(1886)

CONTENTS

Preface
On the Prejudices of Philosophers
The Free Spirit
What Is Religious
Epigrams and Interludes
Natural History of Morals
We Scholars
Our Virtues
Peoples and Fatherlands
What Is Noble
From High Mountains: Aftersong




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Preface




Supposing truth is a woman--what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that
all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about
women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they
have usually approached truth so far1 have been awkward and very improper methods
for winning a woman's heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to
be won--and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discourag-
ed. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fall-
en, that all dogmatism lies on the ground--even more, that all dogmatism is dying.

Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, how-
ever solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more
than a noble childishness and tyronism. And perhaps the time is at hand when it
will be comprehended again and again how little used to be sufficient to furnish the
cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers' edifices as the dogma-
tists have built so far: any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the
soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has. not
even yet ceased to do mischief); some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar.
or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too
human facts.

The dogmatists' philosophy was, let us hope. only a promise across millennia--as as-
trology was in still earlier times when perhaps more work, money, acuteness, and pa-
tience were lavished in its service than for any real science so far: to astrology
and its "supra-terrestrial" claims we owe the grand style of architecture in Asia
and Egypt. It seems that all great things first have to bestride the earth in mon-
strous and frightening masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of human-
ity with eternal demands: dogmatic philosophy was such a mask; for example, the Ve-
danta doctrine in Asia and Platonism in Europe.

Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be conceded that the worst,
most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatist's error--namely,
Plato's invention of the pure spirit and the good as such. But now that it is over-
come, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can
enjoy a healthier--sleep, we, whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all
that strength which has been fostered2 by the fight against this error. To be sure,
it meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of
all life, when one spoke of spirit and the good as Plato did. Indeed, as a physician
one might ask: "How could the most beautiful growth of antiquity, Plato, contract such
a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt him after all? Could Socrates have been
the corrupter of youth after all' And did he deserve his hemlock?"

But the fight against Plato or, to speak more clearly and for "the people," the fight
against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia--for Christianity is Plato-
nism for "the people"--has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the
like of which bad never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot
for the most distant goals. To be sure. European man experiences this tension as need
and distress: twice already attempts have been made in the grand style to unbend the
how--once by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of the democratic enlight-
enment which, with the aid of freedom of the press and newspaper-reading, might in-
deed bring it about that the spirit would no longer experience itself so easily as a
"need." (The Germans have invented gunpowder--all due respect for that!--but then
they made up for that: they invented the press.)3 But we who are neither Jesuits nor
democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans 4 and free, very free spirits--
we still feel it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow. And
perhaps also the arrow, the task, and--who knows?--the goal--

Sits Maria, Upper Engadine,
June 1885.5




　　　　　　　　　　　Part One1


　　　　　On the Prejudices of Philosophers



　　　　　　　　　　　　1.



The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness
of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect--what questions has this will
to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! That is a
long story even now--and yet it seems as if it had scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that
we should finally become suspicious, lose patience, and turn away impatiently? that we
should finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions, too? Who is it really that puts
questions to us here? What in us really wants "truth"?

Indeed we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will--until we fin-
ally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. We asked about the val-
ue of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even
ignorance?

The problem of the value of truth came before us--or was it we who Came before the prob-
lem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of ques-
tions and question marks.

And though it scarcely seems credible, it finally almost seems to us as if the problem
had never even been put so far--as if we were the first to see it, fix it with our eyes,
and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater.



　　　　　　　　　　　　2




"How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of error? or
the will to truth out of the will to deception? or selfless deeds out of selfishness?
or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust? Such origins are impossible; who-
ever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse; the things of the highest value must base
another, peculiar origin--they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, decep-
tive, paltry world. from this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being,
the intransitory, the hidden god. the 'thing-in-itself--there must be their basis, and
nowhere else."

This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which give away
the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all
their logical proce-dures; it is on account of this "faith" that they trouble them-
selves about "knowledge," about something that is finally baptized solemnly as "the
truth." The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values.2
It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt
right here at the threshold where it was surely most ne.essary--even if they vowed to
themselves. "de omnibus dubitamium."3

For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether
these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal,
are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps
even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an
expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the truthful. the selfless
may deserve, it would still he possible that a higher and more fundamental value for
life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be
possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precise-
ly that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seeming-
ly opposite things--maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!

But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous maybes? For that, one real-
ly has to wait for the advent of a new species of philosophers, such as have somehow
another and converse taste and propensity from those we have known so far--philosophers
of the dangerous "maybe" in every sense.

And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming up.



　　　　　　　　　　　　3



After having looked long enough between the philosopher's lines and fingers, I say to my-
self: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among in-
stinctive actisities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking. We have to relearn
here, as one has had to relearn about heredity and what is "innate." As the act of birth
deserves no consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity, so "being con-
scious" is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the con-
scious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by
his instincts.

Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or,
more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life. For
example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance
worth less than "truth"--such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance
for us, nevertheless mere foreground estimates, a certin kind of niaiseries 4 which may be
necessary for the preservation of just such beings as we are. Supposing, that is, that
not just man is the "measure of things"5--



　　　　　　　　　　　　4



The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in
this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is
life-promoting. life-preserving, specks-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating.
And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the
synthetic judgments a priori)6 are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting
the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the
unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means
of numbers, man could not live--that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing
life and a denial of life, To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means
resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this
would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.



　　　　　　　　　　　　5



What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not
that one discovers again and again how innocent they are--how often and how easily they
make mistakes and go astray; in short, their childishness and childlikeness--but that they
are not honest enough in their work, although they all make a lot of virtuous noise when
the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discov-
ered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divine-
ly unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and
doltish--and talk of 'inspiration"); while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed
a kind of "inspiration"--most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made
abstract--that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all ad-
vocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their preju-
dices which they baptize "truths"--and very far from having the courage of the conscience
that admits this, precisely this, to itself; very far from having the good taste of the cou-
rage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuber-
ance, to mock itself.

The equally stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical
bypaths that lead to his "categorical imperative"--really lead astray and seduce--this spect-
acle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and find it quite amusing to watch closely the
subtle tricks of old moralists and preachers of morals. Or consider the hocus-pocus of math-
ematical form with which Spinoza clad his philosophy--really "the love of his wisdom," to
reader that word fairly and squarely--in mail and mask, to strike terror at the very outset
into the heart of any assailant who should dare to glance at that invincible maiden and Pal-
las Athena: how much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick hermit
betrays!



　　　　　　　　　　　　6



Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the
personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that
the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from
which the whole plant had grown.

Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really
came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does
he) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a "drive to knowledge" is the father of philoso-
phy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misun-
derstanding) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to
what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds)
will find that all of them have done philosophy at some timc--and that every single one of
them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence
and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive wants to be master--and it
attempts to philosophize in that spirit.

To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men, things may be different--"better," if
you like--there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge, some small, indepen-
dent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation
from all the other drives of the scholar. The real "interests" of the scholar therefore lie us-
ually somewhere else--say, in his family, or in making money, or in politics. Indeed, it is al-
most a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is placed at this or that spot
in science, and whether the "promising" young worker turns himself into a good philologist or
an expert on fungi or a chemist: it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that.
In the philosopher, conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal;7 and above all,
his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is--that is, in what order of rank
the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.



　　　　　　　　　　　　7



How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus
permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. That means
literally--and this is the foreground meaning--flatterers of Dionysius," in other words, ty-
rant's baggage and lickspittles; but in addition to this he also wants to say, "they are all
actors, there is nothing genuine about them" (for Dionysokolax was a popular name for an act-
or).8 And the latter is really the malice that Epicurus aimed at Plato: he was peeved by the
grandiose manner, the mise en scene 9 at which Plato and his disciples were so expert--at
which Epicurus was not an expert--he, that old schoolmaster from Samos, who sat, hidden away,
in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books--who knows? perhaps from rage
and ambition against Plato?

It took a hundred years until Greece found out who this garden god, Epicurus, had been.-- Did
they find out?--



　　　　　　　　　　　　8



There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher's "conviction" appears on the stage--
or to use the language of an ancient Mystery:

　　　Adventavit asinus,
　　　Pulcher et fortissimus.10



　　　　　　　　　　　　9



"According to nature" you want to live? 0 you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Im-
agine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without pur-
poses and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the
same time; imagine indifference itselt as a power--how could you live according to this indif-
ference? Living--is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living--
estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing
your imperative "live according to nature" meant at bottom as much as "live according to life"--
how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?

In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon
of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers
Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature--even in nature--and incorpo-
rate them in her you demand that she hould be nature "according to the Stoa," and you would
like all existence to exist only after your own image--at an Immense eternal glorification
and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so
long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically,
that you are no longer able to see her differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still
inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves--Stoicism
is self-tyranny--nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoics a piece of nature?

But this is an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens
today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the
world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself,
the most spiritual will to power, to the "creation of the world,' to the causa prima.11



　　　　　　　　　　　　10



The eagerness and subtlety--I might even say, shrewdness--with which the problem of "the real
and the apparent world" is to-day attacked all over Europe makes one think and wonder; and an-
yone who hears nothing in the background except a "will to truth," certainly does not have
the best of ears. In rare and isolated Instances it may really be the case that such a will
to truth, some extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician's ambition to hold a hope-
less position, may participate and ultimately prefer even a handful of "certainty" to a whole
carload of beautiful possibilities; there may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience
who prefer even a certain nothing to an uncertain something to lie down on--and die. But this
is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul--however courageous the gestures
of such a virtue may look.

It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for
life. When they side against appearance, and speak of "perspective," with a new arrogance; when
they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the visual ev-
idence that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently in good humor, let their securest
possession go (for in what does one at present believe more firmly than in one's body?) --who
knows if they are not trying at bottom to win back somehing that was formerly an even securer
possession, something of the ancient domain of the faith of former times, perhaps the "immortal
soul," perhaps "the old God," in short, ideas by which we could live better, that is to say,
more vigorously and cheerfully, than by "modern ideas"? There is mistrust of these modern i-
deas in this attitude, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there
is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, unable to endure any longer the bric-a-
brac of concepts of the most diverse origin, which is the form in which so-called positivism
offers itself on the market today; a disgust of the more fastidious taste at the village-fair
motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters in whom there is nothing new or
genuine, except this motleyness. In this, it seems to me, we should agree with these skeptical
anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of today: their instinct, which repels them from mod-
ern reality, is unrefuted--what do their retrograde bypaths concern us! The main thing about them
is not that they wish to go `back," but that they wish to get--away. A little more strength,
light, courage, and artistic power, and they would want to rise--not return!



　　　　　　　　　　　　11



It seems to me that today attempts are made everywhere to divert attention from the actual in-
fluence Kant exerted on German thilosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value he set
upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his table of categories; with that in his
hand he said: "This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of met-
aphysics."

Let us only understand this "could be" He was proud of having discovered a new faculty in
man, the faculty for synthetic judgments, a priori. Suppose he deceived himself in this matter;
the development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride,
and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover, if possible, something still
prouder--at all events "new faculties"!

But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?"
Kant asked himself--and what really is his answer? "By virtue of a faculty"12 "--but unfortu-
nately not in. five words, but so circumstantially, venerably, and with such display of German pro-
fundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical niaiserie allemande 13 involv-
ed in such an answer. People were actually beside themselves with delight over this new fac-
ulty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered a moral faculty in
man--for at that time the Germans were still moral and not yet addicted to Realpolitik.

The honeymoon of German phlosophy arrived. All the young theologians of the Tubingen semin-
ary went into the bushes--all looking for "faculties." And what did they not find--in tha inno-
cent, rich, and still youthful period of the German spirit, to which romanticism, the malig-
nant fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet distinguish between "finding" and "invent-
ing"!14 Above all, a faculty for the "surprasensible": Schelling christened it Intellectual in-
tuition, and thus gratified the most heartfelt cravings of the Germans, whose cravings were
at bottom pious. One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and enthusiastic
movement, which was really youthfulness, however boldly it disguised itself in hoary and sen-
ile concepts, than to take it seriously or worse, to treat it with moral indignation. Enough, one
got older and the dream vanished. A time came when people scrachted their heads, and they still
scratch them today. One had been dreaming, and first and foremost--old Kant. "By virtue of a
faculty"--he had said. or at least meant. But is that--an answer? An explanation? Or is it
not rather merely a repetition of the quation? How does opium induce sleep? "By virtue of a
faculty," namely the virtu: dormitiva, replies the doctor in Molter;

　　　Quirt est in eo virtus dormitiva.
　　　Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.15

But such replies belong in comedy, and it is high time to re-place the Kantian question, "How
are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judg-
ments necessary?"--and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for
the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be
false judgments fot all that! Or to speak more clearly and coarsely: synthetic judgments a
priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are no-
thing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a fore-
ground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life.

Finally, to call to mind the enormous influence that "German philosophy"--I hope you under-
stand its right to quotation marks-- has exercised throughout the whole of Europe, there is
no doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva had a share in it: it was a delight to the noble id-
lers, the virtuous, the mystics, artists, three-quarter Christians, and political obscurant-
ists of all nations, to find, thanks to German philosophy, an antidote to the still predomi-
nant sensualism which overflowed from the last century into this, in short--"sensus assoupire."



　　　　　　　　　　　　12



As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there are, and in Europe
perhaps no one in the learned world is now so unscholarly as to attach serious significance
to it, except for convenient household use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)--
thanks chiefly to the Dalmatian Boscovicht he and the Pole Corpemicus have been the greatest
and most successful opponents of visual evidence so far. For while Copernicus has persuaded
us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand fast, Boscovich has
taught us to abjure the belief in the last part of the earth that "stood fast"--the belief'
in "substance," in "matter." in the earth-residuum and particle-atom:16 it is the greatest tri-
umph over the senses that has been gained on earth so far.

One must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless war unto death, a-
gainst the "atomistic need" which still leads a dangerous afterlife in places where no one
suspects it, just like the more celebrated "metaphysical need": one must also, first of all,
give the finishing stroke to that other and more calamitous atomism which Christianity has
taught best and longest, the soul atomism. Let it be permitted to designate by this expres-
sion the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as
a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between ourselves, it
is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" at the same time, and thus to renounce one
of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses--as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists
who can hardly touch on the soul" without immediately losing it. But the way is open for
new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal
soul," and "soul as subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the drives
and affects,"17 want henceforth to have citizens' rights in science. When the new psych-
ologist puts an end to the superstitions which have so far flourished with almost tropical
luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he practically exiles himself into a new desert and
a new suspicion--it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more com-
fortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he also condemns
himself to nwention--and--who knows?--perhaps to discovery.



　　　　　　　　　　　　13



Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the car-
dinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength
--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most fre-
quent results.

In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles--one
of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency).18 Thus
method, which must be essentially economy of principles, demands it.



　　　　　　　　　　　　14



It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation
and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation; but in-
sofar as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to
come must be regarded as more--namely, as an explanation. Eyes and fingers speak in its favor,
visual evidence and pal-pableness do, too: this strikes an age with fundamentally plebeian
tastes as fascinating, persuasive, and cum incing--after all, it follows instinctively the can-
on of truth of eternally popular sensualism. What is clear, what is "explained"? Only what
can be seen and felt--every problem has to be pursued to that point. Conversely, the charm of
the Platonic way of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking, consisted precisely in res-
istance to obvious sense-evidence--perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more demand-
ing senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining
masters of their senses--and this by means of pale, cold, gray concept nets which they threw
over the motley whirl of the senses--the mob of the senses, as Plato said. In this overcoming
of the world, and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, there was an enjoyment
different from that which the physicists of today offer us--and also the Darwinists and anti-
teleologists among the workers in physiology, with their principle of the "smallest possible
force" and the greatest possible stupidity. "Where man cannot find anything to ace or to grasp,
he has no further business"--that is certainly art imperative different from the Platonic one,
but it may be thi, right imperative for a tough, industrious race of machinists and bridge-
builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do.



　　　　　　　　　　　　15



To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist that the sense organs are not
phenomena in the sense of idealistic philosophy; as such they could not be causes! Sensual-
ism, therefore, at least as a regulative hypothesis, if not as a heuristic principle.

What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body,
as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs them-
selves would be--the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad
absurdum,19 assuming that the concept of a causa sui 20 is something fundamentally absurd.
Consequently, the external world is nut the work of our organs--?



　　　　　　　　　　　　16



There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties";
for example, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though
knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as "the thing in itself," without
any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that "immediate cer-
tainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a contradictio
in adjecto,21 I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the se-
duction of words!

Let the people suppose that knowledge means knowing things entirely; the philosopher must
say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, "I think,"
I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to
prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily he something that
thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought
of as a cause, that there is an "ego," and, finally, that it is already determined what
is to he designated by thinking--that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already
decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is
just happening is not perhaps "willing" or "feeling"? In short, the assertion "I think"
assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I
know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with
further "knowledge," it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.

In place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the case at hand,
the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, truly
searching questions of the intellect; to wit: "From where do I get the concept of thinking?
Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even
of an ego as cause, and finally of an ego as the cause of thought?" Whoever ventures to
answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception,
like the person who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and c
ertain"--will encounter a smile and two question marks from a philosopher nowadays. "Sir,"
the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not
mistaken; but why insist on the truth?"--



　　　　　　　　　　　　17



With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small
terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede--namely, that a thought comes
when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the
case to say that the subject "I" is the coodition of the predicate "think." it thinks; but
that this "it" is precisely the famous old "ego" is, to put it mildly, only a supposition,
an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After an, one has even gone
too far with this "it thinks"--even the "it" contains an interpretation of the process, and
does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit:
"Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently--"

It was pretty much according to the same schema that the older atomism sought, besides the
operating "power," that lump of matter in which it resides and out of which it operates--
the atom. More rigorous minds, however, teamed at last to get along without this "earth-
residuum," and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to
get along without the little "it" (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego).



　　　　　　　　　　　　18



It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely there-
by that it attracts subtler minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of a "free
will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; again and again someone comes along who
feels he is strong enough to refute it.



　　　　　　　　　　　　19



Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as if it were the best-known thing in the
world; indeed, Schopenhaucr has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to
us, absolutely and completely known, without subtraction or addition. But again and again it
seems to me that in this case, too, Schopenbauer only did what philosophers are in the habit
of doing--he adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated it. Willing seems to me to be above
all something complicated, something that is a unit only as a word--and it is precisely in
this one word that the popular prejudice lurks, which has defeated the always inadequate cau-
tion of philosophers. So let us for once be more cautious, let us be "unphilosophical": let
us say that in all willing there is, first, a plurality of sensations, namely, the sensation of the
state "away from which," the sensation of the state "towards which," the sensations of this
"from" and "towards" themselves, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation, which,
even without our putting into motion "arms and legs," begins its action by force of habit as
soon as we anything.

Therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of temptations) are to be recognized
as ingredients of the will, so, secondly, should thinking also: in every act of the will there
is a ruling thought--let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the "willing,"
as if any will would then remain over!

Third, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an affect,
and specifically the affect of the command. That which is termed "freedom of the will" is
essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must
obey"--this consciousness is inherent in every vial; and equally so the straining of the atten-
tion, the straight look liat fixes itself exclusively on one aim, the unconditional evaluaion
that "this and nothing else is necessary now," the inward certainty that obedience will be ren-
dered--and whatever else be. longs to the position of the commander. A man who wills com-
mands something within himself that renders obedience, or that be believes renders obedi-
ence.

But now let us notice what is strangest about the will--this manifold thing for which the
people have only one word: inasmuch as in the given circumstances we are at the same
time the commanding and the obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the sensa-
tions of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and motion, which usually begin im-
mediately after the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to dis-
regard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic concept
"I," a whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false evaluations of the
will itself, has become attached to the act of willing--to such a degree that he who wills
believes sincerely. that willing suffices for action. Since in the great majority of cases
there has been exercise of will only when the effect of the command--that is, obedience;
that is, the action--was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the
feeling, as if there were a necessity of effect. In short, he who wills believes with a fair
amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the car-
rying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensa-
tion of power which accompanies all success.

"Freedom of the will"--that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the per-
son exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the exe-
cutor of the order--who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks with-
in himself that it was really his will itself that overcame them. In this way the person ex-
ercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the
useful "under-wills" or under-souls--indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of
many souls--to his feelings of delight as commander. L'effet c'est moi:22 what happens here
is what happens in every welt-constructed and happy commonwealth; namely, the governing
class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing it is abso-
lutely a question of commanding and obeying. on the basis, as already said, of a social
structure composed of many souls." Hence a philosopher should claim the right to include will-
ing as such within the sphere of morals--morals being understood the doctrine of the rela-
tions of supremacy under which the phenomenon of "life" comes to be.



　　　　　　　　　　　　20



That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving.
but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly and arbi-
trarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much
to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent--is betrayed in the end also by
the fact that most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of
possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same
orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical system-
atic wills, something within them leads them, something compels them in a definite order, one
after the other--to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts.
Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and
a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and elusive household of the soul, out of which those
concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order.

The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek. and German philosophizing is explained
easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common phil-
osophy of grammar--I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar
grammatical functions--that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and
sequence of tilosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain her possibi-
lities of world-interpretation. It is highly probable that silosophers within the domain of
the Ural-Altaic languages (where the concept of the subject is least developed) look other-
wise "into the world," and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the
Indo-Germanic peoples and the Muslims; the spell of certain grammatical functions is ulti-
mately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.

So much by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality regarding the origin of ideas.



　　　　　　　　　　　　21



The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort
of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle
itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire. for "free- dom of
the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in
the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility
for one's ac-tions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance and society
involves nothing kss than to be precisely this causa su and, with more than Manchhausen's
audacity, to pull oneself ug into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.23
Suppose someone were thus to see through the boorish simplicity of this celebrated concept
of "free will" and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his "enlight-
enment" a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous con-
ception of "free will": I mean "unfree will," which amounts to a misuse of cause and ef-
fect. One should not wrongly reify "cause" and "effect," as the natural scientists do (and
whoever, like them, now "naturalizes" in his thinking), according to the prevailing mech-
anical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it "effects" its end; one
should use "cause" and "effect" only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional
fictions for the purpose of designation and communication--not for explanation. In the "in-
itself' there is nothing of "causal connections," of "necessity," or of "psychological non-
freedom"; there the effect dues not follow the cause, there is no rule of "law." It is we
alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number,
law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into
things as if it existed "in itself," we act once more as we have always acted--mythologi-
cally. The "unfree will" is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak
wills.

It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker senses in every
"causal connection" and "psycho'. logical necessity" something of constraint, need, com-
pulsion to obey, pressure, and unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings --the per-
son betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the "unfreedom of the
will" is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a pro-
foundly personal manner: some will not give up their "responsibility," their belief in them-
selves, the personal right to their merits at any price (the vain races belong to this
class). Others, on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for
anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to lay the blame for themselves some-
where else. The latter, when they write books, are in the habit today of taking the side
of criminals; a sort of socialist pity is their most attractive disguise. And as a matter
of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose
as "la religion de la souffrance humaine";24 that is its "good taste."



　　　　　　　　　　　　22



Forgive me as an old philologist who cannot desist from the malice of putting his finger on
bad modes of interpretation: but "nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists talk
so proudly, as though--why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad "philology."
It is no matter of fact, no "text," but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and
perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts
of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality before the law; nature is no different in that res-
pect, no better off than we are"--a fine instance of ulterior motivatior, in which the ple-
beian antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic as well as a second and more refin-
ed atheism are disguised once more. "Ni Dieu, ni maitre"25--that is what you, too, want;
and therefore "cheers for the law of nature!"--is it not so? But as said above, that is in-
terpretation, not text; and somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and modes
of interpretation, could read out of the same "nature," and with regard to the same phenomena,
rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power--an inter-
preter who would picture the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all "will to power"
so vividly that almost every word, even the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually seem un-
suitable, or a weakening and attenuating metaphor--being too human--but he might, neverthe-
less, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary"
and "calculable" course, not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lack-
ing, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment. Supposing that this
also is only interpretation--and you will be eager enough to make this objection?--well, so
much the better.



　　　　　　　　　　　　23



All psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend
into the depths. To understand it is morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will
to power. as I do--nobody has yet come close to doing this even in thought--insofar as it is
permissible to recognize in what has been written so far a symptom of what has so far been kept
silent. The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most spiritual world, which
would seem to be the coldest and most devoid of presuppositions, and has obviously operated in
an injurious, inhibiting, blinding, and distorting manner. A proper physio-psychology has to
contend with unconscious resistance in the heart if the investigator, it has "the heart" a-
gainst it: even a doctrine of he reciprocal dependence of the "good" and the "wicked" drives,
causes (as refined immorality) distress and aversion in a still hale nd hearty conscience--
still more so, a doctrine of the derivation of all good impulses from wicked ones. If, however,
a person should regard even the affects of hatred, envy, covetousness, and the lust to rule as
conditions of life, as factors which. fundamentally and essentially, must be present in the gen-
eral economy of life (and must, therefore, be further enhanced if life is to be further enhanced)
--he will suffer from such a view of things as from seasickness. And yet even this hypothesis
is far from being the strangest and most painful in this immense and almost new domain of dan-
gerous inghts; and there are in fact a hundred good reasons why everyone should keep away from
it who--can.

On the other hand, if one has once drifted there with one's bark, well! all right! let us
clench our teeth! let us open our eyes and keep our hand firm on the helm! We sail right over
morality, we crush, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by .daring to make our
voyage there--but what matter are we! Never yet did a profounder world of insight reveal itself
to daring travelers and adventurers, and the psychologist who thus "makes sacrifice---it is
not the sacrifizio dell' intelletto,26 on the contrary --will at least be entitled to demand
in return that psychology shall be recognized again27 as the queen of the sciences, for whose
sere ice and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now again the path to
the fundamental problems.




　　　　　　　　　　　Part Two


　　　　　　　　THE FREE SPIRIT



　　　　　　　　　　　　24.



O sancta simplieitas! 28 In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can
never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! how we have made
everything around too clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give our
senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps
and wrong inferences! how from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in
order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, lack of scruple and caution, heartiness,
and gaiety of life--in order to enjoy life! And only on this now solid, granite foundation
of ignorance could knowledge rise so far--the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far
more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its
opposite, but--as its refinement!

Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue
to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation: even
if the inveterate Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and
blood,"infects the words even of those of us who know better--here and there we under-
stand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep
us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world--
at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life.



　　　　　　　　　　　　25



After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would like to be heard; it appeals to
the most serious. Take care, philosophers and friend, of knowledge, and beware of martyr-
dom! Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the
innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against object-
ions and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes when in the struggle with dan-
ger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of hostility, you have to
pose as protectors of truth upon earth--as though "the truth" were such an innocuous and
incompetent creature as to re-quire protectors! and you of all people, you knights of the
most sorrowful countenance,29: dear loafers and cobweb-spinners of the spirit! After all,
you know well enough that it cannot be of any consequence if you of all people are proved
right; you know that no philosopher so far has been proved right, and that there might be
a more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark that you place after your spe--
cial words and favorite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the sol-
emn gestures and trumps before accusers and law courts.30: Rather, go away. Flee into con-
cealment. And have your masks and subtlety,31 that you may bo mistaken for what you are not,
or feared a little. And don't forget the garden, the garden with golden trelliswork. And have
people around you who are as a garden--or as music on the waters in the evening. when
the day is turning into memories. Choose the good solitude, the free, playful, light sol-
itude that gives you, too, the right to remain good in some sense. How poisonous. how
crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, that cannot he waged openly by means of
force! How personal does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible en-
emies! These outcasts of society, these long-pursued, wickedly persecuted ones--also the
compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos--always become in the end, even
under the most spiritual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it,
sophisticated vengeance-seekers and poison-brewers (let someone lay bare the foundation
of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which
is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that his philosophical sense of humor has left him.
The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces into the
light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and if one has so fat contemplated
bun only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand
the dangerous desire to see him also in his degeneration (degenerated into a "martyr,"
into a stage. and platform-bawler). Only. that it is necessary with such a desire to be
clear what spectacle one will see in any case--merely a satyr play, merely an epilogue
farce, merely the continued proof that the long. real tragedy is at an end, assuming that
every philosophy was in its genesis a long tragedy.



　　　　　　　　　　　　26



Every choice human being strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is
saved from the crowd, the many. the peat majority--where he may forget "men who are the
rule," being their exception--excepting only the one case in which he is pushed straight
to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a seeker after knowledge in the great and
exceptional sense. Anyone who, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in
all the colors of distress, green and gray, with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess,
and loneliness, is certainly not a man of elevated tastes; supposing, however, that he
does not take all this burden and disgust upon himself voluntarily, that he persistently
avoids it, and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing
is certain: he was not made, he was not predestined, for knowledge. If he were, he would
one day have to say to himself: "The devil take my good taste! but the rule is more inter-
esting than the exception--than myself, the exception!" And he would go down,32 and a-
bove all, he would go "inside."

The long and serious study of the average man, and consequently much disguise, self-over-
coming, familiarity, and bad contact (all contact is bad contact except with one's equals)
--this constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every philosopher, perhaps
the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a
favorite child of knowledge should be, he will encounter suitable shortcuts and helps
for his task; I mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the common-
place, and 'the rule" in themselves, and at the same time stilt have that degree of spir-
ituality and that itch which makes them talk of themselves and their likes before wit-
nesses--sometimes they even wallow in books, as on their own dung.

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty; and the higher man must
listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown
without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him.

There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust--namely, where by a
freak of nature genius is tied to some such indiscreet billygoat and ape, as in the case of
the Abbe Galiani,33 the profoundest, most clear-sighted, and perhaps also filthiest man
of his century--he was far profounder than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal
more taciturn. It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head
is placed on an ape's body, a subtle exceptional understanding in a base soul, an ocur-
rence by no means rare, especially among doctors and physiologists of morality. And when-
ever anyone speaks without bitterness, quite innocently, of man as a belly with two re-
quirements, and a head with one; whenever anyone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hung-
er, sexual lust, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when
anyone speaks "badly"--and not even "wickedly"--of man, the lover of knowledge should
listen subtly and diligently; he should altogether have an open ear wherever people talk
without indignation. For the indignant and whoever perpetually tears and lacerates with
his own teeth himself for as a substitute, the world, or God, or society) may indeed,
morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every
other sense they are a more ordinary, more in-different, and less instructive case. And
no one lies as much as the indignant do.



　　　　　　　　　　　　27



It is hard to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotagati 34 among
men who think and live differently--namely, kurmagati,35 or at but "the way frogs walk,"
mandukagati 36 (I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself!)--and one
should be cordially grateful for the good will to some subtlety of interpretation. As regards
"the good friends," however, who are always too lazy and think that as friends they
have a right to relax, one does well to grant them from the outset some leeway and romp-
ing place for misunderstanding: then one can even laugh--or get rid of thent altogether,
these good friends --and also laugh.



　　　　　　　　　　　　28



What is most difficult to render from one language into another is the tempo of its
style, which has its basis in thc character of the race, or to speak more physiological-
ly, in the average tempo of its metabolism. There are honestly meant translations that,
as involuntary vulgarizations, are almost falsdkatisms of the original, merely because
its bold and merry tempo (which leaps over and obviates all dangers in things and words)
could not be translated. A German is almost incapable of presto 37 in his language; thus
also, as may be reasonably inferred, of many of he most delightful and daring nuances of
free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body
and conscience, so Arktophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything pon-
derous, viscous, and solemnly clumsy, all long-winded and boring types of style are de-
veloped in profuse variety among Germans --forgive me the fact that even Goethe% prose,
in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, being a reflection of the
"good old time" to which it belongs, and a reflection of German taste at a time when
there still was a "German taste"--a rococo taste in moribus et artibus 38

Lessing is an exception, owing to his histrionic nature which understood much and under-
stood how to do many things. He was not the translator of Bayle for nothing and liked to
flee to the neighborhood of Diderot and Voltaire, and better yet that of the Roman com-
edy writers. In tempo, too, Lessing loved free thinking and escape from Germany. But how
could the German language, even in the prose of a Lessing. imitate the tempo of Machia-
velli,39 who in his Principe (The Prince) lets to breathe the dry, refined air of Flor-
ence and cannot help presenting the most serious matters in a boisterous allegrissimo,40
perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he risks--long, difficult,
hard, dangerous thoughts and the tempo of the gallop and the very best, most capricious
humor?

Who, finally, could venture on a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any
great musician so far. was a master of presto in invention, ideas, and words? What do the
swamps of the sick, wicked world, even the "ancient world." matter in the end, when one
has the feet of a wind as he did, the rush, the breath, the liberating scorn of a wind
that makes everything healthy by making everything run! And as for Aristophanes--that
transfiguring. complementary spirit for whose sake one forgives everything Hellenic for
having existed, provided one has understood in its full profundity all that needs to be
forgiven and transfigured here--there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on
Plato's secrecy and sphinx nature than the happily preserved petit fait 41 that under the
pillow of his deathbed there was found no "Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean,
or Platonic--but a volume of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life--a
Greek life he repudiated--without an Aristophanes?



　　　　　　　　　　　　29



Independence is for the very few; it is s privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts
it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not
only strong. but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth.
be multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the
least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely,
and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to
grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor
sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.--



　　　　　　　　　　　　30



Our highest insights must--and should--sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when
they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for
them.42 The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, formerly known to philoso-
phers--among the Indians as among the Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever
one believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights--doess not so much
consist in this, that the exoteric approach comes from outside and aces, estimates, mea-
sures, and judges from the outside, not the inside: what is much more essential is that
the exoteric approach aces things from below, the esoteric looks down from above. There
are heights of the soul horn which even tragedy ceases to look tragic; and rolling toge-
ther all the woe of the world--who could dare to decide whether its sight would necessarily
seduce us and compel us to feel pity and thus double this woe?

What serves the higher type of men as nourishment or delectation must almost be poison
for a very different and inferior type. The virtues of the common man might perhaps signi-
fy vices and weaknesses in a philosopher. It could be possible that a man of a high type,
when degenerating and perishing, might only at that point acquire qualities that would re-
quire those in the lower sphere into which he had sunk to begin to venerate him like a saint.
There are books that have opposite values for soul and health, depending on whether the low-
er soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more vigorous ones turn to them: in the for-
mer case, these books are dangerous and lead to crumbling and disintegration; in the lat-
ter, heralds' cries that call the bravest to their courage. Books for all the world are
always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them. Where the people cat
and drink, even where they venerate. it usually stinks. One should not go to church if one
wants to breathe pure air.



　　　　　　　　　　　　31



When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which consti-
tutes the best gain of life, and it is only lair that one has to pay dearly for having as-
saulted men and things In this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the
worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused un-
til a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying men what
is artificial--as the real artists of life do.

The wrathful and reverent attitudes characteristic of youth do not seem to permit themselves
any rest until they have forged men and things in such a way that these anitudes may be vent-
ed on them--after all, youth in itself has something of forgery and deception. Later, when
the young soul, tortured by all kinds of disappointments, finally turns suspiciously against
itself, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience--how .wroth it is
with itself now! how it tears itself to pieces, impatiently! how it takes revenge for its long
self-delusion. just as if it bad been a deliberate blindness! Is this transition one punishes
oneself with inistrust against one's own feelings; one tortures one's own enthusiasm With
doubts; indeed, one experiences even a good conscience as a danger, as if it were a way of
wrapping oneself in veils and the exhaustion of subtler honesty--and above all one takes
sides, takes sides on principle, against "youth."-- Ten years later one comprehends that all
this, too-was still youth.



　　　　　　　　　　　　32



During the longest part of human history--so-called prehistorical times--the value or disvalue
of an action was derived front its consequences. The action itself was considered as link as
its origin. It was rather the way a distinction or disgrace still reaches back today from a
child to its parents, in China: it was the retroactive force of success or failure that led
men to think well or ill of an action. Let us call this period the pre-moral period of mankind:
the imperative "know thyself!" was as yet unknown.

In the last ten thousand years, however, one has reached the point, step by step. in a fcw
large regions on the earth, where it is no longer the consequences but the origin of an action
that one allows to decide its value. On the whole this is a great event which involves a con-
siderable refinement of vision and standards; It is the unconscious aftereffect of the rule
of aristocratic values and the faith in "descent"--the sign of a period that one may call moral
in the narrower sense. It involves the first attempt at self-knowledge. Instead of the conse-
quences, the origin: indeed a reversal of perspective! Surely, a reversal achieved only after
long struggles and vacillations. To be sure, a calamitous new superstition, an odd narrowness
of interpretation, thus become, dominant: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most
definite sense as origin in an intention; one came to agree that the value of an action lay
in the value of the intention. The intention as the whole origin and prehistory of an action--
almost to the present day this prejudice dominated moral praise, blame, judgment, and philos-
ophy on earth.

But today--shouldn't we have reached the necessity of once more resolving on a reversal and
fundamental shift in values, owing to another self-examination of man, another growth in pro-
fundity? Don't we stand at the threshold of a period which should be designated negatively, to
begin with, as extra-moral? After all today at least we immoralists have the suspicion that
the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional in it, while everything
about it that is intentional, everything about it that coat be seen, known, "conscious," still
belongs to its surface and skin, which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even
more. In short, we believe that the intention is merely a sign and symptom that still requires
interpretation--moreover, a sign that means too much and therefore, taken by itself alone, al-
most nothing. We believe that morality in the traditional sense, the morality of intentions,
was a prejudice, precipitate and perhaps provisional--something on the order of astrology and
alchemy--but in any case something that must be overcome. The overcoming of morality, in a
certain sense even the self-overcoming of morality--let this be the name for that long secret
work which has been saved up for the finest and most honest, also the most malicious, con-
sciences of today, as hying touchstones of the soul.



　　　　　　　　　　　　33



There Is no other way: the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one's neighbor, the whole
morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court--no less than the
aesthetics of "contemplation devoid of all interest" which is used today as a elective guise
for the emasculation of art, to give it a good conscience. There is too much charm and sugar
in these feelings of "for others," "not for myself," for us not to need to become doubly sus-
picious at this point and to ask: "art these not perhaps--seductions?"

That they please--those who have them and those who enjoy their fruits, and also the mere
spectator--this does not yet constitute an argument in their favor but rather invites caution.
So let us be cautious.



　　　　　　　　　　　　34



Whatever philosophical standpoint one may adopt today, from every point of view the erroneous-
ness of the world in which we think we live is the surest and firmest fact that we can lay eyes
on: we find reasons upon reasons for it which would like to lure us to hypotheses concern-
ing a deceptive principle in "the essence of things." But whoever holds our thinking itself,
"the spirit," in other words, responsible for the falseness of the world--an honorable way out
which is chosen by every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei 43--whoever takes this world,
along with space, time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred--anyone like that would at least
have ample reason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking. Wouldn't thinking have
put over on us the biggest hoax yet? And what warrant would there be that it would not con-
tinue to do what it has always done?

In all seriousness: the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and evokes reverence,
when today they still step before consciousness with the request that it should please give
them honest answers; for example, whether it is "real," and why it so resolutely keeps the
external world at a distance, and other questions of that kind. The faith in "immediate cer-
tainties" is a moral naivete that reflects honor on us philosophers; but--after all we should
not be "merely moral" men. Apart from morality, this faith is s stupidity that reflects lit-
tle honor on us. In bourgeois life ever. present suspicion may be considered a sign of 'bad
character" and hence belong among things imprudent, here, among us, beyond the bourgeois
world and its Yes and No--what should prevent from being imprudent and saying: a philosopher
has nothing less than a right to "bad character," as the being who has so far always been fooled
best on earth; he has a duty to suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of suspi-
cion.

Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and trope; for I myself have learned long ago to
think differently, to estimate differently with regard to deceiving and being deceived, and
I keep in reserve at least a couple of jostles for the blind rage with which the philosophers
resist being deceived. Why not? It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth
more than mere appearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world. Let
at least this much be admitted: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective
estimates and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some phil-
osopher; one wanted to abolish the "apparent world" altogether--well, supposing you could
do that, at least nothing would be left of your "truth" either. Indeed, what forces us at all
to suppose that there is an essential opposition of "true" and "false"? Is it not sufficient
if it assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades
of appearance--different "values," to use the language of painters? Why couldn't the world
that concerns us be a fiction? And if somebody asked, "but to a fiction there surely belongs
an author?"--couldn't one answer simply: why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the
fiction, too? Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the pred-
icate and object? Shouldn't philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar? All
due respect for governesses--but hasn't the time come for philosophy to renounce the faith
of governesses?44



　　　　　　　　　　　　35



O Voltaire! O humaneness! O nonsense! There is something about "truth," about the search
for truth; and when a human being is too human about it--"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire
le bien"45--I bet he finds nothing.



　　　　　　　　　　　　36



Suppose nothing else were "given" as real except our world of desires and passions, and
we could not get down, or up, to any other "reality" besides the reality of our drives--for
thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the
experiment and to ask the question whether this "given" would not be sufficient for also
understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or "material")
world? I mean, not as a deception, as "mere appearance," an "idea" (in the tease of Berkeley
and Schopenhauer) but as holding the same rank of reality as our affect--as a more primitive
form of the world of affects in which everything still lies contained in a powerful unity
that before it undergoes ramifications and developments in the organic process (and, as is
only fair, also becomes tenderer and weaker) --as a kind of instinctive life in which all
organic functions are still synthetically intertwined along with self-regulation, assimila-
tion, nourishment, excretion, and metabolism--as a pre-form of life.

In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method de-
mands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with
a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say
so)--that is a moral of method which one may not shirk today --it follows "from its defini-
tion," as a mathematician would say. The question is in the end whether we really recognize
the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do --and at
bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself--then we have
to make the experiment of positing the causality of the will hypothetically as the only
one. "Will." of course, can affect only "will"--and not "matter" (not "nerves," for example).
In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever "effects"
are recognized--and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active
in them, will force, effects of will.

Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development
and ramification of one basic form of the will--namely, of the will to power, as my propo-
sition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced hack to this will to power and
one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment--it is
one problem--then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocal-
ly as --will to power. The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined accord-
ing to its "intelligible character"--it would be "will to power" and nothing else.--



　　　　　　　　　　　　37



"What? Doesn't this mean, to speak with the vulgar: God refuted, but the devil is not?" On
the contrary! On the contrary, friends. And, the devil--who forces you to speak with the vulgar?



　　　　　　　　　　　　38



What happened most recently in the broad daylight of modern times in the case of the French Rev-
olution--that gruesome farce which, considered closely, was quite superfluous, though noble and
enthusiastic spectators from all oser Europe contemplated it from a distance and interpreted
it according to their own indignations and enthusiasms for so long, and so passionately, that
the text finally disappeared under the interpretation--could happen once more as a noble poste-
rity might misunderstand the whole past and in that way alone make it tolerable to look at.

Or rather: isn't this what has happened even now? haven't we ourselves been this "noble post-
erity"? And isn't now precisely the moment when, insofar as we comprehend this, it is all over?



　　　　　　　　　　　　39



Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or vir-
tuous--except perhaps the lovely "idealists" who become effusive about the good, the true, and
the beautiful and allow all kinds of motley, clumsy, and benevolcot desiderata to swim around
in utter confusion in their pond. Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people like to
forget--even sober spirits-that making unhappy and evil are no counter-arguments. Something
might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might he a
basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in
which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the "truth"
one could still barely endure--or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it
to be thinned down. shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.46

But there is no doubt at all that the evil and unhappy are more favored when it comes to the
discovery of certain parts of truth, and that the probability of their success here is great-
er--not to speak of the evil who are happy, a species the moralists bury in silence. Perhaps
hardness and cunning furnish more favorable conditions for the origin of the strong. indepen-
dent spirit and philosopher than that gentle, fine, conciliatory good-naturedness and art of
taking things lightly which people prize, and prize rightly, in a scholar. Assuming first of
all that the concept "philosopher" is not restricted to the philosopher who writes books--or
makes books of his philosophy.

A final trait (or the image of the free-spirited philosopher is contributed by Stendhat whom,
considering German taste, I do not want to fail to stress--for he goes against the German taste.
"Pour lire bon philosophe," says this last great psychologist, "il faut lire sec, dais, sant
Illusion. Un banquier, qui a fait fortune, tine partie du caractlre requis pour false des de-
couvertes en philosophie, c'est-a-dire pour voir dafr dans ce qui ea."47



　　　　　　　　　　　　40



Whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable. Might
not nothing less than the opposite be the proper disguise for the shame of a god?48 A quest-
ionable question: it would be odd if some mystic had not risked something to that effect in
his mind. There are occurrences of such a delicate nature that one does well to cover them
up with some rudeness to conceal them; there are actions of love and extravagant generosity
after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give any eyewitness a sound
thrashing: that would muddle his memory. Some know how to muddle and abuse their own memory
in order to have their revenge at least against this only witness: shame is inventive.

It is not the worst things that cause the worst shame: there is much graciousness in cunning.
I could imagine that a human being who had to guard something precious and vulnerable might
roll through life, rude and round as an old green wine cask with heavy hoops: the refinement
of his shame would want it that way.

A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions,
too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not
know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life.
Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and
who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him
roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want
it. he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there--and that this
is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is
growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every
word, every step, every sign of life be gives.49--



　　　　　　　　　　　　41



One has to test oneself to see that one is destined for independence. and command--and do it
at the right time. One should not dodge one's tests, though they may be the most dangerous
game one could play and are tests that are taken in the end before no witness or judge but our-
selves.

Not to remain stuck to a person--not even the most loved--every person is a prison, also a nook.50
Not to remain stuck to a fatherland--not even if it suffers most and needs help most--it is less
difficult to sever one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to remain stuck to some pity--
not even for higher men into whose rare torture and helplessness some accident allowed us to
look.51 Not to remain stuck to a science--even if it should lure us with the most precious finds
that seem to have been saved up precisely for us.52 Not to remain stuck to one's own detachment,
to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who flees ever higher to see ever
more below him--the danger of the flier. Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a
whole the victim of some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is the danger of dangers
for superior and rich souls who spend themselves lavishly, almost indifferently, and exaggerate
the virtue of generosity into a vice. One must know bow to conserve oneself: the hardest test
of independence.



　　　　　　　　　　　　42



A new species of philosophers is coming up: I venture to baptize them with a name that is not
free of danger. As I unriddle them, insofar as they allow themselves to be unriddled--for it be-
longs to their nature to want to remain riddles at some point--these philosophers of the future
may have a right--it might also be a wrong--to be called attempters.53 This name itself is in the
end a mere attempt and, if you will, a temptation.



　　　　　　　　　　　　43



Are these coming philosophers new friends of "truth"? That is probable enough, for all philoso-
phers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must offend
their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman --which has
so far been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations. "My judgment is my
judgment: no one else is so easily entitled to it--that is what such a philosopher of the future
may perhaps say of himself.

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's
neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: what-
ever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great
things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and,
in brief, all that is rare for the rare.54--



　　　　　　　　　　　　44



Need I still say expressly after all this that they, too, will be free, very free spirits, these
philosophers of the future--though just as certainly they will not be merely free spirits but some-
thing more, higher, greater, and thoroughly different that does not want to be misunderstood and
mistaken for something else. But saying this I feel an obilgation--almost as much to them as to
ourselves who are their heralds and precursors, we free spirits--to sweep away stupid old prejudice
and misunderstanding about the lot of us: all too long it has clouded the concept "free spirit"
like a fog.

In all the countries of Europe, and in America, too, there now is something that abuses this
name: a very narrow, imprisoned chained type of spirits who want just about the opposite of what
accords with our intentions and instincts--not to speak of the fact that regarding the new philo-
sophers who are coming up they must assuredly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong
briefly and sadly, among the levelers--these falsely so-called "free spirits"--being eloquent and
prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its "modern ideas"; they are all human
beings without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy good fellow whom one should not deny
either coursge or respectable decency--only they are unfree and ridiculously superficial, above
all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of the old society as it existed so far just a-
bout the cause of all human misery and failure--which is a way of standing truth happily upon her
head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green pasture happi-
ness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the
two songs and doctrines which they repeat most often are "equality of rights" "sympathy for all
that suffers"--and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished.

We opposite men, having opened our eyes and conscience to the question where and how the plant
"man" has so far grows most vigorously to a height--we think that this has happened every time
under the opposite conditions, that to this end the dangerousness of his situation must first grow
to the point of enormity, his power of invention and simulation (his "spirit") had to develop under
prolonged pressure and constraint into refinement and audacity, his life-will had to be enhanced
into an unconditional power-will. We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the
alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that
everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and
serpents serves the enhancement of the species "man" as much as its opposite does. Indeed,
we do not even say enough when we say only that much; and at any rate we are at this point,
in what we say and keep silent about, at the other end from all modern ideology and herd deside-
rata--as their antipodes perhaps?

Is it any wonder that we "free spirits" are not exactly the most communicative spirits? that we
do not want to betray in every particular from what a spirit can liberate himself and to what
be may then be driven? And as for the meaning of the dangerous formula "beyond good and evil,"
with which we at least guard against being mistaken for others: we are something different from
"libres-penseurs," "liberi pensatori," "Freidenker,"55 and whatever the all these goodly advo-
cates of "modern ideas" like to call themselves.

At home, or at least having been guests, in many countries of the spirit; having escaped again
and again from the musty agreeable nooks into which preference and prejudice, youth, origin,
the accidents of people and books or even exhaustion from wandering seemed to have banished
us; full of malice against the lures of dependence that lie hidden in honors, or money, or offices,
or enthusiasms of the senses; grateful even to need and vacillating sickness because they al-
ways rid us from some rule and its "prejudice," grateful to god, devil, sheep, and worm in us;
curious to a vice, investigator to the point of cruelty, with uninhibited fingers for the un-
fathomable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for every feat that requires
a sense of acuteness and acute senses, ready for every venture, thanks to an excess of "free
will," with fore- and back-souls into whose ultimate intentions nobody can look so easily, with
fore- and backgrounds which no foot is likely to explore to the end; concealed under cloaks of
light, conquerers even if we look like heirs and prodigals, arrangers and collectors from morning till
late, misers of our riches and our crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, in-
ventive in schemas, occasionally proud of tables of categories, occasionally pedants, occasion-
ally night owls of work even in broad daylight; yes, when it is necessary even scarecrows--and
today it is necessary; namely, insofar as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of
our own most profound, most midnightly, most middaily solitude: that is the type of man we are,
we free spirits! And perhaps you have something of this, too, you that are coming? you new
philosophers?--




　　　　　　　　　　　Part Three


　　　　　　　　WHAT IS RELIGIOUS56



　　　　　　　　　　　　45.



The human soul and its limits. the range of inner human experiences reached so far, the heights,
depths, and distances of these experiences. the whole history of the soul so far and its as yet
unexhausted possibilities--that is the predestined hunting ground for a born psychologist and
lover of the "great hunt." But how often he has to say to himself in despair: "One hunter! alas,
only a single one! and look at this huge forest, this primeval forest!" And then he wishes he had
a few hundred helpers and good, well-trained hounds that he could drive into the history of the
human soul to round up his game. In vain: it is proved to him again and again, thoroughly and
bitterly, how helpers and hounds for all the things that excite his curiosity cannot be found.
Whet is wrong with sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, sense,
and subtlety in every way are required, is that they cease to be of any use precisely where the
"great hunt," but also the great danger, begins: precisely there they lose their keen eye and nose.

To figure out and determine, for example, what kind of a history the problem of science and con-
science 57 has so far had in the soul of homines religiosi,58 one might perhaps have to be as profound,
as wounded, as monstrous as Pascal's intellectual conscience was--and then one would still need
that vaulting heaven of bright, malicious spirituality that would be capable of surveying from
above, arranging, and forcing into formulas this swarm of dangerous and painful experiences.

But who would do me this service? But who would have time to wait for such servants? They obvi-
ously grow too rarely; they are to improbable in any age. In the end one has to do everything
oneself in order to know a few things oneself: that is, one has a lot to do.

But a curiosity of my type remains after all the most agreeable of an vices--sorry, I meant to
say: the lose of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.--



　　　　　　　　　　　　46



The faith demanded, and not infrequently attained, by original Christianity, in the midst of a
skeptical and southern free-spirited world that looked back on, and still contained, a centuries-
long fight between philosophical schools, besides the education for tolerance given by the
Imperium Romanum 59--this faith is not that ingenuous and bearlike subalterns' faith with which,
say, a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit, clung to his god
and to Christianity. It is much closer to the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a gruesome
manner a continual suicide of reason--a tough, long-lived, wormlike reason that cannot be kill-
ed all at once and with a single stroke.

From the start, the Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all
self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation.
There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith which is expected of an over-ripe,
multiple, and much-spoiled conscience: it presupposes that the subjection of the spirit hurts
indescribably; that the whole past and the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum 60
which "faith" represents to it.

Modern men, obtuse to all Christian nomenclature, no longer feel the gruesome superlative that
struck a classical taste in the paradoxical formula "god on the cross." Never yet and nowhere
has there been an equal boldness in inversion, anything as horrible, questioning, and quest-
ionable as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity.

It is the Orient, deep Orient, it is the Oriental slave who revenged himself in this way on
Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance, on the Roman "catholicity" of faith, It has
always been not faith but the freedom from faith, that half-stoical and smiling unconcern
with the seriousness of faith, that enraged slaves in their masters--against their masters.
"Enlightenment" enrages: for the slave wants the unconditional; he understands only what is
tyrannical, in morals, too; he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the depths, to the point of
pain, of sickness--his abundant concealed suffering is enraged against the noble taste that
seems to deny suffering. Nor was skepticism concerning suffering, at bottom merely a pose of
aristocratic morality, the least cause of the origin of the last great slave rebellion which began
with the French Revolution.



　　　　　　　　　　　　47



Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous diet-
ary demands: solitude, fasting. and sexual abstinence. But one cannot decide with certainty
what is cause and what effect, and whether any relation of cause and effect is involved here.
The final doubt seems justified because among its lost regular symptoms, among both savage
and tame peoples, we also find the most sudden, most extravagant voluptuousness which then,
just as suddenly, changes into a penitential spasm and denial of the world and will--both
perhaps to be interpreted as masked epilepsy? But nowhere should one resist interpretation
more: no other type has yet been surrounded by such a lavish growth of nonsense and super-
stition, no other type seems to have interested men, :yen philosophers, more. The time has
come for becoming a hit old right here, to learn caution--better yet: to look away, to go
away.

Even in the background of the most recent philosophy, that of .ichopenhauct, we find, al-
most as the problem-in-itself, this gruesome question mark of the religious crisis and
awakening. How is he denial of the will possible? how is the saint possible? This really
icems to have been the question over which Schopenhauer became a philosopher and began.
And so it was a genuinely Schopenhauerian conclusion when his most convinced adherent (per-
haps also the last one, as far as Germany is concerned t, namely, Richard Wagner, finish-
ed his Ides work at precisely this point and in the end brought this horrible and eternal
type on the stage as Kundry, type vecu,'61 in the flesh--at the very time when the psychia--
trists of almost all the countries of Europe had occasion to study it at close quarters,
wherever the religious neurosis--or what I call "das religiose Wesen"62--had its latest
epidemic outbreak and pageant in the "Salvation Army."

Let us ask what precisely about this whole phenomenon of the saint has seemed so enormously
interesting to men of all types and ages, even to philosophers. Beyond any doubt, it was the
air of the miraculous that goes with it--namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of
states of the soul that are judged morally in opposite ways. It seemed palpable that a "bad
man" was suddenly transformed into a "saint." a good man. The psychology we have had so far
sulTered shipwreck at this point: wasn't this chiefly he. cause it had placed itself under
the dominion of morals, because it, too, believed in opposite moral values and saw, read,
interpreted these opposites into the text and the facts?

What? the "miracle" merely a mistake of interpretation? A lack of philology?



　　　　　　　　　　　　48



It seems that Catholicism is much more intimately related to the Latin races than all of
Christianity in general is to us northerners--and unbelief therefore means something alto-
gether different in Catholic and Protestant countries: among them, a kind of rebellion a-
gainst the spirit of the race, while among us it is rather a return to the spirit (or anti-
spirit) of the race. We northerners are undoubtedly descended from barbarian races, which
also shows in our talent for religion: we have little talent for it. We may except the Celts,
who therefore also furnished the best soil for the spread of the Christian infection to the
north: in France the Christian ideal came to flourish as much as the pale sun of the north
permitted it. How strangely pious for our taste are even the most recent French skeptics in-
sofar as they have any Celtic blood! How Catholic, how un-German Auguste Comte's sociology
smells to us with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical that gracious and clever
cicerone of Port-Royal, Sainte-Relive, in spite of all his hostility against the Jesuits! And
especially Ernest Renan: how inaccessible the language of such a Renan sounds to us northern-
ers: at one instant after another some nothing of religious tension imbalances His soul,
which is, in the more refined sense, voluptuous and inclined to stretch out comfortably.
Let us speak after him these beautiful sentences--and how much malice and high spirits stir
immediately in our probably less beautiful and harder, namely more German, soul as a response!

'Disons donc hardiment que la religion est un produit de l'homme normal, que l'homme est le
plus dans le vrai quand il est le plus religieux et le plus assure d'une destine infinie...C'est
quand it est bon qu'il veut que la vertu corresponde a un ordre eternal, c'est quand il
contemple les choses d'une maniere desinteressee qu'il trouve la morte revoltante et absurde.
Comment ne pas supposer que c'est dans c'est moments-la, que l'homme voit le mieux?"63

These sentences are so utterly antipodal to my ears and habits that on finding them my first
wrath wrote on the margin "la niaise religieuse par excellence!" But my subsequent wrath actu-
ally took a fancy to them--these sentences standing truth on her head! It is so neat, so dist-
inguished to have one's own antipodes!



　　　　　　　　　　　　49



What is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gra-
titude it exudes: it is a very noble type of man that confronts nature and life in this way.64

Later, when the rabble gained the upper hand in Greece, fear became rampant in religion, too--
and the ground was prepared for Christianity.--



　　　　　　　　　　　　50



The passion for God: there are peasant types, sincere and obtrusive, like Luther--the whole of
Protestantism lacks southern delicatezza.65 There is sometimes an Oriental ecstasy worthy of a
slave who, without deserving it, has been pardoned and elevated--for example, in Augustine, who
lacks in a truly offensive manner all nobility of gestures and desires. There is a womanly ten-
derness' and lust that presses bashfully and ignorantly toward a unio mystica et physica 66 --as
in Madame de Guyon.67 In many cases it ap pears oddly enough as a disguise for the puberty of
a girl or youth, here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also as her final ambition--
and in several such instances the church has proclaimed the female a saint.



　　　　　　　　　　　　51



So far the most powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as the
riddle of self-conquest and deliberate final renunciation. Why did they bow? In him--and as it
were behind the question mark of his fragile and miserable appearance--they sensed the superior
force that sought to test itself in such a conquest, the strength of the will in which they rec-
ognized and honored their own strength and delight in dominion: they honored something in them-
selves when they honored the saint. Moreover, the sight of the saint awakened a suspicion in them:
such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will not have been desired for nothing, they said
to and asked themselves. There may be a reason for it, some very great danger about which the as-
cetic, thanks to his secret comforters and visitors, might have inside information. In short, the
powerful of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet
unconquered enemy--itwas the "will to power" that made them stop before the saint. They had to
ask him-



　　　　　　　　　　　　52



In the Jewish "Old Testament." the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and
speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it.
With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was, and
will have sad thoughts about ancient Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe, which wants
by all means to signify as against Asia the "progress of man." To be sure, whoever is himself mere-
ly a meager, tame domestic animal -and knows only the needs of domestic animals (like our educated
people of today, including the Christians of "educated" Christianity) has no cause for amazement
or sorrow among these ruins--the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for "great" and "small"68
--perhaps he will find the New Testament, the book of grace, still rather more after his heart (it
contains a lot of the real, tender, musty true-believer and small-soul smell). To have glued this
New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, to the Old Testament to make one book,
as the "Bible," as "the book par excellence"--that is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin a-
gainst the spirit" that literary Europe has on its conscience.69



　　　　　　　　　　　　53



Why atheism today?--"The father" in God has been thor-oughly refuted; ditto, "the judge," "the re-
warder." Also his "free will": he does not hear--and if he heard he still would not know how to
help. Worst of all: he seems incat able of dear communication: is he unclear?

This is what I found to be causes for the decline of European theism, on the basis of a great
many conversations, asking and listening. it seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed
In the process of growing powerfully--but the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspi-
cion.



　　　　　　　　　　　　54



What is the whole of modern philosophy doing at bottom? Since Descartes--actually more despite
him than because of his precedent--all the philosophers seek to assassinate the old soul concept,
under the guise of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept--which means an attempt on the
life of the basic presupposition of the Christian doctrine, Modern philosophy, being an episte-
mological skepticism, is, covertly or overtly, anti-Christian--although, to say this for the ben-
efit of more refined cars, by no means anti-religious.

For, formerly, one believed in "the soul" as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject:
one said, "I" is the condition, "think" is the predicate and conditioned--thinking is an activity
to which thought must supply a subject as cause. Then one tried with admirable perseverance and
cunning to get out of this 'net--and asked whether the opposite might not be the case: "think" the
condition, "I" the conditioned; "I" in that case only a synthesis which is made by thinking. At
bottom, Kant wanted to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved--nor
could the object: the possibility of a merely apparent existence of the subject. "the soul" in
other words, may not always •have remained strange to him--that thought which as Vedanta philosophy
existed once before on this earth and exercised tremendous power.



　　　　　　　　　　　　55



There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most im-
portant.

Once one sacrificed human beings to one's god, perhaps pre-cisely those whom one loved most: the
sacrifices of the first-born in all prehistoric religions belong here, as well as the sacrifice of
the Emperor Tiberius jn the Mithras grotto of the isle of Capri, that most gruesome of all Roman
anachronisms.

Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one's god one's own strongest instincts,
one's "nature": this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of the ascetic, the "anti-natural" enth-
usiast.

Finally--what remained to be sacrificed? At long last, did one not have to sacrifice for once what-
ever is comforting, holy', healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony. in future blisses and
justices? didn't one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the
stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing--this paradoxical
mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us al-
ready know something of this.--



　　　　　　　　　　　　56



Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its
depths and to liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which
it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauees philosophy;
whoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, down into the most world-
denying of all possible ways of thinking--beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and
Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality--may just thereby, without really meaning to
do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite idea!: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and
world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever
was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity,70 shouting insatiably
da capo,71--not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but
at bottom to him who needs precisely this spectacle--and who makes it necessary because again and
again he needs himself--and makes himself necessary-- hat? And this wouldn't be--circulus vitiosus
deus? 72



　　　　　　　　　　　　57



With the strength of his spiritual eye and insight grows distance and, as it were, the space a-
round man: his world becomes more profound; ever new stars, ever new riddles and images become vis-
ible for him. Perhaps everything on which the spirit's eye has exercised its acuteness and thought-
fulness was nothing but an occasion for this exercise, a playful matter, something for children
and those who are childish. Perhaps the day will come when the most solemn concepts which have
caused the most fights and suffering, the concepts "God" and "sin," will seem no more important
to us than a child's toy and a child's pain seem to an old man--and perhaps "the old man" will
then be in need of another toy and another pain--still child enough, an eternal child!



　　　　　　　　　　　　58



Has it ever been really noted to what extent a genuinely religious life (both its microscopic fav-
orite occupation of self-examination and that tender composure which calls itself "prayer" and is
a continual readiness for the "coming of God") requires a leisure class, or half-leisure--I mean
leisure with a good conscience, from way back, by blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that
work disgraces is not altogether alien--the feeling that it makes soul and body common. And that
consequently our modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud,
educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for "unbelief."

Among those, for example, who now live in Germany at a distance from religion I find people whose
"free-thinking" is of diverse types and origins, but above all a majority of those in whom indus-
triousness has, from generation unto generation, dissolved the religious instincts, so they no
longer even know what religions are good for and merely register their presence in the world with
a kind of dumb amazement. They feel abundantly committed, these good people, whether to their
business or to their pleasures, not to speak of the "fatherland" and the newspapers and "family obli-
gations": it seems that they simply have no time left for religion, the more so because it remains
unclear to them whether it involves another business or another pleasure--for it is not possible,
they say to themselves, that one goes to church merely to dampen one's good spirits. They are not
enemies of religious customs; when participation in such customs is required in certain cases, by
the state, for example, they do what is required, as one does so many things--with a patient and
modest seriousness and without much curiosity and discomfort: they simply live too much apart
and outside to feel any need for any pro and con in such matters.

Those indifferent in this way include today the great majority of German middle-class Protestants,
especially in the great industrious centers of trade and traffic; ako the great majority of indus-
trious scholars and the other accessories of the universities (excepting the theologians, whose
presence and possibility there pose ever increasing and ever subtler riddles for a psychologist).
Pious or even merely churchly people rarely have the slightest idea how much good will--one might
say caprice--is required of a German scholar today if he is to take the problem of religion seri-
ously. On the basis of his whole trade (and, as noted, on the basis of the tradelike industriousness
to which he is committed by his modern conscience) he is inclined toward a superior, almost good-
natured amusement in the face of religion, occasionally mixed with a dash of disdain for the "un-
cleanliness" of the spirit which he assumes wherever a church is still acknowledged. The scholar
succeeds only with the help of history (not on the basis of his own personal experience) to muster
a reverent seriousness and a certain shy consideration in the face of religion. But even if he
raises his feeling into real gratitude toward it,73 he still has not personally approached, not
even by a single step, what still exists now as church or piety; perhaps even the opposite. The
practical indifference toward religious matters into which he has been born and brought up is
generally sublimated in him into caution and cleanliness that shun contact with religious men and
matters; and it may be precisely the depth of his tolerance and humanity that bids him dodge the
subtle distress involved in tolerance.

Every age has its own divine type of naivete for whose invention other ages may envy it--and how
much naivete, venerable, childlike, and boundlessly clumsy naivete lies in the scholar's faith
in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the uninspecting simple certain-
ty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type that he has
outgrown. leavng it behind, beneath him--him, that presumptuous little dwarf and rabble man,
the assiduous and speedy head- and handiworker of "ideas," of "modern ideas"!



　　　　　　　　　　　　59



Anyone who has looked deeply into the world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality
of men. The instinct that preserves them teaches them to be flighty, light, and false. Here and
there one encounters an impassioned and exaggerated worship of "pure forms," among both philoso-
phers and artists: let nobody doubt that whoever stands that much in need of the cult of surfaces
must at some time have reached beneath them with disastrous results.

Perhaps there even exists an order of rank among these burnt children, these born artists who
can find the enjoyment of life only in the intention of falsifying its image (as it were, in a
longwinded revenge on life): the degree to which life has been spoiled for them might be inferred
from the degree to which they wish to see its image falsified, thinned down, transcendentalized,
deified--the homines religiosi might be included among artists, as their highest rank. .

It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury
their teeth in and cling to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of that instinct
which senses that one might get a hold of the truth too soon, before man as become strong enough,
hard enough, artist enough.

Piety, the "life in God," seen in this way, would appear as the subtlest and final offspring of
the fear of truth, as an artist's worship and intoxication before the most consistent of all
falsifications, as to will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at any price. It may be that
until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can
turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes
one suffer.



　　　　　　　　　　　　60



To love man for God's sake-that has so far been the noblest and most remote feeling attained a-
mong men. That the love of man is just one more stupidity and brutishness if there is no ulterior
intent to sanctify it; that the inclination to such love of man must receive its measure, its
subtlety, its grain of salt and dash of ambergris from some higher inclination--whoever the human
being may have been who first felt and "experienced" this, however much his tongue may have stum-
bled74 as it tried to express such delicatesse, let him remain holy and venerable for us for all time
as the human being who has flown highest yet and gone astray most beautifully!



　　　　　　　　　　　　61



The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits--as the man of the most comprehensive re-
sponsibility who has the conscience for the overall development of man--this philosopher will make
use of religions for his project of cultivation75 and education, just as he will make use of what-
ever political and economic states are at hand. The selective and cultivating76 influence, always
destructive as well as creative and form-giving, which can be exerted with the help of religions,
Is always multiple and different according to the sort of human beings who are placed under its
spell and protection. For the strong and independent who are prepared and predestined to command
and in whom the reason and art of a governing race become incarnate, religion is one more means
for overcoming resistances, for the ability to rule--as a bond that unites rulers and subjects
and betrays and delivers the consciences of the latter, that which is most concealed and intimate
and would like to elude obedience, to the former. And if a few individuals of such noble descent
are inclined through lofty spirituality to prefer a more withdrawn and contemplative life and re-
serve for themselves only the most subtle type of rule (over selected disciples or brothers in
some order), then religion can even be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and ex-
ertion of cruder forms of government, and purity from the necessary dirt of all politics. That is
how the Brahmins, for example, understood things: by means of a religious organization they gave
themselves the power of nominatng the kings of the people white they themselves kept and felt
part and outside, as men of higher and supra-royal tasks.

Meanwhile religion also gives to some of the ruled the instruction and opportunity to prepare
themselves for future ruling sad obeying: those slowly ascending classes--in which, thanks to
fortunate marital customs, the strength and joy of the will, the will to self-control is ever
growing--receive enough nudges and temptations from religion to walk the paths to higher spiritu-
ality, to test the feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude. Asceticism and
puritanism are almost indispensable means for educating and ennobling a race that wishes to be-
come master over its origins among the rabble and that works its way up toward future rule.

To ordinary human beings, finally--the vast majority who exist for service and the general advan-
tage, and who may exist only for that--religion gives an inestimable contentment with their situa-
tion and type, manifold peace of the heart, an ennobling of obedience, one further happiness and
sorrow with their peers and something transfiguring and beautifying, something of a justification
for the whole everyday character, the whole lowliness, the whole half-brutish poverty of their
souls. Religion and religious significance spread the splendor of the sun over such ever-toiling
human beings and make their own sight tolerable to them. Religion has the same effect which an
Epicurean philosophy has on sufferers of higher rank: it is refreshing, refining, makes, as it were,
the most of suffering, and in the end even sanctifies and justifies. Perhaps nothing in Christ-
ianity or Buddhism is as venerable as their art of teaching even the lowliest how to place them-
selves through piety in an illusory higher order of things and thus to maintain their contentment
with the real order, in which their life is hard enough--and precisely this hardness is necessary.



　　　　　　　　　　　　62



In the end, to be sure--to present the other side of the account of these religions, too, and to
expose their uncanny dangerousness--one always pays dearly and terribly when religions do not want
to be a means of education and cultivation in the philosopher's hand but insist on having their
own sovereign way, when they themselves want to be ultimate ends and not means among other means.
There is among men as in every other animal species an excess of failures, of the sick, degenerat-
ing, infirm, who suffer necessarily; the successful cases are, among men too, always the exception--
and in view of the fact that man is the as yet undetermined animal, the rare exception. But still
worse: the higher the type of man that a man represents, the greater the improbability that he will
turn out well. The accidental, the law of absurdity in the whole economy of mankind, manifests it-
self most horribly in its destructive effect on the higher men whose complicated conditions of
life can only be calculated with great subtlety and difficulty.

What, then, is the attitude of the above-mentioned two greatest religions toward this excess of
cases that did not turn out right? They seek to preserve, to preserve alive whatever can possibly
be preserved; indeed, as a matter of principle, they side with these cases as religions for suffer-
ers; they agree with all those who suffer life like a sickness and would like to make sure that
every other feeling about life should be considered false and should become impossible. Even if
the very highest credit is given to this considerate and preserving care, which, besides being
directed toward all the others, was and is also directed toward the highest type of man, the type
that so far has almost always suffered most; nevertheless, in a tots; accounting. the sovereign
religions we have had so far are among the chief Causes that have kept the type "man" on a lower
rung--they have preserved too much of what ought to perish. What we have to thank them for is
inestimable; and who could be rich enough in gratitude not to be impoverished in view of all that
the "spiritual men" of Christianity, for example, have so far done for Europe! And yet, when they
gave comfort to sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the in-
dependent, and lured away from society into monasteries and penitentiaries for the soul those who
had been destroyed inwardly and who had become savage: how much more did they have to do besides,
in order to work with a good conscience and on principle, preserve all that was sick and that suf-
fered--which means, in fact and in truth, to worsen the European race? Stand all valuations on their
head--that is what they had to do. And break the strong, sickly o'er77 great hopes, cast suspicion on
the joy in beauty, bend everything haughty, manly, conquering, domineering, all the instincts char-
acteristic of the highest and best-turned-out type a "man," into unsureness, agony of conscience,
self-destruction--indeed, invert all love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred
of the earth and the earthly--that is the task the church posed for itself and had to pose, until
in its estimation "becoming unworldly," "unsensual," and "higher men" were fused to a single feel-
ing.

Suppose we could contemplate the oddly painful and equally crude and subtle comedy of European
Christianity with the mocking and aloof eyes of an Epicurean god, I think our amazement and laugh-
ter would never end: doesn't it seem that a single will dominated Europe for eighteen centuries--
to turn man into a sublime miscarriage? Anyone, however, who approached this almost deliberate de-
generation and atrophy of man represented by the Christian European (Pascal, for example). feeling
the opposite kind of desire, not in an Epicurean spirit but rather with some divine hammer in his
hand, would surely have to cry out in wrath, in pity, in horror: "0 you dolts, you presumptuous, pit-
ying dolts, what have you done! Was that work for your hands? how have you bungled and botched my
beautiful stone! What presumption!"

I meant to say: Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet. Men, not high
and hard enough to have any right to try to form man as artists; men, not strong and far-sighted
enough to let the foreground law of thousandfold failure and ruin prevail, though it cost them
sublime self-conquest; men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm
of rank, between man and man--such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their
"equal before God," until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something
eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today--




　　　　　　　　　　　Part Four


　　　　　EPIGRAMS AND LNTERLUDES



　　　　　　　　　　　　63.


Whoever is a teacher through and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his stu-
dents--even himself.


　　　　　　　　　　　　64


"Knowledge for its own sale--that is the last snare of morality: with that one becomes complete-
ly entangled in it once more.


　　　　　　　　　　　　65


The attraction of knowledge would be small if one did not have to overcome so much shame on the
way.


　　　　　　　　　　　　65a78


One is most dishonest to one's god: he is not allowed to sin.


　　　　　　　　　　　　66


The inclination to depreciate himself, to let himself be robbed, lied to, and taken advantage of,
could be the modesty79 of a god among men.


　　　　　　　　　　　　67


Love of one is a barbarism; for it is exercised at the expense of all others. The love of God,
too.


　　　　　　　　　　　　68


"I have done that," says my memory. I cannot have done that," says my pride, and remains inex-
orable. Eventually--memory yields.80


　　　　　　　　　　　　69


One has watched life badly if one has not also seen the hand that considerately--kills.


　　　　　　　　　　　　70


If one has character one also has one's typical experience, which recurs repeatedly.


　　　　　　　　　　　　71


The sage as astronomer,-- As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you"
you lack the eye of knowledge.


　　　　　　　　　　　　72


Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.


　　　　　　　　　　　　73


Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso.


　　　　　　　　　　　　73a81


Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes--and calls that his pride.


　　　　　　　　　　　　74


A man with spirit is unbearable if he does not also have at least two other things: gratitude82
and cleanliness.


　　　　　　　　　　　　75


The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.


　　　　　　　　　　　　76


Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.


　　　　　　　　　　　　77


With one's principles one wants to bully one's habits, or justify, honor, scold, or conceal
them: two men with the same principles probably aim with them at something basically different.


　　　　　　　　　　　　78


Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.


　　　　　　　　　　　　79


A soul that knows it is loved but does not Itself love betrays its sediment: what is at the
bottom comes up.


　　　　　　　　　　　　80


A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.-- What was on the mind of that god who coun-
selled: "Know thyself!" Did he mean: "Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!-- And Socrates?
--And "scientific men"?--


　　　　　　　　　　　　81


It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it
does not even--quench thirst any more?


　　　　　　　　　　　　83


Instinct.-- When the house burns one forgets even lunch.--Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes.


　　　　　　　　　　　　84


Woman learns to hate to the extent to which her charms--decrease.


　　　　　　　　　　　　85


The same affects in man and woman are yet different in tempo: therefore man and woman do not cease
to misunderstand each other.


　　　　　　　　　　　　86


Women themselves always still have in the background of all personal vanity an impersonal contempt--
for "woman."--


　　　　　　　　　　　　87


Tethered heart, free spirit--If one tethers one's heart severely and imprisons it, one can give
one's spirit many liberties: I have said that once before. But one does not believe me, unless one
already knows it--


　　　　　　　　　　　　88


One begins to mistrust very clever people when they becontill embarrassed.


　　　　　　　　　　　　89


Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible.


　　　　　　　　　　　　90


Heavy, heavy-spirited people become lighter prec'..ely through what makes others heavier, through
hatred and loss, and for a time they surface.


　　　　　　　　　　　　91


So cold, so icy that one burns one's fingers on him! Every hand is startled when touching him.--
And for that very reason some think he glows.


　　　　　　　　　　　　92


Who has not, for the sake of his good reputation--sacrificed himself once?--


　　　　　　　　　　　　93


Affability contains no hatred of men, but for that very reason Soo much contempt for men.


　　　　　　　　　　　　94


A man's maturity--consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.


　　　　　　　　　　　　95


To be ashamed of one's immorality--that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also
ashamed of one's morality.


　　　　　　　　　　　　96


One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nauskaa-- blessing it rather than in love
with it.


　　　　　　　　　　　　97


What? A greas man? I always see only the actor of his own ideal.


　　　　　　　　　　　　98


If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts us.


　　　　　　　　　　　　99


The voice of disappointment:83 "I listened for an echo and heard nothing but praiso--"


　　　　　　　　 　　　100


Tn front of ourselves we all pose as simpler than we arc: thus we take a rest from our fellow
men.


　　　　　　　　 　　　101


Today the man of knowledge might well feel like God become animal.


　　　　　　　　 　　　102


Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved
"What? this person is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or--or--"


　　　　　　　　 　　　103


Danger in happiness.84-- "Now everything redounds to my best, now 1 love every destiny--who
feels like being my destiny?"


　　　　　　　　 　　　104


Not their love of men but the impotence of their love of men keeps the Christians of today from
--burning us.85


　　　　　　　　 　　　105


The pia fraus 86 offends the taste (the "piety") of the free spirit, who has "the piety of the search
for knowledge," even more than the impia fraus. Hence his profound lack of understanding for the
church, a characteristic of the type 'free spirit"--his unfreedom.


　　　　　　　　 　　　106


In music the passions enjoy themselves.


　　　　　　　　 　　　107


Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counterargument: sign of a strong
character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.


　　　　　　　　 　　　108


Them are no moral rhynonlcila at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena-


　　　　　　　　 　　　109


A criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it.87


110


The lawyers defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of
his deed to his advantage.


111


Our vanity is hardest to wound when our pride has just been wounded.


112


Those who feel predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and obtru-
sive: they fend them off.


113


"You want to prepossess him in your favor? Then pretend to be embarrassed in his presence--"


114


The enormous expectation in sexual love and the sense of 'shame in this expectation spoils all per-
spective for women from the start.


115


Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman's pine is mediocre.


116


The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best
in us.


117


The will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects.


118


There is an innocence in admiration; It Is found In those to whom it has never yet occurred that
they, too, might be admired some day.


119


The disgust with dirt can be so great that it keeps us froze cleaning ourselves--from "justifying"
ourselves.


120


Sensuality often hastens the growth of Love so much that roots remain weak and are easily torn up.


121


It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wished to become an author--and not to learn it better.


122


Enjoying praise is in some people merely a courtesy of the heart--and just the opposite of vanity of
the spirit.


123


Even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage.


124


Whoever rejoices on the very stake triumphs not over pain but at the absence of pain that be had ex-
pected. A parable.


125
When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the Inconvenience he causes us very much a-
gainst him.


126


A people88 is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men.-- Yes, and then to get around
them.


127


Science offends the modesty of all real women. It makes them lleci as if one wanted to peep under
their skin--yet worse, under their dress and finery.


128


The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.


129


The devil has the broadest perspectives for God; therefore he &ceps so far away from God--the
devil being the most ancient Caul of wisdom,


130


What a man Is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases --when he stops showing what he
can do. Tatcnt, too, is finery; finery, too, is a hiding place.


131
The sexes deceive themselves about each other--because at bottom they honor and love only them-
selves (or their own ideal, to put it more pleasantly). Thus man likes woman peaceful--but woman
is enennally unpeaceful, like a cat, however well she may have trained herself to seem peaceable.


132


One is best punished for ones virtues.


133


Whoever does not know how to find the way to hls ideal lir* more frivolously and impudently than
the man without an ideal.


134


All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth con* only from the senses.


135


Pharisaisrn is not a degeneration b a good man: a good deal of it is rather the condition of all
being good.


136


One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone whom he can help: origin of a good conver-
sation.


137


When associating with scholars and artists we easily miscal-culate in opposite directions: be-
hind a remarkable scholar one finds, not infrequently, a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre
artist quite often--a very remarkable man.


138


When we are awake we also do what we do In our dreams: we invent and make up the person with
whom we associate--and into mediately forget it.


139


In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than matt,


140


Rule as a riddle.-- "If the bond shan't burst--bite upon I first."


141


The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take him-•f for a god.


142


The chastest words I have heard: "Dans le veritable amour c'est l'ame, qui enveloppe le corps."89


143


Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered hat is hardest for us. Con-
cerning the origin of many a morality.


144


When a woman has scholarly inclinations there Is usually scathing wrong with her sexual-
ly. Sterility itself disposes one toard a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may say
so, "the code animal:"


145


Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: onsan would not have the genius for
finery if she dui not have an stinct for a secondary tole.


146


Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.


147


Prom old Florentine novels; also--from life: "Buona femina e male femina vuol bastone."90
13 Saccbctti, Nov. 86.


148


Seducing one's neighbor to a good opinion and afterwards belicving piously in this opinion--
who could equal women in art?--


149


What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as
good--the atavism of a ma ancient ideaL


150
Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy; around lb demi-god, into a satyr play; and
around God--what? perhaps task "world-1--


151


Having a talent is not enough: one also requires your pasta sion for it--right, my friends?


152


"Where the tree of knowledge stands, there is always Pan disc": thus speak the oldest and the
youngest serpents.


153


Whatever is done from lose always occurs beyond good a evil.


154


Objections, digressions, gay mistrust, the delight in mockery are signs of health: everything un-
onditional belongs in pathology.


155


The sense of the tragic gains and wanes with sensuality.


156


Madness is rare in individuals--but in groups, panics, at tens, and ages it is the rule.


157


The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps ono through many a dreadful night.


158


To our strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason Inn but also our conscience.


159


One has to repay good and ill--but why precisely to the per. who has dune us good or ill?


160


One no longer loves one's insight enough once one communitea it.


161


Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them.


162


"Our neighbors91-is not our neighbor but his neighbor"--thus inks every nation.


163


Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the eer into the light--what is rare and
exceptional in him: to that lent it easily deceives regarding his normality.
-

164


Jesus said to his Jews: "The law was for senants--love God Dow him, as his soul What are morals
to us sons of Godl"


165


Regarding all parties.-- A shepherd always needs a bellaher--or he himself must occasionally be
a %ether.


166


Even when the mouth lies, the way It looks still tells the truth


167


In men who are hard, intimacy involves shame--and is precious.


168


Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated--into a vice.


169


Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.


170


Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.


171


In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.


172


From love of man one occasionally embraces someone at random (because one cannot em-
brace all): but one must not tell this--


173


One does not hate as long as one still despises, but only do whom one esteems equal or higher.


174


You utilitarians, you, too, love everything useful only vehicle for your inclinations; you, too,
really find the noise of its wheels insufferable?


175


In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired.


176


The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.


177


Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is.


178


One does not credit clever people with their follies: what a loss of human rights!


179


The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim
that meanwhile we have "improved."



180


There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith


181


It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.


182


The familiarity of those who are superior embitters because may not be returned.


183


"Not that you lied to mc, but that I no longer believe you, has akcn me"--


184


The high spirits of kindness may look like malice.


185


"I don't like him."-- Why?-- "1 am not equal to him."--. Has any human being ever answered that
way?




　　　　　　　　　　　Part Five


　　　　　NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS




　　　　　　　　　　　186



The moral sentiment in Europe today is as refined, old, diverse, irritable, and subtle, as the
"science of morals" that accompanies it is still young, raw, clumsy, and butterfingered--an at-
tractive contrast that occasionally even becomes visible and incarnate in the person of a moralist.
Even the term "science of morals" is much too arrogant considering what it designates, and of-
fends good taste--which always prefers more modest terms.

One should own up in all strictness to what is still necessary here for a long time to come, to
what alone is justified so far: to collect material, to conceptualize and arrange a vast realm of
subtle feelings of value and differences of value which are alive, grow, beget, and perish--and per-
haps attempts to present vividly some of a more frequent and recurring forms of such living crys-
tallizems--all to prepare a typology of morals.

To be sure, so far one has not been so modest. With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter,
all our philosophers demanded something far more exalted, presumptuous, and solemn from them-
selves as soon as they approached the study of morality: they wanted to supply a rational foundatlon
for morality--and every philosopher so far has believed that he has provided such a foundon. Mor-
ality itself, however, was accepted as "given." How remote from their clumsy pride was that task
which they considered insignificant and left in dust and must--the task of description--though the
subtlest fingers and senses can scarcely be subtle enough for it.

Just because our moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately in arbitrary
extracts or in accidental epitomes--for example, as the morality of their environment, their class,
their church, the spirit of their time, their climate and part of the world--just because they were
poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages--they
never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many
moralities. In all "science of morals" so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the
problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problem-
atic here. What the philosophers called "a rational foundation for morality" and tried to supply
was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the common faith is the prevalent
morality; a new means of expression for this faith; and thus just another fact within a particu-
lar morality; indeed, in the last analysis a kind of denial that this morality might ever be con-
sidered problematic--certainly the very opposite of an examine. tion, analysis, questioning, and
vivisection of this very faith.

Listen, for example, with what almost venerable innocence Schopcnhauer still descrased his task,
and then draw your condo. sions about the scientific standing of a "science" whose ultimate mas-
ters still talk like children and little old women: 'The principle," he says (p. 136 of Grundprobleme
der Moral),92 "the fundamental proposition on whose contents all moral philosophers are really 93
agreed--neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva 94--that is really the proposition for which
all moralists endeavor to find to rational foundation . . . the real basis of ethics for which is has been
looking for thousands of years as for the philosopher's one."

The difficulty of providing a rational foundation for the principle cited may indeed be great--as
is well known, Schopcnhaucr did not succeed either--and whoever has once felt deeply how insip-
idly false and sentimental this principle is in a world whose essence is will to power, may allow him-
self to be reminded that Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really--played the flute. Every day, af-
ter dinner: one should read his biography on tha.t And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God
and the world but comes to a stop before morality---who affirms morality and plays the flute--the
laede neminem morality--what? is that really--a pessimist?



　　　　　　　　　　　187



Even apart from the value of such claims as "there is a categorical imperative in us," one can still
always ask: what does such claim tell us about the man who makes it? There are moralities that are
meant to justify their creator before others. Other moralities are meant to calm him and lead him to
be satisfied with himself. With yet others he wants to crucify himself and humiliate himself. With o-
thers he wants to wreak revenge, with others conceal himself, with others transfigure himself and place
himself way up, at a distance. This morality is used by its creator to forget, that one to have others
forget him or something about him. Some moralists want to vent their power and creative whims on
humanity; some others, perhaps including Kant, suggest with their morality: "What deserves respect
in me is that I can obey--and you ought not to be different from me."--In short, moralities are also
merely a sign language of the affects.



　　　　　　　　　　　188



Every morality is, as opposed to laisser aller,95 a bit of tyranny against "nature"; also a-
gainst "reason"; but this in itself is no objection, as long as we do not hate some other
morality which permits us to decree that every kind of tyranny and unreason is inpermis-
sible. What is essential and inestimable in every morality is that it constitutes a long
compulsion: to understand Stoicism or PortRoyal or Puritanism, one should recall the com-
pulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom--the metrical
compulsion of rhyme and rhythm.

How much trouble the poets and orators of all peoples have taken--not excepting a few prose
writers today in whose ear there dwells an inexorable conscience--"for the sake of some fool-
ishness." as utilitarian dolts say, feeling smart--"submitting abjectly to capricious laws," as
anarchists say, feeling "free," even "free-spirited." But the curious fact is that all there
is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whe-
ther in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in
ethics, has developed only owing to the "tyranny of such capricious laws"; and in all serious-
ness, the probability is by no means small that precisely this is "nature" and "natural"--and
not that laisser aller.

What is essential "in heaven and on earth" seems to be, to say once more, that there should
be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction: given that, something al-
ways develops, and has developed. for whose sake it is worth while to live on earth; for
example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality--something transfiguring, subtle, mad,
and divine. The long unfreedom of the spirit, the mistrustful constraint in the communi-
cability of thoughts, the discipline thinkers imposed on themselves to think within the direct-
ions laid down by a church or court, or under Arisotelian presuppositions, the long spir-
itual will to interpret all events under a Christian schema and to rediscover and justify
the Christlan god in every accident--all this, however forced, capricious, hard, gruesome,
and anti-rational, has shown itself to be the means through which the European spirit has
been trained to strength, ruthless curiosity, and subtle mobility, though admittedly in the
process an irreplaceable amount of strength and spirit had to crushed, stifled, and ruined
(for here, as everywhere, "nature" manifests herself as she is, in all her prodigal and in-
different magnificence which is outrageous but noble).

That for thousands of years European thinkers thought merely in order to prove something--
today, conversely, we suspect every thinker who "wants to prove something"--that the
conclusions that ought to be the result of their most rigorous reflection were always set-
tled from the start, just as it used to be with Asiatic astrology, and still is today with the
innocuous Christian-moral interpretation of our most intimate personal experiences "for
the glory God" and "for the salvation of the soul"--this tyranny, this caprice, this rig-
orous and grandiose stupidity has educated the spirit. Slavery is, as it seems, both in the
cruder and in the more subtle sense, the indispensable means of spiritual discipline and
cultivation,96 too. Consider any morality with this in mind: what there is in it of "nature"
teaches hatred of the laisser aller, of any all-too-great freedom, and implants the need
for limited horizons and the nearest tasks--teaching the narrowing of our perspective,
and thus in a certain sense stupidity, as a condition of life and growth.

"You shall obey--someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last res-
pect for yourself"--this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to
he sure, is neither "categorical" as the old Kant would have it (hence the "else") nor
addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races,
ages, classes--but above all to the whole human animal, to man.



　　　　　　　　　　　189



Industrious races find it very troublesome to endure leisure: it was a masterpiece of
English instinct to make the Sabbath so holy and so boring that the English begin uncon-
sciously to lust again for their work- and week-day. It is a kind of cleverly invented,
cleverly inserted fast, the like of which is also encountered frequently in the ancient
world (although, in fairness to southern peoples, not exactly in regard to work ).
There have to be fasts of many kinds; and wherever powerful drives and habits prevail,
legislators have to see to it that intercalary days are inserted on which such a drive
is chained and learns again to hunger. Viewed from a higher vantage point, whole gen-
erations and ages that make their appearance, infected with some moral fanaticism,
seem to be such times of constraint and fasting during which a drive learns to stoop
and submit, but also to purify and sharpen itself. A few philosophical sects. too,
permit such an interpretation (for example, the Stoa in the midst of Hellenistic cul-
ture with its lascivious atmosphere, overcharged with aphrodisiac odors).

This is also a hint for an explanation of the paradox: why it was precisely during the
most Christian period of Europe and altogether only under the pressure of Christian
value judgments that the sex drive sublimated97 itself into love (amour-passion).



　　　　　　　　　　　190



There is something in the morality of Plato that does not really belong to Plato but
is merely encountered in his philosophy--one might say, in spite of Plato: namely,
the Socratism for which he was really too noble. "Nobody wants to do harm to himself,
therefore all that is bad is done involuntarily. For the bad do harm to themselves:
this they would not do if they knew that the bad is bad. Hence the bad are bad only
because of an error; if one removes the error, one necessarily makes them--good."

This type of inference smells of the rabble that sees nothing in bad actions but the
unpleasant consequences and really judges, "it is stupid to do what is bad," while "good"
is taken without further ado to be identical with "useful and agreeable." In the case
of every moral utilitarianism one may immediately infer the same origin and follow
one's nose: one will rarely go astray.

Plato did everything he could in order to read something refined and noble into the
proposition of his teacher-above all, himself. He was the most audacious of all in-
terpreters and took the whole Socrates only the way one picks a popular tune and folk
song from the streets in order to vary it into the infinite and impossible--namely,
into all of his own masks and multiplicities In a jest, Homeric at that: what is the
Platonic Socrates after all if not prosthe Platon opithen te Platen messe te Chim-
aira.98



　　　　　　　　　　　191



The ancient theological problem of "faith" and "knowledge"--or, more clearly, of in-
stinct and reason--in other words, the question whether regarding the valuation of
things instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants us to evaluate and
act in accordance with reasons, with a "why?"--in other words, in accordance with ex-
pedience and utility--this is still the ancient moral problem that first emerged in
the person of Socrates and divided thinking people long before Christianity. Socrates
himself, to be sure, with the taste of his talent--that of a superior dialectician--
had initially sided with reason; and in fact, what did ho do his life long but laugh
at the awkward incapacity of noble Athenians who, like all noble men, were men of in-
stinct and never could give sufficient information about the reasons for their actions?
In the end, however, privately and secretly, he laughed at himself, too: in himself he
found, before his subtle conscience and self-examination, the same difficulty and in-
capacity. But is that any reason, he encouraged himself, for giving up the instincts?
One has to see to it that they as well as reason receive their due--one must follow the
instincts but persuade reason to assist them with good reasons. This was the real false-
ness of that great ironic, so rich in secrets; he got his conscience to be satisfied with a
kind of self-trickery: at bottom, he had seen through the irrational element in moral
judgments.

Plato. more innocent in such matters and lacking the craftiness of the plebeian, wanted
to employ all his strength--the greatest strength any philosopher so far has had at his
disposal-to prove to himself that reason and instinct of themselves tend toward one goal,
the good, "God." And since Plato, all theologians philosophers are on the same track--
that is, in moral matters it has so far been instinct, or what the Christians call "faith,"
or "the herd," as I put it, that has triumphed. Perhaps Descartes should be excepted.
as the father of rationalism (and hence the grandfather of the Revolution) who conceded
authority to reason alone: but reason is merely an instrument, and Descartes was super-
ficial.



　　　　　　　　　　　192



Whoever has traced the history of an individual science finds a clue in its development
for understanding the most ancient and common processes of all "knowledge and cogni-
tion." There as here it is the rash hypotheses, the fictions, the good dumb will to "believe."
the lack of mistrust and patience that are developed first; our senses learn only late,
and never learn entirely, to be subtle, faithful, and cautious organs of cognition. Our
eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more
an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different
and new in an impression. The latter would require more strength, more "morality." Hear-
ing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear, foreign music we do not
hear well. When we hear another language we try involuntarily to form the sounds we hear
into words that sound more familiar and more like home to us: thus the German, for ex-
ample, transformed arcubalista, when he heard that, into Armbrust.99 What is new finds
our senses, too, hostile and reluctant; and even in the "simplest" processes of sensa-
tion the affects dominate, such as fear, love, hatred, including the passive affects of
laziness.

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllab-
les) on a page--rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses"
at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words--just as little do we see a
tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is
so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in
the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part
of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "in-
ventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are--accustomed to
lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is
much more of an artist than one knows.

In an animated conversation I often see the face of the person with whom I am talk-
ing so clearly and so subtly determined in accordance with the thought he expresses,
or that I believe has been produced in him, that this degree of clarity far surpasses
my powers of vision: so the subtle shades of the play of the muscles and the expres-
sion of the eyes must have been made up by me. Probably the person made an altoget-
her different face, or none at all.



　　　　　　　　　　　193



Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit:100 but the other way around, too. What we experi-
ence in dreams--assuming that we experience it often--belongs in the end just as
much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually": we
are richer or poorer on account of it, have one need more or less. and finally are
led a little by the habits of our dreams even in broad daylight and in the most
cheerful moments of our wide-awake spirit

Suppose someone has flown often in his dreams and finally, as soon as he dreams,
he is conscious of his power and art of flight as if it were his privilege, also his
characteristic and enviable happiness. He believes himself capable of realizing ev-
ery kind of are and angle simply with the lightest impulse; he knows the feeling
of a certain divine frivolity, an "upward" without tension and constraint, a "down-
ward" without condescension and humiliation--without gravity! How could a hu-
man being who had had such dream experiences and dream habits fail to find that
the word "happiness" had a different color and definition in his waking life, too?
How could he fail to--desire happiness differently? "Rising" as described by poets
must seem to him, compared with this "flying." too earthbound, muscle-bound, forc-
ed, too "grave."



　　　　　　　　　　　194



The difference among men becomes manifest not only in the difference between
their tablets of goods--in the fact that they consider different goods worth striving
for and also disagree about what is more and less valuable. about the order of rank
of the goods they recognize in common--it becomes manifest even more in what
they take for really having and possessing something good.

Regarding a woman, for example, those men who are more modest consider the mere
use of the body and sexual gratification a sufficient and satisfying sign of "having."
of possession. Another type, with a more suspicious and demanding thirst for pos-
session. sees the "question mark," the illusory quality of such "having" and wants,
subtler tests, above all in order to know whether the woman does not only give her-
self to him but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to have: only
then does she seem to him "possessed." A third type, however, does not reach the
end of his mistrust and desire for having even so: he asks himself whether the woman,
when she gives up everything for him, does not possibly do this for a phantom of him.
He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being
loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in
his possession only when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves
him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness pati-
ence, and spirituality.

One type wants to possess a people--and all the higher arts of a Cagliostro and Cat-
iline suit him to that purpose. Someone else, with a more subtle thirst for posses-
sion, says to himself: "One may not deceive where one wants to possess." The idea
that a mask of him might command the heart of the people,101 irritates him and makes
him impatient: "So I must let myself be known, and first must know myself."

Among helpful and charitable people one almost regularly encounters that clumsy ruse
which first doctors the person to be helped--as if, for example, he "deserved" help,
required just their help, and would prove to be profoundly grateful for all help,
faithful and submissive. With these fancies they dispose of the needy as of possess-
ions, being charitable and helpful people from a desire for possessions. One finds
them jealous if one crosses or anticipates them when they want to help.

Involuntarily, parents turn children into something similar to themselves--they call
that "education." Deep in her heart, no mother doubts that the child she has borne is
her property; no father contests his own right to subject it to his concepts and val-
uations. Indeed, formerly it seemed fair for fathers (among the ancient Germans, for
example) to decide on the life or death of the newborn as the born as they saw fit.
And like the father, teacher, classes, priests, and princes still see, even today, in
every new human being an unproblematic opportunity for another possession. So it
follows--



　　　　　　　　　　　195



The Jews--a people "born for slavery," as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say; "the cho-
sen people among the peoples," as they themselves say and believe--the Jews have brought
off that miraculous feat of an inversion of values, thanks to which life on earth has ac-
quired a novel and dangerous attraction for a couple of millennia: their prophets have
fused "rich," "godless," "evil," ' violent," and "sensual" into one and west the first to
use the word "world" as an opprobrium. This inversion of values (which includes using the
word "poor" as synonymous with "holy" and "friend") constitutes the significance of the
Jewish people: they mark the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals.102



　　　　　　　　　　　196



Countless dark bodies are to be inferred beside the sun--and we shall never see them. A-
mong ourselves, this is a parable; and a psychologist of morals reads the whole writing of the
stars only as a parable- and sign-language which can be used to bury much in silence.



　　　　　　　　　　　197



We misunderstand the beast of prey and the man of prey (for example. Cesare Borgia)103
thoroughly, we misunderstand "nature," as long as we still look for something "pathological"
at the sottorn of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or :ben for some
"hell" that is supposed to be innate in them; yet his is what almost all moralists so far
have done. Could it be that oclalists harbor a hatred of the primeval forest and the trop-
ics? And that the "tropical man" must be discredited at any price, abether as sickness and
degeneration of man or as his own hell and tell-torture? Why? In favor of the "temperate
zones"? In favor of emperate men? Of those who are "moral"? Who are mediocre?--this
for the chapter "Morality as Timidity."



　　　　　　　　　　　198



All these moralities that address themselves to the individual, for the sake of his "hap-
piness," as one says--what are they but counsels for behavior in relation to the degree
of dangerousness in which the individual lives with himself; recipes against his passions,
his good and bad inclinations insofar as they have the will to aower and want to play the
master, little and great prudences and artifices that exude the nook odor of old nostrums
and of the wisdom of old women; all of them baroque and unreasonable in form--because they
address themselves to "all," because they generalize where one must not generalize. All of
them speak unconditionally, take themselves for unconditional, all of them flavored with
more than one grain of salt and tolerable only--at times even eductive--when they begin to
smell over-spiced and dangerous, specially "of the other world." All of it is, measured
intellectully, worth very little and not by a long shot "science," much less wisdom," but
rather, to say it once more, three times more, prudence, prudence, prudence, mixed with
stupidity, stupidity, stupidity--whether it be that indifference and statue coldness against
the ot-headed folly of the affects which the Stoics advised and administered; or that laugh-
ing-no-more and weeping-no-more of pinoza, his so naively advocated destruction of the af-
fects through wir analysis and vivisection; or that tuning down of the affects to a harmless
mean according to which they may he satisfied, the Arisotelianism of morals; even morality
as enjoyment of the affects in a deliberate thinness and spiritualization by means of the
symbolism of art, say, as musk, or as love of God and of man for God's sake--for in religion
the passions enjoy the rights of citizens again, assuming that--; finally even that accomm-
odating and playful surrender to the affects, as Hafiz and Goethe taught it, that bold
dropping of the reins, that spiritual-physical licentia morum 104 in the exceptional case
of wise old owls and sots105 for whom it "no longer holds much danger." This, too, for the
chapter "Morality as Timidity."



　　　　　　　　　　　199



Inasmuch as at all times, as long as there have been human beings, there have also been
herds of men (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great
many people who obeyed, compared with the small number of those commanding--considering,
then, that nothing has been exercised and cultivated better and longer among men so far
than obedience--it may fairly be assumed that the need for it is now innate in the average
man, as a kind of formal conscience that commands: "thou shalt unconditionally do something,
unconditionally not do something else," in short, "thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy
itself and to fill its form with some content. According to its strength, impatience, and
tension, it seizes upon things as a rude appetite, rather indiscriminately, and accepts
whatever is shouted into its can by someone who issues commands--parents, teachers, laws,
class prejudices, public opinions.

The strange limits of human development, the way it hesitates, takes so long, often turns
back, and moves in circles, is due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is in-
herited best, and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct
progressing for once to its ultimate excesses, then those who command and are independent
would eventually be lacking altogether: or hey would secretly suffer from a bad conscience
and would find It ecessary to deceive themselves before they could command--as if hey, too,
merely obeyed. This state is actually encountered in Euope today: I call it the moral hy-
pocrisy of those commanding. they know no other way to protect themselves against their
bad onscience than to pose as the executors of more ancient or higher lommands (of ancest-
ors, the constitution, of right, the laws, or •ven of God). Or they even borrow herd maxims
from the herd's vay of thinking. such as "first servants of their people" or "instruments
of the common weal."

On the other side, the herd man in Europe today gives himself the appearance of being the
only permissible kind of man, and glorifies his attributes, which make him tame, easy to
get along with, and useful to the herd, as if they were the truly human virtues: namely,
public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indul-
gence, and pity. In those cases, however, where one considers leaders and bellwethers in-
dispensable, people today make one attempt after another to add together :lever herd men
by way of replacing commanders: all parliamentary constitutions, for example, have this
origin. Nevertheless, the appearance of one .who commands unconditionally strikes these
serd-animal Europeans as an immense comfort and salvation from gradually intolerable pres-
sure, as was last attested in a major way sy the effect of Napoleon's appearance. The his-
tory of Napoleon's reception is almost the history of the higher happiness attained by his
whole century in its most valuable human beings and moments.



　　　　　　　　　　　200



In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, trman beings have in their
bodies the heritage of multiple origins, hat is, opposite, and often not merely opposite,
drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any est. Such
human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human be-
ings: their most profound desire that the war they are should come to an end. Happiness
appears to them, in agreement with a tranquilizing (for example, Epicurean or Christian)
medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of resting, of not being dis-
turbed, of satiety, of finally attained unity, as a "sabbath of sabbaths," to speak with
the holy rhetorician Augustine who was himself such a human being.

But when the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and
incentive of life--and if, moreover, in addition to his powerful and irreconcilable drives,
a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self-control,
self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated, too--then those magical, incomprehens-
ible, and unfathomable ones arise, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduct-
ion, whose most beautiful expression is found in Alcibiades and Caesar (to whose company
I should like to add that first European after my taste, the Hohenstaufen Frederick II,)106 and
among artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear in precisely the same ages when that
weaker type with its desire for rest comes to the fore; both types belong together and
one their origin to the same causes.



　　　　　　　　　　　201



As long as the utility reigning in moral value judgments is solely the utility of the herd,
as long as one considers only the preservation of the community, and immorality is sought
exactly and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the survival of the community--there
can be no morality of "neighbor love." Supposing that even then there was a constant little
exercise of consideration, pity, fairness, mildness, reciprocity of assistance; supposing that
even in that state of society all those drives are active that later receive the honorary
designation of "virtues" and eventually almost coincide with the concept of "morality"--in
that period they do not yet at all belong in the realm of moral valuations; they are still
extra-moral. An act of pity, for example, was not considered either good or bad, moral or
immoral, in the best period of the Romans; and even when it was praised, such praise was per-
fectly compatible with a kind of disgruntled disdain as soon as it was juxtaposed with an
action that served the welfare of the whole, of the res publica.107

In the last analysis, "love of the neighbor" is always some-thing secondary, partly conven-
tional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor. After the structure of
socety is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of
the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and
dangerous drives, like an enterprising spirit, foolhardiness, vengefulness, craftiness, rap-
acity, and the lust to rule, which had so far not merely been honored insofar as they were
socially useful--under different names, to be sure, from those :hasen here--but had to be
trained and cultivated to make them great (because one constantly needed them in view of
the dangers :o the whole community, against the enemies of the community), ire now experi-
enced as doubly dangerous, since the channels to divert them are lacking, and, step upon
step, they are branded as immoral and abandoned to slander.

Now the opposite drives and inclinations receive moral honors; step upon step, the herd in-
stinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little is dangerous to the community, dan-
gerous to equality, in an opinion, in a state or affect, in a will, in a talent--that now
constitutes the moral perspective: here, too, fear is again he mother of morals.

The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately and drive the individual
far above the average and the tats of the herd conscience, wreck the self-confidence of
the coin-unity, its faith in itself, and it is as if its spine snapped. Hence just hese
drives are branded and slandered most. High and independnt spirituality, the will to stand
alone, even a powerful reason are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an indi-
vidual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor henceforth called evil and the fair mo-
dest, submissive conformin mentali the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations
and honors. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, the opportunity and necessity for
educating one's feelings to severity and hardness is lacking more and more; and every se-
verity, even in justice, begins to disturb the conscience; any high and hard nobility and
self-reliance is almost felt to be an insult and arouses mistrust; the "lamb," even more
the "sheep," gains in respect.

There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and ten-
der that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does
this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is cer-
tain that imagining "punishment" and "being supposed to punish" hurts it, arouses fear
in it. "Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is
terrible." With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate
consequence. Supposing that one could altogether abolish danger, the reason for fear,
this morality would be abolished, too, eo ipso: it would no longer be needed, it would no
longer consider itself necessary.

Whoever examines the conscience of the European today will have to pull the same impera-
tive out of a thousand moral folds and hideouts--the imperative of herd timidity: "we
want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!" Some day--through-
out Europe. the will and way to this day is now called "progress."108



　　　　　　　　　　　202



Let us immediately say once more what we have already said hundred times, for today's ears
resist such truths--our truths. We know well enough how insulting it sounds when anybody
counts man, unadorned and without metaphor, among the animals; but will be charged against
us as almost a guilt that precisely for the men of "modern ideas" we constantly employ
such expressions as "herd," "herd instincts," and so forth. What can be done about it? He
cannot do anything else; for here exactly lies our novel insight. We have found that in
all major moral judgments Europe is now one mind, including even the countries dominated
by the influx: of Europe: plainly, one now knows in Europe what Socrates thought he did
not know and what that famous old serpent once promised to teach--today one "knows"
what is good and evil.109

Now it must sound harsh and cannot be heard easily when we keep insisting: that which here
believes it knows, that which here glorifies itself with its praises and reproaches, calling
itself good, that is the instinct of the herd animal, man, which has scored a breakthrough
and attained prevalence and predominance over her instincts--and this development is con-
tinuing in accordance with the growing physiological approximation and assimilation of it
is the symptom. Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality--in other words, as we un-
derstand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which
many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible. But this morality
resists such a "possibility," such an "ought," with all its power: it says stubbornly and in-
exorably, "I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality.' Indeed, with the help of a
religion which indulged and flattered the most sublime herd-animal desires, we have reach-
ed the point where we find even political and social institutions an ever more visible ex-
pression of this morality: the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement.

But there are indications that its tempo is still much too slow and sleepy for the more
impatient, for the sick, the sufferers of the instinct mentioned: witness the ever madder
howling of the anarchist dogs who are baring their fangs more and more obviously and roam
through the alleys of European culture. They seem opposites of the peacefully industri-
ous democrats and ideologists of revolution, and even more so of the doltish philosophast-
ers and brotherhood enthusiasts who call themselves socialists and want "free society";
but in fact they are at one with the lot in their thorough and instinctive hostility to ev-
ery other form of society except that of the autonomous herd (even to the point of repu-
diating the very concepts of "master" and "servant"--ni dieu ni maitre 110 runs a socialist
formula). They are at one in their tough resistance t every special claim, every special
right and privilege (which Men in the last analysis, every right: for once all are equal
nobody need "rights" any more). They are at one in their mistrust of pinkly justice (as
if it were a violation of those who are weaker, a woe against the necessary consequence
of all previous society). But they are also at one in the religion of pity, in feeling
with all who feel, live, and suffer (down to the animal, up to "God"--the excess of a
"pity with God" belongs in a democratic age). They are one, the lot of them, in the cry
and the impatience of pity, in the deadly hatred of suffering generally, in their almost
feminine inability to remain spectators, to let someone suffer. They are at one in their
involuntary plunge into gloom and unmanly tenderness under whose spell Europe seems
threatened by a new Buddhism. The are at one in their faith in the morality of shared
pity, as if that were morality in itself, being the height, the attained height of man,
the sole hope of the future, the consolation of present man, the great absolution from
all former guilt. They are at one, the lot of them, in their faith in the community as
the savior, in short, in the herd, in themselves"--



　　　　　　　　　　　203



We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the de-
cay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man,
making him mediocre and lowering his value. Where, then, must we reach with our hopes?

Toward new philosophers; there is no choice; toward spirits strong and original enough
to provide the stimuli for opposite valuations and to revalue and invert "eternal values";
toward forerunners, toward men of the future who in the present tie the knot and con-
straint that forces the will of millennia upon new tracks. To teach man the future of
man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare great ventures and overall
attempts of discipline and cultivation by way of putting an end to that gruesome dominion
of nonsense and accident that has so far been called "history"--the nonsense of the
"greatest number" is merely its ultimate form: at some time new types of philosophers
and commanders will be necessary for that, and whatever has existed on earth of conceal-
ed, terrible, and benevolent spirits, will look pale ad dwarfed by comparison. It is the im-
age of such leaders that we envisage: may I say this out loud, you free spirits? The con-
ditions that one would have partly to create and partly to exploit for their genesis; the
probable ways and tests that would enable a soul to grow to such a height and force that
it would feel the compulsion for such tasks; a revaluation of values under whose new pres-
sure and hammer a conscience would be steeled, a heart turned to bronze, in order to en-
dure the weight of such responsibility; on the other hand, the necessity of such leaders,
the frightening danger that they might fail to appear or that they might turn out badly or
degenerate--these are our real worries and gloom--do you know that, you free spirits?
--these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms that pass over the sky of our life.

There are few pains as sore as once having seen, guessed, felt how an extraordinary hu-
man being strayed from his path and degenerated.111 But anyone who has the rare eye for
the overall danger that "man" himself degenerates; anyone who, like us, has recogniz-
ed the monstrous fortuity that has so far had its way and play regarding the future
of man--a game in which no hand, and not even a finger, of God took part as a player;
anyone who fathoms the calamity that lies concealed in the absurd guilelessness and
blind confidence of "modern ideas" and even more in the whole Christian-European
morality--suffers from an anxiety that is past all comparisons. With a single glance he
sees what, given a favorable accumulation and increase of forces and tasks, might yet
be made of man; he knows with all the knowledge of his conscience how man is still un-
exhausted for the greatest possibilities and how often the type "man" has already con-
fronted enigmatic decisions and new paths--he knows still better from his most painful
memories what wretched things have so far usually broken a being of the highest rank
that was in the process of becoming, so that it broke, sank, and became contemptible.

The overall degeneration of man down to what today appears to the socialist dolts and
flatheads as their "man of the future"--as as their ideal--this degeneration and dimin-
ution of man into the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to the man of the "free so-
ciety"), this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims,
is possible, there is no doubt of it. Anyone who has once thought through this possi-
bility to the end knows one kind of nausea that other men don't know--but perhaps
also a new task!--




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