No More Learning

We
gossip, and the whole court believes that we have
already been at work and racked our brains: there
is no light to be seen earlier than that which burns
in our window. —Hark! Was that not the bell?
The devil! The day and the dance commence,
and we do not know our rounds! We must then
improvise,—all the world improvises its day. To-
day, let us for once do like all the world! —And
therewith vanished my wonderful morning dream,
probably owing to the violent strokes of the tower-
clock, which just then announced the fifth hour
with all the importance which is peculiar to it. It
seems to me that, on this occasion, the God of
dreams wanted to make merry over my habits,—
it is my habit to commence the day by arranging
it properly, to make it endurable for myself, and
it is possible that I may often have done this too
formally, and too much like a prince.
23-
The Characteristics of Corruption. —Let us observe
the following characteristics in that condition of


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 63
society from time to time necessary, which is desig-
nated by the word " corruption. " Immediately upon
the appearance of corruption anywhere, a motley
superstition gets the upper hand, and the hitherto
universal belief of a people becomes colourless and
impotent in comparison with it; for superstition is
freethinking of the second rank,—he who gives
himself over to it selects certain forms and formulae
which appeal to him, and permits himself a right
of choice. The superstitious man is always much
more of a " person," in comparison with the religious
man, and a superstitious society will be one in
which there are many individuals, and a delight in
individuality. Seen from this standpoint supersti-
tion always appears as a progress in comparison
with belief, and as a sign that the intellect becomes
more independent and claims to have its rights.
Those who reverence the old religion and the
religious disposition then complain of corruption,—
they have hitherto also determined the usage of
language, and have given a bad repute to supersti-
tion, even among the freest spirits. Let us learn
that it is a symptom of enlightenment. —Secondly,
a society in which corruption takes a hold is blamed
for effeminacy: for the appreciation of war, and
the delight in war perceptibly diminish in such a
society, and the conveniences of life are now just
as eagerly sought after as were military and
gymnastic honours formerly. But one is accus-
tomed to overlook the fact that the old national
energy and national passion, which acquired a
magnificent splendour in war and in the tourney,
has now transferred itself into innumerable private


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64 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
passions, and has merely become less visible;
indeed in periods of " corruption " the quantity and
quality of the expended energy of a people is prob-
ably greater than ever, and the individual spends
it lavishly, to such an extent as could not be done
formerly—he was not then rich enough to do so!
And thus it is precisely in times of " effeminacy"
that tragedy runs at large in and out of doors, it
is then that ardent love and ardent hatred are
born, and the flame of knowledge flashes heaven-
ward in full blaze. —Thirdly, as if in amends for the
reproach of superstition and effeminacy, it is cus-
tomary to say of such periods of corruption that
they are milder, and that cruelty has then greatly
diminished in comparison with the older, more
credulous, and stronger period. But to this praise
I am just as little able to assent as to that reproach:
I only grant so much—namely, that cruelty now
becomes more refined, and its older forms are
henceforth counter to the taste; but the wounding
and torturing by word and look reaches its highest
development in times of corruption,—it is now only
that wickedness is created, and the delight in wicked-
ness. The men of the period of corruption are
witty and calumnious; they know that there are
yet other ways of murdering than by the dagger
and the ambush—they know also that all that is
well said is believed in. —Fourthly, it is when
"morals decay" that those beings whom one calls
tyrants first make their appearance; they are the
forerunners of the individual, and as it were early
matured firstlings. Yet a little while, and this
fruit of fruits hangs ripe and yellow on the tree of


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 65
a people,—and only for the sake of such fruit did
this tree exist! When the decay has reached its
worst, and likewise the conflict of all sorts of tyrants,
there always arises the Czesar, the final tyrant, who
puts an end to the exhausted struggle for sove-
reignty, by making the exhaustedness work for him.
In his time the individual is usually most mature,
and consequently the "culture" is highest and
most fruitful, but not on his account nor through
him: although the men of highest culture love to
flatter their Caesar by pretending that they are his
creation. The truth, however, is that they need
quietness externally, because internally they have
disquietude and labour. In these times bribery and
treason are at their height: for the love of the ego,
then first discovered, is much more powerful than
the love of the old, used-up, hackneyed "father-
land"; and the need to be secure in one way or other
against the frightful fluctuations of fortune, opens
even the nobler hands, as soon as a richer and more
powerful person shows himself ready to put gold
into them. There is then so little certainty with
regard to the future; people live only for the day:
a condition of mind which enables every deceiver
to play an easy game,—people of course only let
themselves be misled and bribed "for the present,"
and reserve for themselves futurity and virtue.
The individuals, as is well known, the men who
only live for themselves, provide for the moment
more than do their opposites, the gregarious men,
because they consider themselves just as incalcul-
able as the future; and similarly they attach them-
selves willingly to despots, because they believe
5


## p. 66 (#90) ##############################################

66 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
themselves capable of activities and expedients,
which can neither reckon on being understood by
the multitude, nor on finding favour with them,—
but the tyrant or the Caesar understands the rights
of the individual even in his excesses, and has an
interest in speaking on behalf of a bolder private
morality, and even in giving his hand to it. For
he thinks of himself, and wishes people to think of
him what Napoleon once uttered in his classical
style—" I have the right to answer by an eternal
* thus I am' to everything about which complaint
is brought against me. I am apart from all the
world, I accept conditions from nobody. I wish
people also to submit to my fancies, and to take
it quite as a simple matter, if I should indulge in
this or that diversion. " Thus spoke Napoleon
once to his wife, when she had reasons for calling
in question the fidelity of her husband. —The times
of corruption are the seasons when the apples fall
from the tree: I mean the individuals, the seed-
bearers of the future, the pioneers of the spiritual
colonisation and of a new construction of national
and social unions. Corruption is only an abusive
term for the harvest time of a people.
24.
Different Dissatisfactions. —The feeble and as it
were feminine dissatisfied people have ingenuity
for beautifying and deepening life; the strong
dissatisfied people—the masculine persons among
them, to continue the metaphor—have the ingenuity
for improving and safeguarding life. The former


## p. 67 (#91) ##############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 67
show their weakness and feminine character by
willingly letting themselves be temporarily deceived,
and perhaps even by putting up with a little
ecstasy and enthusiasm on a time, but on the whole
they are never to be satisfied, and suffer from the
incurability of their dissatisfaction; moreover they
are the patrons of all those who manage to concoct
opiate and narcotic comforts, and just on that
account averse to those who value the physician
higher than the priest,—they thereby encourage
the continuance of actual distress! If there had
not been a surplus of dissatisfied persons of this
kind in Europe since the time of the Middle Ages,
the remarkable capacity of Europeans for constant
transformation would perhaps not have originated
at all; for the claims of the strong dissatisfied
persons are too gross, and really too modest to
resist being finally quieted down. China is an
instance of a country in which dissatisfaction on a
grand scale and the capacity for transformation
have died out for many centuries; and the Socialists
and state-idolaters of Europe could easily bring
things to Chinese conditions and to a Chinese
"happiness," with their measures for the ameliora-
tion and security of life, provided that they could
first of all root out the sicklier, tenderer, more
feminine dissatisfaction and Romanticism which
are still very abundant among us. Europe is an
invalid who owes her best thanks to her incurability
and the eternal transformations of her sufferings;
these constant new situations, these equally con-
stant new dangers, pains, and make-shifts, have at
last generated an intellectual sensitiveness which is


## p. 68 (#92) ##############################################

68 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
almost equal to genius, and is in any case the
mother of all genius.
25.
Not Pre-ordained to Knowledge. —There is a pur-
blind humility not at all rare, and when a person
is afflicted with it, he is once for all unqualified
for being a disciple of knowledge. It is this in
fact: the moment a man of this kind perceives
anything striking, he turns as it were on his heel,
and says to himself: "You have deceived yourself!
Where have your wits been! This cannot be
the truth ! "—and then, instead of looking at it and
listening to it with more attention, he runs out of
the way of the striking object as if intimidated,
and seeks to get it out of his head as quickly as
possible. For his fundamental rule runs thus: " I
want to see nothing that contradicts the usual
opinion concerning things! Am / created for the
purpose of discovering new truths? There are
already too many of the old ones. "
26.
What is Living! —Living—that is to continually
eliminate from ourselves what is about to die;
Living—that is to be cruel and inexorable towards
all that becomes weak and old in ourselves, and
not only in ourselves. Living—that means, there-
fore, to be without piety toward the dying, the
wretched and the old? To be continually a mur-
derer ? —And yet old Moses said: "Thou shalt not
kill! "


## p. 69 (#93) ##############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 69
27.
The Self-Renouncer. — What does the self-
renouncer do? He strives after a higher world,
he wants to fly longer and further and higher than
all men of affirmation—he throws away many things
that would burden his flight, and several things
among them that are not valueless, that are not
unpleasant to him: he sacrifices them to his desire
for elevation. Now this sacrificing, this casting
away, is the very thing which becomes visible in
him: on that account one calls him the self-
renouncer, and as such he stands before us,
enveloped in his cowl, and as the soul of a
hair-shirt. With this effect, however, which he
makes upon us he is well content: he wants to
keep concealed from us his desire, his pride, his
intention of flying above us. —Yes! He is wiser
than we thought, and so courteous towards us—
this affirmer! For that is what he is, like us,
even in his self-renunciation.
28.
Injuring with one's best Qualities. —Our strong
points sometimes drive us so far forward that we
cannot any longer endure our weaknesses, and we
perish by them: we also perhaps see this result
beforehand, but nevertheless do not want it to be
otherwise. We then become hard towards that
which would fain be spared in us, and our pitiless-
ness is also our greatness. Such an experience,
which must in the end cost us our life, is a symbol
S


## p. 70 (#94) ##############################################

70 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
of the collective effect of great men upon others
and upon their epoch:—it is just with their best
abilities, with that which only they can do, that they
destroy much that is weak, uncertain, evolving, and
willing, and are thereby injurious. Indeed, the
case may happen in which, taken on the whole,
they only do injury, because their best is accepted
and drunk up as it were solely by those who lose
their understanding and their egoism by it, as by
too strong a beverage; they become so intoxicated
that they go breaking their limbs on all the wrong
roads where their drunkenness drives them.
29.
Adventitious Liars. — When people began to
combat the unity of Aristotle in France, and con-
sequently also to defend it, there was once more
to be seen that which has been seen so often, but
seen so unwillingly:—people imposed false reasons
on themselves on account of which those laws ought
to exist, merely for the sake of not acknowledging
to themselves that they had accustomed themselves
to the authority of those laws, and did not want
any longer to have things otherwise. And people
do so in every prevailing morality and religion, and
have always done so: the reasons and intentions
behind the habit, are only added surreptitiously
when people begin to combat the habit, and ask for
reasons and intentions. It is here that the great
dishonesty of the conservatives of all times hides:
—they are adventitious liars.


## p. 71 (#95) ##############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
30.
The Comedy of Celebrated Men. —Celebrated men
who need their fame, as, for instance, all politicians,
no longer select their associates and friends without
after-thoughts: from the one they want a portion
of the splendour and reflection of his virtues; from
the other they want the fear-inspiring power of
certain dubious qualities in him, of which every-
body is aware; from another they steal his reputa-
tion for idleness and basking in the sun, because it
is advantageous for their own ends to be regarded
temporarily as heedless and lazy :—it conceals the
fact that they lie in ambush; they now use the
visionaries, now the experts, now the brooders, now
the pedants in their neighbourhood, as their actual
selves for the time, but very soon they do not
need them any longer! And thus while their en-
vironment and outside die off continually, every-
thing seems to crowd into this environment,
and wants to become a "character" of it; they
are like great cities in this respect. Their repute
is continually in process of mutation, like their
character, for their changing methods require this
change, and they show and exhibit sometimes this
and sometimes that actual or fictitious quality on
the stage; their friends and associates, as we have
said, belong to these stage properties. On the other
hand, that which they aim at must remain so much
the more steadfast, and burnished and resplendent
in the distance,—and this also sometimes needs its
comedy and its stage-play.


## p. 72 (#96) ##############################################

^2 "THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
31-
Commerce and Nobility. — Buying and selling is
now regarded as something ordinary, like the art
of reading and writing; everyone is now trained
to it even when he is not a tradesman, exercising
himself daily in the art; precisely as formerly in
the period of uncivilised humanity, everyone was a
hunter and exercised himself day by day in the
art of hunting. Hunting was then something
common: but just as this finally became a privilege
of the powerful and noble, and thereby lost the
character of the commonplace and the ordinary—
by ceasing to be necessary and by becoming an
affair of fancy and luxury:—so it might become the
same some day with buying and selling. Condi-
tions of society are imaginable in which there will
be no selling and buying, and in which the necessity
for this art will become quite lost; perhaps it may
then happen that individuals who are less subjected
to the law of the prevailing condition of things
will indulge in buying and selling as a luxury of
sentiment. It is then only that commerce would
acquire nobility, and the noble would then perhaps
occupy themselves just as readily with commerce
as they have done hitherto with war and politics:
while on the other hand the valuation of politics
might then have entirely altered. Already even
politics ceases to be the business of a gentleman;
and it is possible that one day it may be found
to be so vulgar as to be brought, like all party
literature and daily literature, under the rubric:
"Prostitution of the intellect. "


## p. 73 (#97) ##############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 73
32.
Undesirable Disciples. —What shall I do with
these two youths! called out a philosopher
dejectedly, who "corrupted" youths, as Socrates
had once corrupted them,—they are unwelcome
disciples to me. One of them cannot say " Nay,"
and the other says " Half and half" to everything.
Provided they grasped my doctrine, the former
would suffer too much, for my mode of thinking
requires a martial soul, willingness to cause pain,
delight in denying, and a hard skin,—he would
succumb by open wounds and internal injuries.
And the other will choose the mediocre in every-
thing he represents, and thus make a mediocrity
of the whole,—I should like my enemy to have such
a disciple.
33-
Outside the Lecture-room. —" In order to prove
that man after all belongs to the good-natured
animals, I would remind you how credulous he
has been for so long a time. It is now only,
quite late, and after an immense self-conquest, that
he has become a distrustful animal,—yes! man is
now more wicked than ever. "—I do not understand
this; why should man now be more distrustful and
more wicked ? —" Because he now has science,—
because he needs to have it! "—
34.
Historia abscondita. —Every great man has a
power which operates backward; all history is


## p. 73 (#98) ##############################################

^2 THE JOVFUL WISDOM, I
31-
Commerce and Nobility. —Buying and selling is
now regarded as something ordinary, like the art
of reading and writing; everyone is now trained
to it even when he is not a tradesman, exercising
himself daily in the art; precisely as formerly in
the period of uncivilised humanity, everyone was a
hunter and exercised himself day by day in the
art of hunting. Hunting was then something
common: but just as this finally became a privilege
of the powerful and noble, and thereby lost the
character of the commonplace and the ordinary—
by ceasing to be necessary and by becoming an
affair of fancy and luxury:—so it might become the
same some day with buying and selling. Condi-
tions of society are imaginable in which there will
be no selling and buying, and in which the necessity
for this art will become quite lost; perhaps it may
then happen that individuals who are less subjected
to the law of the prevailing condition of things
will indulge in buying and selling as a luxury of
sentiment. It is then only that commerce would
acquire nobility, and the noble would then perhaps
occupy themselves just as readily with commerce
as they have done hitherto with war and politics:
while on the other hand the valuation of politics
might then have entirely altered. Already even
politics ceases to be the business of a gentleman;
and it is possible that one day it may be found
to be so vulgar as to be brought, like all party
literature and daily literature, under the rubric:
"Prostitution of the intellect. "


## p. 73 (#99) ##############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 73
32.
Undesirable Disciples. —What shall I do with
these two youths! called out a philosopher
dejectedly, who "corrupted" youths, as Socrates
had once corrupted them,—they are unwelcome
disciples to me. One of them cannot say " Nay,"
and the other says " Half and half" to everything.
Provided they grasped my doctrine, the former
would suffer too much, for my mode of thinking
requires a martial soul, willingness to cause pain,
delight in denying, and a hard skin,—he would
succumb by open wounds and internal injuries.
And the other will choose the mediocre in every-
thing he represents, and thus make a mediocrity
of the whole,—I should like my enemy to have such
a disciple.
33-
Outside the Lecture-room. —" In order to prove
that man after all belongs to the good-natured
animals, I would remind you how credulous he
has been for so long a time. It is now only,
quite late, and after an immense self-conquest, that
he has become a distrustful animal,—yes! man is
now more wicked than ever. "—I do not understand
this; why should man now be more distrustful and
more wicked ? —" Because he now has science,—
because he needs to have it! "—
34-
Historia abscondita. —Every great man has a
power which operates backward; all history is


## p. 73 (#100) #############################################

^2 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
31-
Commerce and Nobility. — Buying and selling is
now regarded as something ordinary, like the art
of reading and writing; everyone is now trained
to it even when he is not a tradesman, exercising
himself daily in the art; precisely as formerly in
the period of uncivilised humanity, everyone was a
hunter and exercised himself day by day in the
art of hunting. Hunting was then something
common: but just as this finally became a privilege
of the powerful and noble, and thereby lost the
character of the commonplace and the ordinary—
by ceasing to be necessary and by becoming an
affair of fancy and luxury:—so it might become the
same some day with buying and selling. Condi-
tions of society are imaginable in which there will
be no selling and buying, and in which the necessity
for this art will become quite lost; perhaps it may
then happen that individuals who are less subjected
to the law of the prevailing condition of things
will indulge in buying and selling as a luxury of
sentiment. It is then only that commerce would
acquire nobility, and the noble would then perhaps
occupy themselves just as readily with commerce
as they have done hitherto with war and politics:
while on the other hand the valuation of politics
might then have entirely altered. Already even
politics ceases to be the business of a gentleman;
and it is possible that one day it may be found
to be so vulgar as to be brought, like all party
literature and daily literature, under the rubric:
'- Prostitution of the intellect. "


## p. 73 (#101) #############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 73
32.
Undesirable Disciples. —What shall I do with
these two youths! called out a philosopher
dejectedly, who "corrupted" youths, as Socrates
had once corrupted them,—they are unwelcome
disciples to me. One of them cannot say " Nay,"
and the other says " Half and half" to everything.
Provided they grasped my doctrine, the former
would suffer too much, for my mode of thinking
requires a martial soul, willingness to cause pain,
delight in denying, and a hard skin,—he would
succumb by open wounds and internal injuries.
And the other will choose the mediocre in every-
thing he represents, and thus make a mediocrity
of the whole,—I should like my enemy to have such
a disciple.
33-
Outside the Lecture-room. —" In order to prove
that man after all belongs to the good-natured
animals, I would remind you how credulous he
has been for so long a time. It is now only,
quite late, and after an immense self-conquest, that
he has become a distrustful animal,—yes! man is
now more wicked than ever. "—I do not understand
this; why should man now be more distrustful and
more wicked ? —" Because he now has science,—
because he needs to have it! "—
3+
Historia abscondita. —Every great man has a
power which operates backward; all history is


## p. 74 (#102) #############################################

74 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
again placed on the scales on his account, and a
thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their
lurking-places—into his sunlight. There is ab-
solutely no knowing what history may be some
day. The past is still perhaps undiscovered in
its essence! There are yet so many retroactive
powers needed!
35-
Heresy and Witchcraft. —To think otherwise
than is customary—that is by no means so much
the activity of a better intellect, as the activity of
strong, wicked inclinations,—severing, isolating,
refractory, mischief-loving, malicious inclinations.
Heresy is the counterpart of witchcraft, and is
certainly just as little a merely harmless affair,
or a thing worthy of honour in itself. Heretics
and sorcerers are two kinds of bad men; they
have it in common that they also feel themselves
wicked; their unconquerable delight is to attack
and injure whatever rules,—whether it be men or
opinions. The Reformation, a kind of duplication
of the spirit of the Middle Ages at a time when
it had no longer a good conscience, produced both
of these kinds of people in the greatest profusion.
36.
Last Words. —It will be recollected that the
Emperor Augustus, that terrible man, who had
himself as much in his own power, and who could
be silent as well as any wise Socrates, became
indiscreet about himself in his last words; for


## p. 75 (#103) #############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 75
the first time he let his mask fall, when he gave to
understand that he had carried a mask and played
a comedy,—he had played the father of his country
and wisdom on the throne well, even to the point
of illusion! Plaudite amid, comoedia finita est! —
The thought of the dying Nero: qualis artifexpereo!
was also the thought of the dying Augustus:
histrionic conceit! histrionic loquacity! And the
very counterpart to the dying Socrates! —But
Tiberius died silently, that most tortured of all
self-torturers,—he was genuine and not a stage-
player! What may have passed through his
head in the end! Perhaps this: "Life — that
is a long death. I am a fool, who shortened the
lives of so many! Was / created for the purpose
of being a benefactor? I should have given them
eternal life: and then I could have seen them dying
eternally. I had such good eyes for that: qualis
spectator pereo! '" When he seemed once more
to regain his powers after a long death-struggle,
it was considered advisable to smother him with
pillows,—he died a double death.
37-
Owing to three Errors. —Science has been furthered
during recent centuries, partly because it was hoped
that God's goodness and wisdom would be best
understood therewith and thereby—the principal
motive in the soul of great Englishmen (like
Newton); partly because the absolute utility of
knowledge was believed in, and especially the most
intimate connection of morality, knowledge, and
happiness—the principal motive in the soul of great


## p. 76 (#104) #############################################

76 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
Frenchmen (like Voltaire); and partly because it
was thought that in science there was something
unselfish, harmless, self-sufficing, lovable, and truly
innocent to be had, in which the evil human
impulses did not at all participate—the principal
motive in the soul of Spinoza, who felt himself
divine, as a knowing being:—it is consequently
owing to three errors that science has been
furthered.
38.
Explosive People. —When one considers how
ready are the forces of young men for discharge,
one does not wonder at seeing them decide so
unfastidiously and with so little selection for this
or that cause: that which attracts them is the
sight of eagerness about any cause, as it were the
sight of the burning match—not the cause itself.
The more ingenious seducers on that account
operate by holding out the prospect of an explosion
to such persons, and do not urge their cause by
means of reasons; these powder-barrels are not
won over by means of reasons!
39-
Altered Taste. —The alteration of the general
taste is more important than the alteration of
opinions; opinions, with all their proving, refuting,
and intellectual masquerade, are merely symptoms
of altered taste, and are certainly not what they
are still so often claimed to be, the causes of
the altered taste. How does the general taste
alter? By the fact of individuals, the powerful


## p. 77 (#105) #############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I J?
and influential persons, expressing and tyrannically
enforcing without any feeling of shame, their hoc
est ridiculum, hoc est absurdum; the decisions, there-
fore, of their taste and their disrelish :—they thereby
lay a constraint upon many people, out of which
there gradually grows a habituation for still more,
and finally a necessity for all. The fact, however,
that these individuals feel and "taste" differently,
has usually its origin in a peculiarity of their mode
of life, nourishment, or digestion, perhaps in a
surplus or deficiency of the inorganic salts in their
blood and brain, in short in their physis; they
have, however, the courage to avow their physical
constitution, and to lend an ear even to the most
delicate tones of its requirements: their aesthetic
and moral judgments are those "most delicate
tones" of their physis.
40.
The Lack of a noble Presence. —Soldiers and their
leaders have always a much higher mode of com-
portment toward one another than workmen and
their employers. At present at least, all militarily
established civilisation still stands high above all
so-called industrial civilisation; the latter, in its
present form, is in general the meanest mode of
existence that has ever been. It is simply the
law of necessity that operates here: people want
to live, and have to sell themselves; but they
despise him who exploits their necessity, and
purchases the workman. It is curious that the
subjection to powerful, fear-inspiring, and even
dreadful individuals, to tyrants and leaders of


## p. 78 (#106) #############################################

78 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
armies, is not at all felt so painfully as the sub-
jection to such undistinguished and uninteresting
persons as the captains of industry; in the em-
ployer the workman usually sees merely a crafty,
blood-sucking dog of a man, speculating on every
necessity, whose name, form, character, and reputa-
tion are altogether indifferent to him. It is prob-
able that the manufacturers and great magnates
of commerce have hitherto lacked too much all
those forms and attributes of a superior race, which
alone make persons interesting; if they had had
the nobility of the nobly-born in their looks and
bearing, there would perhaps have been no socialism
in the masses of the people. For these are really
ready for slavery of every kind, provided that the
superior class above them constantly shows itself
legitimately superior, and born to command—by its
noble presence! The commonest man feels that
nobility is not to be improvised, and that it is
his part to honour it as the fruit of protracted race-
culture,—but the absence of superior presence, and
the notorious vulgarity of manufacturers with red,
fat hands, brings up the thought to him that it is
only chance and fortune that has here elevated the
one above the other; well then — so he reasons
with himself—let us in our turn tempt chance and
fortune! Let us in our turn throw the dice! —and
socialism commences.
41.
Against Remorse. — The thinker sees in his
own actions attempts and questionings to obtain
information about something or other; success


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 79
and failure are answers to him first and foremost.
To vex himself, however, because something does
not succeed, or to feel remorse at all—he leaves
that to those who act because they are commanded
to do so, and expect to get a beating when their
gracious master is not satisfied with the result.
42.
Work and Ennui. —In respect to seeking work
for the sake of the pay, almost all men are alike
at present in civilised countries; to all of them
work is a means, and not itself the end; on which
account they are not very select in the choice of the
work, provided it yields an abundant profit. But
still there are rarer men who would rather perish
than work without delight in their labour: the
fastidious people, difficult to satisfy, whose object
is not served by an abundant profit, unless the work
itself be the reward of all rewards. Artists and
contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare
species of human beings; and also the idlers who
spend their life in hunting and travelling, or in
love affairs and adventures. They all seek toil
and trouble in so far as these are associated with
pleasure, and they want the severest and hardest
labour, if it be necessary. In other respects, how-
ever, they have a resolute indolence, even should
impoverishment, dishonour, and danger to health
and life be associated therewith. They are not so
much afraid of ennui as of labour without pleasure;
indeed they require much ennui, if their work is to
succeed with them. For the thinker and for all
inventive spirits ennui is the unpleasant "calm"


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80 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
of the soul which precedes the happy voyage and
the dancing breezes; he must endure it, he must
await the effect it has on him :—it is precisely this
which lesser natures cannot at all experience! It
is common to scare away ennui in every way, just
as it is common to labour without pleasure. It
perhaps distinguishes the Asiatics above the Euro-
peans, that they are capable of a longer and pro-
founder repose; even their narcotics operate slowly
and require patience, in contrast to the obnoxious
suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.
43-
What the Laws Betray. —One makes a great mis-
take when one studies the penal laws of a people,
as if they were an expression of its character; the
laws do not betray what a people is, but what
appears to them foreign, strange, monstrous, and
outlandish. The laws concern themselves with the
exceptions to the morality of custom; and the
severest punishments fall on acts which conform to
the customs of the neighbouring peoples. Thus
among the Wahabites, there are only two mortal sins:
having another God than the Wahabite God, and—
smoking (it is designated by them as "the disgraceful
kind of drinking"). "And how is it with regard
to murder and adultery ? "—asked the Englishman
with astonishment on learning these things. "Well,
God is gracious and pitiful! " answered the old
chief. —Thus among the ancient Romans there was
the idea that a woman could only sin mortally in
two ways: by adultery on the one hand, and—by
wine-drinking on the other. Old Cato pretended


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 81
that kissing among relatives had only been made
a custom in order to keep women in control on this
point; a kiss meant: did her breath smell of wine?
Wives had actually been punished by death who
were surprised taking wine: and certainly not
merely because women under the influence of wine
sometimes unlearn altogether the art of saying No;
the Romans were afraid above all things of the orgi-
astic and Dionysian spirit with which the women
of Southern Europe at that time (when wine
was still new in Europe) were sometimes visited,
as by a monstrous foreignness which subverted
the basis of Roman sentiments; it seemed to
them treason against Rome, as the embodiment
of foreignness.
44.
The Believed Motive. —However important it may
be to know the motives according to which man-
kind has really acted hitherto, perhaps the belief
in this or that motive, and therefore that which
mankind has assumed and imagined to be the
actual mainspring of its activity hitherto, is some-
thing still more essential for the thinker to know.
For the internal happiness and misery of men
have always come to them through their belief in
this or that motive,—not however, through that
which was actually the motive! All about the
latter has an interest of secondary rank.
45-
Epicurus. —Yes, I am proud of perceiving the
character of Epicurus differently from anyone else
6


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82 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
perhaps, and of enjoying the happiness of the
afternoon of antiquity in all that I hear and read
of him:—I see his eye gazing out on a broad
whitish sea, over the shore-rocks on which the
sunshine rests, while great and small creatures play
in its light, secure and calm like this light and that
eye itself. Such happiness could only have been
devised by a chronic sufferer, the happiness of an
eye before which the sea of existence has become
calm, and which can no longer tire of gazing at the
surface and at the variegated, tender, tremulous
skin of this sea. Never previously was there such a
moderation of voluptuousness.
46.
Our Astonishment. —There is a profound and
fundamental satisfaction in the fact that science
ascertains things that hold their ground, and again
furnish the basis for new researches :—it could
certainly be otherwise. Indeed, we are so much
convinced of all the uncertainty and caprice of our
judgments, and of the everlasting change of all
human laws and conceptions, that we are really
astonished how persistently the results of science
hold their ground! In earlier times people knew
nothing of this changeability of all human things;
the custom of morality maintained the belief that
the whole inner life of man was bound to iron
necessity by eternal fetters:—perhaps people then
felt a similar voluptuousness of astonishment when
they listened to tales and fairy stories. The
wonderful did so much good to those men, who
might well get tired sometimes of the regular and


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 83
the eternal. To leave the ground for once! To
soar! To stray! To be mad ! —that belonged to
the paradise and the revelry of earlier times; while
our felicity is like that of the shipwrecked man
who has gone ashore, and places himself with both
feet on the old, firm ground—in astonishment that
it does not rock.
47-
The Suppression of the Passions. —When one
continually prohibits the expression of the passions
as something to be left to the "vulgar," to coarser,
bourgeois, and peasant natures—that is, when one
does not want to suppress the passions themselves,
but only their language and demeanour, one never-
theless realises therewith just what one does not
want: the suppression of the passions themselves,
or at least their weakening and alteration,—as the
court of Louis XIV. (to cite the most instructive
instance), and all that was dependent on it, ex-
perienced. The generation that followed, trained
in suppressing their expression, no longer pos-
sessed the passions themselves, but had a pleasant,
superficial, playful disposition in their place,—
a generation which was so permeated with the
incapacity to be ill-mannered, that even an injury
was not taken and retaliated, except with court-
eous words. Perhaps our own time furnishes
the most remarkable counterpart to this period:
I see everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not
least in all that is written) satisfaction at all the
coarser outbursts and gestures of passion; a certain
convention of passionateness is now desired,—


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84 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
only not the passion itself! Nevertheless it will
thereby be at last reached, and our posterity will
have a genuine savagery, and not merely a formal
savagery and unmannerliness.
48.
Knowledge of Distress. —Perhaps there is nothing
by which men and periods are so much separated
from one another, as by the different degrees of
knowledge of distress which they possess; distress
of the soul as well as of the body. With respect
to the latter, owing to lack of sufficient self-
experience, we men of the present day (in spite
of our deficiencies and infirmities), are perhaps all
of us blunderers and visionaries in comparison
with the men of the age of fear — the longest
of all ages,—when the individual had to pro-
tect himself against violence, and for that purpose
had to be a man of violence himself. At that time
a man went through a long schooling of corporeal
tortures and privations, and found even in a certain
kind of cruelty toward himself, in a voluntary use
of pain, a necessary means for his preservation;
at that time a person trained his environment to
the endurance of pain; at that time a person
willingly inflicted pain, and saw the most frightful
things of this kind happen to others, without
having any other feeling than for his own
security. As regards the distress of the soul,
however, I now look at every man with respect
to whether he knows it by experience or by
description; whether he still regards it as necessary
to simulate this knowledge, perhaps as an indica-


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 85
tion of more refined culture; or whether, at the
bottom of his heart, he does not at all believe in
great sorrows of soul, and at the naming of them
has in his mind a similar experience as at the
naming of great corporeal sufferings, such as tooth-
aches, and stomach-aches. It is thus, however,
that it seems to be with most people at present.
Owing to the universal inexperience of both kinds
of pain, and the comparative rarity of the spectacle
of a sufferer, an important consequence results:
people now hate pain far more than earlier man
did, and calumniate it worse than ever; indeed
people nowadays can hardly endure the thought
of pain, and make out of it an affair of con-
science and a reproach to collective existence.
The appearance of pessimistic philosophies is
not at all the sign of great and dreadful miseries;
for these interrogative marks regarding the worth
of life appear in periods when the refinement
and alleviation of existence already deem the
unavoidable gnat-stings of the soul and body
as altogether too bloody and wicked; and in the
poverty of actual experiences of pain, would now
like to make painful general ideas appear as
suffering of the worst kind. —There might indeed
be a remedy for pessimistic philosophies and
the excessive sensibility which seems to me the
real "distress of the present":—but perhaps this
remedy already sounds too cruel, and would itself
be reckoned among the symptoms owing to which
people at present conclude that" existence is some-
thing evil. " Well! the remedy for "the distress"
is distress.


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86 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
49-
Magnanimity and allied Qualities. —Those para-
doxical phenomena, such as the sudden coldness
in the demeanour of good-natured men, the humour
of the melancholy, and above all magnanimity, as
a sudden renunciation of revenge or of the grati-
fication of envy—appear in men in whom there is
a powerful inner impulsiveness, in men of sudden
satiety and sudden disgust. Their satisfactions are
so rapid and violent that satiety, aversion, and
flight into the antithetical taste, immediately follow
upon them: in this contrast the convulsion of
feeling liberates itself, in one person by sudden
coldness, in another by laughter, and in a third
by tears and self-sacrifice. The magnanimous
person appears to me—at least that kind of
magnanimous person who has always made most
impression—as a man with the strongest thirst for
vengeance, to whom a gratification presents itself
close at hand, and who already drinks it off in
imagination so copiously, thoroughly, and to the
last drop, that an excessive, rapid disgust follows
this rapid licentiousness ;—he now elevates himself
"above himself," as one says, and forgives his
enemy, yea, blesses and honours him. With this
violence done to himself, however, with this mockery
of his impulse to revenge, even still so powerful,
he merely yields to the new impulse, the disgust
which has become powerful, and does this just
as impatiently and licentiously, as a short time
previously he forestalled, and as it were exhausted,
the joy of revenge with his fantasy. In magnanimity



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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 87
there is the same amount of egoism as in revenge,
but a different quality of egoism.
50.
The Argument of Isolation. —The reproach of
conscience, even in the most conscientious, is weak
against the feeling: "This and that are contrary
to the good morals olyour society. " A cold glance
or a wry mouth, on the part of those among whom
and for whom one has been educated, is still feared
even by the strongest. What is really feared there?
Isolation! as the argument which demolishes even
the best arguments for a person or cause! —It is
thus that the gregarious instinct speaks in us.
Si-
Sense for Truth. —Commend me to all scepticism
where I am permitted to answer: "Let us put it to
the test! " But I don't wish to hear anything more
of things and questions which do not admit of being
tested. That is the limit of my "sense for truth ":
for bravery has there lost its right.
52.
What others Know of us. —That which we know
of ourselves and have in our memory is not so
decisive for the happiness of our life as is generally
believed. One day it flashes upon our mind what
others know of us (or think they know)—and then
we acknowledge that it is the more powerful. We
get on with our bad conscience more easily than
with our bad reputation.


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/ 88 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
53-
Where Goodness Begins. —Where bad eyesight can
no longer see the evil impulse as such, on account
of its refinement,—there man sets up the kingdom
of goodness; and the feeling of having now gone
over into the kingdom of goodness brings all those
impulses (such as the feelings of security, of com-
fortableness, of benevolence) into simultaneous
activity, which were threatened and confined by
the evil impulses. Consequently, the duller the eye
so much the further does goodness extend! Hence
the eternal cheerfulness of the populace and of
children! Hence the gloominess and grief (allied
to the bad conscience) of great thinkers.
54-
The Consciousness of Appearance. —How won-
derfully and novelly, and at the same time how
awfully and ironically, do I feel myself situated
with respect to collective existence, with my know-
ledge! I have discovered for myself that the old
humanity and animality, yea, the collective primeval
age, and the past of all sentient being, continues to
meditate, love, hate, and reason in me,—I have
suddenly awoke in the midst of this dream, but
merely to the consciousness that I just dream, and
that I must dream on in order not to perish; just
as the sleep-walker must dream on in order not to
tumble down. What is it that is now "appear-
ance" to me! Verily, not the antithesis of any
kind of essence,—what knowledge can I assert of
any kind of essence whatsoever, except merely the



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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
89
predicates of its appearance! Verily not a dead
mask which one could put upon an unknown X,
and which to be sure one could also remove !
Appearance is for me the operating and living
thing itself; which goes so far in its self-mockery
as to make me feel that here there is appearance,
and Will o' the Wisp, and spirit-dance, and nothing
more,—that among all these dreamers, I also, the
"thinker,” dance my dance, that the thinker
is a means of prolonging further the terrestrial
dance, and in so far is one of the masters of
ceremony of existence, and that the sublime con-
sistency and connectedness of all branches of
knowledge is perhaps, and will perhaps, be the
best means for maintaining the universality of the
dreaming, the complete, mutual understandability
of all those dreamers, and thereby the duration of
the dream.
55.
The Ultimate Nobility of Character. —What then
makes a person “noble"? Certainly not that he
makes sacrifices; even the frantic libertine makes
sacrifices. Certainly not that he generally follows
his passions; there are contemptible passions.
Certainly not that he does something for others
and without selfishness; perhaps the effect of
selfishness is precisely at its greatest in the
noblest persons. —But that the passion which
seizes the noble man is a peculiarity, without his
knowing that it is so: the use of a rare and
singular measuring-rod, almost a frenzy: the feel-
ing of heat in things which feel cold to all other


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90 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I
persons: a divining of values for which scales have
not yet been invented: a sacrificing on altars which
are consecrated to an unknown God: a bravery
without the desire for honour: a self-sufficiency
which has superabundance, and imparts to men and
things. Hitherto, therefore, it has been the rare
in man, and the unconsciousness of this rareness,
that has made men noble. Here, however, let us
consider that everything ordinary, immediate, and
indispensable, in short, what has been most pre-
servative of the species, and generally the rule in
mankind hitherto, has been judged unreasonable
and calumniated in its entirety by this standard,
in favour of the exceptions. To become the
advocate of the rule—that may perhaps be the
ultimate form and refinement in which nobility of
character will reveal itself on earth.
56.
The Desire for Suffering. —When I think of the
desire to do something, how it continually tickles
and stimulates millions of young Europeans, who
cannot endure themselves and all their ennui,—
I conceive that there must be a desire in them to
suffer something, in order to derive from their
suffering a worthy motive for acting, for doing
something. Distress is necessary! Hence the cry
of the politicians, hence the many false, trumped-
up, exaggerated " states of distress " of all possible
kinds, and the blind readiness to believe in them
This young world desires that there should arrive
or appear from the outside—not happiness—but
misfortune; and their imagination is already


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, I 91
busy beforehand to form a monster out of it, so
that they may afterwards be able to fight with a
monster. If these distress-seekers felt the power
to benefit themselves, to do something for themselves
from internal sources, they would also understand
how to create a distress of their own, specially their
own, from internal sources. Their inventions might
then be more refined, and their gratifications might
sound like good music: while at present they fill
the world with their cries of distress, and conse-
quently too often with the feeling of distress in
the first place! They do not know what to make
of themselves—and so they paint the misfortune of
others on the wall; they always need others!
And always again other others! —Pardon me, my
friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on
the wall.
S


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57-
To the Realists. —Ye sober beings, who feel your-
selves armed against passion and fantasy, and
would gladly make a pride and an ornament out
of your emptiness, ye call yourselves realists and
give to understand that the world is actually
constituted as it appears to you; before you alone
reality stands unveiled, and ye yourselves would
perhaps be the best part of it,—oh, ye dear images
of Sais! But are not ye also in your unveiled
condition still extremely passionate and dusky
beings compared with the fish, and still all too like
an enamoured artist ? *—and what is "reality" to
an enamoured artist! Ye still carry about with
you the valuations of things which had their origin
in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries!
There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunken-
ness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of
"reality," for example—oh, that is an old, primitive
"love"! In every feeling, in every sense-impres-
sion, there is a portion of this old love: and
similarly also some kind of fantasy, prejudice,
irrationality, ignorance, fear, and whatever else
has become mingled and woven into it. There
is that mountain! There is that cloud! What
* Schiller's poem, "The Veiled Image of Sais," is again
referred to here. —Tr.
95


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96 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
is "real" in them? Remove the phantasm and
the whole human element therefrom, ye sober
ones! Yes, if ye could do that! If ye could
forget your origin, your past, your preparatory
schooling,—your whole history as man and beast!
There is no " reality" for us—nor for you either, ye
sober ones,—we are far from being so alien to one
another as ye suppose, and perhaps our good-will
to get beyond drunkenness is just as respectable
as your belief that ye are altogether incapable of
drunkenness.
58.
Only as Creators ! —It has caused me the greatest
trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble,
to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon
what things are called, than on what they are.
The reputation, the name and appearance, the
importance, the usual measure and weight of
things — each being in origin most frequently
an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things
like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and
even to their exterior—have gradually, by the
belief therein and its continuous growth from
generation to generation, grown as it were on-
and-into things and become their very body; the
appearance at the very beginning becomes almost
always the essence in the end, and operates
as the essence! What a fool he would be who
would think it enough to refer here to this
origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order
to annihilate that which virtually passes for the
world—namely, so-called "reality"! It is only as


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 97
creators that we can annihilate! —But let us not
forget this: it suffices to create new names and
valuations and probabilities, in order in the long
run to create new "things. "
59-
We Artists! —When we love a woman we have
readily a hatred against nature, on recollecting all
the disagreeable natural functions to which every
woman is subject; we prefer not to think of
them at all, but if once our soul touches on
these things it twitches impatiently, and glances,
as we have said, contemptuously at nature :—
we are hurt; nature seems to encroach upon
our possessions, and with the profanest hands.
We then shut our ears against all physiology, and
we decree in secret that "we will hear nothing
of the fact that man is something else than
soul and form! " "The man under the skin" is
an abomination and monstrosity, a blasphemy of
God and of love to all lovers. —Well, just as the
lover still feels with respect to nature and natural
functions, so did every worshipper of God and his
"holy omnipotence" formerly feel: in all that was
said of nature by astronomers, geologists, physiolo-
gists, and physicians, he saw an encroachment on
his most precious possession, and consequently an
attack, — and moreover also an impertinence of
the assailant! The "law of nature" sounded to
him as blasphemy against God; in truth he would
too willingly have seen the whole of mechanics
traced back to moral acts of volition and arbitrari-


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98 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
ness :—but because nobody could render him this
service, he concealed nature and mechanism from
himself as best he could, and lived in a dream.
Oh, those men of former times understood how to
dream, and did not need first to go to sleep! —and
we men of the present day also still understand
it too well, with all our good-will for wakefulness
and daylight! It suffices to love, to hate, to
desire, and in general to feel,—immediately the
spirit and the power of the dream come over us,
and we ascend, with open eyes and indifferent
to all danger, the most dangerous paths, to the
roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any
giddiness, as persons born for climbing—we the
night-walkers by day! We artists! We con-
cealers of naturalness! We moon-struck and God-
struck ones! We dead-silent, untiring wanderers
on heights which we do not see as heights, but as
our plains, as our places of safety!
60.
Women and their Effect in the Distance. —Have
I still ears? Am I only ear, and nothing else
besides? Here I stand in the midst of the
surging of the breakers, whose white flames fork
up to my feet;—from all sides there is howling,
threatening, crying, and screaming at me, while in
the lowest depths the old earth-shaker sings his aria,
hollow like a roaring bull; he beats such an earth-
shaker's measure thereto, that even the hearts of
these weathered rock-monsters tremble at the
sound. Then, suddenly, as if born out of nothing-


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 99
ness, there appears before the portal of this hellish
labyrinth, only a few fathoms distant,—a great
sailing-ship gliding silently along like a ghost.
Oh, this ghostly beauty! With what enchantment
it seizes me!