No More Learning

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:
meadow without which there is no rest from labour,
the claim to honour and consideration (which first
and foremost presupposes recognition and recognisa-
bility), the sunshine of a good name, the perpetual
ratification of his value and usefulness, with which
the inward distrust which lies at the bottom of the
heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals,
has again and again to be overcome. The learned
man, as is appropriate, has also maladies and
faults of an ignoble kind : he is full of petty envy,
and has a lynx-eye for the weak points in those
natures to whose elevations he cannot attain. He
is confiding, yet only as one who lets himself go,
but does not flow; and precisely before the man of
the great current he stands all the colder and more
reserved—his eye is then like a smooth and irre-
sponsive lake, which is no longer moved by rapture
or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing
of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct
of mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of
mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the
destruction of the exceptional man, and endeavours
to break—or still better, to relax-every bent bow.
To relax, of course, with consideration, and naturally
with an indulgent hand-to relax with confiding
sympathy : that is the real art of Jesuitism, which
has always understood how to introduce itself as
the religion of sympathy.
a
207
However gratefully one may welcome the objective
spirit—and who has not been sick to death of all
subjectivity and its confounded ipsissimosity ! -in


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BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
the end, however, one must learn caution even with
regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to the
exaggeration with which the unselfing and de-
personalising of the spirit has recently been cele-
brated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were
salvation and glorification - as is especially ac-
customed to happen in the pessimist school, which
has also in its turn good reasons for paying the
highest honours to “disinterested knowledge. ” The
objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like
the pessimist, the ideal man of learning in whom
the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a
thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly
one of the most costly instruments that exist, but
his place is in the hand of one who is more power-
ful. He is only an instrument; we may say, he is a
mirror-he is no "purpose in himself. " The objec-
tive man is in truth a mirror : accustomed to pro-
stration before everything that wants to be known,
with such desires only as knowing or “reflecting”
imply-he waits until something comes, and then
expands himself sensitively, so that even the light
footsteps and gliding past of spiritual beings may
not be lost on his surface and film. Whatever
"personality” he still possesses seems to him
accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing ; so
much has he come to regard himself as the passage
and reflection of outside forms and events. He
calls up the recollection of "himself” with an effort,
and not infrequently wrongly; he readily confounds
himself with other persons, he makes mistakes with
regard to his own needs, and here only is he un-
refined and negligent. Perhaps he is troubled about


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the health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere
of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and
society-indeed, he sets himself to reflect on his
suffering, but in vain! His thoughts already rove
away to the more general case, and to-morrow he
knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help
himself. He does not now take himself seriously
and devote time to himself: he is serene, not from
lack of trouble, but from lack of capacity for grasp-
ing and dealing with his trouble. The habitual
complaisance with respect to all objects and ex-
periences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with
which he receives everything that comes his way,
his habit of inconsiderate good-nature, of dangerous
indifference as to Yea and Nay: alas! there are
enough of cases in which he has to atone for these
virtues of his ! —and as man generally, he becomes
far too easily the caput mortuum of such virtues.
Should one wish love or hatred from him I mean
love and hatred as God, woman, and animal under-
stand them—he will do what he can, and furnish
what he can. But one must not be surprised if it
should not be much-if he should show himself just
at this point to be false, fragile, questionable, and
deteriorated. His love is constrained, his hatred is
artificial, and rather un tour de force, a slight ostenta-
tion and exaggeration. He is only genuine so far
as he can be objective ; only in his serene totality
is he still “nature” and “natural. ” His mirroring
and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows
how to affirm, no longer how to deny ; he does not
command; neither does he destroy. "Je ne méprise
presque rien" he says, with Leibnitz: let us not
-
9)


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142
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
overlook nor undervalue the presque ! Neither is
he a model man; he does not go in advance of any
one, nor after either; he places himself generally
too far off to have any reason for espousing the
cause of either good or evil. If he has been so
long confounded with the philosopher, with the
Cæsarean trainer and dictator of civilisation, he has
had far too much honour, and what is most essential
in him has been overlooked-he is an instrument,
something of a slave, though certainly the sublimest
sort of slave, but nothing in himself-presque rien !
The objective man is an instrument, a costly, easily
injured, easily tarnished, measuring instrument and
mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of
and respected ; but he is no goal, no outgoing nor
upgoing, no complementary man in whom the rest
of existence justifies itself, no termination-and
still less a commencement, an engendering, or
primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred,
that wants to be master ; but rather only a soft,
inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must
wait for some kind of content and frame to “shape"
itself thereto—for the most part a man without
frame and content, a "selfless
“selfless” man. Consequently,
also, nothing for women, in parenthesi.
208.
When a philosopher nowadays makes known
that he is not a sceptic-I hope that has been
gathered from the foregoing description of the
objective spirit ? —people all hear it impatiently;
they regard him on that account with some appre-
hension, they would like to ask so many, many


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143
.
questions . . indeed among timid hearers, of
whom there are now so many, he is henceforth said
to be dangerous. With his repudiation of scepti-
cism, it seems to them as if they heard some evil-
threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind
of explosive were being tried somewhere, a dyna-
mite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered
Russian nihiline, a pessimism bonæ voluntatis, that
not only denies, means denial, but-dreadful
thought! practises denial. Against this kind of
"good will”—a will to the veritable, actual nega-
tion of life-there is, as is generally acknowledged
nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than
scepticism, the mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of
scepticism; and Hamlet himself is now prescribed
by the doctors of the day as an antidote to the
"spirit,” and its underground noises. “Are not
our ears already full of bad sounds ? ” say the
sceptics, as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind
of safety police, “this subterranean Nay is terrible!
Be still, ye pessimistic moles ! ” The sceptic, in
effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily
frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to
start at every Nay, and even at every sharp,
decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby.
Yea! and Nay! —they seem to him opposed to
morality; he loves, on the contrary, to make a
festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness, while
perhaps he says with Montaigne: “What do I
know? " Or with Socrates: “I know that I know
nothing. " Or: "Here I do not trust myself, no
door is open to me. ” Or: “Even if the door were
open, why should I enter immediately ? ” Or:
"
>
"


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144
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
“What is the use of any hasty hypotheses ? It
might quite well be in good taste to make no
hypotheses at all. Are you absolutely obliged to
straighten at once what is crooked ? to stuff every
hole with some kind of oakum? Is there not time
enough for that? Has not the time leisure? Oh,
ye demons, can ye not at all wait ? The uncertain
also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a Circe, and
Circe, too, was a philosopher”—Thus does a sceptic
console himself; and in truth he needs some con-
solation. For scepticism is the most spiritual
expression of a certain many-sided physiological
temperament, which in ordinary language is called
nervous debility and sickliness; it arises whenever
races or classes which have been long separated,
decisively and suddenly blend with one another.
In the new generation, which has inherited as it
were different standards and valuations in its
blood, everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt,
and tentative; the best powers operate restrictively,
the very virtues prevent each other growing and
becoming strong, equilibrium, ballast, and perpen-
dicular stability are lacking in body and soul.
That, however, which is most diseased and degen-
erated in such nondescripts is the will; they are
no longer familiar with independence of decision,
or the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing-
they are doubtful of the "freedom of the will”
even in their dreams. Our present-day Europe,
the scene of a senseless, precipitate attempt at a
radical blending of classes, and consequently of
races, is therefore sceptical in all its heights and
depths, sometimes exhibiting the mobile scepti-


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145
cism which springs impatiently and wantonly from
branch to branch, sometimes with gloomy aspect,
like a cloud overcharged with interrogative signs-
and often sick unto death of its will! Paralysis of
will; where do we not find this cripple sitting
nowadays! And yet how bedecked oftentimes !
How seductively ornamented! There are the
finest gala dresses and disguises for this disease ;
and that, for instance, most of what places itself
nowadays in the show-cases as objectiveness,"
“the scientific spirit,” “ l'art pour l'art,” and “pure
voluntary knowledge," is only decked-out scepti-
cism and paralysis of will—I am ready to answer
for this diagnosis of the European disease. —The
disease of the will is diffused unequally over
Europe; it is worst and most varied where civilisa-
tion has longest prevailed; it decreases according
as “the barbarian" still—or again-asserts his
claims under the loose drapery of Western culture.
It is therefore in the France of to-day, as can be
readily disclosed and comprehended, that the will
is most infirm; and France, which has always
had a masterly aptitude for converting even the
portentous crises of its spirit into something
charming and seductive, now manifests emphatic-
ally its intellectual ascendency over Europe, by
being the school and exhibition of all the charms
of scepticism. The power to will and to persist,
moreover, in a resolution, is already somewhat
stronger in Germany, and again in the North of
Germany it is stronger than in Central Germany;
it is considerably stronger in England, Spain, and
Corsica, associated with phlegm in the former and
K


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BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
with hard skulls in the latter—not to mention
Italy, which is too young yet to know what it
wants, and must first show whether it can exercise
will; but it is strongest and most surprising of all
in that immense middle empire where Europe as it
were flows back to Asia-namely, in Russia.
There the power to will has been long stored up
and accumulated, there the will—uncertain whether
to be negative or affirmative—waits threateningly to
be discharged (to borrow their pet phrase from our
physicists). Perhaps not only Indian wars and
complications in Asia would be necessary to free
Europe from its greatest danger, but also internal
subversion, the shattering of the empire into small
states, and above all the introduction of parlia-
mentary imbecility, together with the obligation
of every one to read his newspaper at breakfast.
I do not say this as one who desires it; in my
heart I should rather prefer the contrary-I mean
such an increase in the threatening attitude of
Russia, that Europe would have to make up its
mind to become equally threatening-namely, to
acquire one will, by means of a new caste to rule
over the Continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its
own, that can set its aims thousands of years ahead;
so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-
stateism, and its dynastic as well as its democratic
many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a
close. The time for petty politics is past; the next
century will bring the struggle for the dominion
of the world—the compulsion to great politics.


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209.
As to how far the new warlike age on which we
Europeans have evidently entered may perhaps
favour the growth of another and stronger kind of
scepticism, I should like to express myself pre-
liminarily merely by a parable, which the lovers of
German history will already understand. That un-
scrupulous enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers
(who, as King of Prussia, brought into being a
military and sceptical genius—and therewith, in
reality, the new and now triumphantly emerged
type of German), the problematic, crazy father of
Frederick the Great, had on one point the very
knack and lucky grasp of the genius : he knew
what was then lacking in Germany, the want of
which was a hundred times more alarming and
serious than any lack of culture and social form-his
ill-will to the young Frederick resulted from the
anxiety of a profound instinct. Men were lacking;
and he suspected, to his bitterest regret, that his own
son was not man enough. There, however, he de-
ceived himself; butwho would not have deceived him-
self in his place? He saw his son lapsed to atheism,
to the esprit, to the pleasant frivolity of clever
Frenchmen--he saw in the background the great
bloodsucker, the spider scepticism ; he suspected
the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer
hard enough either for evil or good, and of a broken
will that no longer commands, is no longer able to
command. Meanwhile, however, there grew up in
his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous
scepticism--who knows to what extent it was en-
a


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BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
couraged just by his father's hatred and the icy
melancholy of a will condemned to solitude ? —the
scepticism of daring manliness, which is closely
related to the genius for war and conquest, and
made its first entrance into Germany in the person
of the great Frederick. This scepticism despises
and nevertheless grasps ; it undermines and takes
possession; it does not believe, but it does not
thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit a dangerous
liberty, but it keeps strict guard over the heart. It
is the German form of scepticism, which, as a con-
tinued Fredericianism, risen to the highest spiritua-
lity, has kept Europe for a considerable time under
the dominion of the German spirit and its critical
and historical distrust. Owing to the insuperably
strong and tough masculine character of the great
German philologists and historical critics (who,
rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of
destruction and dissolution), a new conception of
the German spirit gradually established itself—in
spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy,
in which the leaning towards masculine scepticism
was decidedly prominent: whether, for instance, as
fearlessness of gaze, as courage and sternness of the
dissecting hand, or as resolute will to dangerous
voyages of discovery, to spiritualised North Pole
expeditions under barren and dangerous skies.
There may be good grounds for it when warm-
blooded and superficial humanitarians cross them-
selves before this spirit, cet esprit fataliste, ironique,
méphistophélique, as Michelet calls it, not without a
shudder. But if one would realise how characteristic
is this fear of the “man" in the German spirit which
1


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149
awakened Europe out of its "dogmatic slumber,"
let us call to mind the former conception which had
to be overcome by this new one-and that it is not
so very long ago that a masculinised woman could
dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend
the Germans to the interest of Europe as gentle,
good-hearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools.
Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough
Napoleon's astonishment when he saw Goethe: it
reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the
“German spirit. ” “ Voild un homme! ”-that was
as much as to say :
“ But this is a man! And I
only expected to see a German ! "
210.
Supposing, then, that in the picture of the philo-
sophers of the future, some trait suggests the
question whether they must not perhaps be sceptics
in the last-mentioned sense, something in them
would only be designated thereby—and not they
themselves. With equal right they might call
themselves critics; and assuredly they will be
men of experiments. By the name with which I
ventured to baptize them, I have already expressly
cmphasised their attempting and their love of
attempting : is this because, as critics in body and
soul, they will love to make use of experiments in a
new, and perhaps wider and more dangerous sense?
In their passion for knowledge, will they have to go
further in daring and painful attempts than the sensi-
tive and pampered taste of a democratic century
can approve of ? - There is no doubt: these coming
ones will be least able to dispense with the serious


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150
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish
the critic from the sceptic: I mean the certainty as
to standards of worth, the conscious employment
of a unity of method, the wary courage, the standing-
alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility ;
indeed, they will avow among themselves a delight
in denial and dissection, and a certain considerate
cruelty, which knows how to handle the knife surely
and deftly, even when the heart bleeds. They will
be sterner (and perhaps not always towards them-
selves only) than humane people may desire, they
will not deal with the “truth” in order that it may
"please" them, or "elevate" and "inspire" them-
they will rather have little faith in “ truth” bringing
with it such revels for the feelings. They will
smile, those rigorous spirits, when any one says in
their presence: “that thought elevates me, why
should it not be true ? "or: “that work enchants me,
why should it not be beautiful ? ” or : "that artist en-
larges me, why should he not be great? ” Perhaps
they will not only have a smile, but a genuine disgust
for all that is thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and
hermaphroditic; and if any one could look into their
inmost heart, he would not easily find therein the
intention to reconcile “Christian sentiments" with
"antique taste," or even with "modern parliamen-
tarism" (the kind of reconciliation necessarily found
even amongst philosophers in our very uncertain
and consequently very conciliatory century).
Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces
to purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not
only be demanded from themselves by these philo-
sophers of the future; they may even make a display
»


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151
.
thereof as their special adornment-nevertheless
they will not want to be called critics on that
account. It will seem to them no small indignity
to philosophy to have it decreed, as is so welcome
nowadays, that “philosophy itself is criticism and
critical science - and nothing else whatever ! "
Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the
approval of all the Positivists of France and Ger-
many (and possibly it even flattered the heart and
taste of Kant : let us call to mind the titles of his
principal works), our new philosophers will say, not-
withstanding, that critics are instruments of the
philosopher, and just on that account, as instru-
ments, they are far from being philosophers them-
selves! Even the great Chinaman of Königsberg
was only a great critic.
"
211.
I insist upon it that people finally cease con-
founding philosophical workers, and in general
scientific men, with philosophers—that precisely
here one should strictly give "each his own," and
not give those far too much, these far too little. It
may be necessary for the education of the real
philosopher that he himself should have once stood
upon all those steps upon which his servants, the
scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing,
and must remain standing: he himself must perhaps
have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and
besides, poet, and collector, and traveller, and
riddle-reader, and moralist, and seer, and “free
spirit," and almost everything, in order to traverse
the whole range of human values and estimations,


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BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
and that he may be able with a variety of eyes and
consciences to look from a height to any distance,
from a depth up to any height, from a nook into
any expanse. But all these are only preliminary
conditions for his task; this task itself demands
something else—it requires him to create values.
The philosophical workers, after the excellent
pattern of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and formal-
ise some great existing body of valuations—that
is to say, former determinations of value, creations
of value, which have become prevalent, and are for
a time called “truths”—whether in the domain of
the logical, the political (moral), or the artistic. It
is for these investigators to make whatever has
happened and been esteemed hitherto, conspicuous,
conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten
everything long, even "time" itself, and to subjugate
the entire past: an immense and wonderful task,
in the carrying out of which all refined pride, all
tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. The
real philosophers, however, are commanders and law-
givers, they say: “Thus shall it be! ”
;
They
determine first the Whither and the Why of man-
kind, and thereby set aside the previous labour
of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of
the past--they grasp at the future with a creative
hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them
thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer.
Their “knowing" is creating, their creating is a
law-giving, their will to truth is-Will to Power. -
Are there at present such philosophers? Have
there ever been such philosophers ? Must there
not be such philosophers some day?


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212,
It is always more obvious to me that the philo-
sopher, as a man indispensable for the morrow and
the day after the morrow, has ever found himself,
and has been obliged to find himself, in contradiction
to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always
been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those
extraordinary furtherers of humanity' whom one
calls philosophers—who rarely regarded themselves
as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools
and dangerous interrogators—have found their
mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission
(in the end however the greatness of their mission),
in being the bad conscience of their age. In putting
the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very virtues
of their age, they have betrayed their own secret;
it has been for the sake of a new greatness of man,
a new untrodden path to his aggrandisement.
They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy,
indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how
much falsehood was concealed under the most
venerated types of contemporary morality, how
much virtue was outlived; they have always said :
“We must remove hence to where you are least at
home. " In face of a world of "modern ideas,"
which would like to confine every one in a corner,
in a “specialty," a philosopher, if there could be
philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to
place the greatness of man, the conception of
"greatness,” precisely in his comprehensiveness and
multifariousness, in his all-roundness; he would
even determine worth and rank according to the


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BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
CC
amount and variety of that which a man could bear
and take upon himself, according to the extent to
which a man could stretch his responsibility. Nowa-
days the taste and virtue of the age weaken and
attenuate the will; nothing is so adapted to the
spirit of the age as weakness of will : consequently,
in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will,
sternness and capacity for prolonged resolution,
must specially be included in the conception of
greatness”; with as good a right as the opposite
doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble,
selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age-
such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from
its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest
,
torrents and floods of selfishness. In the time of
Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts,
old conservative Athenians who let themselves
go_" for the sake of happiness," as they said; for
the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated-
and who had continually on their lips the old
pompous words to which they had long forfeited
the right by the life they led, irony was perhaps
necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic
assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who
cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh
and heart of the "noble," with a look that said
plainly enough: “Do not dissemble before me!
here-we are equal ! ” At present, on the contrary,
when throughout Europe the herding animal alone
attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when
"equality of right” can too readily be transformed
into equality in wrong : I mean to say into general
war against everything rare, strange, and privileged,
6


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155
<
against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher
duty, the higher responsibility, the creative pleni-
potence and lordliness — at present it belongs to
the conception of “greatness" to be noble, to wish
to be apart, to be capable of being different, to
stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative;
and the philosopher will betray something of his ,
own ideal when he asserts: "He shall be the
greatest who can be the most solitary, the most
concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond
good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of
superabundance of wilt ; precisely this shall be
called greatness : as diversified as can be entire, as
ample as can be full. And to ask once more the
question: Is greatness possible—nowadays?
213.
It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is,
because it cannot be taught: one must “know" it
by experience or one should have the pride not
to know it. The fact that at present people all
talk of things of which they cannot have any experi-
ence, is true more especially and unfortunately as
concerns the philosopher and philosophical matters:
the very few know them, are permitted to
know them, and all popular ideas about them are
false. Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical
combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which
runs at presto pace, and a dialectic rigour and
necessity which makes no false step, is unknown
to most thinkers and scholars from their own
experience, and therefore, should any one speak of
it in their presence, it is incredible to them. They


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156
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
)
-
conceive of every necessity as troublesome, as a
painful compulsory obedience and state of con-
straint; thinking itself is regarded by them as
something slow and hesitating, almost as a trouble,
and often enough as "worthy of the sweat of the
noble”—but not at all as something easy and divine,
closely related to dancing and exuberance! “To
think" and to take a matter “seriously," "ardu-
ously”—that is one and the same thing to them;
such only has been their “experience. ”—Artists
have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know
only too well that precisely when they no longer
do anything “arbitrarily," and everything of neces-
sity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power,
of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches
its climax-in short, that necessity and “freedom
of will” are then the same thing with them. There
is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states,
to which the gradation of rank in the problems
corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruth-
lessly every one who ventures too near them, with-
out being predestined for their solution by the
loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what
use is it for nimble, everyday intellects, or clumsy,
honest mechanics and empiricists to press, in their
plebeian ambition, close to such problems, and as
it were into this "holy of holies"-as so often
happens nowadays! But coarse feet must never
tread upon such carpets: this is provided for in
the primary law of things; the doors remain closed
to those intruders, though they may dash and
break their heads thereon! People have always
to be born to a high station, or, more definitely,


## p. 157 (#179) ############################################

WE SCHOLARS.
157
:
they have to be bred for it: a person has only a
right to philosophy—taking the word in its higher
significance—in virtue of his descent; the ancestors,
the "blood,” decide here also. Many generations
must have prepared the way for the coming of the
philosopher; each of his virtues must have been
separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted, and
embodied ; not only the bold, easy, delicate course
and current of his thoughts, but above all the
readiness for great responsibilities, the majesty of
ruling glance and contemning look, the feeling of
separation from the multitude with their duties and
virtues, the kindly patronage and defence of what-
ever is misunderstood and calumniated, be it God
or devil, the delight and practice of supreme justice,
the art of commanding, the amplitude of will, the
lingering eye which rarely admires, rarely looks up,
rarely loves. . . .


## p. 158 (#180) ############################################



## p. 159 (#181) ############################################

SEVENTH CHAPTER
OUR VIRTUES.
-
214.
OUR Virtues ? —It is probable that we too have
still our virtues, although naturally they are not
those sincere and massive virtues on account of
which we hold our grandfathers in esteem and also
at a little distance from us. We Europeans of the
day after to-morrow, we firstlings of the twentieth
century — with all our dangerous curiosity, our
multifariousness and art of disguising, our mellow
and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and
spirit - we shall presumably, if we must have
virtues, have those only which have come to agree-
ment with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations,
with our most ardent requirements: well, then, let
us look for them in our labyrinths ! -where, as we
know, so many things lose themselves, so many
things get quite lost! And is there anything finer
than to search for one's own virtues ? Is it not
almost to believe in one's own virtues ? But this
"believing in one's own virtues"—is it not practi-
cally the same as what was formerly called one's
"good conscience," that long, respectable pigtail of
an idea, which our grandfathers used to hang behind


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160
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
their heads, and often enough also behind their
understandings ? It seems, therefore, that however
little we may imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned
and grandfatherly respectable in other respects, in
one thing we are nevertheless the worthy grand-
children of our grandfathers, we last Europeans
with good consciences: we also still wear their
pigtail. —Ah! if you only knew how soon, so very
soon-it will be different!
215.
As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes
two suns which determine the path of one planet,
and in certain cases suns of different colours shine
around a single planet, now with red light, now
with green, and then simultaneously illumine and
flood it with motley colours : so we modern men,
owing to the complicated mechanism of our “firma-
ment,” are determined by different moralities; our
actions shine alternately in different colours, and
are seldom unequivocal—and there are often cases,
also, in which our actions are motley-coloured.
216.
To love one's enemies? I think that has been
well learnt: it takes place thousands of times at
present on a large and small scale ; indeed, at
times the higher and sublimer thing takes place :
we learn to despise when we love, and precisely
when we love best; all of it, however, unconsciously,
without noise, without ostentation, with the shame
and secrecy of goodness, which forbids the utter-


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QUR VIRTUES.
161
ance of the pompous word and the formula of
virtue.
Morality as attitude—is opposed to our
taste nowadays. This is also an advance, as it
was an advance in our fathers that religion as an
attitude finally became opposed to their taste,
including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness
against religion (and all that formerly belonged
to freethinker-pantomime). It is the music in our
conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan
litanies, moral sermons, and goody-goodness won't
chime.
217
Let us be careful in dealing with those who
attach great importance to being credited with
moral tact and subtlety in moral discernment!
They never forgive us if they have once made a
mistake before us (or even with regard to us)—they
inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and
detractors, even when they still remain our "friends. "
-Blessed are the forgetful; for they "get the better”
even of their blunders.
218.
The psychologists of France—and where else are
there still psychologists nowadays ? -have never
yet exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoy-
ment of the bêtise bourgeoise, just as though . . . in
short, they betray something thereby. Flaubert, for
instance, the honest citizen of Rouen, neither saw,
heard, nor tasted anything else in the end ; it was
his mode of self-torment and refined cruelty As
this is growing wearisome, I would now recommend
L


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162
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
for a change something else for a pleasure
namely, the unconscious astuteness with which
good, fat, honest mediocrity always behaves to-
wards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to
perform, the subtle, barbed, Jesuitical astuteness,
which is a thousand times subtler than the taste
and understanding of the middle-class in its best
moments—subtler even than the understanding of
its victims a repeated proof that “instinct” is
:
the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence
which have hitherto been discovered. In short,
you psychologists, study the philosophy of the
"rule" in its struggle with the "exception": there
you have a spectacle fit for Gods and godlike
malignity! Or, in plainer words, practise vivi-
section on “good people,” on the “homo bonæ
voluntatis," . . . on yourselves !
»
219.
The practice of judging and condemning morally,
is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow
on those who are less so; it is also a kind of
indemnity for them being badly endowed by
nature; and finally, it is an opportunity for acquir-
ing spirit and becoming subtle :malice spiritualises.
They are glad in their inmost heart that there is a
standard according to which those who are over-
endowed with intellectual goods and privileges, are
equal to them; they contend for the "equality of all
before God," and almost need the belief in God for
his purpose. It is among them
It is among them that the most
powerful antagonists of atheism are found. If any
one were to say to them: "a lofty spirituality is


## p. 163 (#185) ############################################

OUR VIRTUES.
163
beyond all comparison with the honesty and
respectability of a merely moral man ”-it would
make them furious ; I shall take care not to say
so. I would rather flatter them with my theory
that lofty spirituality itself exists only as the
ultimate product of moral qualities; that it is a
synthesis of all qualities attributed to the “merely
moral” man, after they have been acquired singly
through long training and practice, perhaps during
a whole series of generations; that lofty spirituality
is precisely the spiritualising of justice, and the
beneficent severity which knows that it is author-
ised to maintain gradations of rank in the world,
even among things—and not only among men.
220.
6
Now that the praise of the " disinterested person
is so popular, one must-probably not without
some danger-get an idea of what people actually
take an interest in, and what are the things
generally which fundamentally and profoundly
concern ordinary men — including the cultured,
even the learned, and perhaps philosophers also, if
appearances do not deceive.
The fact thereby
becomes obvious that the greater part of what
interests and charms higher natures, and more
refined and fastidious tastes, seems absolutely “un-
interesting "to the average man :-if
, notwithstand-
ing, he perceive devotion to these interests, he calls
it désintéressé, and wonders how it is possible to
act “disinterestedly. " There have been philo-
sophers who could give this popular astonishment
a seductive and mystical, other-world expression


## p. 164 (#186) ############################################

164
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
.
(perhaps because they did not know the higher
nature by experience ? ), instead of stating the naked
and candidly reasonable truth that “disinterested”
action is very interesting and “interested" action,
provided that . “ And love? ”—What! Even
an action for love's sake shall be “unegoistic”? But
you fools—! “And the praise of the self-sacrificer? ”
-But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows
that he wanted and obtained something for it-
perhaps something from himself for something from
himself; that he relinquished here in order to have
more there, perhaps in general to be more, or even
feel himself“ more. "
But this is a realm of ques-
tions and answers in which a more fastidious spirit
does not like to stay: for here truth has to stifle
her yawns so much when she is obliged to answer.
And after all, truth is a woman; one must not use
force with her.
>
a
221.
“It sometimes happens," said a moralistic pedant
and trifle-retailer, “that I honour and respect an
unselfish man: not, however, because he is unselfish,
but because I think he has a right to be useful to
another man at his own expense. In short, the
question is always who he is, and who the other is.
For instance, in a person created and destined for
command, self-denial and modest retirement, instead
of being virtues would be the waste of virtues : so
it seems to me. Every system of unegoistic mor-
ality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals
to every one, not only sins against good taste, but
is also an incentive to sins of omission, an additional


## p. 165 (#187) ############################################

OUR VIRTUES.
165
seduction under the mask of philanthropy-and
precisely a seduction and injury to the higher,
rarer, and more privileged types of men. Moral
systems must be compelled first of all to bow
before the gradations of rank; their presumption
must be driven home to their conscience-until
they thoroughly understand at last that it is
immoral to say that “what is right for one is
proper for another. ”—So said my moralistic pedant
and bonhomme. Did he perhaps deserve to be
laughed at when he thus exhorted systems of
morals to practise morality? But one should not
be too much in the right if one wishes to have the
laughers on one's own side; a grain of wrong
pertains even to good taste.
")
222.
Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached
nowadays-and, if I gather rightly, no other re-
ligion is any longer preached_let the psycholo-
gist have his ears open: through all the vanity,
through all the noise which is natural to these
preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse,
groaning, genuine note of self-contempt. It belongs
to the overshadowing and uglifying of Europe,
which has been on the increase for a century (the
first symptoms of which are already specified
documentarily in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to
Madame d'Epinay)-if it is not really the cause
thereof! The man of "modern ideas," the con-
ceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself-
,
this is perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity
wants him only “to suffer with his fellows. "
"


## p. 166 (#188) ############################################

166
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
223.
The hybrid European-a tolerably ugly plebeian,
taken all in all-absolutely requires a costume:
he needs history as a storeroom of costumes. To
be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit
him properly-he changes and changes. Let us
look at the nineteenth century with respect to these
hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades
of style, and also with respect to its moments of
desperation on account of "nothing suiting” us,
It is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or
classical, or Christian, or Florentine, or barocco, or
"national,” in moribus et artibus : it does not
“clothe us”! But the “spirit,” especially the
“ historical spirit," profits even by this desperation :
once and again a new sample of the past or of
the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up,
and above all studied - we are the first studious
age in puncto of “costumes," I mean as concerns
morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions;
we are prepared as no other age has ever been for
a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual
festival-laughter and carrogance, for the transcen-
dental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic
ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still dis-
covering the domain of our invention just here, the
domain where even we can still be original, pro-
bably as parodists of the world's history and as
God's Merry-Andrews,-perhaps, though nothing
else of the present have a future, our laughter itself
may have a future!
a
3


## p. 167 (#189) ############################################

OUR VIRTUES.
167
224.
The historical sense (or the capacity for divining
quickly the order of rank of the valuations accord-
ing to which a people, a community, or an indi-
vidual has lived, the “divining instinct” for the
relationships of these valuations, for the relation of
the authority of the valuations to the authority of
the operating forces),--this historical sense, which
we Europeans claim as our speciality, has come to
us in the train of the enchanting and mad semi-
barbarity into which Europe has been plunged by
the democratic mingling of classes and races--it is
only the nineteenth century that has recognised
this faculty as its sixth sense. Owing to this
mingling, the past of every form and mode of life,
and of cultures which were formerly closely con-
tiguous and superimposed on one another, flows
forth into us “modern souls”; our instincts now
run back in all directions, we ourselves are a kind
of chaos: in the end, as we have said, the spirit
perceives its advantage therein. By means of our
semi-barbarity in body and in desire, we have secret
access everywhere, such as a noble age never had;
we have access above all to the labyrinth of imper-
fect civilisations, and to every form of semi-
barbarity that has at any time existed on earth;
and in so far as the most considerable part of
human civilisation hitherto has just been semi-
barbarity, the “historical sense” implies almost the
sense and instinct for everything, the taste and
tongue for everything: whereby it immediately
proves
itself to be an ignoble sense. For instance,


## p. 168 (#190) ############################################

168
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
we enjoy Homer once more: it is perhaps our
happiest acquisition that we know how to appre-
ciate Homer, whom men of distinguished culture
(as the French of the seventeenth century, like
Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for his esprit
vaste, and even Voltaire, the last echo of the cen-
tury) cannot and could not so easily appropriate-
whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy.
The very decided Yea and Nay of their palate,
their promptly ready disgust, their hesitating reluc-
tance with regard to everything strange, their
horror of the bad taste even of lively curiosity, and
in general the averseness of every distinguished
and self-sufficing culture to avow a new desire, a
dissatisfaction with its own condition, or an admira-
tion of what is strange: all this determines and
disposes them unfavourably even towards the best
things of the world which are not their property or
could not become their prey—and no faculty is more
unintelligible to such men than just this historical
sense, with its truckling, plebeian curiosity. The
case is not different with Shakespeare, that mar-
vellous Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste,
over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of
Æschylus would have half-killed himself with
laughter or irritation: but we-accept precisely this
wild motleyness, this medley of the most delicate,
the most coarse, and the most artificial, with a
secret confidence and cordiality; we enjoy it as a
refinement of art reserved expressly for us, and
allow ourselves to be as little disturbed by the
repulsive fumes and the proximity of the English
populace in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives,
1


## p. 169 (#191) ############################################

OUR VIRTUES.
169
»
as perhaps on the Chiaja of Naples, where, with all
our senses awake, we go our way, enchanted and
voluntarily, in spite of the drain-odour of the lower
quarters of the town. That as men of the "historical
sense" we have our virtues, is not to be disputed :
we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave,
habituated to self-control and self-renunciation,
very grateful, very patient, very complaisant—but
with all this we are perhaps not very "tasteful. ”
Let us finally confess it, that what is most difficult
for us men of the “historical sense to grasp, feel,
taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally pre-
judiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfec-
tion and ultimate maturity in every culture and art,
the essentially noble in works and men, their
moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency,
the goldenness and coldness which all things show
that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great
virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast
to good taste, at least to the very best taste; and we
can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly,
and with compulsion the small, short, and happy
godsends and glorifications of human life as they
shine here and there: those moments and mar-
vellous experiences, when a great power has volun-
tarily come to a halt before the boundless and
infinite, -when a superabundance of refined delight
has been enjoyed by a sudden checking and
petrifying, by standing firmly and planting oneself
fixedly on still trembling ground. Proportionate-
ness is strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves;
our itching is really the itching for the infinite,
the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward


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170
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
panting horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite,
we modern men, we semi-barbarians—and are only
in our highest bliss when we-are in most danger.
225.
Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utili-
tarianism, or eudæmonism, all those modes of
thinking which measure the worth of things accord-
ing to pleasure and pain, that is, according to
accompanying circumstances and secondary con-
siderations, are plausible modes of thought and
naïvetés, which every one conscious of creative
powers and an artist's conscience will look down
upon with scorn, though not without sympathy.
Sympathy for you! —to be sure, that is not sympathy
as you understand it: it is not sympathy for social
"distress," for "society” with its sick and mis-
fortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective
who lie on the ground around us; still less is it
sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary
slave-classes who strive after power--they call it
“ freedom. ” Our sympathy is a loftier and further-
sighted sympathy:-we see how man dwarfs himself,
how you dwarf him! and there are moments when
we view your sympathy with an indescribable
anguish, when we resist it,--when we regard your
seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of
levity. You want, if possible and there is not a
more foolish “if possible”--to do away with suffer-
ing; and we? —it really seems that we would rather
have it increased and made worse than it has
ever been! Well-being, as you understand it-


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OUR VIRTUES.
171
>
is certainly not a goal ; it seems to us an end ; a
condition which at once renders man ludicrous and
contemptible—and makes his destruction desirable !
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—know
ye not that it is only this discipline that has pro-
duced all the elevations of humanity hitherto?
The tension of soul in misfortune which communi-
cates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack
and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in under-
going, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting mis-
fortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise,
spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon
the soul-has it not been bestowed through suffer-
ing, through the discipline of great suffering ? In
man creature and creator are united : in man there
is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly,
chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor,
the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the
,
spectator, and the seventh day-do ye understand
this contrast? And that your sympathy for the
creature in man" applies to that which has to be
fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, an-
nealed, refined to that which must necessarily
suffer, and is meant to suffer ? And our sympathy
-do
ye
not understand what our reverse sympathy
applies to, when it resists your sympathy as the
worst of all pampering and enervation ? --So it is
sympathy against sympathy ! -But to repeat it
once more, there are higher problems than the pro-
blems of pleasure and pain and sympathy; and all
systems of philosophy which deal only with these
are naïvetés.
C


## p. 172 (#194) ############################################

172
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
226.
(6
-
We Immoralists. This world with which we are
concerned, in which we have to fear and love, this
almost invisible, inaudible world of delicate com-
mand and delicate obedience, a world of “ almost
in every respect, captious, insidious, sharp, and
tender — yes, it is well protected from clumsy
spectators and familiar curiosity! We are woven
into a strong net and garment of duties, and cannot
disengage ourselves-precisely here, we are “men
of duty," even we! Occasionally it is true we
dance in our “ chains” and betwixt our "swords ";
it is none the less true that more often we gnash our
teeth under the circumstances, and are impatient at
the secret hardship of our lot. But do what we
will, fools and appearances say of us :
men without duty," —we have always fools and
appearances against us!
o these are
227.
Honesty, granting that it is the virtue from which
we cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits—well, we
will labour at it with all our perversity and love, and
not tire of "perfecting” ourselves in our virtue,
which alone remains : may its glance some day
overspread like a gilded, blue, mocking twilight this
aging civilisation with its dull gloomy seriousness !
And if, nevertheless, our honesty should one day
grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find
us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter,
easier, and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us


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OUR VIRTUES.
173
66
remain hard, we latest Stoics, and let us send to its
help whatever devilry we have in us our disgust
at the clumsy and undefined, our "nitimur in veti-
tum," our love of adventure, our sharpened and
fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised,
intellectual Will to Power and universal conquest,
which rambles and roves avidiously around all the
realms of the future-let us go with all our devils"
to the help of our “God”! It is probable that
people will misunderstand and mistake us on that
account: what does it matter! They will say :
“ Their 'honesty '—that is their devilry, and nothing
else ! ” What does it matter! And even if they
were right-have not all Gods hitherto been such
sanctified, re-baptized devils ? And after all, what
do we know of ourselves ? And what the spirit that
leads us wants to be called ? (It is a question of
names. ) And how many spirits we harbour ? Our
honesty, we free spirits—let us be careful lest it be-
come our vanity, our ornament and ostentation, our
limitation, our stupidity! Every virtue inclines to
stupidity, every stupidity to virtue ; "stupid to the
point of sanctity," they say in Russia,- let us be care-
ful lest out of pure honesty we do not eventually
become saints and bores! Is not life a hundred
times too short for us—to bore ourselves ? One
would have to believe in eternal life in order to. . . .
228.
I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all
moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has
belonged to the soporific appliances — and that


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174
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
virtue,” in my opinion, has been more injured by
the tediousness of its advocates than by anything
else ; at the same time, however, I would not wish
to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable
that as few people as possible should reflect upon
morals, and consequently it is very desirable that
morals should not some day become interesting!
But let us not be afraid! Things still remain to-
day as they have always been: I see no one in
Europe who has (or discloses) an idea of the fact
that philosophising concerning morals might be
conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring
manner-that calamity might be involved therein.
Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable
English utilitarians : how ponderously and respect-
ably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor
expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham,
just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of
the respectable Helvétius! (no, he was not a a
dangerous man, Helvétius, ce sénateur Pococurante,
to use an expression of Galiani). No new thought,
nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better
expression of an old thought, not even a proper
history of what has been previously thought on the
subject : an impossible literature, taking it all in all,
unless one knows how to leaven it with some mis-
chief. In effect, the old English vice called cant,
which is moral Tartuffism, has insinuated itself also
into these moralists (whom one must certainly read
with an eye to their motives if one must read them),
concealed this time under the new form of the
scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from
them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience,


## p. 175 (#197) ############################################

OUR VIRTUES.
175
>
from which a race of former Puritans must natur-
ally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with
morals. (Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan?
That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as
questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short,
as a problem? Is moralising not-immoral ? ) In
the end, they all want English morality to be re-
cognised as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or
the "general utility,” or “the happiness of the
greatest number,"—no! the happiness of England,
will be best served thereby. They would like, by
all means, to convince themselves that the striving
after English happiness, I mean after comfort and
fashion (and in the highest instance, a seat in Parlia-
ment), is at the same time the true path of virtue ;
in fact, that in so far as there has been virtue in the
world hitherto, it has just consisted in such striving.
Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken
ñerding-animals (who undertake to advocate the
cause of egoism as conducive to the general wel-
fare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of
the facts that the “general welfare” is no ideal, no
goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is
only a nostrum,—that what is fair to one may not at
all be fair to another, that the requirement of one
morality for all is really a detriment to higher men,
in short, that there is a distinction of rank between
man and man, and consequently between morality
and morality. They are an unassuming and funda-
mentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian
Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as
they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of
their utility. One ought even to encourage them,


## p. 176 (#198) ############################################

176
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
as has been partially attempted in the following
rhymes :
Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,
“Longer-better," aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee;
Unenraptured, never jesting,
Mediocre everlasting,
Sans genie et sans esprit!
229.
In these later ages, which may be proud of their
humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much
superstition of the fear, of the “cruel wild beast," the
mastering of which constitutes the very pride of
these humaner ages—that even obvious truths, as
if by the agreement of centuries, have long remained
unuttered, because they have the appearance of
helping the finally slain wild beast back to life
again. I perhaps risk something when I allow
such a truth to escape ; let others capture it again
and give it so much “milk of pious sentiment”* to
drink, that it will lie down quiet and forgotten, in
its old corner. -One ought to learn anew about
cruelty, and open one's eyes; one ought at last to
learn impatience, in order that such immodest gross
errors--as, for instance, have been fostered by
ancient and modern philosophers with regard to
tragedy-may no longer wander about virtuously
and boldly. Almost everything that we call
“higher culture” is based upon the spiritualising
* An expression from Schiller's William Tell, Act IV. ,
Scene 3.


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OUR VIRTUES.
177
>
-*
a
and intensifying of cruelty—this is my thesis ; the
"wild beast” has not been slain at all, it lives, it
flourishes, it has only been-transfigured.
That
which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is
cruelty ; that which operates agreeably in so-called
tragic sympathy, and at the basis even of everything
sublime, up to the highest and most delicate thrills
of metaphysics, obtains its sweetness solely from the
intermingled ingredient of cruelty. What the Roman
enjoys in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of
the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the faggot
and stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day
Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy, the
workman of the Parisian suburbs who has a home-
sickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne
who, with unhinged will, “undergoes” the perform-
ance of “ Tristan and Isolde”—what all these enjoy,
and strive with mysterious ardour to drink in, is the
philtre of the great Circe "cruelty. " Here, to be
sure, we must put aside entirely the blundering
psychology of former times, which could only teach
with regard to cruelty that it originated at the sight
of the suffering of others: there is an abundant,
superabundant enjoyment even in one's own suffer-
ing, in causing one's own suffering—and wherever
man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-
denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation,
as among the Phænicians and ascetics, or in
general, to desensualisation, decarnalisation, and
contrition, to Puritanical repentance-spasms, to
vivisection of conscience and to Pascal-like sacri-
fizio dell' intelleto, he is secretly allured and impelled
forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of
M


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178
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL,
cruelty towards himself. –Finally, let us consider
that even the seeker of knowledge operates as an
artist and glorifier of cruelty, in that he compels his
spirit to perceive against its own inclination, and
often enough against the wishes of his heart:-he
forces it to say Nay, where he would like to affirm,
love, and adore ; indeed, every instance of taking
a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation,
an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of
the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance
and superficiality,-even in every desire for know-
ledge there is a drop of cruelty.
230.
Perhaps what I have here said about a “funda-
mental will of the spirit ” may not be understood
without further details; I may be allowed a word
I
of explanation. —That imperious something which
is popularly called “the spirit,” wishes to be master
internally and externally, and to feel itself master :
it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a
binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling
will. Its requirements and capacities here, are the
same as those assigned by physiologists to every-
thing that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power
of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals
itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to
the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or
repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it
arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and
falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign
elements, in every portion of the "outside world. ”
Its object thereby is the incorporation of new "ex-


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OUR VIRTUES.
179
periences,” the assortment of new things in the old
arrangements—in short, growth; or more properly,
the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power
-is its object. This same will has at its service an
apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly
adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary
shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial
of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of
defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a
contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in
horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance:
as that which is all necessary according to the degree
of its appropriating power, its“ digestive power,” to
speak figuratively (and in fact“ the spirit” resembles
a stomach more than anything else). Here also
belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let
itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion
that it is not so and so, but is only allowed to pass
as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an
exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way
narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the
foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the
misshapen, the beautified—an enjoyment of the
arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power.
Finally, in this connection, there is the not un-
scrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other
spirits and dissemble before them—the constant
pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, change-
able power : the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness
and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling
of security therein—it is precisely by its Protean arts
that it is best protected and concealed ! -Counter to
this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for


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180
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside—for
every outside is a cloak—there operates the sublime
tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and
insists on taking things profoundly, variously, and
thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual
conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker
will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought
to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye
sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed
to severe discipline and even severe words. He
will say: “There is something cruel in the tendency
of my spirit”: let the virtuous and amiable try to
convince him that it is not so! In fact, it would sound
nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our “extrava-
gant honesty" were talked about, whispered about
and glorified—we free, very free spirits—and some
day perhaps such will actually be our--posthumous
glory! Meanwhile—for there is plenty of time
until then--we should be least inclined to deck our-
selves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage ;
our whole former work has just made us sick of this
taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are
beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words :
honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for
knowledge, heroism of the truthful—there is some-
thing in them that makes one's heart swell with
pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long
ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an
anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of
verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment,
frippery,and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity,
and that even under such flattering colour and
repainting, the terrible original text homo natura


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OUR VIRTUES.
181
must again be recognised. In effect, to translate
man back again into nature; to master the many
vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate
meanings which have hitherto been scratched and
daubed over the eternal original text, homo natura;
to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand
before man as he now, hardened by the discipline
of science, stands before the other forms of nature,
with fearless Edipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-
ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical
bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long :
“ Thou art more! thou art higher thou hast a
different origin ! "—this may be a strange and
foolish task, but that it is a task, who can deny !
Why did we choose it, this foolish task? Or, to
put the question differently: “Why knowledge at
all? " Every one will ask us about this. And thus
pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question
a hundred times, have not found, and cannot find
any better answer.
231.
Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment 1
does that does not merely “conserve"—as the phy-
siologist knows.