not to speak of the most learned118 and conceited119
of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both by profession). Sometimes it
was the specialist and nook dweller who instinctively resisted any kind of synthetic ent-
erprise and talent; sometimes the industrious worker who had got a whiff of otium 120 and the
noble riches in the psychic economy of the philosopher which had made him feel defensive
and small. Sometimes it was that color blindness of the utility man who sees nothing in
philosophy but a series of refuted systems and a prodigal effort that "does nobody any
good." Sometimes the fear of masked mysticist and a correction of the limits of knowledge
leaped forward; sometimes lack of respect for individual philosophers that had involun-
tarily generalized itself into lack of respect for philosophy.

Most frequently, finally, I found among young scholars that what lay behind the arrogant
contempt for philosophy was the bad aftereffect of-a philosopher to whom they now denied
allegiance on the whole without, however, having broken the spell of his cutting evalua-
tion of other philosophers-with the result of an over-all irritation with all philosophy.
(Schopenhauer's aftereffect on our most modern Germany, for example, seems to me to be
of this kind: with his unintelligent wrath against Hegel121 he has succeeded in wrenching the
whole last generation of Germans out of the context of German culture-a culture that
was, considering everything, an elevation and divinatory subtlety of the historical sense.
But precisely at this point Schopenhauer was poor, unreceptive, an un-German to the point
of genius.)

Altogether, taking a large view, it may have been above a what was human, all too human,
in short, the wretchedness of if most recent philosophy itself that most thoroughly damag-
ed respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the instinct of the rabble. Let us con-
fess how utterly our modern world lacks the whole type122 of a Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles,
and whatever other names these royal and magnificent hermits of the spirit had; and how
it is with considerable justification that, confronted with such representatives of phil-
osophy as are today, thanks to fashion, as much on top as they are really at the bottom-
in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Duhring and the am-
algamist Eduard von Hartmann123-a solid man of science may feel that he is of a better
type and descent. It is especially the sight of those hodgepodge philosophers who call
themselves "philosophers of reality" or "positivists" that is capable of injecting a dan-
gerous mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young scholar: these are at best scholars
and specialists themselves-that is palpable-they are all losers who have been brought
back under the hegemony of science, after having desired more of themselves at some time
without having had the right to this "more" and its responsibilities-and who now repre-
sent, in word and deed, honorably, resentfully, and vengefully, the unbelief in the mas-
terly task and masterfulness of philosophy.

Finally: how could it really be otherwise? Science is flourishing today and her good con-
science is written all over her face, while the level to which all modem philosophy has
gradually sunk, this rest of philosophy today, invites mistrust and displeasure, if not mock-
ery and pity. Philosophy reduced to "theory of knowledge." in fact no more than a tim-
id epochism and doctrine of abstinence-a philosophy that never gets beyond the thres-
hold and takes pains o deny itself the right to enter-that is philosophy in its last throes,
an end, an agony, something inspiring pity. How could such a philosophy-dominate!



　　　　　　　　　　　205



The dangers for a philosopher's development are indeed so manifold today that one may
doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the
sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosoph-
er grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become
a "specialist"-so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look,
for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and
strength are spent-or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his over-all value
judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intel-
lectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is
afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand
antennae; he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead
in the realm of knowledge-unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical
Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste,
even if it were not a question of conscience.

Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he de-
mands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the val-
ue of life-that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even duty, to
such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right at faith only from the most compre-
hensive-perhaps most disturbb and destructive124-experiences, and frequently hesitates,
doubt and lapses into silence.

Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mi taken the philosopher, whether for
a scientific man and ide scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized,125 "desecu-
larized" enthusiast and sott of God.126 And if a man is praised today for living "wisely" or
"as a philosopher," it hardly means more than 'prudently and apart" Wisdom-seems to the
rabble a kind of escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the
genuine philosopher-as it seems to us, my friends?-lives "unphilosophically" and "unwise-
ly," above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and
temptations of life-he risks himself constantly, who plays the wicked game-



　　　　　　　　　　　206



Compared to a genius-that is, to one who either begets or gives birth, taking both terms
in their most elevated sense-the scholar, the scientific average man, always rather re-
sembles an old maid: like her he is not conversant with the two most valuable functions
of man. Indeed, one even concedes to both, to the scholars and to old maids, as it were
by way of a compensation, that they are respectable-one stresses their respectability-
and yet feels annoyed all over at having to make this concession.

Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? To begin with, a type of man that
is not noble, with the virtues of a type of man that is not noble, which is to say, a type
that does not dominate and is neither authoritative nor self-sufficient: he has industri-
ousness, patient acceptance of his place in rank and file, evenness and moderation in his
abilities and needs, an instinct for his equals and for what they need; for example, that
bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work, that claim
to honor and recognition (which first of all presupposes literal recognition and recogniz-
ability), that sunshine of a good name, that constant attestation of his value and utility
which is needed to overcome again and again the internal mistrust which is the sediment
in the hearts of all dependent men and herd animals.

The scholar also has, as is only fair, the diseases and bad manners of a type that is not
noble: he is rich in petty envy and has lynx eyes for what is base in natures to whose
heights he cannot attain. He is familiar, but only like those who let themselves go, not
flow; and just before those who flow like great currents he freezes and becomes doubly
reserved: his eye becomes like a smooth and reluctant lake with not a ripple of delight
or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing of which scholars are capable comes from
their sense of the mediocrity of their own type-from that Jesuitism of mediocrity which
instinctively works at the annihdalion of the uncommon man and tries to break every bent
bow or, preferably, to unbend it. Unbending-considerately, of course, with a solicitous
hand-unbending with familiar pity, that is the characteristic art of Jesuitism which has
always known how to introduce itself as a religion of pity.-



　　　　　　　　　　　207



However gratefully we may welcome an objective spirit-and is there anyone who has never
been mortally sick of everything subjective and of his accursed ipsissimosity?127-in the
end we also have to learn caution against our gratitude and put a halt to the exaggerat-
ed manner in which the "unselfing" and depersonalization of the spirit is being celebrat-
ed nowadays as if it were the goal itself and redemption and transfiguration. This is par-
ticularly characteristic of the pessimist's school, which also has good reasons for accord-
ing the highest honors to "disinterested knowledge."

The objective person who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the real scholar
in whom the scientific instinct, after thousands of total and semi-failures, for once
blossoms and blooms to the end, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there
are; but he belongs in the hand of one more powerful. He is only an instrument; let us
say, he is a mirror-he is no "end in himself." The objective man is indeed a mirror:
he is accustomed to submit before whatever wants to be known, without any other plea-
sure than that found in knowing and "mirroring"; he waits until something comes, and then
spreads himself out tenderly lest light footsteps and the quick passage of spiritlike be-
ings should be lost on his plane and skin.

Whatever still remains in him of a "person" strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary,
still more often disturbing: to such an extent has he become a passageway and reflection
of strange forms and events even to himself. He recollects "himself" only with an effort
and often mistakenly; he easily confuses himself with others, he errs about his own needs
and is in this respect alone unsubtle and slovenly. Perhaps his health torments him, or
the pettiness and cramped atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and
company-yes, he forces himself to reflect on his torments-in vain. Already his thoughts
roam-to a more general case, and tomorrow he knows no more than he did yesterday how
he might be helped. He has lost any seriousness for himself, also time: he is cheerful, not
for lack of distress, but for lack of fingers and handles for his need. His habit of meet-
ing every thing and experience halfway, the sunny and impartial hospitality with which he
accepts everything that comes his way, his type of unscrupulous benevolence, of dangerous
unconcern about Yes and No-alas, there are cases enough in which he has to pay for these
virtues! And as a human being he becomes all too easily the caput mortuum 128 of (these
virtues.

If love and hatred are wanted from him-I mean love and hatred as God, woman, and animal
understand them-he will do what he can and give what he can. But one should not be sur-
prised if it is not much-if just here he proves inauthentic, fragile, questionable, and
worm-eaten. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and rather un tour de force, a lit-
tle vanity and exaggeration. After all, he is genuine only insofar as he may be objective:
only in his cheerful "totalism" he is still "nature" and "natural." His mirror soul, eter-
nally smoothing itself out, no longer knows how to affirm or negate; he does not command,
neither does he destroy, "Je ne meprise presque rien,"129 he says with Leibniz: one should
not overlook and underestimate that presque.130

Neither is he a model man; he does not go before anyone, not behind; altogether he places
himself too far apart to have any reason to take sides for good or evil. When confusing
him for so long with the philosopher, with the Caesarian cultivator and cultural dynarno,131
one accorded him far too high honors and overlooked his most essential characteristics:
he is an instrument, something of a slave though certainly the most sublime type of slave,
but in himself nothing-presque rien! The objective man is an instrument, a precious, ea-
sily injured and clouded instrument for measuring and, as an arrangement of mirrors, an
artistic triumph that deserves care and honor; but he is no goal, no conclusion and sun-
rise,132 no complementary man in whom the rest of existence is justified, no termination-
and still less a beginning, a begetting and first cause, nothing tough, powerful, self-
reliant that wants to be master--rather only a delicate, carefully dusted, fine, mobile
pot for forms that still has to wait for some content and substance in order to "shape"
itself accordingly-for the most part, a man without substance and content. a "selfless"
man. Consequently, also nothing for women, in parenthesi.-



　　　　　　　　　　　208



When a philosopher suggests these days that he is not a skeptic-I hope this is clear
from the description just given of the objective spirit-everybody is annoyed. One be-
gins to look at him apprehensively, one would like to ask, to ask so much- Indeed, a-
mong timid listeners, of whom there are legions now, he is hence-forth considered danger-
ous. It is as if at his rejection of skepticism they heard some evil, menacing rumbling
in the distance, as if a new explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the
spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihiline,133 a pessimism bonae voluntatis134
that does not merely say No, want No, but-horrible thought!-does No.

Against this type of "good will"-a will to the actual, active denial of life-there is to-
day, according to common consent, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism, the
gentle, fair, lulling poppy of skepticism; and even Hamlet is now prescribed by the doc-
tors of the day against the "spirit"135 and its underground rumblings. "Aren't our ears
filled with wicked noises as it is?" asks the skeptic as a friend of quiet, and almost as
a kind of security police; "this subterranean No is terrible! Be still at last, you pessi-
mistic moles!"

For the skeptic, being a delicate creature, is frightened all too easily; his conscience
is trained to quiver at every No, indeed even a Yes that is decisive and hard, and to
feel as if it had been bitten.136 Yes and No-that goes against his morality; conversely,
he likes to treat his virtue to a feast of noble abstinence, say, by repeating Montaigne's
"What do I know?" or Socrates' "I know that I know nothing." Or: "Here I don't trust myself,
here no door is open to me" Or: "Even if one were open. why enter right away?" or: "What
use are all rash hypotheses? Entertaining no hypotheses at all might well be part of good
taste. Must you insist on immediately straightening what is crooked? on filling up ev-
ery hole with oakum? Isn't there time? Doesn't time have time? O you devilish brood, are
you incapable of waiting? The uncertain has its charms, too; the sphinx, too, is a Cir-
ce; Circe. too, was a philosopher

Thus a skeptic consoles himself; and it is true that he stands in need of some consolation.
For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condi-
tion that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness; it always
develops when races or classes that have long been separated are crossed suddenly and
decisively. In the new generation that, as it were, has inherited in its blood diverse stan-
dards and values, everything is unrest, disturbance, doubt, attempt; the best forces have
an inhibiting effect, the very virtues do not allow each other to grow and become strong;
balance, a center of gravity, and perpendicular poise are lacking in body and soul. But
what becomes sickest and degenerates most in such hybrids is the will; they no longer know
independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willing-they doubt the
"freedom of the will even in their dreams.

Our Europe of today, being the arena of an absurdly sudden attempt at a radical mixture of
classes, and hence races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths-sometimes
with the mobile skepticism which leaps impatiently and lasciviously from branch to branch,
sometimes dismal like a cloud overcharged with question marks-and often mortally sick
of its will. Paralysis the will: where today does one not find this cripple sitting? And of-
ten in such finery! How seductive the finery looks! This disease enjoys the most beautiful
pomp- and lie-costumes; and most of what today displays itself in the showcases, for ex-
ample, as "objectivity," "being scientific," "l'art pour l'art," "pure knowledge, free of
will," is merely dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will: for this diagnosis of the
European sickness I vouch.

The sickness of the will is spread unevenly over Europe: appears strongest and most man-
ifold where culture has been home longest; it disappears to the extent to which the "bar-
barian" still-or again-claims his rights under the loose garments of Western culture. In
France today the will is accordingly most seriously sick, which is as easy to infer as it
is palpable. And France, having always possessed a masterly skill at converting even the
most calamitous turns of its spirit into something attractive and seductive, now really
shows its cultural superiority over Europe by being the school and display of all the
charms of skepticism.

The strength to will, and to will something for a long time. is a little greater in Ger-
many. and more so in the German north than in center of Germany; but much stronger
yet in England, Corsica, here in association with indolence, there with hard heads-not
to speak of Italy, which is too young to know what it wants and still has to prove whether
it is able to will-but it is strongest and most amazing by far in that enormous empire in
between where Europe, as it were, flows back into Asia, in Russia. where the strength to
will has long been accumulated and stored up, there the will-uncertain whether as a will
to negate or a will to affirm-is waiting menacingly to be discharged, to borrow a pet phrase
of our physicists today. It may well take more than Indian wars and complications in Asia
to rid Europe of its greatest danger: internal upheavals would be needed, too, the shattering
of empire into small units, and above all the introduction of the parliamentary nonsense,
including the obligation for everybody to read his newspaper with his breakfast.

I do not say this because I want it to happen: the opposite would be rather more after my
heart-I mean such an increase in menace of Russia that Europe would have to resolve to
become menacing, too, namely, to acquire one will by means of a new caste that would rule
Europe, a long, terrible will of its own that would be able to cast its goals millennia hence-so
the long-drawn-out comedy of its many splinter states as well as its dynastic and democra-
tic splinter wills would come to an end. The time for petty politics is over: the very next
century will bring the fight for the dominion of earth-the compulsion to large-scale pol-
itics.



　　　　　　　　　　　209



To what extent the new warlike age into which we Europeans have evidently entered may
also favor the development of another and stronger type of skepticism, on that I want to com-
et for the present only in the form of a parable which those who like German history should
understand readily. That unscrupulous enthusiast for handsome and very tall grenadiers who,
as King of Prussia,137 brought into being a military and skeptical genius-and thus, when you
come right down to it, that new type of German which has just now come to the top triumph-
antly-the questionable, mad father of Frederick the Great himself had the knack and luck-
y claw of genius, though only at one point: he knew what was missing in Germany at that
time, and what lack was a hundred times more critical and urgent than, say, the lack of
education and social graces-his antipathy against the young Frederick came from the fear
of a deep instinct. Men were missing; and he suspected with the most bitter dismay that
his own son was not man enough. In this he was deceived: but who, in his place, wouldn't
have deceived himself about that? He saw his son surrender to atheism, to esprit, to the
hedonistic frivolity of clever Frenchmen: in the background he saw that great vampire,
the spider of skepticism; he suspected the incurable misery of a heart that is no longer
hard enough for evil or good, of a broken will that no longer commands, no longer is capable
of commanding. Meanwhile there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new type
of skepticism-who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy
melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?-the skepticism of audacious manliness which
is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest and first entered Germany in the
shape of the great Frederick.

This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it
does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous free-
dom, but it is severe on the heart; it is the German form of skepticism which, the form of
a continued Frederickianism that had been sublimated spiritually, brought Europe for a long
time under the hegemony of the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks
to the unconquerably strong and tough virility of the great philologists and critical histor-
ians (viewed properly, all of them were also artists of destruction and dissolution), a new
concept of the German spirit crystallized gradually in spite of all romanticism in music and
philosophy, and the inclination to virile skepticism became a decisive trait, now, for example,
as an intrepid eye, now as the courage and hardness of analysis, as the tough will to un-
dertake dangerous journeys of exploration and spiritualized North Pole expeditions under
desolate and dangerous skies.138

There may be good reasons why warmblooded and superficial humanitarians cross them-
selves just when they behold this spirit-cet esprit fataliste, ironique, mephistophelique,139
Michelet calls it, not without a shudder. But if we want to really feel what a distinction
such fear of the "man" in the German spirit confers-a spirit through which Europe was
after all awakened from her "dogmatic slumber"140-we have to remember the former concep-
tion which was replaced by this one: it was not so long ago that a masculinized woman could
dare with unbridled presumption to commend the Germans to the sympathy of Europe as
being gentle, goodhearted, weak-willed, and poetic dolts.141 At long last we ought to unde-
stand deeply enough Napoleon's surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what
people had associated with the "German spirit" for centuries, "Voila un homme!"-that
meant: "But this is a man! And I had merely expected a German.142



　　　　　　　　　　　210



Suppose then that some trait in the image of the philosophers of the future poses the rid-
dle whether they would not perhaps have to be skeptics in the sense suggested last, this
would still designate only one feature and not them as a whole. With just as much right one
could call them critics: and certainly they will be men of experiments.143 With the name in
which I dared to baptize them I have already stressed expressly their attempts and delight
in attempts: was this done because as critics in body and soul they like to employ experi-
ments in a new, perhaps wider, perhaps more dangerous sense? Does their passion for know-
ledge force them to go further with audacious and painful experiments than the softhearted
and effeminate taste of a democratic century could approve?

No doubt, these coming philosophers will be least able to dispense with those serious and
by no means unproblematic qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic; I mean
the certainty of value standards, the deliberate employment of a unity of method, a shrewd
courage, the ability to stand alone and give an account of themselves. Indeed, they admit
to a pleasure in saying No and in taking things apart, and to a certain levelheaded cruel-
ty that knows how to handle a knife surely and subtly, even when the heart bleeds. They
will be harder (and perhaps not always only against themselves) than humane people might
wish; they will not dally with "Truth" to be "pleased" or "elevated" or "inspired" by her.
On the contrary, they will have little faith that truth of all things should be accompanied
by such amusements for our feelings.

They will smile, these severe spirits, if somebody should say in front of them: "This thought
elevates me; how could it fail to be true?" Or: "This work delights me; how could it fail to
be beautiful" Or: "This artist makes me greater; how could he fail to be great?" Perhaps they
do not merely have a smile but feel a genuine nausea over everything that is enthusiastic,
idealistic, feminine, hermaphroditic in this vein. And whoever knew how to follow them into
the most secret chambers of their hearts would scarcely find any intention there to reconcile
"Christian feelings" with "classical taste" and possibly even with "modern parliamenarism"
(though such conciliatory attempts are said to occur even among philosophers in our very
unsure and consequently very conHliatory century).

Critical discipline and every habit that is conducive to cleanliness and severity in matters
of the spirit will be demanded by these philosophers not only of themselves: they could dis-
play them as their kind of jewels-nevertheless they still do not want to be called critics on
that account. They consider it no small disgrace for philosophy when people decree, as is
popular nowadays: 'Philosophy itself is criticism and critical science-and nothing whatever
besides." This evaluation of philosophy may elicit applause from all the positivists of France
and Germany (and it might even have pleased the heart and taste of Kant-one should reme-
mber the titles of his major works); our new philosophers will say nevertheless: critics are in-
struments of the philosopher and for that very reason, being instruments, a long ways from be-
ing phiosophers themselves. Even the great Chinese of Konigsberg144 was •merely a great critic.-



　　　　　　　　　　　211



I insist that people should finally stop confounding philosophical laborers, and scientific
men generally, with philosophers; precisely at this point we should be strict about giving
"each his due," and not far too much to those and far too little to these.

It may be necessary for the education of a genuine philosospher that he himself has also once
stood on all these steps on which sis servants, the scientific laborers of philosophy, remain
standing-have to remain standing. Perhaps he himself must have been critic and skeptic
and dogmatist and historian and also poet and collector and traveler and solver of riddles
and moralist and seer and "free spirit" and almost everything in order to pass through
the whole range of human values and value feelings and to be able to see with many differ-
ent eyes and consciences, from a height and into every distance, from the depths into ev-
ery height, from a nook into every expanse. But all these are merely preconditions of his
task: this task itself demands something different-it demands that he create values.

Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine
and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art,
some great data of valuations-that is, former posltings of values, creations of value which
have become dominant and are for a time called "truths." It is for these investigators to
make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to
think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even "time," and
to overcome the entire past-an enormous and wonderful task in whose service every subtle
pride, every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. Genuine philosophers, however,
are commanders and legislators: they say, "thus it shall be!" They first determine the Whi-
ther and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of
all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach
for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a
hammer. Their "knowing" is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is-
will to power.

Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers yet? Must there not
be such philosophers?-145



　　　　　　　　　　　212



More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow
and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contra-
diction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary
furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt
like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have
found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of
their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they be-
trayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way
to his enhancement. Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting one-
self go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of
their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said: "We must
get there, that way, where you today are least at home."

Facing a world of "modern ideas" that would banish everybody into a corner and "specialty,"
a philosopher-if today there ould be philosophers-would be compelled to find the greatness
man, the concept of "greatness," precisely in his range and mutiplicity, in his wholeness
in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how
many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility.

Today the taste of the time and the virtue of the time weakens and thins down the will;
nothing is as timely as weakness of the will. the philosopher's ideal, therefore, precisely
strength of the will, and the capacity for long-range decisions must belong to the concept of
"greatness"-with as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a dumb, renun-
ciatory, humble, selfless humanity was suitable for an opposite age, one that suffered, like the
sixteenth century, from its accumulated energy of will and from the most savage floods and ti-
dal waves of selfishness.

In the age of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient
Athens who let themselves go-"toward happiness," as they said; toward pleasure, as they acted-
and who all the while still mouthed the ancient pompous words to which their lives no longer
gave them any right, irony may have been required for greatness of soul,146 that Socratic sar-
castic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh,
as he did into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said clearly enough:
"Don't dissemble in front of me! Here-we are equal."

Today, conversely, when only the herd animal receives and dispenses honors in Europe, when
"equality of rights" could all too slily be changed into equality in violating rights-I mean,
into a common war on all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul,
the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and the abundance of creative power and masterful-
ness-today the concept of greatness entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being able
to be different, standing alone and having to live independently. And the philosopher will be-
tray something of his own ideal when he posits: "He shall be greatest who can be loneliest,
the most concealed, the most deviant, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of
his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable
of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full." And to ask it once more: today-is greatness
possible?



　　　　　　　　　　　213



What a philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot taught: one must "know" it, from
experience-or one should have the pride not to know it. But nowadays all the world talks of things
of which it cannot have any experience, and this is most true, and in the worst way, concerning phil-
osophers and philosophical states: exceedingly few know them, may know them, and all popular o-
pinions about them are false.-

That genuinely philosophical combination, for example, of a bold and exuberant spirituality that
runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity that takes no false step is unknown to most
thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and therefore would seem incredible to them if
somebody should speak of it in their presence. They picture every necessity as a kind of need,
as a painstaking having-to-follow and being-compelled. And thinking they consider something slow
and hesitant, almost as toil, and often enough as "worthy of the sweat of the noble"-but not in
the least as something light, divine, closely related to dancing and high spirits. "Thinking" and
taking a matter "seriously," considering it "grave"-for them all this belongs together: that is
the only way they have "experienced" it.

Artists seem to have more sensitive noses in these matters, knowing only too well that precise-
ly when they no longer do nothing "voluntarily" but do everything of necessity, their feeling
of freedom, subtlety, full power, of creative placing, disposing, ant forming reaches its peak-
in short, that necessity and "freedom to the will" then become one in them.

Ultimately, there is an order of rank among states of the soul, and the order of rank of prob-
lems accords with this. The higher problems repulse everyone mercilessly who dares approach
them without being predestined for their solution by the height and power of his spirituality.
What does it avail when nimble smarties or clumsy solid mechanics and empiricists push near
them, as is common today, trying with their plebeian ambition to enter the "court of courts."
Upon such carpets coarse feet may never step: the primeval law of things takes care of that;
the doors remain closed to such obtrusiveness, even if they crash and crush that heads against
them.

For every high world one must be born; or to speak more clearly, one must be cultivated for it:
a right to philosophy-taking that word in its great sense-one has only by virtue of one's ori-
gins; one's ancestors, one's "blood"147 decide here, too. Many generations must have labored
to prepare the origin of the philosopher; every one of his virtues must have been acquired, nur-
tured, inherited, and digested singly, and not only the bold, light, delicate gait and course
of his thoughts but above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the loftiness of glanc-
es that dominate and look down, feeling separated from the crowd and its duties and virtues, the
affable protection and defense of whatever is misunderstood and slandered, whether it be god or
devil, the pleasure and exercise of the great justice, the art of command, the width of the will,
the slow eye that rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves-148




　　　　　　 　　　PART SEVEN


　　　　　　　　　OUR VIRTUES




　　　　　　　　　　　214



Our virtues?-lt is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, although in all fairness they
will not be the simpleminded and four-square virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in ho-
nor-and at arm's length. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we first-born of the twent-
ieth century-with all our dangerous curiosity, multiplicity and an of disguises, our mellow and,
as it were, encd cruelty in spirit and senses-if we should have virtues we shall presumably
have only virtues which have learned to get along best with our most secret and cordial inclina-
tions, with our most ardent needs. Well then, let us look for them in our labyrinths-where, as
is well known, all sorts of things lose themselves, all sorts of things are lost for good. And
is there anything more beautiful than looking for one's own virtues? Doesn't this almost mean:
believing in one's own virtue? But this "believing in one's virtue-isn't this at bottom the
same thing that was formerly called one's "good conscience," that venerable long pigtail of a
concept which our grandfathers fastened to the backs of their heads, and often enough also to
the backside of their understanding? So it seems that however little we may seem old-fashion-
ed and and grandfatherly-honorable to ourselves in other matters, in one respect we are neverthe-
less the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, then, we last Europeans with a good conscience:
we, too, still wear their pigtail.- Alas, if you knew how soon, very soon-all will be different!-



　　　　　　　　　　　215



As in the realm of stars the orbit of a planet is in some cases determined by two suns; as
in certain cases suns of different colors shine near a single planet, sometimes with red light,
sometimes with green light, and then occasionally illuminating the planet at the same time and
flooding it with colors-so we modern men are determined, thanks to the complicated mechanics
of our "starry sky," by different moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colors, they
are rarely univocal-and there are cases enough in which we perform actions of many colors.



　　　　　　　　　　　216



Love one's enemies? I think this has been learned well: it is done thousands of times today,
in small ways and big ways. Indeed, at times something higher and more sublime is done: we
learn to despise when we love. and precisely when we love best-but all of this unconsciously,
without noise, without pomp, with that modesty and concealed goodness which forbids the mouth
solemn words and virtue formulas. Morality as a pose-offends our taste today. That, too, is
progress-just as it was progress when religion as a pose finally offended our fathers' taste,
including hostility and Voltairian bitterness against religion (and everything that formerly
belonged to the gestures of free-thinkers). It is the music in our conscience thc dance in our
spirit, with which the sound of all puritanic litanies, all moral homilies and old-fashioned res-
pectability won't go.



　　　　　　　　　　　217



Beware of those who attach great value to being credited *it moral tact and subtlety in mak-
ing moral distinctions. They near forgive us once they have made a mistake in front of us (or,
worse, against us): inevitably they become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if
they should still remain our "friends."

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities too.



　　　　　　　　　　　218



The psychologists of France-and where else are any pychologists left today?-still have
not exhausted their bitter and manifold delight in the betise bourgeoise,149 just as if-enough,
this betrays something. Flaubert, for example, that solid citizen of Rouen, in the end no longer
saw, heard, or tasted anything else anymore: this was his kind of self-torture and subtler
cruelty. Now, for change-since this is becoming boring-I propose another source of amuse-
ment: the unconscious craftiness with which all good, fat, solid, mediocre spirits react to
higher spirits and their tasks-that subtle, involved, Jesuitical craftiness which is a thou-
id times more subtle than not only the understanding and taste of this middle class is at its
best moments, but even the understanding of its victims-which proves once again that "in-
stinct" is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far the most intelli-
gent. in short, my dear psychologists, study the ilasophy of the "norm" in its fight against
the "exception": there you have a spectacle that is good enough for gods and godlike malice!
Or, still more clearly: vivisect the "good man," the "homo bonae voluntatis"150-yourselves!



　　　　　　　　　　　219



Moral judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited
against those less limited-also a sort of compensation for having been ill-favored by nature-
finally an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming refined-malice ritualized. It pleases
them deep down in their hearts that there are standards before which those overflowing with
the wealth and privvileges of the spirit are their equals: they fight for the "equality of all men
before God" and almost need faith in God just for that, include the most vigorous foes of a-
theism. Anyone who said 'hem, "high spirituality is incomparable with any kind of solidity
1 respectability of a merely moral man" would enrage them-I shall beware of doing this.
Rather I want to flatter them with my proposition, that high spirituality itself exists only
as the ultimate product of moral qualities; that it is a synthesis of all those states which
are attributed to "merely moral" men, after they have been acquired singly through long disc-
ipline and exercise, perhaps through whole chains of generations; that high spirituality is
the spiritualization of justice and of that gracious severity which knows that it is its mis-
sion to maintain the order of rank in the world among things themselves-and not only among
men.



　　　　　　　　　　　220



In view of the modern popularity of praise of the "disinterested," we should bring to con-
sciousness, perhaps not without some danger, what it is that elicits the people's interest,
and what are the things about which the common man is deeply and profoundly concerned-in-
cluding the educated, even the scholars, and unless all appearances deceive, perhaps even the
philosophers. Then the fact emerges that the vast majority of the things that interest and
attract choosier and more refined tastes and every higher nature seem the average man totally
"uninteresting"; and when he =vents' less notices a devotion to such matters he calls it
"desinteresse" and wonders how it is possible to act "without interest." There has been phil-
osophers who have known how to lend to this popular wonder a seductive and mystical-transcen-
dental expression151 (-perhaps because they did not know the higher nature from experience?)
-instead of positing the naked truth, which is sure not hard to come by, that the "disin-
terested" action is an exceedingly interesting and interested action, assuming-

"And love?"- What? Even an action done from love is supposed to he "unegoistic"? But you
dolts! "And the praise of sacrifices?"- But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows
that I wanted and got something in return-perhaps something of himself in return for some-
thing of himself-that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be
more or at least to feel that he was "more." But this is a realm of questions and answers
which a choosier spirit does not like to dwell: even now truth finds it necessary to stifle her
yawns when she is expected to give answers. In the end she is a woman; she should not be
violated.



　　　　　　　　　　　221



It does happen, said a moralistic pedant and dealer in trifles, that I honor and exalt a
man free of self-interest-not because he is free of self-interest but because he seems to
me to be entitled to profit another human being at his own expense. Enough: the question
is always who he is, and who the other person is. In a person, for example, who is called
and made to command, self-denial and modest self-effacement would not be a virtue but the
waste of a virtue: thus it seems to me. Every unegoistic morality that takes itself for
unconditional and addresses itself to all does not only sin against taste: it is a provo-
cation to sins of omission, one more seduction under the mask of philanthropy-and pre-
cisely a seduction and injury for the higher, rarer, privileged. Moralities must be forced
to how first of all before the order of rank; their presumption must be brought home to
their conscience-until they finally reach agreement that it is immoral to say: "what is
right for one is fair for the other."

Thus my moralistic pedant and bonhomme.152 does he deserve to be laughed at for thus
admonishing moralities to become moral? But one should not be too right if one wants to
have those who laugh on one's own side; a grain of wrong actually belongs to good taste.



　　　　　　　　　　　222



Where pity is preached today-and. if you listen closely, this is the only religion preach-
ed now-psychologists should keep their ears open: through all the vanity, through all the
noise that characterizes these preachers (like all preachers) they will hear a hoarse,
groaning, genuine sound of self-contempt. This belongs to that darkening and uglification
of Europe which has bccri growing for a century now (and whose first symptoms were regis-
tered in a thoughtful letter Galiani wrote to Madame dEpinay)153-unless it is the cause of
this process. The man of "modern Ideas," this proud ape, is immeasurably dissatisfied with
himself: that is certain. He suffers-and his vanity wants him to sutler only with others,
to feel pity.-



　　　　　　　　　　　223



The hybrid European-all in all, a tolerably ugly plebeian-simply needs a costume: he re-
quires history as a storage room for costumes. To be sure, he soon notices that not one fits
him very well; so he keeps changing. Let anyone look at the nineteenth century with an eye
for these quick preferences and changes of the style masquerade; also for the moments of
despair over the fact that "nothing is becoming." It is no use to parade as romantic or
classical, Christian or Florentine, baroque or "national," in moribus et artibus: it "does
not look good." But the "spirit," especially the "historical spirit," finds its advantage
even in this despair: again and again a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is
tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, and above all studied: we are the first age that
has truly studied "costumes"-I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, tastes in the
arts, and religions-prepared like no previous age for a carnival in the grand style, for
the laughter and high spirits of the most spiritual revelry, for the transcendental heights of
the highest nonsense and Aristophanean derision of the world. Perhaps this is where we
shall still discover the realm of our invention, that realm in which we, too, can still be orig-
inal, say. as parodists of world history and God's buffoons-perhaps, even if nothing else
today has any future, our laughter may yet have a future.



　　　　　　　　　　　224



The historical sense (or the capacity for quickly guessing the order of rank of the valu-
ations according to which a people, a soci-ety, a human being has lived; the "divinatory
instinct" for the rela-tions of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of
values to the authority of active forccs)--this historical sense to which we Europeans lay
claim as our specialty has come to to in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbar-
ism Into which Europe had been plunged by tk democratic mingling- of classes and races:
only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form
and way of life, of cultures that formerly lay right next to each other or one on top of
the other, now flows into us "modern souls," thanks to this mixture; our instincts now run
back 1 everywhere; we ourselves are a kind of chaos. Finally, as already mentioned, "the
spirit" sees its advantage in this.

Through our semi-barbarism in body and desires we have secret access in all directions,
as no noble age ever did; above all, access to the labyrinths of unfinished cultures and
to every semi-barbarism that ever existed on earth. And insofar as the most con-siderable
part of human culture so far was semi-barbarism, "historical sense" almost means the
sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything-which immediately
proves it to be an ignoble sense. We enjoy Homer again, for example: perhaps it is our
most fortunate advantage that we know how to relish Homer whom the men of a noble culture
(say, the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for
his esprit vaste,154 and even their afterglow, Voltaire) cannot and could not assimilate so
easily-whom to enjoy they scarcely permitted themselves. The very definite Yes and No
of their palate, their easy nausea, their hesitant reserve toward everything foreign,
their horror of the poor taste even of a lively curiosity, and alto-gether the reluctance
of every noble and self-sufficient culture to own a new desire, a dissatisfaction with
what is one's own, and admiration for what is foreign-all this inclines and disposes them
unfavorably esen against the best things in the world which are not theirs or could not
become their prey. No sense is more incotnprohensible for such people than the historical
sense and its submissive plebeian curiosity.

It is no different with Shakespeare, that amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of
tastes that would have all but killed an ancient Athenian of Aeschylus' circle with laugh-
ter or irritation. But we accept precisely this wild abundance of colors, this medley of
what is most delicate, coarsest, and most artificial, with a secret familiarity and cordi-
ality; we enjoy him as a superb subtlety of art saved up especially for us; and the disgust-
ing odors and the proximity of the English rabble in which Shakespeare's art and taste
live we do not allow to disturb us any more than on the Chiaja of Naples, where we go our
way with all our senses awake, enchanted and willing, though the sewer smells of the plebe-
ian quarters fill the air.

As men of the "historical sense" we also have our virtues; that cannot be denied: we are
unpretentious, selfless, modest, courageous, full of self-overcoming, full of devotion, very
grateful, very patient, very accommodating; but for all that we are perhaps not paragons of
good taste. Let us finally own it to ourselves: what we men of the "historical sense" find
most difficult to grasp, to feel, to taste once more, to love once more, what at bottom finds
us prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity of every
culture and art,155 that which Is really noble in work or human being, the moment when their
sea is smooth and they have found halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and cold aspect of
all things that have consummated themselves.

Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is necessarily opposed to good taste, at
least to the very best taste; and precisely the highest little strokes of luck and transfig-
urations of human life that briefly light up here and there we can recapture only poorly,
hesitantly, by forcing ourselves-those moments and marvels when great power voluntarily
stopped this side of the immeasurable and boundless, when an excess of subtle delight in
sudden restraint and petrification, in standing firm and taking one's measure, was enjoyed
on still trembling ground. Measure is alien to us; let us own it; our thrill is the thrill of the
infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a steed that flies forward, we drop the reins before
the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians-and reach our bliss only here we are
most-in danger.



　　　　　　　　　　　225



Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism-alI these ways of think-
ing that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere
phenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naive-
tes on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down
not within derision, nor without pity. Pity with you-that, of course, is not pity in your sense:
it is not pity with social "distress," with "society" and its sick and unfortunate members,
with those addicted to vice and maimed from the start, though the ground around us is littered
with them; it is even less pity with grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata who long
for dominion, calling it "freedom." Our pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how
man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller--and there are moments when we behold
your very pity with indescribable anxiety, when we resist this pity-when we find your serious-
ness more dangerous than any frivolity. You want, if possible-and there is no more insane "if
possible"-to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and
worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it-that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a
state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible-that makes his destruction156 desirable.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering--do you not know that only this discipline
has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which
cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and
courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has
been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness-was it not granted
to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature and crea-
tor are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but
in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh
day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the "creature in man," for
what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified--that which
necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity--do you not comprehend for whom our con-
verse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?

Thus it is pity versus pity.

But to say it once more: there are higher problems than all problems of pleasure, pain, and
pity; and every philosophy that stops with them is a naivete.-



　　　　　　　　　　　226



We Immoralists!- This world that concerns us, in which we fear and love, this almost invisible
and inaudible world of subtle commanding and subtle obeying. in every way a world of the "al
most," involved, captious, peaked, and tender-indeed, it is defended well against clumsy spec-
tators and familiar curiosity. We have been spun into a severe yarn and shirt of duties and
cannot get out of that-and in this we are "men of duty," we, too. Occasionally, that is true,
we dance in our "chains" and between our "swords"; more often, that is no less true, we gnash
our teeth and feel impatient with all the secret hardness of our destiny. But we can do what we
like-the dolts and appearances speaks against us, lying: "These are men without duty." We al-
ways have the dolts and appearances against us.



　　　　　　　　　　　227



Honesty,157 supposing that this is our virtue from which we cannot get away, we free spirits-well,
let us work on it with all our malice and love and not weary of "perfecting" ourselves in our virtue,
the only one left us. May its splendor remain spread out one day like a gilded blue mocking evening
light over this aging culture and its musty and gloomy seriousness! And if our honesty should nev-
ertheless grow weary one day and sigh and stretch its limbs and find us too hard, and would like to
have things better, easier, tenderer, like an agreeable vice-let us remain hard, we last Stoics!
And let us dispatch to her assistance whatever we have in us of devilry: our disgust with what is
clumsy and approximate, our nitimur in vetitum,158 our adventurous courage, our seasoned and choosy
curiosity, our subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the world
that flies and flutters covetously round all the realms of the future-let us come to the assist-
ance of our "god" with all our "devils"!

It is probable that we shall be misunderstood and mistaken for others on this account: what mat-
ter?159 And even if they were right! Have not all gods so far been such devils who have become
holy and been rebaptized? And what ultimately do we know of ourselves? And how the spirit that
leads us would like to be called? (It is a matter of names.) And how many spirits we harbor?

Our honesty, we free spirts-let us see to it that it does not become our vanity, our finery and
pomp, our limit, our stupidity. Every virtue inclines toward stupidity; every stupidity, toward
virtue. 'Stupid to the point of holiness,' they say in Russia; let us see to it that out of honesty
we do not finally become saints and bores. Is not life a hundred times too short-for boredom?
One really would have to believe in eternal life to-



　　　　　　　　　　　228



May I be forgiven the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and was a soporif-
ic and that "virtue" has been impaired more for me by its boring advocates than by any thing else,
though I am not denying their general utility. It is important that as few people as possible
should think about morality hence it is very important that morality should not one day becomes in-
teresting. But there is no reason for worry. Things still stand to. day as they have always stood:
I see nobody in Europe who has (let alone, promotes) any awareness that thinking about morality
could become dangerous, captious, seductive-that there might be. any calamity involved.

Consider, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable British utilitarians, how they walk clumsily
and honorably in Bentham' footsteps, walking along (a Homeric simile says it more plainly), even
as he himself had already walked in the footsteps of the honorable Helvetius160 (no, he was no dan-
gerous person, this Helvetius, ce senateur Pococurante,161 to speak with Galiani). Not a new idea
no trace of a subtler version or twist of en old idea, not even a real history of what had been
thought before: altogether an impossible literature, unless one knows how to flavor it with some
malice.

For into these moralists, too (one simply has to read them with ulterior thoughts, if one has to
read them), that old English vice has crept which is called cant and consists in moral Tartuffery;
this time it hides in a new, scientific, form. A secret fight against a bad conscience is not lacking
either, as it is only fair that a race of former Puritans will have a bad conscience whenever it tries
deal with morality scientifically. (Isn't a moral philosopher the opposite of a Puritan? Namely, in-
sofar as he is a thinker who considers morality questionable, as calling for question marks, in short
a problem? Should moralizing not be-immoral?)

Ultimately they all want English morality to be proved right-because this serves humanity best, or
"the general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest number"-no, the happiness of England. With
all their powers they want to prove to themselves that the striving for English happiness-I mean for
comfort and fashion162 (and at best a seat in Parliament)-is at the same time also the right way to
virtue; indeed that whatever virtue has existed in the world so far must have consisted in such striving.

None of these ponderous herd animals with their unquiet consciences (who undertake to advocate the
cause of egoism as the cause of the general welfare) wants to know or even sense that "the general
welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no remotely intelligible concept, but only an emetic-that what is fair
for one cannot by any means for that reason alone also be fair for others; that the demand of one
morality for all is detrimental for the higher men; in short, that there is an order of rank between
man and man, hence also between morality and morality. They are a modest and roughly mediocre
type of man, these utilitarian Englishmen, and, as said above, insofar as they are boring one cannot
think highly enough of their utility. They should even be encouraged: the following rhymes represent
an effort in this direction.

Hail, dear drudge and patient fretter!
"More drawn out is always better,"
Stiffness grows in head and knee,
No enthusiast and no joker,
Indestructibly mediocre,
Sans genie et sans esprit! 163



　　　　　　　　　　　229



In late ages that may be proud of their humanity, so much fear remains, so much superstitious fear
of the "savage cruel beast whose conquest is the very pride of these more humane ages, that even
palpable truths remain unspoken for centuries, as if by some agreement, because they look as if they
might reanimate that savage beast one has finally "mortified." Perhaps I dare something when I let
one of these truths slip out: let others catch it again an give it "milk of the pious ways of think-
ing"164 to drink until it lies still and forgotten in its old corner.

We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes. We should at long last learn impatience lest such
immodest fat errors keep on strutting about virtuously and saucily, as have been fostered about tragedy,
for example, by philosophers both ancient and modern. Almost everything we call "higher culture" is
based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That
"savage animal" has not really been "mortified"; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become-
divine.

What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called
tragic pity, and at bottom everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphy-
sics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the
Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the Japanese of to-
day when he flocks to tragedies, the laborer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody rev-
olutions, the Wagnerienne who "submits to" Tristan and lsolde, her will suspended-what all of them
enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, "cruelty."

To see this we must, of course, chase away the clumsy psychology of bygone times which had nothing
to teach about cruelty except that it came into being at the sight of the sufferings of others. There
is also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment at one's own suffering, at making oneself suffer-and
wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation,
as among Phoenicians and ascetics, or altogether to desensualization, decarnalization, contrition, Pur-
itanical spasms of penitence, vivisection of the conscience, and sacrifizio dell'intelletto 165 a la Pascal,
he is secretly lured and pushed forward by his cruelty, by those dangerous thrills of cruelty turned
against oneself.

Finally consider that even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize things against the
inclination of the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart-by way of saying No
where he would like to say Yes, love, and adore-and thus acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty.
Indeed, any insistence on profundity and thoroughness is a violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of
the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial-in all desire to know there is a
drop of cruelty.



　　　　　　　　　　　230



What I have just said of a "basic will of the spirit" may not be readily understood: permit me an explan-
ation.

That commanding something which the people call "the spirit" wants to be master in and around its
own house and wants to feel that it is master; it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that
ties up, tames, and is domineering and truly masterful. Its needs and capacities are so far the same as
those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The spirit's power to ap-
propriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the
manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory-just as it involuntarily emphasizes
certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the "external world," retouching and
falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate. new "experiences," to file
new things in old files-growth, in a word-or, more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of
increased power.

An apparently opposite drive serves this same will: a suddenly erupting decision in favor of ignor-
ance, of deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one's windows, an internal No to this or that thing, a re-
fusal to let things approach, a kind of state of defense against much that is knowable, a satisfaction
with the dark, with the limiting horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignorance-all of which is necessary in pro-
portion to a spirit's power to appropriate, its "digestive capacity," to speak metaphorically-and act-
ually "the spirit" is relatively most similar to a stomach.

Here belongs also the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a capricious in-
timation of the fact that such and such is not the case, that one merely accepts such and such a de-
light in all uncertainty and ambiguity, a jubilant self-enjoyment in the arbitrary narrowness and secrecy
of some nook, in the too near, in the foreground, in what is enlarged, diminished, displaced, beauti-
fied, a self-enjoyment in the caprice of all these expressions of power.

Here belongs also, finally, that by no means unproblematic readiness of the spirit to deceive other
spirits and to dissimulatae in front of them, that continual urge and surge of a creative, form-giving,
changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and craftiness of its masks, it also en-
joys the feeling of its security behind them: after all, it is surely its Protean arts that defend and
conceal it best.

This will to mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface-for every
surface is a cloak-is countered by that sublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge he who insists
on profundity, multiplicity, and thoroughness, with a will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellect-
ual conscience and taste. Every courageous thinker will recognize this in himself, assuming only that,
as fit, he has hardened and sharpened his eye for himself long enough and that he is used to severe
discipline, as well severe words. He will say: "there is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit";
let the virtuous and kindly try to talk him out of that!

Indeed, it would sound nicer if we were said, whispered, reputed" to be distinguished not by cru-
elty but by "extravagant honesty," we free, very free spirits-and perhaps that will actually be our-
posthumous reputation." Meanwhile-for there is plenty of time until then-we ourselves are probably
least inclined to put on the garish finery of such moral word tinsels: our whole work so far makes
us sick of this taste and its cheerful luxury. These are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words:
honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful-they have
something that swells one's pride. But we hermits and marmots have long persuaded ourselves
in the full secrecy of a hermit's conscience that this worthy verbal pomp, too, belongs to the old men-
dacious pomp, junk, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such flattering colors
and make-up as well, the basic text of homo natura must again be recognized.

To translate man back into nature; to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic inter-
retations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text of
homo natura; to see to it that man henceforth stands before man as even today, hardened in the dis-
ipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus
ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long,
"you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!"-that may be a strange and insane task,
but it is a task-who would deny that? Why did we choose this insane task? Or, putting it differently
"why have knowledge at all?"

Everybody will ask us that. And we, pressed this way, we who have put the same question to ourselves
a hundred times, we have found and find no better answer-



　　　　　　　　　　　231



Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely "preserve"-as
physiologists know. But at the bottom of us, really "deep down," there is, of course, something unteach-
able, some granite of spiritual fatum,20 of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected
questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable "this is I"; about
man and woman, for example, a thinker canny relearn but only finish learning-only discover ultimate-
ly how tb is "settled in him." At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong
faith in us; some call them henceforth their "convictions." Later-we see them only as steps to self-
knowledge, signposts to the problem we are-rather, to the great stupidity we are-to our spiritual
fatum, to what is unteachable very "deep down."

After this abundant civility that I have just evidenced in relation to myself I shall perhaps be per-
mitted more readily to statea few truths about "woman as such"-assuming that it is now knov from
the outset how very much these are after all only-my truths.



　　　　　　　　　　　232



Woman wants to become self-reliant-and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about "wo-
man as such": this is one the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe. For what must
these clumsy attempts of women at scientific self-exposure bring to light! Woman has much reason for
shame; so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty licentiousness and
immodesty lies concealed in woman-one only needs to study her behavior with children!-and so far this
was at bottom best repressed and kept under control by fear of man. Woe when "the eternally boring in
woman""-she is rich that!-is permitted to venture forth! When she begins to unlearn thororoughly and
on principle her prudence and art-of grace, of play, of chasing away worries, of lightening burdens and
taking things lightly-and her subtle aptitude for agreeable desires!

Even now female voices are heard which-holy Aristophanes!-are frightening: they threaten with medi-
cal explicitness what woman wants from man, first and last. Is it not in the worst taste when woman sets
about becoming scientific that way? So far enlightenment of this sort was fortunately man's affair,
man's lot-we mained "among ourselves" in this; and whatever women write out "woman," we may in the
end reserve a healthy suspicion whether woman really wants enlightenment about herself-whether she
can will it-

Unless a woman seeks a new adornment for herself that way-I do think adorning herself is part of
the Eternal-Feminine?-she surely wants to inspire fear of herself-perhaps she seeks mastery. But
she does not want truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, re-
pugnant, and hostile to woman than truth-her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appear-
ance and beauty. Let us men confess it: we honor and love precisely this art and this instinct in wo-
man-we who have a hard time and for our relief like to associate with beings under whose hands, eyes,
and tender follies our seriousness, a gravity and profundity23 almost appear to us like folly.

Finally I pose the question: has ever a woman conceded profundity to a woman's head, or justice to
a woman's heart? And is it not true that on the whole "woman" has so far been despised most by wo-
man herself-and by no means by us?

We men wish that woman should not go on compromising herself through enlightenment-just as it
was man's thoughtfulness and consideration for woman that found expression in the church decree:
mulier taceat in ecclesia! 24 It was for woman's good when Napoleon gave the all too eloquent
Madame de Stael to understand: mulier taceat in politicis! And I think it is a real friend of women
that counsels them today: mulier taceat de muliere!



　　　　　　　　　　　233



It betrays a corruption of the instincts-quite apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste-when a
woman adduces Madame Roland or Madame de Stael or Monsieur George Sand, of all people, as if they
proved anything in favor of "woman as such. Among men these three are the three comical women as
such-nothing more!-and precisely the best involuntary counterarguments against emancipation and
feminine vainglory.



　　　　　　　　　　　234



Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook: the gruesome thoughtlessness to which the feeding of the fam-
ily and of the master of the house is abandoned! Woman does not understand what food means-and wants
to be cook. If woman were a thinking creature she, as cook for millennia, would surely have had to discov-
er the greatest physiological facts, and she would have had to gain possession of the art of healing.
Bad cooks-and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen-have delayed human development longer and impair-
ed it most: nor have things improved much even today. A lecture for finishing-school girls.



　　　　　　　　　　　235



There are expressions and bull's-eyes of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words,
in which a whole culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized. Among these belongs the occasion-
al remark of Madame de Lambert to her son: "mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que de folies, qui vous
feront grand plaisir" 2'-incidentally the most motherly and prudent word ever directed to a son.



　　　　　　　　　　　236



What Dante and Goethe believed about woman-the former when he sang, "ella guardava suso, ed io
in lei," 2'‘ and the latter when he translated this, "the Eternal-Feminine attracts us higher"-I do
not doubt that every nobler woman will resist this faith, for she believes the same thing about the
Eternal-Masculine.-



　　　　　　　　　　　237


　　　　SEVEN EPIGRAMS ON WOMAN


Vt


Whom I thank for my success? God!-and my dear Worm.


VA


Young: flower-covered den. Old: a dragon denizen.


Noble name, the legs are fine, man as well: that he were mine!


Ample meaning, speech concise29-she-a-s, watch for slippery Ice!



　　　　　　　　　　　237a



Men have so far treated women like birds who had strayed to them from some height: as something more
refined and vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, and more soulful-but as something one has to lock
up lest it fly away.



　　　　　　　　　　　238



To go wrong on the fundamental problem of "man and woman," to deny the most abysmal antagonism be-
tween them and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, to dream perhaps of equal rights, equal
education, equal claims and obligations-that is a typical sign of shallowness, and a thinker who has
proved shallow in this dangerous place-shallow in his instinct-may be considered altogether suspi-
cious, even more-betrayed, exposed: probably he will be too "short" for all fundamental problems of
life, of life yet to come, too, and incapable of attaining any depth." A, on the other hand, who has
depth, in his spirit as well as in Is desires, including that depth of benevolence which is capable
of 'verity and hardness and easily mistaken for them, must always think about woman as Orientals do:
he must conceive of woman as possession, as property that can be locked, as something predestined for
service and achieving her perfection in that. Here he must base himself on the tremendous reason of
Asia, on Asia's superiority in the instincts, as the Greeks did formerly, who were Asia's best heirs
and students: as is well known, from Homer's time to the age of Pericles, as their culture increased
along with the range of their powers, they also gradually became more severe, in brief, more Oriental,
against woman. How necessary, how logical, how humanely desirable even, this was-is worth pondering.



　　　　　　　　　　　239



In no age has the weaker sex been treated with as much repect by men as in ours: that belongs to the
democratic inclination and basic taste, just like disrespectfulness for old age. No wonder that this res-
pect is immediately abused. One wants more, one learns to demand, finally one almost finds this tribute
of respect insulting, one would prefer competition for rights, indeed even a genuine fight: enough, woman
loses her modesty. Let us immediately add that she also loses taste. She unlearns her fear of man: but
the woman who "unlearns fear" surrenders her most womanly instincts.

That woman ventures forth when the aspect of man that inspires fear-let us say more precisely, when
the man in man is no longer desired and cultivated-that is fair enough, also comprehensible enough.
What is harder to comprehend is that, by the same token-woman degenerates. This is what is happening
today: let us not deceive ourselves about that.

Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now as-
pires to the economic and legal self-reliance of a clerk: 32 "woman as clerk" is inscribed on the gate to
the modern society that is taking shape now. As she thus takes possession of new rights, aspires to be-
come "master"'' and writes the "progress" of woman upon her standards and banners the opposite de-
velopment is taking place with terrible clarity: woman is retrogressing.

Since the French Revolution, woman's influence in Europe has decreased proportionately as her rights and
claims have increased; and the "emancipation of woman," insofar as that is demanded and promoted by
women themselves (and not merely by shallow males) is thus seen to be an odd symptom of the increasing
weakening and dulling of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost mas-
culine stupidity of which a woman who had turned out well-and such women are always prudent-would
have to be thoroughly ashamed.

To lose the sense for the ground on which one is most certain of victory; to neglect practice with one's
proper weapons; to let onself go before men, perhaps even "to the point of writing a book" when former-
ly one disciplined oneself to subtle and cunning humility; to work with virtuous audacity against men's
faith in a basically different ideal that he takes to be concealed in woman, something Eternally-and-Neces-
sarily-Feminine-to talk men emphatically and loquaciously out of their notion that woman must be main-
tained, taken care of, protected, and indulged like a more delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant
domestic animal; the awkward and indignant search for everything slavelike and serflike that has charact-
erized woman's position in the order of society so far, and still does (as if slavery were a counterar-
gument and not instead a condition of every higher culture, every enhancement of culture)-what is the
meaning of all this if not a crumbling of feminine instincts, a defeminization?

To be sure, there are enough imbecilic friends and corrupters of woman among the scholarly asses of the
male sex who advise woman to defeminize herself in this way and to imitate all the stupidities with
which "man" in Europe, European "manliness," is sick: they would like to reduce woman to the level of
"general education," probably even of reading the newspapers and talking about politics. Here and there
they even want to turn women into freethinkers and scribblers-as if a woman without piety would not
seem utterly obnoxious and ridiculous to a profound and godless man.

Almost everywhere one ruins her nerves with the most pathological and dangerous kind of music (our most
recent German music) and makes her more hysterical by the day and more incapable of her first and last
profession-to give birth to strong children. Altogether one wants to make her more "cultivated" and, as
is said, make the weaker sex strong through culture-as if history did not teach us as impressively as
possible that making men "cultivated" and making them weak-weakening, splintering, and sicklying over
the force of the will-have always kept pace, and that the most powerful and influential women of the
world (most recently Napoleon's mother) owed their power and ascendancy over men to the force of their
will-and not to schoolmasters!

What inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature, which is more "natural" than
man's, the genuine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey, the tiger's claw under the glove, the naivete
of her egoism, her uneducability and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, scope, and movement of her
desires and virtues-

What, in spite of all fear, elicits pity for this dangerous and beautiful cat "woman" is that she appears
to suffer more, to be more vulnerable, more in need of love, and more condemned to disappointment than
any other animal. Fear and pity: with these feelings man has so far confronted woman, always with one
foot in tragedy" which tears to pieces as it enchants."

What? And this should be the end? And the breaking of woman's magic spell is at work? The "borification"
of woman is slowly dawning? 0 Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal you always found most attractive;
it still threatens you! Your old fable could yet become "history"-once more an immense stupidity might
become master over you and carry you off. And this time no god would hide in it; no, only an "idea," a
"modern idea!"-




　　　　　　 　　　PART EIGHT


　　　　　PEOPLES AND FATHERLANDS




　　　　　　　　　　　240




I heard once again for the first time-Richard Wagner's overture to the Meistersinger: it is magnificent,
overcharged, heavy, late art that has the pride of presupposing two centuries of music as still living, if
it is to be understood: it is to the credit of the Germans that such pride did not miscalculate. What fla-
vors and forces, what seasons and climes are not mixed here! It strikes us now as archaic, now as strange,
tart, and too young, it is just as capricious as it is pompous-traditional, it is not infrequently saucy,
still more often coarse and rude-it has fire and courage and at the same time the loose dun skin of
fruit that ripens too late. It flows broad and full-and suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a
gap opening up between cause and effect, a pressure triggering dreams, almost nightmares-but already the
old width and breadth are regained by the current of well-being, the most manifold well-being, old and new
happiness, very much including the artist's happiness with himself which he has no wish to hide, his amaz-
ed, happy sharing of the knowledge that the means he has employed here are masterly-new artistic de-
vices, newly acquired, not yet tested, as he seems to let us know.

Altogether, no beauty, no south, nothing of southern and subtle brightness of the sky, nothing of graceful-
ness, no dance, scarcely no will to logic; even a certain clumsiness that is actually stressed, as if the
artist wished to say to us, "that is part of my intention"; cumbersome drapery, something capricious, bar-
barian, and solemn, a flurry of erudite preciousness and lace; something German in the best and worst
senses of the word, something manifold, formless and inexhaustible in a German way; a certain German
powerfulness and overfulness of the soul which is not afraid of hiding behind the refinements of decay
-which perhaps really feels most at home there; a truly genuine token of the German soul which is at
the same time young and superannuated, overly mellow and still overrich in future. This kind of music
expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after
tomorrow-as yet they have no today.



　　　　　　　　　　　241



We "good Europeans"-we, too, know hours when we permit ourselves some hearty fatherlandish-
ness, a plop and relapse into old loves and narrownesscs-I have just given a sample of that
-hours of national agitations, patriotic palpitations, and various other sorts of archaizing
sentimental inundations. More ponderous spirits than we are may require more time to get over
what with us takes only hours and in a few hours has run its course: some require half a
year, others half a life, depending on the speed and power of their digestion and metabolism.
Indeed, I could imagine dull' and sluggish races who would require half a century even in our
rapidly moving Europe to overcome such atavistic attacks of fatherlandishness and soil add-
iction and to return to reason, meaning "good Europeanism."

As I am digressing to this possibility, it so happens that I become an ear-witness of a con-
versation between two old "patriots": apparently both were hard of hearing and therefore spoke
that much louder.

"He thinks and knows as much of philosophy as a peasant or a fraternity student," said one;
"he is still innocent. But what does it matter today? This is the age of the masses: they gro-
vel on their bellies before anything massive. In politicis, too. A statesman who piles up for
them another tower of Babel, a monster of empire and power, they call 'great; what does it
matter that we, more cautious reserved, do not yet abandon the old faith that only a great
thought can give a deed or cause greatness. Suppose a statesman put his people in a position
requiring them to go in for 'great politics' from now on, though they were ill-disposed for that
by nature and ill prepared as well, so that they would find it necessary to sacrifice their old
and secure virtues for the sake of a novel and dubious mediocrity-suppose a statesman act-
ually condemned his people to 'politicking' although so far they had had better things to do
and think about, and deep down in their souls they had not got rid of a cautious disgust with
the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy quarrelsomeness of peoples that really go in for poli-
ticking-suppose such a statesman goaded the slumbering passions and lusts of people, turn-
ing their diffidence and delight in standing aside into a blot, their cosmopolitanism and secret
infinity into a serious wrong, devaluating their most cordial inclinations, inverting their con-
science, making their spirit narrow, their taste 'national'-what! a statesman who did all this,
for whom his people would havo to atone for all future time, if they have any future, such a
statesman: should be great?"

"Without a doubt!" the other patriot replied vehemently; otherwise he would not have been
able to do it. Perhaps it was insane to want such a thing? But perhaps everything great was
merely insane when it started."

"An abuse of words!" his partner shouted back; "strong! strong! strong and insane! Not
great!"

The old men had obviously become heated as they thus flung their truths into each other's
faces; but I, in my happiness and beyond, considered how soon one stronger will become
master over the strong; also that for the spiritual flattening' of a people there is a compen-
sation, namely the deepening of another people.



　　　　　　　　　　　242



Call that in which the distinction of the European is sought' "civilization" or "humaniza-
tion" or "progress," or call it simply without praise or blame-using a political formula,
Europe's democratic movement: behind all the moral and political foregrounds to which
such formulas point, a tremendous physiological process is taking place and gaining mo-
mentum. The Europeans are becoming more similar to each other; they become more and
more detached from the conditions under which races originate that are tied to some cli-
mate or class; they become increasingly independent of any determinate milieu that would
like to inscribe itself for centuries in body and soul with the same demands. Thus an es-
sentially supra-national and nomadic type of man is gradually coming up, a type that poss-
esses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typi-
cal distinction.

The tempo of this process of the "evolving European" may be retarded by great relapses,
but perhaps it will gain in vehemence and profundity and grow just on their account: the still
raging storm and stress of "national feeling" belongs here, also that anarchism which is
just now coming up. But this process will probably lead to results which would seem to be
least expected by those who naively promote and praise it, the apostles of "modern ideas."
The very same new conditions that will on the average lead to the leveling and mediocri-
tization of man-to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal-are likely in the
highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and at-
tractive quality.

To be sure, that power of adaptation which keeps trying out changing conditions and begins
some new work with every generation, almost with every decade, does not make possible the
powerfulness of the type, and the over-all impression of such future Europeans will pro-
bably be that of manifold garrulous workers who will be poor in will, extremely employable,
and as much in need of a master and commander as of their daily bread. But while the dem-
ocratization of Europe leads to the production of a type that is prepared for slavery in the
subtlest sense, in single, exceptional cases the strong human being will have to turn out
stronger and richer than perhaps ever before-thanks to the absence of prejudice from his
training, thanks to the tremendous manifoldness of practice, art, and mask. I meant to say:
the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cul-
tivation of tyrants-taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.



　　　　　　　　　　　243



I hear with pleasure that our sun is swiftly moving toward the constellation of Hercules-and
I hope that man on this earth will in this respect follow the sun's example? And we first of
all, we good Eropeans!-



　　　　　　　　　　　244



There was a time when it was customary to attribute "profundity" to the Germans, as a dis-
tinction. Now that the most successful type of the new-Germanism lusts after utterly differ-
ent honors and perhaps misses "pluck" in everything profound, some doubt may almost be
timely and patriotic as to whether that former praise was not based on self-deception-in
short, whether German profundity is not at bottom something different and worse, and some-
thing that, thank God, one is about to shake off successfully. Let us make the attempt to
relearn about German profundity: nothing more is needed for this than a little vivisection
of the German soul.

The German soul is above all manifold, of diverse origins, more put together and superimpos
-ed than actually built: that is due to where it comes from. A German who would make bold
to say, "two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,"4 would violate the truth rather grossly
or, more precisely, would fall short of the truth by a good many souls. As a people of the
most monstrous mixture and medley of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-
Aryan element, as "people of the middle" in every sense, the Germans are more incompre-
hensible, comprehensive, contradictory, unknown, incalculable, surprising, even fright-
ening than other people are to themselves: they elude definition and would be on that ac-
count alone the despair of the French.

It is characteristic of the Germans that the question, "what is German?" never dies out
among them. Kotzebue surely knew his Germans well enough: "we have been recognized!"
they jubilated-but Sand, too, thought he knew them. Jean Paul knew what he was doing
when he declared himself wrathfully against Fichte's mendacious but patriotic flatteries and
exaggerations-but it is probable that Goethe did not think about the Germans as Jea Paul
did, although he considered him right about Fichte. What did Goethe really think about
the Germans?

But there were many things around him about which he never spoke clearly, and his life
long he was a master of subtle silence-he probably had good reasons for that. What is
certain is that was not "the Wars of Liberation"7 that made him look up more cheerfully,
any more than the French Revolution; the event on whose account he rethought his Faust,
indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of Napoleon. There are words of
Goethe in which he deprecates with impatient hardness, as if he belonged to a foreign
country, what the Germans take pride in: the celebrated German Gemut he once defined as
"indulgence toward the weaknesses of others as well as one's own." Was he wrong in that?
It is characteristic of the Germans that one is rarely completely wrong about them.

The German soul has its passageways and inter-passageways; there are caves, hideouts, and
dungeons in it; its disorder has a good deal of the attraction of the mysterious; the Ger-
man is an expert on secret paths to chaos. And just as everything loves its simile, the Ger-
man loves clouds and everything that is unclear, becoming, twilit, damp, and overcast: what-
ever is in any way uncertain, unformed, blurred, growing, he feels to be "profound." The man
himself is not, he becomes, he "develops." "Development" is therefore the truly German
find and hit in the great realm of philosophical formulas-a governing concept that, united
with German beer and German music, is at work trying to Germanize the whole of Europe.

Foreigners stand amazed and fascinated before the riddles posed for them by the contradict-
ory nature at the bottom of the German soul (brought into a system by Hegel and finally
set to music by Richard Wagner). "Good-natured and vicious"-such a conjunction, pre-
posterous in relation to any other people, is unfortunately justified all too often in Ger-
many: let anyone live for a while among Swabians! The ponderousness of the German scho-
lar, his social bad taste, gets along alarmingly well with an inner rope-dancing and easy
boldness which has taught all the gods what fear is. Whoever wants a demonstration of
the "German soul" ad ocular should merely look into German taste, into German arts and
customs: What boorish indifference to "taste"! How the noblest stands right next to the
meanest! How disorderly and rich this whole psychic household is! The German drags his
soul along: whatever he experiences he drags. He digests his events badly, he never gets
"done" with them; German profundity is often merely a hard and sluggish "digestion." And
just as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics, love comfort, Germans love "openness" and
"Biederkeit": how comfortable it is to be open and "bieder"!

Perhaps the German of today knows no more dangerous and successful disguise than
this confiding, accommodating, cards-on-the-table manner of German honesty: this is
his true Mephistopheles art; with that he can "still go far." The German lets himself go
while making faithful blue, empty, German eyes-and immediately foreigners confound
him with his dressing gown.

I meant to say: whatever "German profundity" may be-when we are entirely among our-
selves, perhaps we permit ourselves to laugh at it?-we shall do well to hold its sem-
blance and good name in honor in the future, too, and not to trade our of reputation
as a people of profundity too cheaply for Prussia "pluck" and Berlin wit and sand." It
is clever for a people to make and let itself be considered profound. awkward, good-na-
tured, honest, and not clever: it might even be-profound. Finally, one should live up
to one's name: it is not for nothing that one is calle the "tiusche" Volk, the Tausche
-Volk, deceiver people.'12,-



　　　　　　　　　　　245



The "good old time" is gone, in Mozart we hear its swan song. How fortunate we are
that his rococo still speaks to us, that his "good company," his tender enthusiasms, his
childlike delight in curlicues and Chinese touches, his courtesy of the heart, his longing
for the graceful, those in love, those dancing, those easily moved to tears, his faith
in the south, may still appeal to some residue us. Alas, some day all this will be gone-
but who may doubt tlx' the understanding and taste for Beethoven will go long betas'
that! Beethoven was after all merely the final chord of transition style, a style
break, and not, like Mozart, the last chord of centuries-old great European taste.

Beethoven is the interlude of a mellow old soul that constantly breaks and an over-
young future soul that constantly comes; on his music lies that twilight of eternal los-
ing and eternal extragant hoping-the same light in which Europe was bathed when
it dreamed with Rousseau, danced around the freedom tree of the revolution, and finally
almost worshiped before Napoleon. But how quickly this feeling pales now; how difficult
is mere knowledge of this feeling even today-how strange to our ears sounds the lan-
guage of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, Byron, in whom, taken together, the same fate of
Europe found its way into words that in Beethoven knew how to sing!

Whatever German music came after that belongs to romanticism, a movement that was,
viewed historically, still briefer, still more fleeting, still more superficial than that
great entr'acte, that transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the rise of
democracy. Weber: but what are Freischutz and Oberon to us today! Or Marschner's Hans
Heiling and Vampyr! Or even Wagner's Tannhauser. That is music that has died away though
it is not yet forgotten. All this music of romanticism, moreover, was not noble enough to
remain valid anywhere except in the theater and before crowds; it was from the start sec-
ond-rate music that was not considered seriously by genuine musicians.

It is different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master who, on account of his light-
er, purer, more enchanted soul, was honored quickly and just as quickly forgotten: as the
beautiful intermezzo of German music. But as for Robert Schumann, who was very serious
and also was taken seriously from the start-he was the last to found a school-is it not
considered a good fortune among us today, a relief, a liberation, that this Schumann ro-
manticism has been overcome?

Schumann, fleeing into the "Saxon Switzerland" 13 of his soul, half like Werther, half
like Jean Paul, certainly not like Beethoven, certainly not like Byron-his Manfred music
is a mistake and misunderstanding to the point of an injustice-Schumann with his taste
which was basically a small taste (namely, a dangerous propensity, doubly dangerous a-
mong Germans, for quiet lyricism and sottishness of feeling), constantly walking off to
withdraw shyly and retire, a noble tender-heart who wallowed in all sorts of anony-
mous bliss and woe, a kind of girl and noli me tangere from the start: this Schumann
was already a merely German event in music, no longer a European one, as Beethoven
was and, to a still greater extent, Mozart. With him German music was threatened by
its greatest danger: losing the voice for the soul of Europe and descending to mere
fatherlandishness.



　　　　　　　　　　　246



What torture books written in German are for anyone who has a third ear! How vexed one
stands before the slowly revolving swamp of sounds that do not sound like anything and
rhythms that do not dance, called a "book" among Germans! Yet worse is the German who
reads books! How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know,
and demand of themselves that they should know, that there is art in every good sen-
tence-art that must he figured out if the sentence is to be understood! A mis-under-
standing about its tempo, for example-and the sentence itself is misunderstood.

That one must not be in doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one ex-
periences the break with any excessively severe symmetry as deliberate and attractive,
that one lends a subtle and patient ear to every staccato's and every rubato," that
one figures out the meaning in the sequence of vowels and diphthongs and how deli-
cately and richly they can be colored and change colors as they follow each other-who
among book-reading Germans has enough good will to acknowledge such duties and demands
and to listen to that much art and purpose in language? In the end one simply does
not have "the ear for that"; and thus the strongest contrasts of style go unheard,
and the subtlest artistry is wasted as on the deaf.

These were my thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and undiscerningly two masters
in the art of prose were confounded-one whose words drop hesitantly and coldly, as
from the ceiling of a damp cave-he counts on their dull sound and resonance-and an-
other who handles his language like a flexible rapier, feeling from his arm down to
his toes the dangerous delight of the quivering, over-sharp blade that desires to
bite, hiss, cut."-



　　　　　　　　　　　247



How little German style has to do with sound and the ears is shown by the fact that
precisely our good musicians write badly. The German does not read aloud, not for
the ear but only with the eye: meanwhile his ears are put away in a drawer. In anti-
quity men read-when they did read, which happened rarely enough-to themselves, a-
loud, with a resounding voice; one was surprised when anyone read quietly, and sec-
retly asked oneself for the reasons. With a resounding voice: that means, with all
the crescendos, inflections, and reversals of tone and changes in tempo in which
the ancient public world took delight.

The laws of written style were then the same as those for spoken style; and these
laws depended partly on the amazing development and the refined requirements of ear
and larynx, partly on the strength, perseverance, and power of ancient lungs. A per-
iod in the classical sense is above all a physiological unit, insofar as it is held
together by a single breath. Such periods as are found in Demosthenes and Cicero,
swelling twice and coming down twice, all within a single breath, are delights for
the men of antiquity who, from their own training, knew how to esteem their virtue
and how rare and difficult was the delivery of such a period. We really have no
right to the great period, we who are modern and in every sense short of breath.19

All of these ancients were after all themselves dilettantes in rhetoric, hence con-
noisseurs, hence critics and thus drove their rhetoricians to extremes; just as in
the last ccntury, when all Italians and ltaliennes knew how to sing, virtuosity in
singing (and with that also the art of melody) reached its climax among them. In
Germany, however, there really was (until quite recently, when a kind of platform
eloquence began shyly and clumsily enough to flap its young wings) only a single
species of public and roughly artful rhetoric: that front the pulpit

In Germany the preacher alone knew what a syllable weighs, or a word, and how a
sentence strikes, leaps, plunges, runs, runs out; he alone had a conscience in his
ears, often enough a bad conscience; for there is no lack of reasons why Germans
rarely attain proficiency in rhetoric, and almost always too late. The masterpiece
of German prose is therefore, fairly enough, the masterpiece of its greatest preach-
er: the Bible has so far been the best German book. Compared with Luther's Bible,
almost everything else is mere "literature"-something that did not grow in Germany
and therefore also did not grow and does not grow into German hearts-as the Bible
did.



　　　　　　　　　　　248



There are two types of genius: one which above all begets and wants to beget, and
another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth. Just so, there are among
peoples of genius those to whom the woman's problem of pregnancy and the secret
task of forming, maturing, and perfecting has been allotted-the Greeks, for examp-
le, were a people of this type; also the French-and others who must fertilize and
become the causes of new orders of life-like the Jews," the Romans, and, asking
this in all modesty, the Germans? Peoples, tormented and enchanted by unknown fe-
vers and irresistibly pressed beyond themselves, in love and lusting after foreign
races (after those who like "being fertilized"), and at the same time domineering
like all that knows itself to be full of creative towers and hence "by the grace
of God." These two types of genius seek each other, like man and woman; but they
also misunderstand each other-like man and woman.




　　　　　　　　　　　249



Every people has its own Tartuffery and calls it its virtues.- What is best in us
we do not know-we cannot know.



　　　　　　　　　　　250



What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing
that is both of the best and of the worst: the grand style in morality, the ter-
ribleness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanti-
cism and sublimity of moral questionabilities-and hence precisely the most at-
tractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to
life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is
burning now-perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and phil-
osophers are-grateful for this to the Jews.



　　　　　　　　　　　251



It must be taken into the bargain if all sorts of clouds and disturbances-in brief,
little attacks of hebetation-pass over the spirit of a people that is suffering,
and wants to suffer, of nationalistic nerve fever and political ambition. Examples
among the Germans today include now the anti-French stupidity, now the anti-Jewish,
now the anti-Polish, now the Christian-romantic, now the Wagnerian, now the Teuton-
ic, now the Prussian (just look at the wretched historians, these Sybels and Treit-
schkes and their thickly bandaged heads!) and whatever other names these little
mistifications" of the German spirit and conscience may have. Forgive me, for during
a brief daring sojourn in very infected territory too, I did not altogether escape this
disease and began like everyone else to develop notions about matters that are
none of my business: the first sign of the political infection. For example about the
Jews: only listen!

I have not met a German yet who was well disposed toward the Jews; and however
unconditionally all the cautious and politially-minded repudiated real anti-Semitism,"
even this caution and policy are not directed against the species of this feeling it-
self but only against its dangerous immoderation, especially against the insipid and
shameful expression of this immoderate feeling-about this, one should not deceive
oneself. That Germany has amply enough Jews, that the German stomach, the German
blood has trouble (and will still have trouble for a long time) digesting even this
quantum of "Jew"-as the Italians, French, and English have done, having a stronger
digestive system-that is the clear testimony and language of a general instinct
to which one must listen, in accordance with which one must act. "Admit no more new
Jews! And especially close the doors to the east (also to Austria)!" thus commands
the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indefinite, so it could easily
be blurred or extinguished by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond any
doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to
prevail even under the worst conditions (even better than under favorable conditions),
by means of virtues that today one would like to mark as vices-thanks above all to a
resolute faith that need not be ashamed before "modern ideas"; they change, when they
change, always only as the Russian Empire makes its conquests-being an empire that
has time and is not of yesterday-namely, according to the principle, "as slowly as
possible.

A thinker who has the development of Europe on his conscience will, in all his pro-
jects for this future, take into account the Jews as well as the Russians as the
provisionally surest and most probable factors in the great play and fight of forces.
What is called a "nation" in Europe today, and is really rather a res facta than a
res nata (and occasionally can hardly be told from a res ficta et picta)" is in
any case something evolving, young, and easily changed, not yet a race, let alone
such an aere perennius as the Jewish type: these "nations" really should careful-
ly avoid every hotheaded rivalry and hostility! That the Jews, if they wanted it-
or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want-could
even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is
certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.

Meanwhile they want and wish rather, even with some importunity, to be absorbed
and assimilated by Europe; they long to be fixed, permitted, respected somewhere
at long last, putting an end to the nomads' life, to the "Wandering Jew"; and this
bent and impulse (which may even express an attenuation of the Jewish instincts)
should be noted well and accommodated' to that end it might be useful and fair to
expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country." Accommodated with all caution,
with selection; approximately as the English nobility does. It is obvious that the
stronger and already more clearly defined types of the new Germanism can enter into
relations with them with the least hesitation; for example, officers of the nobil-
ity from the March Brandenburg:" it would be interesting in many ways to see whe-
ther the hereditary art of commanding and obeying-in both of these, the land just
named is classical today-could not be enriched with the genius of money and pa-
tience (and above all a little spirituality, which is utterly lacking among these
officers). But here it is proper to break off my cheerful Germanomania and holiday
oratory; for I am beginning to touch on what is serious for me, the "European pro-
blem" as I understand it, the cultivation of a new caste that will rule Europe.



　　　　　　　　　　　252



They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on
the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and lowering of
the value of the concept of "philosophy" for more than a century. It was against
Hume that Kant arose, and rose; it was Locke of whom Schelling said, understand-
ably, "je meprise Locke";" in their fight against the English-mechanistic dolt-
ification of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer were of one mind (with Goethe)-
these two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward oppo-
site poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other as only
brothers wrong each other."

What was lacking in England, and always has been lacking there, was known well
enough to that semi-actor and rhetorician, the insipid muddlehead Carlyle, who
tried to conceal behind passionate grimaces what he knew of himselfnamely, what
was lacking in Carlyle: real power of spirituality, real profundity of spiritual
perception; in brief, philosophy

It is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it clings firmly to
Christianity: they need its discipline to become "moralized" and somewhat human-
ized. The English, being gloomier, more sensual, stronger in will, and more bru-
tal than the Germans, are precisely for that reason more vulgar, also more pious
than the Germans: they stand more in need of Christianity. For more sensitive
nostrils even this English Christianity still has a typically English odor of spleen
and alcoholic dissipation against which it is needed for good reasons as a rem-
edy-the subtler poison against the coarser: a subtler poisoning is indeed for
clumsy peoples some progress, a step toward spiritualization. English clumsiness
and peasant seriousness is still disguised most tolerably or rather elucidated
and reinterpreted by the language of Christian gestures and by prayers and sing-
ing of psalms. And for those brutes of sots and rakes who formerly learned how
to grunt morally under the sway of Methodism and more recently again as a "Sal-
vation Army," a penitential spasm may really be the relatively highest achieve-
ment of "humanity" to which they can be raised: that much may be conceded in all
fairness. But what is offensive even in the most humane Englishman is his lack
of music, speaking metaphorically (but not only metaphorically): in the movements
of his soul and body he has no rhythm and dance, indeed not even the desire for
rhythm and dance, for "music." Listen to him speak; watch the most beautiful Eng-
lishwomen walk-there are no more beautiful doves and swans in any country in
the world finally listen to them sing! But I am asking too much-



　　　　　　　　　　　253



There are truths that are recognized best by mediocre minds because they are
most congenial to them; there are truths that have charm and seductive powers
only for mediocre spirits: we come up against this perhaps disagreeable propos-
ition just now, since the spirit of respectable but mediocre Englishmen-I name
Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer-is beginning to predominate in the
middle regions of European taste. Indeed, who would doubt that it is useful that
such spirits should rule at times? It would be a mistake to suppose that the
spirits of a high type that soar on their own paths would be particularly skill-
ful at determining and collecting many small and common facts and then drawing
conclusions from them: on the contrary, being exceptions, they are from the
start at a disadvantage when it comes to the "rule." Finally, they have more to
do than merely to gain knowledge-namely, to be something new, to signify some-
thing new, to represent new values. Perhaps the chasm between know and can is
greater, also uncannier, than people suppose: those who can do lags in the grand
style, the creative, may possibly have to be lackng in knowledgewhile, on the
other hand, for scientific discoveries of the type of Darwin's a certain narrow-
ness, aridity, and intuitions diligence, something English in short, may not be
a bad Es-position.

Finally, we should not forget that the English with their profound normality have
once before caused an over-all depression of the European spirit: what people
call "modern ideas" or "the ideas of the eighteenth century" or also "French
ideas"that, in other words, -that, against which the German spirit has risen with
a profound disgust-was of English origin; there is no doubt of that. The French
have merely been apes and mimes of these ideas; also their best soldiers; unfor-
tunately, their first and most thoroughgoing victims as well: for over this damnable
Anglomania of "modern ideas" the ame francaise" has in the end become so thin
and emaciated that today one recalls her sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
her profound and passionate strength, and her inventive nobility almost with dis-
belief. Yet we must hang on to this proposition of historical fairness with our very
teeth, defending it against momentary appearances: European noblesse-of feeling,
of taste, of manners, taking the word, in short, in every higher sense-is the work
and invention of France; European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas, that
of England. 1



　　　　　　　　　　　254



Even now France is still the seat of he most spiritual and sophisticated culture
in Europe and the foremost school of taste-but one has to know how to find this
"France of taste." Those who belong to it stay well hidden: it may be a small
number in whom it lives-at that, perhaps human beings whose legs might be sturd-
ier, some of them fatalists, somber and sick, some of them overly delicate and
artificial, such as have the ambition to hide. One point they all have in com-
mon: they plug their ears against the raging stupidity and the noisy twaddle of
the democratic bourgeois. Indeed, the foreground today is taken up by a part of
France that has become stupid and coarse: recently, at Victor Hugo's funeral,hs
it celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste and at the same time self-admira-
tion. They have in common one other point as well: the good will to resist any
spiritual Genrnanintionand a still better incapacity to succeed.

Perhaps Schopenhauer is even now more at home and indigenous In this France
of the spirit, which is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany
not to speak of Heinrich Heine, who has long become parrot the very flesh and
blood of the 'tier and mote demanding lyric poets of Paris, or of Hegel, who lay
exerts an almost tyrannical influence through Taine, who is foremost historian
now living. But as for Richard Wagner: the more French music learns to form it-
self in accordance with the actual needs of the ame moderne," the more it will
"Wagnerize"-that one can predict-and it is doing enough of that even now.

Nevertheless, there are three things to which the French can point with pride
today, as their heritage and possession and an during mark of their ancient cul-
tural superiority over Europe, in ite of all voluntary and involuntary German-
ization and vulgaation of their taste. First, the capacity for artistic pass-
ions, for ft deva3tion to "form" for which the phrase tart pour tart has en
invented along with a thousand others: that sort of thing has .t been lacking
in France for the last three centuries and has ide possible again and again,
thanks to their reverence for the mall number," a kind of chamber music in lit-
erature for which e looks in vain in the rest of Europe.

The second thing on which the French can base a superiority er Europe is their
old, manifold, moralistic" culture, as a result of which we find, on the average,
even in the little romanciers of the newspapers and in chance boulevardiers de
Paris a psychological oversensitivity and curiosity of which in Germany, for ex-
ample, e simply has no idea (let alone the thing itself). For this the Germans
lack a few centuries of moralistic work which, as mentioned, France did not
spare herself; anyone who calls the Germans naive on that account praises them
for a defect. (By way of contrast to the German inexperience and innocence in
voluptate psychologica," which is none too distantly related to the tediousness of
German company, and as the most consummate expression of a typically French
curiosity and inventiveness for this realm of delicate thrills, one may consider
Henri Beyle,"9 that remarkable anticipatory and precursory human being who
ran with a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of
the European soul, as an explorer and discoverer of this soul: it required
two generations to catch up with him in any way, to figure out again a few of
the riddles that tormented and enchanted him, this odd epicurean and question
mark of a man who was France's last great psychologist.)

There is yet a third claim to superiority. The French character contains a
halfway successful synthesis of the north and the south which allows them to
comprehend many things and to do things which an Englishman could never
understand. Their temperament, periodically turned toward and away from the
south, in which from time to time Provencal and Ligurian blood foams over,
protects them against the gruesome northern gray on gray and the sunless con-
cept-spooking and anemia-the disease of German against whose excesses
one has now prescribed for oneself, considerable resolution, blood and iron,"
which means "great politics" (in accordance with a dangerous healing art which
teaches me to wait and wait but so far has not taught me any hope.) Even now
one still encounters in France an advance understanding and are too compre-
hensive to find satisfaction in any fatherland-less and know how to love the
south in the north and the north le south-the born Midlanders, the "good
Europeans."It was for them that Bizet made music, this last genius to see a
new beauty and seduction-who discovered a piece of the south of music.



　　　　　　　　　　　255



Against German music all kinds of precautions seem to me to be indicated.
Suppose somebody loves the south as I love it, as a great school of conval-
escence, in the most spiritual as well as the most sensuous sense, as an
uncontainable abundance of sun and transfiguration by the sun that suffuses
an existence that believes and glories in itself: well, such a person will
learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because in cor-
rupting his taste again it also corrupts his health again.

If such a southerner, not by descent but by faith, should dream of the fu-
ture of music, he must also dream of the redemption of music from the north,
and in his ears he must have the prelude of a more profound, more powerful,
perhaps more evil and mysterious music, a supra-German music that does not
fade away at the sight of the voluptuous blue sea and the brightness of the
Mediterranean sky, nor does it turn yellow and then pale as all German music
does-a supra-European music that prevails even before the brown sunsets of
the desert, a music whose soul is related to palm trees and feels at home
and knows how to roam among great, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey-

I could imagine a music whose rarest magic would consist in its no longer
knowing anything of good and evil, only now and then some sailor nostalgia,
some golden shadows and delicate weaknesses would pass over it-an art that
from a great distance would behold, fleeing toward it, the colors of a set-
ting moral world that had almost become unintelligible-and that would be
hospitable and profound enough to receive such late fugitives.-



　　　　　　　　　　　256



Owing to the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has
induced, and still induces, among the peoples of Europe; owing also to the
shortsighted and quick-handed politicians who are at the top today with the
help of this insanity, without any inkling that their separatist policies can
of necessity only be entr'acte policies; owing to all this and much else that
today simply cannot be said, the most unequivocal portents are now being over-
looked, or arbitrarily and mendaciously reinterpreted-that Europe wants to
become one.

In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all
direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for
this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the fu-
ture: only in their foregrounrds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they
belong to the "fatherlandish"-they were merely taking a rest from themselves
when they became "patriots." I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon,
Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it a-
gainst me when I include Richard Wagner too, with them, for one should not
allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings-geni-
uses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves. Even less,
to be sure, by the indecent noise with which people in France now close them-
selves off against him and resist him: the fact remains nevertheless that the
late French romanticism of the forties and Richard Wagner belong together most
closely and intimately. In all the heights and depths of their needs they are
related, fundamentally related: it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul surg-
es and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and impetuous
art-where? into a new light? toward a new sun? But who could express pre-
cisely what all these masters of new means of language could not express pre-
cisely? What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented them and
that they sought in the same way, these last great seekers!

Literature dominated all of them up to their eyes and ears-they were the
first artists steeped in world literature-and most of them were themselves
writers, poets, mediators and mixers of the arts and senses (as a musician,
Wagner belongs among painters; as a poet, among musicians; as an artist in
general, among actors); all of them were fanatics of expression "at any
price"-I should stress Delacroix, who was most closely related to Wagner-
all of them great discoverer's in the realm of the sublime, also of the ugly
and gruesome, and still greater discoverers concerning effects, display,
and the art of display windows-all of them talents far beyond their genius
-virtuosos through and through, with uncanny access to everything that
seduces, allures, compels, overthrows; born enemies of logic and straight
lines, lusting after the foreign, the exotic, the tremendous, the crooked,
the self-contradictory; as human beings, Tantaluses of the will, successful
plebeians who knew themselves to be incapable, both in their lives and works,
of a noble tempo, a lentan-take Balzac, for example-unbridled workers, al-
most self-destroyers through work; antinomians and rebels against custom,
ambitious and insatiable without balance and enjoyment; all of them broke
and collapsed in the end before the Christian cross (with right and reason:
for who among them would have been profound and original42 enough for a
philosophy of the Antichrist?)-on the whole, an audaciously daring, magni-
ficently violent type of higher human beings who soared, and tore others
along, to the heights-it fell to them to first teach their century-and
it is the century of the crowd!-the concept "higher man"-

Let the German friends of Richard Wagner ponder whether there is in Wag-
ner's art anything outright German, or whether it is not just its dist-
inction that it derives from supra-German sources and impulses. Nor
should it be underestimated to what extent Paris was indispensable for
the development of his type, and at the decisive moment the depth of his
instincts led him to Paris. His entire manner and self-apostolatc could
perfect itself only when he saw the model of the French socialists. Per-
haps it will be found after a subtler comparison that, to the honor of
Richard Wagner's German nature, his doings were in every respect stronger,
more audacious, harder, and higher than anything a Frenchman of the nine-
teenth century could manage-thanks to the fact that we Germans are still
closer to barbarism than the French. Perhaps Wagner's strangest creation
is inaccessible, inimitable, and beyond the feelings of the whole, so ma-
ture, Latin race, not only today but forever: the figure of Siegfried, that
very free man who may indeed be much too free, too hard, too cheerful, too
healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of ancient and mellow cultured
peoples. He may even have been a sin against romanticism, this anti-romantic
Siegfried: well, Wagner more than atoned for this sin in his old and glum
days when-anticipating a taste that has since then become political-he
began, if not to walk, at least to preach, with his characteristic religious
vehemence, the way to Rome.

Lest these final words be misunderstood, I will enlist the assistance of a
few vigorous rhymes which will betray to less subtle cars, too, what I want
-what I have against the "final Wagner" and his Parsifal music:

　　　　-Is this still German?-
　　　　Out of a German heart, this sultry screeching?
　　　　a German body, this self-laceration?
　　　　German, this priestly affectation,
　　　　this incense-perfumed sensual preaching?
　　　　German, this halting, plunging, reeling,
　　　　this so uncertain bim-bam pealing?
　　　　this nunnish ogling, ve leavening,
　　　　this whole falsely ecstatic heaven overheavening?
　　　　-Is this still German?-
　　　　You still stand at the gate, perplexed?
　　　　Think! What you hear is Rome-Rome's faith without the text.





　　　　　　 　　　PART NINE


　　　　　　　　WHAT IS NOBLE



　　　　　　　　　　　257



Every enhancement of the type "man" has so far been the work of an aristocra-
tic society-and it will be so again and again-a society that believes in the
long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man,
and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance
which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata-when the ruling
caste constantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects and instruments and
just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping
at a distance-that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up ei-
ther-the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself,
the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more
comprehensive states-in brief, simply the enhancement of the type "man," the
continual "self-overcoming of man," to use a moral formula in a supra-moral
sense.

To be sure, one should not yield to humanitarian Musions about the origins of
an aristocratic society (and thus of the presupposition of this enhancement
of the type "man"): truth is hard. Let us admit to ourselves, without trying
to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth so far has begun. Human
beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of
the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will
and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peace-
ful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow old cultures
whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit
and corruption. In the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian
caste: then predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength
of the soul-they were more whole human beings (which also means, at
every level, "more whole beasts").



　　　　　　　　　　　258



Corruption as the expression of a threatening anarchy among the instincts
and of the fact that the foundation of the affects, which is called "life," has
been shaken: corruption is something totally different depending on the or-
ganism in which it appears. When, for example, an aristocracy, like that of
France at the beginning of the Revolution, throws away its privileges with
a sublime disgust and sacrifices itself to an extravagance of its own moral
feelings, that is corruption; it was really only the last act of that cen-
turies-old corruption which had led them to surrender, step by step, then
governmental prerogatives, demoting themselves to a mere funo lion of the
monarchy (finally even to a mere ornament and show piece). The essential
characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it experi-
ences itself not as a function (whether of the monarchy or the commonwealth)
but as their meaning and highest justification-that it therefore accepts with
a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake,
must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to in-
struments. Their fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not
exist for society's sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on
which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and
to a higher state of being3-comparable to those sun-seeking vines of Java-
they are called Sipo Matador -that so long and so often enclasp an oak
tree with their tendril! until eventually, high above it but supported by it,
they can unfold their crowns in the open light and display their happiness.



　　　　　　　　　　　259



Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing
one's will on a par with that of someone else-this may become, in a cer-
tain rough sense, good manners among individuals if the appropriate condi-
tions are present (namely, if these men are actually similar in strength
and value standards and belong together in one body). But as soon as this
principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental prin-
ciple of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is-a will to
the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay.

Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter,
resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropria-
tion, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hard-
ness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its
mildest, exploitation-but why should one always use those words in which
a slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages?

Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals, as sug-
gested before-and this happens in every healthy aristocracy-if it is a
living and not a dying body, has to do to other bodies what the individ-
uals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be an in-
carnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become pre-
dominant-not from any amorality or immorality but because it is living
and because life simply is will to power. But there is no point on which
the ordinary consciousness of Europeans resists instruction as on this:
everywhere people are now raving, even under scientific disguises, about
coming conditions of society in which "the exploitative aspect" will be
removed-which sounds to me as if they promised to invent a way of life
that would dispense with all organic functions. "Exploitation" does not
belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the
essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence
of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.

If this should be an innovation as a theory-as a reality it is the pri-
mordial fact of all history: people ought to be honest with themselves
at least that far.



　　　　　　　　　　　260



Wandering through the many subtler and coarser moralities which have so
far been prevalent on earth, or still are prevalent, I found that cer-
tain features recurred regularly together and were closely associated-
until I finally discovered two basic types an one basic difference.

There are master morality and slave morality4-I add immediately that
in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at
mediation between these two moralities and yet more often the interpen-
etration and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur
directly alongside each other-even in the same human being, within a
single soul.6 The moral discrimination of values has originated either
among a ruling group whose consciousness of its difference from the rul-
ed group was accompanied by delight-or among the ruled, the slaves and
dependents of every degree.

In the first case, when the ruling group determines what is "good," the
exalted, proud states of the soul are experienced as conferring distinct-
ion and determining the order of rank. The noble human being separates
from himself those in whom the opposite of such exalted, proud states
finds expression: he despises them. It should be noted immediately that
in this first type of morality the opposition of "good" and "bad" means
approximately the same as "noble" and "contemptible." (The opposition
of "good" and "evil has a different origin.) One feels contempt for the
cowardly, the anxious, the petty, those intent on narrow utility; also
for the suspicious with their unfree glances, those who humble them-
selves, the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated, the
begging flatterers, above all the liars: it is part of the fundamental
faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. "We truthful ones"
-thus the nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself.

It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first applied to
human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions. Therefore it is
a gross mistake when historians of morality start from such questions
as: why was the compassionate act praised? The noble type of man exper-
iences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judg-
es, "what is harmful to me is harmful in itself"; it knows itself to be
that which first accords honor to things; it is value-creating. Every-
thing it knows as part of itself it honors: such a morality is self-
glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of fullness, of pow-
er that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the conscious-
ness of wealth that would give and bestow: the noble human being, too,
helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from pity, but prompted
more by an urge begotten by excess of power. The noble human being honors
himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself,
who knows how to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and
hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness. "A hard heart
Wotan put into my breast," says an old Scandinavian saga: a fitting poe-
tic expression, seeing that it comes from the soul of a proud Viking.
Such a type of man is actually proud of the fact that he is not made for
pity, and the hero of the saga therefore adds as a warning: "If the heart
is not hard in youth it will never harden." Noble and courageous human
beings who think that way are furthest removed from that morality which
finds the distinction of morality precisely in pity, or in acting for
others, or in desinteressement; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a
fundamental hostility and irony against "selflessness" belong just as
definitely to noble morality as does a slight disdain and caution re-
garding compassionate feelings and a "warm heart."

It is the powerful who understand how to honor; this is their art, their
realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and tradition-all
law rests on this double reverence-the faith an. prejudice in favor of
ancestors and disfavor of those yet to come ar typical of the morality
of the powerful; and when the men of "modern ideas," conversely, believe
almost instinctively in "prop ress" and "the future" and more and more
lack respect for age, thi in itself would sufficiently betray the ig-
noble origin of these "ideas.

A morality of the ruling group, however, is most alien and embarrass-
ing to the present taste in the severity of its principle that one has
duties only to one's peers; that against beings of a lower rank, against
everything alien, one may behave as one pleases or "as the heart de-
sires," and in any case "beyond good and evil"-here pity and like
feelings may find their place.6 The capacity for and the duty of, long
gratitude and long revenge-both only among one's peers-refinement
in repaying, the sophisticated concept of friendship, a certain necessity
for having enemies (as it were, as drainage ditches for the affects of
envy, quarrelsomeness, exuberance-at bottom, in order to be capable
of being good friends): all these are typical characteristics of noble
morality which, as suggested, is not the morality of "modern ideas"
and therefore is hard to empathize with today, also hard to dig up and
uncover.

It is different with the second type of morality, slave morality. Sup-
pose the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of
themselves and weary, moralize: what will their moral valuations have
in common? Probably, a pessimistic suspicion about the whole condition
of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man along with
his condition. The slave's eye is not favorable to the virtues of the
powerful: he is skeptical and suspicious, subtly suspicious, of all
the "good" that is honored there-he would like to persuade himself
that even their happiness is not genuine. Conversely, those qualities
are brought out and flooded with light which serve to ease existence
for those who suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand,
the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness are hon-
ored-for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only
means for enduring the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essen-
tially a morality of utility.

Here is the place for the origin of that famous opposition of "good"
and "evil": into evil one's feelings project power and dan-gerousness,
a certain terribleness, subtlety, and strength that does not permit
contempt to develop. According to slave morality, those who are "e-
vil" thus inspire fear; according to master morality it is precisely
those who are "good" that inspire, and wish to inspire, fear, while
the "bad" are felt to be contemptible.

The opposition reaches its climax when, as a logical consequence of
slave morality, a touch of disdain is associated also with the "good"
of this morality-this may be slight and benevolent-because the good
human being has to be undangerous in the slaves' way of thinking: he
is good-natured, easy to deceive, a little stupid perhaps, un bonhomme.8
Wherever slave morality becomes preponderant, language tends to
bring the words "good" and "stupid" closer together.

One last fundamental difference: the longing for freedom, the in-
stinct for happiness and the subtleties of the feeling of free-
dom belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as art-
ful and enthusiastic reverence and devotion are the regular symptom
of an aristocratic way of thinking and evaluating.

This makes plain why love as passion-which is our European special-
ty-simply must be of noble origin: as is well known, its invention
must be credited to the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent
and inventive human beings of the "gai saber" a to whom Europe owes
so many things and almost owes itself.-



　　　　　　　　　　　261



Among the things that may be hardest to understand for a noble human
being is vanity: he will be tempted to deny it, where another type of
human being could not find it more palpable. The problem for him is to
imagine people who seek to create a good opinion of themselves which
they do not have of themselves-and thus also do not "deserve"-and
who nevertheless end up believing this good opinion themselves. This
strikes him half as such bad taste and lack of self-respect, and half
as so baroquely irrational, that he would like to consider vanity as
exceptional, and in most cases when it is spoken of he doubts it.

He will say, for example: "I may be mistaken about my value and never-
theless demand that my value, exactly as I define it, should be ac-
knowledged by others as well-but this is no vanity (but conceit or,
more frequently, what is called 'humility' or 'modesty')." Or "For
many reasons I may take pleasure in the good opinion of others: per-
haps because I honor and love them and all their pleasures give me
pleasure; perhaps also because their good opinion confirms and
strengthens my faith in my own good opinion; perhaps because the good
opinion of others, even in cases where I do not share it, is still
useful to me or promises to become so-but all that is not vanity."

The noble human being must force himself, with the aid of history, to
recognize that, since time immemorial, in all somehow dependent soc-
ial strata the common man was only what he was considered: not at
all used to positing values himself, he also attached no other value
to himself than his masters attached to him (it is the characteristic
right of masters to create values).

It may be understood as the consequence of an immense atavism that
even now the ordinary man still always waits for an opinion about him-
self and then instinctively submits to that-but by no means only a
"good" opinion; also a bad and unfair one (consider, for example, the
great majority of the self-estimates and self-underestimates that be-
lieving women accept from their father-confessors, and believing
Christians quite generally from their church).

In accordance with the slowly arising democratic order of things (and
its cause, the intermarriage of masters and slave), the originally
noble and rare urge to ascribe value to oneself on one's own and to
"think well" of oneself will actually be encouraged and spread more
and more now; but it is always opposed by an older, ampler, and more
deeply ingrained propensity-and in the phenomenon of "vanity" this
older propensity masters the younger one. The vain person is delighted
by every good opinion he hears of himself (quite apart from all con-
siderations of its utility, and also apart from truth or falsehood),
just as every bad opinion of him pains him: for he submits to both, he
feels subjected to them in accordance with that oldest instinct of sub-
mission that breaks out in him.

It is "the slave" in the blood of the vain person, a residue of The
slave's craftiness-and how much "slave" is still residual in woman,
for example!-that seeks to seduce him to good opinions about himself;
it is also the slave who afterwards immediately prostrates himself
before these opinions as if he had not called them forth.

And to say it once more: vanity is an atavism.



　　　　　　　　　　　262



A species comes to be, a type becomes fixed and strong, through the
long fight with essentially constant unfavorable conditions. Converse-
ly, we know from the experience of breeders" that species accorded su-
perabundant nourishment and quite generally extra protection and care
soon tend most strongly toward variations of the type and become rich
in marvels and monstrosities (including monstrous vices).

Now look for once at an aristocratic commonwealth-say, an ancient
Greek polis,'2 or Venice-as at arrangement, whether I. ol-untary or in-
voluntary, for breeding: 13 human beings are together there who are
dependent on themselves and want their species to prevail, most often
because they have to prevail or run the terrible risk of being exter-
minated. Here that boon, that excess, and that protection which favor
variations are lacking; the species needs itself as a species, as
something that can prevail and make itself durable by virtue of its
very hardness, uniformity, and simplicity of form, in a constant fight
with its neighbors or with the oppressed who are rebellious or threat-
en rebellion. Manifold experience teaches them to which qualities a-
bove all they owe the fact that, despite all gods and men, they are
still there, that they have always triumphed: these qualities they
call virtues, these virtues alone they cultivate." They do this with
hardness, indeed they want hardness; every aristocratic morality is
intolerant-in the education of youth, in their arrangements for women,
in their marriage customs, in the relations of old and young, in their
penaIlaws (which take into account deviants only)-they consider in-
tolerance itself a virtue, calk ing it "justice."

In this way a type with few but very strong traits, a species of
severe, warlike, prudently taciturn men, close-mouthed and closely
linked (and as such possessed of the subtlest feeling for the charms
and nuances of association), is fixed beyond the changing genera-
tions; the continual fight against ever constant unfavorable condi-
tions is, as mentioned previously, the cause that fixes and hardens
type.

Eventually, however, a day arrives when conditions become note fortu-
nate and the tremendous tension decreases; perhaps here are no long-
er any enemies among one's neighbors, and the means of life, even
for the enjoyment of life, are superabundant. At one stroke the bond
and constraint of the old discipline's are torn: it no longer seems
necessary; a condition of existence-if it persisted it would only be a
form of luxury, an archaizing taste. Variation, whether as deviation
(to something higher, subtler, rarer) or as degeneration and monstro-
sity, suddenly appears on the scene in the greatest abundance and
magnificence; the individual dares to be individual and different.

At these turning points of history we behold beside one another, and
often mutually involved and entangled, a splendid, manifold, jungle-
like growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the com-
petition to grow, and a tremendous ruin and self-ruination, as the
savage egoisms that have turned, almost exploded, against one another
wrestle "for sun and light" and can no longer derive any limit, res-
traint, or consideration from their previous 6 morality. It was this
morality itself that dammed up such enormous strength and bent the
bow in such a threatening manner; now it is "outlived." The dangerous
and uncanny point has been reached where the greater, more manifold,
more comprehensive life transcends and lives beyond the old morality;
the "individual" appears, obliged to give himself laws and to devel-
op his own arts and wiles for self-preservation, self-enhancement,
self-redemption.

All sorts of new what-fors and wherewithals; no shared formulas any
longer; misunderstanding allied with disrespect; decay, corruption,
and the highest desires gruesomely entangled; the genius of the race
overflowing from all cornucopias of good and bad; a calamitous simu-
ltaneity of spring and fall, full of new charms and veils that char-
acterize young, still unexhausted, still unwearied corruption. Again
danger is there, the mother of morals, great danger, this time
transposed into the individual, into the neighbor and friend, into
the alley, into one's own child, into one's own heat into the most
personal and secret recesses of wish and will: what may the moral
philosophers emerging in this age have to preach now?

These acute observers and 'oiterers discover that the end approach-
ing fast, that everything around them is corrupted at corrupts, that
nothing will stand the day after tomorrow, except one type of man,
the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have chance of continuing
their type and propagating-they are the men of the future, the only
survivors: "Be like them! Become mediocre is now the only morality
that still makes sense, that still gets a hearing.

But this morality of mediocrity is hard to preach: after all, it may
never admit what it is and what it wants. It must speak measure and
dignity and duty and neighbor love-it will find difficult to conceal
its irony.-



　　　　　　　　　　　263



There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything else is a sign
of a high rank; there is a delight in the nuances of reverence that al-
lows us to infer noble origin and habits. The refinement, graciousness,
and height of a soul is tested dangerously when something of the first
rank passes by without being as yet protected by the shudders of auth-
ority against obtrusive efforts and ineptitudes-something that goes
its way unmarked, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps capriciously conceal-
ed and disguised, like a living touchstone. Anyone to whose task and
practice it belongs to search out souls will employ this very art in many
forms in order to determine the ultimate value of a soul and the unalter-
able, innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will test it for its
instinct of reverence.

Difference engendre haine:17 the baseness of some people suddenly
spurts up like dirty water when some holy vessel, some precious thing
from a locked shrine, some book with the marks of a great destiny, is
carried past; and on the other hand there is a reflex of silence, a hesi-
tation of the eye, a cessation of all gestures that express how a soul
feels the proximity of the most venerable. The way in which reverence
for the Bible has on the whole been maintained so far in Europe is per-
haps the best bit of discipline and refinement of manners that Europe
owes to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate signifi-
cance require some external tyranny of authority for their protection
in order to gain those millennia of persistence which are necessary
to exhaust them and figure them out.

Much is gained once the feeling has finally been cultivated in the
masses (among the shallow and in the high-speed intestines of every
kind) that they are not to touch everything; that there are holy ex-
periences before which they have to take off their shoes and keep away
their unclean hands-this is almost their greatest advance toward hu-
manity. Conversely, perhaps there is nothing about so-called educated
people and believers in "modern ideas" that is as nauseous as their
lack of modesty and the comfortable insolence of their eyes and hands
with which they touch, lick, and finger everything; and it is possible
that even among the common people, among the less educated, especially
among peasants, one finds today more relative nobility of taste and
tactful reverence than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the
spirit, the educated.



　　　　　　　　　　　264



One cannot erase from the soul of a human being what his ancestors liked
most to do and did most constantly: whether they were, for example, assi-
duous savers and appurtenances of a desk and cash box, modest and bourge-
ois in their desires, modest also in their virtues; or whether they lived ac-
customed to commanding from dawn to dusk, fond of rough amusements and
also perhaps of even rougher duties and responsibilities; or whether, fin-
ally, at some point they sacrificed ancient prerogatives of birth and pos-
sessions in order to live entirely for their faith-their "god"-as men of
an inexorable and delicate conscience which blushes at every compromise.
It is simply not possible that a human being should not have the qualities
and preferences of his parents and ancestors in his body, whatever appear-
ances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race.18

If one knows something about the parents, an inference about the child is
permissible: any disgusting incontinence, any nook envy, a clumsy insist-
ence that one is always right-these three things together have always
constituted the characteristic type of the plebeian-that sort of thing
must as surely be transferred to the child as corrupted blood; and with
the aid of the best education one will at best deceive with regard to such
a heredity.

And what else is the aim of education and "culture" today? In our very pop-
ularity-minded-that is, plebeian-age, "education" and "culture" have to
be essentially the art of deceiving about one's origins, the inherited
plebs in one's body and soul. An educator who today preached truthfulness
above all and constantly challenged his students, "be true! be natural! do
not pretend!"-even such a virtuous and guileless ass would learn after a
while to reach for that furca of Horace to naturam expellere: with what
success? "Plebs" usque recurret-



　　　　　　　　　　　265



At the risk of displeasing innocent ears I propose: egoism belongs to the
nature of a noble soul-I mean that unshakable faith that to a being such
as "we are" other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacri-
fice themselves. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without
any question mark, also without any feeling that it might contain hardness,
constraint, or caprice, rather as something that may be founded in the pri-
mordial law of things: if it sought a name for this fact it would say, "it
is justice itself." perhaps it admits under certain circumstances that make
it first make it hesitate that there are some who have rights equal to its
own; as soon as this matter of rank is settled it moves among these equals
with their equal privileges, showing the same sureness of modesty and del-
icate reverence that characterize its relations with itself-in accordance
with an innate heavenly mechanism understood by all stars. It is merely a-
nother aspect of its egoism, this refinement and self-limitation in its re-
lations with its equals-every star is such an egoist-it honors itself
in them and in the rights it cedes to them; it does not doubt that the ex-
change of honors and rights is of the nature of all social relations and
thus also belongs to the natual condition of things.

The noble soul gives as it takes, from that passionate and iritable in-
stinct of repayment that lies in its depth. The concept "grace"20 has no
meaning or good odor inter pares;21 there may be a sublime way of letting
presents from above happen to one, as it were, and to drink them up thirst-
ily like drops-but for this art and gesture the noble soul has no aptitude.
Its egoism hinders it: quite generally it does not like to look "up"-but
either ahead, horizontally and slowly, or down: it knows itself to be at
a height.



　　　　　　　　　　　266



"Truly high respect one can have only for those who do not seek themselves."
-Goethe to Rat Schlosser.



　　　　　　　　　　　267



The Chinese have a proverb that mothers even teach children: siao-sin-
"make your heart small!" This is the characteristic fundamental propensity
in late civilizations: I do not doubt that an ancient Greek would recognize
in us Europeans of today, too, such self-diminution; this alone would suf-
fice for us to "offend his taste."-



　　　　　　　　　　　268



What, in the end, is common? 22

Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however are more or less
definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups
of sensations. To understand one an other, it is not enough that one use the
same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of in-
ner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experience in common.

Therefore the human beings of one people understand one another better than
those belonging to different peoples even if they employ the same language; or
rather when human beings have long lived together under similar conditions
(of climate, soil danger, needs, and work), what results23 from this is pe-
ople will "understand 24 one another"-a people. In all souls an equal num-
ber of often recurring experiences has come to be predominant over experiences
that come more rarely: on the basis of the former one understands the other,
quickly and ever more quickly-the history of language is the history of a pro-
cess of abbreviation-and on the basis of such quick understanding one asso-
ciates, ever more closely.

The greater the danger is, the greater is the need to rear agreement quickly
and easily about what must be done; not misunderstanding one another in times
of danger is what human beings simply cannot do without in their relations.
In every friend or love affair one still makes this test: nothing of that sort
can endure once one discovers that one's partner associates different intentions,
nuances, desires, and fears with the same words. (Fear of the "eternal misun-
derstanding"-that is the benevolent genius which so often keeps persons of
different sex from rash attachments to which their senses and hearts prompt
them -this not some Schopenhauerian "genius of the species"!)

Which group of sensations is aroused, expresses itself, and issues commands
in a soul most quickly, is decisive for the whole order of rank of its values
and ultimately determines its table of goods. The values of a human being be-
tray something of the structure of his soul and where it finds its conditions of
life, its true need.

Assuming next that need has ever brought close to one another only such hu-
man beings as could suggest with similar signs similar requirements and experi-
ences, it would follow on the whole that only communicability of need-which
in the last analysis means experience of merely average and common experi-
ences-must have been the most powerful of all powers at whose disposal man
been so far. The human beings who are more similar, more ordinarary, have had,
and always have, an advantage; those more select, subtle, strange, and diffi-
cult to understand, easily remain alone, succumb to accidents, being isolated,
and rarely propagate. One must invoke tremendous counter-forces in order to
cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the continual dev-
elopment of man toward the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike-common!



　　　　　　　　　　　269



The more a psychologist-a born and inevitable psychologist and unriddler of
souls-applies himself to the more exquisite cases and human beings, the great-
er becomes the danger that he might suffocate from pity.2 He needs hardness
and cheerfulness more than anyone else. For the corruption, the ruination of
the higher men, of the souls of a stranger type, is the rule: it is terrible to
have such a rule always before one's eyes. The manifold torture of the psycho-
logist who has discovered this ruination, who discovers this whole inner hope-
lessness of the higher man, this eternal "too late" in every sense, first in
one case and then almost always through the whole of history-may perhaps
lead him one day to turn against his own lot, embittered, and to make an at-
tempt at self-destruction-may lead to his own "corruption."

In almost every psychologist one will perceive a telltale preference for and
delight in association with everyday, well-ordered people: this reveals that
he always requires a cure, that he needs a kind of escape and forgetting, away
from all that with which his sights, his incisions, his "craft" have burden-
ed his conscience. He is characterized by fear of his memory. He is easily sil-
enced by the judgments of others; he listens with an immobile face as they
venerate, admire, love, and transfigure where he has seen-or even conceals
his silence by expressly agreeing with some foreground opinion. Perhaps the
paradox of his situation is so gruesome that precisely where he has learned
the greatest pity coupled with the greatest contempt, the crowd, the educate-
d, the enthusiasts learn the greatest veneration-the veneration for "great
men" prodigies for whose sake one blesses and honors the fatherland, the
earth, the dignity of humanity, and oneself, and to whom one refers the
young, toward whom one educates them.

And who knows whether what happened in all great cases so far was not
always the same: that the crowd adored a god-and that the "god" was
merely a poor sacrificial animal. Success has ways been the greatest liar-7
-and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror,
the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the
"work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has
created it, is supposed to have created it; "great men," as they are vene-
rated are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction; in the world of his-
torical values, counterfeit rules.

Those great poets, for example-men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi,
Kleist, Gogol (I do not dare mention greater names, but I mean them) 24-
are and perhaps must be men of fleeting moments, enthusiastic, sensual,
childish, frivolous and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which
they usually try to conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with
their works for some inner contamination, often seeking-with their high
flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory;
often lost in the mud and almost in love with it, until they become like
the will-o'-the-wisps around swamps and pose as stars-the people may
then call them idealists-often fighting against a long nausea, with a
recurring specter of unbelief that chills and forces them to languish
for gloria and to gobble their "belief in themselves" from the hands of
intoxicated flatterers-what torture are these great artists and all the
so-called higher men for anyone who has once guessed their true na-
ture! "3

It is easy to understand that these men should so readily reiceive from
woman-clairvoyant in the world of suffering and, unfortunately, also
desirous far beyond her strength to help and save -those eruptions of
boundless and most devoted pity which the multitude, above all the ven-
erating multitude, does not understand and on which it lavishes inquisi-
tive and self-satisfied interpretations. This pity deceives itself reg-
ularly about its powers; woman would like to believe that love can a-
chieve anything-that is her characteristic faith. Alas, whoever knows
the heart will guess how poor, stupid, helpless, arrogant, blundering,
more apt to destroy than to save is even the best and profoundest love!

It is possible that underneath the holy fable and disguise of Jesus'
life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyr-
dom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and des-
irous heart, never sated by any human love; demanding love, to be love-
d and nothing else, with hardness, with insanity, with terrible erupt-
ions against those who denied him love, the story of a poor fellow, un-
sated and insatiable in love, who had to invent hell in order to send
to it those who did not want to love him-and who finally, having gained
knowledge about human love, had to invent a god who is all love, all
ability to love-who has mercy on human love because it is so utterly
wretched and unknowing. Anyone who feels that way, who knows this
about love-seeks death.

But why pursue such painful matters? Assuming one does nol have to.-




　　　　　　　　　　　270



The spiritual haughtiness and nausea of every man who has suffered pro-
foundly-it almost determines the order of rank hos profoundly human be-
ings can suffer-his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors
him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more
than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his
way and has once been "at home" in many distant, terrifying worlds of
which "you know nothing"-this spiritual and silent haughtiness of the
sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the "initiated," of the
almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect
itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether
against everything that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering
makes noble; it separates.

One of the most refined disguises is Epicureanism, and a certain ostenta-
tious courage of taste which takes suffering casually and resists every-
thing sad and profound. There are "cheerful people" who employ cheerful-
ness because they are misunderstood on its account-they want to be mis-
understood. There are "scientific men" who employ science because it cre-
ates a cheerful appearance and because being scientific suggests that a
human being is superficial-they want to seduce others to this false in-
ference. There are free, insolent spirits who would like to conceal and
deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts (the cynicism of Hamlet
-the case of Galiani);28 and occasionally even foolishness is the mask tor
an unblessed all-too-certain knowledge.

From which it follows that it is characteristic of more refined humanity to
respect "the mask" and not to indulge in psychology and curiosity in the
wrong place.



　　　　　　　　　　　271



What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense and degree
of cleanliness. What avails all decency and mutual usefulness and good will
toward each other-in the end the fact remains: "They can't stand each o-
ther's smell!"

The highest instinct of cleanliness places those possessed of it in the oddest
and most dangerous lonesomeness, as saints: for precisely this is saintli-
ness-the highest spiritualization of this instinct. Whether one is privy
to someone's indescribable abundance of pleasure in the bath, or whether one
feels some ardor and thirst that constantly drives the soul out of the night
into the morning and out of the dim and "dark moods" into what is bright,
brilliant, profound, and refined-just as such a propensity distinguishes-it
is a noble propensity-it also separates.

The saint's pity is pity with the dirt of what is human, all too human. And
there are degrees and heights where he experiences even pity itself as a
pollution, as dirty-



　　　　　　　　　　　272



Signs of nobility: never thinking of degrading our duties into duties for ev-
erybody; not wanting to delegate, to share, one's own feasibility; counting
one's privileges and their exercise among one's duties.



　　　　　　　　　　　273



A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets
on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle-or as a temporary
resting place. His characteristic high-grade graciousness toward his fel-
low men becomes possible only once he has attained his height and rules.
Impatience and his consciousness that until then he is always condemned
to comedy-for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means
conceals the end-spoil all of his relations to others: this type of man
knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.



　　　　　　　　　　　274



The problem of those who are waiting.-it requires strokes of luck and much
that is incalculable if a higher man in whom the solution of a problem lies
dormant is to get around to action in time-to "eruption," one might say.
In the average case it does not happen, and in nooks all over the earth
sit men who are waiting, scarcely knowing in what way they are waiting,
much less that they are waiting in vain. Occasionally the call that awak-
ens-that accident which gives the "permission" to act-comes too late,
when best youth and strength for action has already been used up by sitting
still; and many have found to their horror when they "leaped up" that their
limbs had gone to sleep and their spirit had become too heavy. "It is too
late," they said to themselves, having lost their faith in themselves and
henceforth forever useless.

Could it be that in the realm of the spirit "Raphael without hands," taking
this phrase in the widest sense, is perhaps not the exception but the rule?29

Genius is perhaps not so rare after all-but the five hundred hands it re-
quires to tyrannize the kairos, "the right time," seizing chance by its
forelock.



　　　　　　　　　　　275



Anyone who does not want to see what is lofty in a man looks hat much more
keenly for what is low in him and mere foreground-and thus betrays him-
self.



　　　　　　　　　　　276



In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off
than the nobler one: the dangers for the latter must be greater; the prob-
ability that it will come to grief and perish is actually, in view of the
multiplicity of the conditions of its life, tremendous.

In a lizard a lost finger is replaced again; not so in man.



　　　　　　　　　　　277



-Bad enough! The same old story! When one has finished building ones'
house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned some-
thing that one really needed to know in the worst may-before one began.
The eternal distasteful "too later!"

The melancholy of everything finished!-



　　　　　　　　　　　278



Wanderer, who are you? I see you walking on your way without scorn, with-
out love, with unfathomable eyes; moist and sad like a sounding lead that
has returned to the light, unsated, from every depth-what did it seek
down there?-with a breast that does not sigh, with a lip that conceals its
disgust, with a hand that now reaches only slowly: who are you? what have
you done? Rest here: this spot is hospitable to all-recuperate! And whoever
you may be: what do you like now? what do you need for recreation? Name it:
whatever I have 1 offer to you!

"Recreation? Recreation? You are inquisitive! What are you saying! But give
me, please-"

What? What? Say it!

"Another mask! A second mask!"



　　　　　　　　　　　279



Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have
a way of embracing happiness as if they wanted to crush and suffocate it,
from jealousy: alas, they know only too 'well that it will flee.



　　　　　　　　　　　280



"Too bad! What? Isn't he going-back?"

Yes, but you understand him badly when you complain. He is going back like
anybody who wants to attempt a big jump.-



　　　　　　　　　　　281



-"Will people believe me? But I demand that they should believe me: I have
always thought little and badly of myself, only on very rare occasions, on-
ly when I had to, always without any desire for 'this subject,' more than
ready to digress from 'myself': always without faith in the result, owing
to an unconquerable mistrust of the possibility of self-knowledge which
went so far that ever in the concept of 'immediate knowledge,' which theore-
ticians permit themselves, I sensed a contradictio in adjecto: this whole
fact is almost the most certain thing I do know about myself. There must
be a kind of aversion in me to believing anything definite about myself.

"Does this perhaps point to a riddle? Probably; but fortunately none for
my own teeth.

"Perhaps it betrays the species to which I belong?

"But not to me-and of that I am glad."



　　　　　　　　　　　282



-"But whatever happened to you?"

"I don't know," he said hesitantly; "perhaps the Harpies flew over my table."
Nowadays it happens occasionally that a mild, moderate, reticent person sud-
denly goes into a rage, smashes dishes, upends the table, screams, raves, in-
sults everybody-and eventually walks off, ashamed, furious with himself-where?
what for? To starve by himself? To suffocate on his recollection?

If a person has the desires of a high and choosy soul and only rarely finds
his table set and his food ready, his danger will be great at all times; but
today it is extraordinary. Thrown into a noisy and plebeian age with which he
does not care to eat out of the same dishes, he can easily perish of hunger
and thirst or, if eventually he "falls to" after all-of sudden nausea.

Probably all of us have sat at tables where we did not belong; and precisely
the most spiritual among us, being hardest to nourish, know that dangerous
dyspepsia which comes of a sudden insight and disappointment about our food
and our neighbors at the table-the after-dinner nausea.



　　　　　　　　　　　283



It involves subtle and at the same time noble self-control, assuming that one
wants to praise at all, if one always praises only where one does not agree:
for in the other case one would after all praise oneself, which offends good
taste. Still this kind of self-control furnishes a neat occasion and provoca-
tion for constant misunderstandings. To be in a position to afford this real lux-
ury a taste and morality, one must not live among dolts of the spirit but rather
among people whose misunderstandings and blunders are still amusing owing to
their subtlety-or one will have to pay dearly for it!

"He praises me: hence he thinks I am right"-this asinine inference spoils half
our life for us hermits, for it leads asses to seek our neighborhood and friend-
ship.



　　　　　　　　　　　284



To live with tremendous and proud composure; always beyond-. To have and not to
have one's affects, one's pro and con, at will; to condescend to them, for a few
hours; to seat oneself on them as on a horse, often as on an ass-for one must
know how to make use of their stupidity as much as of their fire. To reserve one's
three hundred foregrounds; also the dark glasses; for there are cases when nobody
may look into our eyes, still less into our "grounds." And to choose for company
that impish and cheerful vice, courtesy. And to remain master of one's four vir-
tues: of courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude.32 For solitude is a virtue for
us, as a sublime bent and urge for cleanliness which guesses how all contact be-
tween man and man-"in society"-involves inevitable uncleanliness. All community
makes men-somehow, somewhere, sometime "common."



　　　　　　　　　　　285



The greatest events and thoughts-but the greatest thoughts are the greatest events-
are comprehended last: the generations that are contemporaneous with them do not
experience such events--they live right past them. What happens is a little like
what happens in the realm of stars. The light of the remotest stars comes last to
men; and until it has arrived man denies that there are--stars there. "How many
centuries does a spirit require to be comprehended?"-that is a standard, too; with
that, too, one creates an order of rank and etiquette that is still needed-for
spirit and star.



　　　　　　　　　　　286



"Here the vision is free, the spirit exalted." 34

But there is an opposite type of man that is also on a height and also has free
vision-but looks down.



　　　　　　　　　　　287



-What is noble? What does the word "noble" still mean to us today? What betrays,
what allows one to recognize the noble human being, under this heavy, overcast
sky of the beginning rule of the plebs that makes everything opaque and leaden?


It is not actions that prove him-actions are always open to many interpretations,
always unfathomable-nor is it "works' Among artists and scholars today one finds
enough of those who betray by their works how they are impelled by a profound de-
sire for what is noble; but just this need for what is noble is fundamentally dif-
ferent from the needs of the noble soul itself and actually the eloquent and dan-
gerous mark of its lack. It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here,
that determines the order of rank--to take up again an ancient religious formula
in a new and more profound sense: some fundamental certainty that a noble
soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps
lost.

The noble soul has reverence for itself.35



　　　　　　　　　　　288



There are human beings who have spirit in an inevitable way; they may turn and
twist as they please and hold their hands over their giveaway eyes (as if a hand
did not give away secrets!)-in the end it always will out that they have something
they conceal, namely spirit. One of the subtlest means for keeping up the decept-
ion at least as long as possible and of successfully appearing more stupid than
one is-which in ordinary life is often as desirable an umbrella-is called enthu-
siasm, if we include what belongs with it; for example, virtue. For as Galiani,
who should know, sap vertu est enthousiasme.



　　　　　　　　　　　289



In the writings" of a hermit one always also hears something of the echo of the
desolate regions, something of the whispered tones and the furtive look of soli-
tude; in his strongest words, even in his cry, there still vibrates a new and dan-
gerous kind of silence -of burying something in silence. When a man has been sit-
ting alone with his soul in confidential discord and discourse, year in and year
out, day and night; when in his cave-it may be a labyrinth or a gold mine-he has
become a cave bear or a treasure digger or a treasure guard and dragon; then even
his concepts eventually acquire a peculiar twilight color, an odor just as much
of depth as of must, something incommunicable and recalcitrant that blows at every
passerby like a chill.

The hermit does not believe that any philosopher-assuming that every philosopher
was first of all a hermit-ever expressed his real and ultimate opinions in books:
does one not write books precisely to conceal what one harbors? 37 Indeed, he will
doubt whether a philosopher could possibly have "ultimate and real" opinions, whe-
ther behind every one of his caves there is not, must not be, another deeper cave-
a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abysmally deep
ground behind every ground, under every attempt to furnish "grounds." 38 Every phil-
osophy is a foreground philosophy-that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something
arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging
deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about
it." Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout,
every word also a mask.



　　　　　　　　　　　290



Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunder-
stood. The latter may hurt his vanity, but the former his heart, his sympathy,
which always says: "Alas, why do you want to have as hard a time as I did?"



　　　　　　　　　　　291



Man, a manifold, mendacious, artificial, and opaque animal, uncanny to the other
animals less because of his strength than because of his cunning and shrewdness,
has invented the good conscience to enjoy his soul for once as simple; and the
whole of morality is a long undismayed forgery which alone makes it at all pos-
sible to enjoy the sight of the soul. From this point of view much more may be-
long in the concept of "art" than is generally believed.



　　　　　　　　　　　292



A philosopher-is a human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects,
hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as from
outside, as from above and below, as by his type of experiences and lightning
bolts; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a fatal hu-
man being around whom there are constant rumblings and growlings, crevices, and
uncanny doings. A philosopher-alas, a being that often runs away from itself, of-
ten is afraid of itself-but too inquisitive not to "come to" again-always back to
himself.



　　　　　　　　　　　293



A man who says, "I like this, I take this for my own and want to protect it and
defend it against anybody"; a man who is able to manage something, to carry out
a resolution, to remain faithful to a thought, to hold a woman, to punish and
prostrate one who presumed too much; a man who has his wrath and his sword and
to whom the weak, the suffering, the hard pressed, and the animals, too, like to
come" and belong by nature, in short a man who is by nature a master-when such
a man has pity, well, this pity has value. But what good is the pity of those who
suffer. Or those who, worse, preach pity.

Almost everywhere in Europe today we find a pathological sensitivity and recepti-
vity to pain; also a repulsive incontinence in lamentation, an increase in tend-
erness that would use religion and philosophical bric-a-brac to deck itself out
as something higher--there is a veritable cult of suffering. The unmanliness of
what is baptized as "pity" in the circles of such enthusiasts is, I should think,
what always meets the eye first.

This newest kind of bad taste should be exorcized vigorously nd thoroughly; and
I finally wish that one might place around ne's heart and neck the good, amulet
"gai saber"-"gay science," a make it plain to the plain.



　　　　　　　　　　　294



The Olympian vice.- In despite of that philosopher who, being a real Englishman,
tried to bring laughter into ill repute among all thinking men--laughing is a bad
infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome"
(Hobbes)41--I should actually risk an order of rank among philosophers depending
on the rank of their laughter-all the way up to those capable of golden laughter.
And supposing that gods, too, philophize, which has been suggested to me by many
an inference tould not doubt that they also know how to laugh the while in sup-
erhuman and new way-and at the expense of all serious things. Gods enjoy mock-
ery; it seems they cannot suppress laughter even during holy rites.



　　　　　　　　　　　295



The genius of the heart, as that great concealed one possesses it, the tempter god"
and born pied piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the ne-
therworld of every soul; who does not say a word or cast a glance in which there
is no consideration and ulterior enticement; whose mastery includes the knowledge
of how to seem-not what he is but what is to those who follow him one more
constraint to press ever closer to him in order to follow him ever more inwardly
and thoroughly-the genius of the heart who silences all that is loud and self-
satisfied, teaching it to listen; who smooths rough souls and lets them taste a
new desire-to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them-
the genius of the heart who teaches the doltish and rash hand to hesitate and
reach out more delicately; who guesses the concealed and forgotten treasure,
the drop of graciousness and sweet spirituality under dim and thick ice, and is a
divining rod for very grain of gold that has long lain buried in the dungeon of much
mud and sand; the genius of the heart from whose touch everyone walks away
richer, not having received grace and surprised, not as blessed and oppressed by
alien goods, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown
at and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps more unsure, tenderer, more fragile,
more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and cur-
rents, full of new dissatisfaction and undertows-but what am I doing, my friends?

Of whom am I speaking to you? Have I forgotten myself se far that I have not e-
ven told you his name? Unless you have guessed by yourselves who this question-
able spirit and god is whc wants to be praised in such fashion. For just as hap-
pens to every. one who from childhood has always been on his way and in foreign
parts, many strange and not undangerous spirits have cro my path, too, but above
all he of whom I was speaking just now and he again and again-namely, no less
a one than the Dionysus, that great ambiguous one and tempter god to whom once
offered, as you know, in all secrecy and reverence, my firstborn-as the last,
it seems to mc, who offered him a sacrifice: for I save found no one who under-
stood what I was doing then.44

Meanwhile I have learned much, all too much, more about he philosophy of this
god, and, as I said, from mouth to mouth-I, the last disciple and initiate of
the god Dionysus-and I supoose I might begin at long last to offer you, my
friends, a few tastes of this philosophy, insofar as this is permitted to me? In
an undertone, as is fair, for it concerns much that is secret, new, strange,
odd, uncanny.

Even that Dionysus is a philosopher, and that gods, too, thus do philosophy,
seems to me to be a novelty that is far from innocuous and might arouse suspi-
cion precisely among philosophers. Among you, my friends, it will not seem so
offensive, unless it comes too late and not at the right moment; for today, as
I have been told, you no longer like to believe in God and gods. Perhaps I
shall also have to carry frankness further in my tale than will always be plea-
sing to the strict habits of your ears? Certainly the god in question went fur-
ther, very much further, in dialogues of this sort and was always many steps a-
head of me.

Indeed, if it were permitted to follow human custom in ac-cording to him many
solemn pomp-and-virtue names, I should have to give abundant praise to his ex-
plorer and discoverer courage, his daring honesty, truthfulness, and love of
wisdom. But such a god has no use whatever for all such venerable junk and pomp.
"Keep that," he would say, "for yourself and your likes and whoever else has
need of it! I have no reason for covering nakedness."

One guesses: this type of deity and philosopher is perhaps lacking in shame?

Thus he once said: "Under certain circumstances I love what is human"-and with
this he alluded to Ariadne who was present's -"man is to my mind an agreeable,
courageous, inventive animal that has no equal on earth; it finds its way in
any labyrinth. I am well disposed towards him: I often reflect how I might yet
advance him and make him stronger, more evil, and more profound than he is."

"Stronger, more evil, and more profound?" I asked startled. "Yes," he said once
more; "stronger, more evil, and more profound; also more beautiful"-and at
that the tempter god smiled with his halcyon smile as though he had just paid
an enchanting compliment. Here we also see: what this divinity lacks is not only
a sense of shame-and there are also other good reasons for conjecturing that in
several respects all of the gods could learn from us humans. We humans are-more
humane.''-



　　　　　　　　　　　296



Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long
ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and
secret spices-you made me sneeze and laugh-and now? You have already taken off
your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already
look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been differ-
ent? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese
brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written-what are the only things
we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and
losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and
feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary
of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand-by our hand! We immor-
talize what cannot live and fly much longer-only weary and mellow things! And
it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone
I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and
browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in
your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved-
wicked thoughts!





　　　　　　　From High Mountains


　　　　　　　 　AFTERSONG



O noon of life! O time to celebrate?
O summer garden!
Restlessly happy and expectant, standing.
Watching all day and night, for friends I wait:
Where are you, friends? Conte! It is time? It's late!

The glacier's gray adorned itself for you
Today with roses;
The brook seeks you, and full of longing rises
The wind, the cloud, into the vaulting blue
To look for you from dizzy bird's-eye view.

Higher than mine no table has been set:
Who lives so near
The stars or dread abysses half as sheer?
My realm, like none, is almost infinite,
And my sweet honey--who has tasted it?-

-There you are, friends--Alas, the man you sought
You do not find here?
You hesitate, amazed? Anger were kinder!
I--changed so much? A different face and gait?
And what I am--for you, friends, I am not?

Am I another? Self-estranged? From me--
Did I elude?
A wrestler who too oft himself subdued?
Straining against hit strength too frequently,
Wounded and stopped by his own victory?

I sought where cutting winds are at their worst?
I learned to dwell
Where no one lives, in bleakest polar hell,
Unlearned mankind and god, prayer and curse?
Became a ghost that wanders over glaciers?

--My ancient friends! Alas! You show the shock
0f love and fear!
No, leave! Do not be wroth! You--can't live here--
Here, among distant fields of ice and rock--
Here one must be a hunter, chamois-like.

A wicked archer I've become.--The ends
Of my bow kiss;
Only the strongest bends his bow like this.
No arrow strikes like that which my bow sends:
Away from here--for your own good, my friends!

You leave?--My heart: no heart has borne worse hunger;
Your hope stayed strong:
Don't shut your gates; new friends may come along.
Let old ones go. Don't be a memory-monger!
Once you were young--now you are even younger.

What once tied us together, one hope's bond--
Who reads the signs
Love once inscribed on it, the pallid lines?
To parchment! compare it that the hand
Is loath to touch--discolored, dark, and burnt.

No longer friends--there is no word for those--
It is a wraith
That knocks at night and tries to rouse my faith,
And looks at me and says: "Once friendship was--'
--O wilted word, once fragrant as the rose.

Youth's longing misconceived inconstancy.
Those whom I deemed
Changed to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,
Have aged and lost our old affinity:
One has to change to stay akin to me.

O noon of life! Our second youthful stated
O summer garden!
Restlessly happy and expectant, standing,
Looking all day and night, for friends! wait:
For new friends! Come! les time? It's late!

This song is over--longing's dulcet cry
Died in my mouth:
A wizard did it, friend in time of drought,
The friend of noon--no, do not ask me who--
At noon it was that one turned into two--

Sure of our victory, we celebrate
The feast of feasts:
Friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests!
The world now laughs, rent are the drapes of fright,
The wedding is at hand of dark and light-