No More Learning

. . Beware of all pictur-
esque men! Life was easy-in fact easiest—to me,
in those periods when it exacted the heaviest duties
from me. Whoever could have seen me during the
seventy days of this autumn, when, without inter-
ruption, I did a host of things of the highest rank—
things that no man can do nowadays—with a sense
of responsibility for all the ages yet to come, would
have noticed no sign of tension in my condition, but
rather a state of overflowing freshness and good
cheer. Never have I eaten with more pleasant sen-
sations, never has my sleep been better. I know of
no other manner of dealing with great tasks, than
as play: this, as a sign of greatness, is an essential
prerequisite. The slightest constraint, a sombre
mien, any hard accent in the voice-all these things
are objections to a man, but how much more to his
work! . . . One must not have nerves. . . . Even
to suffer from solitude is an objection—the only
thing I have always suffered from is “multitude. ” *
* The German words are, Einsamkeit and Vielsamkeit.
The latter was coined by Nietzsche. The English word
“multitude" should, therefore, be understood as signifying
multifarious instincts and gifts, which in Nietzsche strove for
ascendancy and caused him more suffering than any solitude.
Complexity of this sort, held in check by a dominant instinct,
as in Nietzsche's case, is of course the only possible basis of
an artistic nature. --TR.


## p. 53 (#90) ##############################################

52
ECCE HOMO
I am fated to figure in great causes. To this I reply
that these trivial matters—diet, locality, climate,
and one's mode of recreation, the whole casuistry of
self-love-are inconceivably more important than
all that which has hitherto been held in high esteem.
It is precisely in this quarter that we must begin
to learn afresh. All those things which mankind
has valued with such earnestness heretofore are not
even real; they are mere creations of fancy, or,
more strictly speaking, lies born of the evil instincts
of diseased and, in the deepest sense, noxious
natures—all the concepts, “God,” “soul,” “virtue,"
“sin,” “Beyond," "truth,” “eternal life. ” . . . But
the greatness of human nature, its “ divinity," was
sought for in them. . . . All questions of politics,
of social order, of education, have been falsified, root
and branch, owing to the fact that the most noxious
men have been taken for great men, and that
people were taught to despise the small things, or
rather the fundamental things, of life. If I now
choose to compare myself with those creatures who
have hitherto been honoured as the first among men,
the difference becomes obvious. I do not reckon
the so-called “first” men even as human beings-
for me they are the excrements of mankind, the
products of disease and of the instinct of revenge:
they are so many monsters laden with rottenness,
so many hopeless incurables, who avenge them-
selves on life. . . . I wish to be the opposite of
these people: it is my privilege to have the very
sharpest discernment for every sign of healthy in-
stincts. There is no such thing as a morbid trait
in me; even in times of serious illness I have never


## p. 53 (#91) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER
53
grown morbid, and you might seek in vain for a
trace of fanaticism in my nature. No one can point
to any moment of my life in which I have assumed
either an arrogant or a pathetic attitude. Pathetic
attitudes are not in keeping with greatness; he who
needs attitudes is false. . . . Beware of all pictur-
esque men! Life was easy—in fact easiest—to me,
in those periods when it exacted the heaviest duties
from me. Whoever could have seen me during the
seventy days of this autumn, when, without inter-
ruption, I did a host of things of the highest rank-
things that no man can do nowadays—with a sense
of responsibility for all the ages yet to come, would
have noticed no sign of tension in my condition, but
rather a state of overflowing freshness and good
cheer. Never have I eaten with more pleasant sen-
sations, never has my sleep been better. I know of
no other manner of dealing with great tasks, than
as play: this, as a sign of greatness, is an essential
prerequisite. The slightest constraint, a sombre
mien, any hard accent in the voice—all these things
are objections to a man, but how much more to his
work! . . . One must not have nerves. . . . Even
to suffer from solitude is an objection-the only
thing I have always suffered from is “multitude. ”*
* The German words are, Einsamkeit and Vielsamkeit.
The latter was coined by Nietzsche. The English word
“multitude" should, therefore, be understood as signifying
multifarious instincts and gifts, which in Nietzsche strove for
ascendancy and caused him more suffering than any solitude.
Complexity of this sort, held in check by a dominant instinct,
as in Nietzsche's case, is of course the only possible basis of
an artistic nature. —TR.


## p. 54 (#92) ##############################################

54 ECCE HOMO
At an absurdly tender age, in fact when I was seven
years old, I already knew that no human speech
would ever reach me: did any one ever see me sad
on that account? At present I still possess the same
affability towards everybody, I am even full of con-
sideration for the lowest: in all this there is not an
atom of haughtiness or of secret contempt. He
whom I despise soon guesses that he is despised by
me: the very fact of my existence is enough to rouse
indignation in all those who have polluted blood in
their veins. My formula for greatness in man is
amor fati: the fact that a man wishes nothing to
be different, either in front of him or behind him,
or for all eternity. Not only must the necessary be
borne, and on no account concealed,—all idealism
is falsehood in the face of necessity,—but it must
also be loved. . . .


## p. 55 (#93) ##############################################

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS
I AM one thing, my creations are another. Here,
before I speak of the books themselves, I shall
touch upon the question of the understanding and
misunderstanding with which they have met. I
shall proceed to do this in as perfunctory a manner
as the occasion demands; for the time has by no
means come for this question. My time has not
yet come either; some are born posthumously. One
day institutions will be needed in which men will
live and teach, as I understand living and teaching;
maybe, also, that by that time, chairs will be
founded and endowed for the interpretation of
Zarathustra. But I should regard it as a complete
contradiction of myself, if I expected to find ears
and eyes for my truths to-day: the fact that no one
listens to me, that no one knows how to receive at
my hands to-day, is not only comprehensible, it
seems to me quite the proper thing. I do not wish
to be mistaken for another—and to this end I must
not mistake myself. To repeat what I have al-
ready said, I can point to but few instances of ill-
will in my life: and as for literary ill-will, I could
mention scarcely a single example of it. On the
other hand, I have met with far too much pure
foolery! . . . It seems to me that to take up one


## p. 56 (#94) ##############################################

56
ECCE HOMO
of my books is one of the rarest honours that a man
can pay himself—even supposing that he put his
shoes from off his feet beforehand, not to mention
boots. . . . When on one occasion Dr. Heinrich von
Stein honestly complained that he could not under-
stand a word of my Zarathustra, I said to him that
this was just as it should be: to have understood
six sentences in that book—that is to say, to have
lived them—raises a man to a higher level among
mortals than “modern ” men can attain. With
this feeling of distance how could I even wish to
be read by the “moderns” whom I know! My
triumph is just the opposite of what Schopenhauer's
was—I say “ Non legor, non legar. "—Not that I
should like to underestimate the pleasure I have
derived from the innocence with which my works
have frequently been contradicted. As late as last
summer, at a time when I was attempting, perhaps
by means of my weighty, all-too-weighty literature,
to throw the rest of literature off its balance, a
certain professor of Berlin University kindly gave
me to understand that I ought really to make use
of a different form: no one could read such stuff
as I wrote. —Finally, it was not Germany, but
Switzerland that presented me with the two most
extreme cases. An essay on Beyond Good and
Evil, by Dr. V. Widmann in the paper called the
Bund, under the heading “Nietzsche's Dangerous
Book," and a general account of all my works, from
the pen of Herr Karl Spitteler, also in the Bund,
constitute a maximum in my life-I shall not say
of what. . . . The latter treated my Zarathustra, for in-
stance, as "advanced exercises in style,"and expressed


## p. 57 (#95) ##############################################

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 57
the wish that later on I might try and attend to
the question of substance as well; Dr. Widmann
assured me of his respect for the courage I showed
in endeavouring to abolish all decent feeling.
Thanks to a little trick of destiny, every sentence
in these criticisms seemed, with a consistency that
I could but admire, to be an inverted truth. In
fact it was most remarkable that all one had to do
was to "transvalue all values," in order to hit the
nail on the head with regard to me, instead of
striking my head with the nail. . . . I am more
particularly anxious therefore to discover an ex-
planation. After all, no one can draw more out of
things, books included, than he already knows. A
man has no ears for that to which experience has
given him no access. To take an extreme case,
suppose a book contains simply incidents which lie
quite outside the range of general or even rare ex-
perience—suppose it to be the first language to
express a whole series of experiences. In this case
nothing it contains will really be heard at all, and,
thanks to an acoustic delusion, people will believe
that where nothing is heard there is nothing to
hear. . . . This, at least, has been my usual experi-
ence, and proves, if you will, the originality of my
experience. He who thought he had understood
something in my work, had as a rule adjusted some-
thing in it to his own image—not infrequently the
very opposite of myself, an "idealist," for instance.
He who understood nothing in my work, would deny
that I was worth considering at all. —The word
"Superman," which designates a type of man that
would be one of nature's rarest and luckiest strokes,


## p. 58 (#96) ##############################################

58 ECCE HOMO
as opposed to "modern" men, to " good" men, to
Christians and other Nihilists,—a word which in the
mouth of Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality,
acquires a very profound meaning,—is understood
almost everywhere, and with perfect innocence, in
the light of those values to which a flat contradic-
tion was made manifest in the figure of Zarathustra
—that is to say, as an " ideal " type, a higher kind
of man, half " saint "and half "genius. " . . . Other
learned cattle have suspected me of Darwinism on
account of this word: even the " hero cult" of that
great unconscious and involuntary swindler, Carlyle,
—a cult which I repudiated with such roguish
malice,—was recognised in my doctrine. Once,
when I whispered to a man that he would do better
to seek for the Superman in a Caesar Borgia than in
a Parsifal, he could not believe his ears. The fact
that I am quite free from curiosity in regard to
criticisms of my books, more particularly when they
appear in newspapers, will have to be forgiven me.
My friends and my publishers know this, and never
speak to me of such things. In one particular case,
I once saw all the sins that had been committed
against a single book—it was Beyond Good and
Evil; I could tell you a nice story about it. Is it
possible that the National-Zeitung—a Prussian
paper (this comment is for the sake of my foreign
readers—for my own part, I beg to state, I read
only Le Journal des DSats)—really and seriously
regarded the book as a "sign of the times," or a
genuine and typical example of Tory philosophy,*
* Junker-Philosophie. The landed proprietors constitute
the dominating class in Prussia, and it is from this class that


## p. 59 (#97) ##############################################

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 59
for which the Kreuz-Zeitung had not sufficient
courage? . . .
This was said for the benefit of Germans: for
everywhere else I have my readers—all of them
exceptionally intelligent men, characters that have
won their spurs and that have been reared in high
offices and superior duties ; I have even real geniuses
among my readers. In Vienna, in St. Petersburg,
in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris, and New
York—I have been discovered everywhere: I have
not yet been discovered in Europe's flatland—
Germany. . . . And, to make a confession, I re-
joice much more heartily over those who do not
read me, over those who have neither heard of my
name nor of the word philosophy. But whither-
soever I go, here in Turin, for instance, every
face brightens and softens at the sight of me.
A thing that has flattered me more than anything
else hitherto, is the fact that old market-women
cannot rest until they have picked out the sweetest
of their grapes for me. To this extent must a man
be a philosopher. . . . It is not in vain that the Poles
are considered as the French among the Slavs. A
charming Russian lady will not be mistaken for a
single moment concerning my origin. I am not
successful at being pompous, the most I can do is
to appear embarrassed. . . . I can think in German,
I can feel in German—I can do most things; but
this is beyond my powers. . . . My old master Ritschl
all officers and higher officials are drawn. The Kreuz-Zeitung
is the organ of the Junker party. —Tr.


## p. 60 (#98) ##############################################

60 ECCE HOMO
went so far as to declare that I planned even my
philological treatises after the manner of a Parisian
novelist—that I made them absurdly thrilling.
In Paris itself people are surprised at " toutes mes
audaces et finesses ";—- the words are Monsieur
Taine's;—I fear that even in the highestforms of the
dithyramb, that salt will be found pervading my
work which never becomes insipid, which never be-
comes " German "—and that is, wit. . . . I can do
nought else. God help me! Amen. —We all know,
some of us even from experience, what a " long-
ears" is. Well then, I venture to assert that I
have the smallest ears that have ever been seen.
This fact is not without interest to women—it
seems to me they feel that I understand them
better! . . . I am essentially the anti-ass, and on
this account alone a monster in the world's history
—in Greek, and not only in Greek, I am the Anti-
christ.
I am to a great extent aware of my privileges
as a writer: in one or two cases it has even been
brought home to me how very much the habitual
reading of my works " spoils " a man's taste. Other
books simply cannot be endured after mine, and
least of all philosophical ones. It is an incompar-
able distinction to cross the threshold of this noble
and subtle world—in order to do so one must
certainly not be a German ; it is, in short, a distinc-
tion which one must have deserved. He, however,
who is related to me through loftiness of will,
experiences genuine raptures of understanding in


## p. 61 (#99) ##############################################

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 6l
my books: for I swoop down from heights into
which no bird has ever soared; I know abysses
into which no foot has ever slipped. People have
told me that it is impossible to lay down a book
of mine—that I disturb even the night's rest. . . .
There is no prouder or at the same time more
subtle kind of books : they sometimes attain to the
highest pinnacle of earthly endeavour, cynicism;
to capture their thoughts a man must have the ten-
derest fingers as well as the most intrepid fists.
Any kind of spiritual decrepitude utterly excludes
all intercourse with them—even any kind of dys-
pepsia: a man must have no nerves, but he must
have a cheerful belly. Not only the poverty of a
man's soul and its stuffy air excludes all intercourse
with them, but also, and to a much greater degree,
cowardice, uncleanliness, and secret intestinal re-
vengefulness; a word from my lips suffices to make
the colour of all evil instincts rush into a face.
Among my acquaintances I have a number of
experimental subjects, in whom I see depicted all
the different, and instructively different, reactions
which follow upon a perusal of my works. Those
who will have nothing to do with the contents of
my books, as for instance my so-called friends, as-
sume an "impersonal" tone concerning them: they
wish me luck, and congratulate me for having pro-
duced another work; they also declare that my
writings show progress, because they exhale a more
cheerful spirit. . . .
The thoroughly vicious people,
the " beautiful souls," the false from top to toe, do
not know in the least what to do with my books—
consequently, with the beautiful consistency of all


## p. 62 (#100) #############################################

62 ECCE HOMO
beautiful souls, they regard my work as beneath
them. The cattle among my acquaintances, the
mere Germans,leave me to understand, if you please,
that they are not always of my opinion, though here
and there they agree with me. . . . I have heard
this said even about Zarathustra. "Feminism,"
whether in mankind or in man, is likewise a barrier
to my writings; with it, no one could ever enter
into this labyrinth of fearless knowledge. To this
end, a man must never have spared himself, he must
have been hard in his habits, in order to be good-
humoured and merry among a host of inexorable
truths. When I try to picture the character of a per-
fect reader, I always imagine a monster of courage
and curiosity, as well as of suppleness, cunning, and
prudence—in short, a born adventurer and explorer.
After all, I could not describe better than Zara-
thustra has done unto whom I really address my-
self: unto whom alone would he reveal his riddle?
"Unto you, daring explorers and experimenters,
and unto all who have ever embarked beneath
cunning sails upon terrible seas;
"Unto you who revel in riddles and in twilight,
whose souls are lured by flutes unto every treacher-
ous abyss:
"For ye care not to grope your way along a
thread with craven fingers; and where ye are able
to guess, ye hate to argue"
I will now pass just one or two general remarks
about my art of style. To communicate a state


## p. 63 (#101) #############################################

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 63
an inner tension of pathos by means of signs, in-
cluding the tempo of these signs,—that is the
meaning of every style; and in view of the fact
that the multiplicity of inner states in me is enor-
mous, I am capable of many kinds of style—in short,
the most multifarious art of style that any man has
ever had at his disposal. Any style is good which
genuinely communicates an inner condition, which
does not blunder over the signs, over the tempo of
the signs, or over moods—all the laws of phrasing
are the outcome of representing moods artistically.
Good style, in itself, is a piece of sheer foolery,
mere idealism, like " beauty in itself," for instance,
or "goodness in itself," or "the thing-in-itself. "
All this takes for granted, of course, that there
exist ears that can hear, and such men as are cap-
able and worthy of a like pathos, that those are
not wanting unto whom one may communicate
one's self. Meanwhile my Zarathustra, for instance,
is still in quest of such people—alas! he will have
to seek a long while yet! A man must be worthy
of listening to him. . . . And, until that time,
there will be no one who will understand the art
that has been squandered in this book. No one
has ever existed who has had more novel, more
strange, and purposely created art forms to fling
to the winds. The fact that such things were
possible in the German language still awaited
proof; formerly, I myself would have denied most
emphatically that it was possible. Before my time
people did not know what could be done with the
German language—what could be done with lan-
guage in general. The art of grand rhythm, of grand


## p. 64 (#102) #############################################

64 ECCE HOMO
style in periods, for expressing the tremendous
fluctuations of sublime and superhuman passion,
was first discovered by me: with the dithyramb
entitled "The Seven Seals," which constitutes the
last discourse of the third part of Zarathustra, I
soared miles above all that which heretofore has
been called poetry.
The fact that the voice which speaks in my
works is that of a psychologist who has not his
peer, is perhaps the first conclusion at which a good
reader will arrive—a reader such as I deserve, and
one who reads me just as the good old philologists
used to read their Horace. Those propositions
about which all the world is fundamentally agreed
—not to speak of fashionable philosophy, of moral-
ists and other empty-headed and cabbage-brained
people—are to me but ingenuous blunders: for in-
stance, the belief that "altruistic" and "egoistic"
are opposites, while all the time the " ego " itself is
merely a "supreme swindle," an "ideal. " . . . There
are no such things as egoistic or altruistic actions:
both concepts are psychological nonsense. Or the
proposition that" man pursues happiness "; or the
proposition that "happiness is the reward of virtue. "
. . . Or the proposition that "pleasure and pain are
opposites. " . . . Morality, the Circe of mankind, has
falsified everything psychological, root and branch
—it has bemoralised everything, even to the terribly
nonsensical point of calling love "unselfish. " A man
must first be firmly poised, he must stand securely
on his two legs, otherwise he cannot love at all.


## p. 65 (#103) #############################################

}
WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 6$
This indeed the girls know only too well: they don't
care two pins about unselfish and merely objective
men. . . . May I venture to suggest, incidentally,
that I know women? This knowledge is part
of my Dionysian patrimony. Who knows? may-
be I am the first psychologist of the eternally femi-
nine. Women all like me. . . . But that's an old
story: save, of course, the abortions among them,
the emancipated ones, those who lack the where-
withal to have children. Thank goodness I am not
willing to let myself be torn to pieces! the perfect
woman tears you to'pieces when she loves you: I
know these amiable Maenads. . . . Oh! what a
dangerous, creeping, subterranean little beast of
prey she is! And so agreeable withal! . . . A little
woman, pursuing her vengeance, would force open
even the iron gates of Fate itself. Woman is incal-
culably more wicked than man, she is also cleverer.
Goodness in a woman is already a sign of degenera-
tion. All cases of " beautiful souls " in women may
be traced to a faulty physiological condition—but
I go no further, lest I should become medicynical.
The struggle for equal rights is even a symptom
of disease; every doctor knows this. The more
womanly a woman is, the more she fights tooth and
nail against rights in general: the natural order of
things, the eternal war between the sexes, assigns
to her by far the foremost rank. Have people had
ears to hear my definition of love? It is the only
definition worthy of a philosopher. Love, in its
means, is war; in its foundation, it is the mortal
hatred of the sexes. Have you heard my reply to
the question how a woman can be cured, " saved":
e ::


## p. 66 (#104) #############################################

66 ECCE HOMO
in fact ? —Give her a child! A woman needs
children, man is always only a means, thus spake
Zarathustra. "The emancipation of women,"—this
is the instinctive hatred of physiologically botched
—that is to say, barren—women for those of their
sisters who are well constituted: the fight against
"man " is always only a means, a pretext, a piece
of strategy. By trying to rise to " Woman per se,"
to "Higher Woman," to the "Ideal Woman," all
they wish to do is to lower the general level of
women's rank: and there are no more certain means
to this end than university education, trousers, and
the rights of voting cattle. Truth to tell, the emanci-
pated are the anarchists in the " eternally feminine"
world, the physiological mishaps, the most deep-
rooted instinct of whom is revenge. A whole species
of the most malicious "idealism "—which, by the
bye, also manifests itself in men, in Henrik Ibsen
for instance, that typical old maid—whose object
is to poison the clean conscience, the natural spirit,
of sexual love. . . . And in order to leave no doubt
in your minds in regard to my opinion, which, on
this matter, is as honest as it is severe, I will reveal
to you one more clause out of my moral code against
vice—with the word " vice" I combat every kind of
opposition to Nature, or, if you prefer fine words,
idealism. The clause reads: "Preaching of chastity
is a public incitement to unnatural practices. All
depreciation of the sexual life, all the sullying of
it by means of the concept 'impure,' is the essen-
tial crimeagainst Life—is the essential crime against
the Holy Spirit of Life. "


## p. 67 (#105) #############################################

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 67
In order to give you some idea of myself as a
psychologist, let me take this curious piece of
psychological analysis out of the book Beyond Good
and Evil, in which it appears. I forbid, by the bye,
any guessing as to whom I am describing in this
passage. "The genius of the heart, as that great
anchorite possesses it, the divine tempter and born
Pied Piper of consciences, whose voice knows how
to sink into the inmost depths of every soul, who
neither utters a word nor casts a glance, in which
some seductive motive or trick does not lie: a part
of whose masterliness is that he understands the art
of seeming—not what he is, but that which will
place a fresh constraint upon his followers to press
ever more closely upon him, to follow him ever more
enthusiastically and whole-heartedly. . . . The
genius of the heart, which makes all loud and self-
conceited things hold their tongues and lend their
ears, which polishes all rough souls and makes them
taste a new longing—to lie placid as a mirror,
that the deep heavens may be reflected in them. . . .
The genius of the heart which teaches the clumsy
and too hasty hand to hesitate and grasp more
tenderly; which scents the hidden and forgotten
treasure, the pearl of goodness and sweet spiritual-
ity, beneath thick black ice, and is a divining rod
for every grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned
in heaps of mud and sand. . . . The genius of the
heart, from contact with which every man goes away
richer, not ' blessed' and overcome, not as though
favoured and crushed by the good things of others;


## p. 68 (#106) #############################################

68 ECCE HOMO
but richer in himself, fresher to himself than before,
opened up, breathed upon and sounded by a thawing
wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more
fragile, more bruised; but full of hopes which as
yet lack names, full of a new will and striving, full
of a new unwillingness and counter-striving. " . . .
"The Birth of Tragedy"
In order to be fair to the Birth of Tragedy (1872)
it is necessary to forget a few things. It created
a sensation and even fascinated by means of its
mistakes—by means of its application to Wagner-
ism, as if the latter were the sign of an ascending
tendency. On that account alone, this treatise was
an event in Wagner's life: thenceforward great hopes
surrounded the name of Wagner. Even to this
day, people remind me, sometimes in the middle of
Parsifal, that it rests on my conscience if the opin-
ion, that this movement is of great value to culture,
at length became prevalent. I have often seen the
book quoted as " The Second Birth of Tragedy
from the Spirit of Music ": people had ears only
for new formulae for Wagner's art, his object and
his mission—and in this way the real hidden value
of the book was overlooked. "Hellenism and
Pessimism "—this would have been a less equivocal
title, seeing that the book contains the first attempt
at showing how the Greeks succeeded in disposing
of pessimism—in what manner they overcame it.


## p. 69 (#107) #############################################

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 69
. . . Tragedy itself is the proof of the fact that the
Greekswerenotpessimists: Schopenhauerblundered
here as he blundered in everything else. —Regarded
impartially, The Birth of Tragedy is a book quite
strange to its age: no one would dream that it was
begun in the thunder of the battle of Worth. I
thought out these problems on cold September
nights beneath the walls of Metz, in the midst of my
duties as nurse to the wounded; it would be easier to
think that it was written fifty years earlier. Its atti-
tude towards politics is one of indifference,—" un-
German," * as people would say to-day,—it smells
offensively of Hegel; only in one or two formulae is
it infected with the bitter odour of corpses which is
peculiar to Schopenhauer. An idea—the antagon-
ism of the two concepts Dionysian and Apollonian
—is translated into metaphysics; history itself is
depicted as the development of this idea; in tragedy
this antithesis has become unity; from this stand-
point things which theretofore had never been face
to face are suddenly confronted, and understood
and illuminated by each other. . . . Opera and re-
volution, for instance. . . . The two decisive inno-
vations in the book are, first, the comprehension of
the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks—it
provides the first psychological analysis of this
phenomenon, and sees in it the single root of all
Greek art; and, secondly, the comprehension of-
* Those Germans who, like Nietzsche or Goethe, recog-
nised that politics constituted a danger to culture, and who
appreciated the literature of maturer cultures, such as that
of France, are called un-deutsch (un-German) by Imperial-
istic Germans. —Tr.


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70 ECCE HOMO
Socraticism—Socrates being presented for the first
time as the instrument of Greek dissolution, as
a typical decadent. "Reason" versus Instinct.
"Reason" at any cost, as a dangerous, life-under-
mining force. The whole book is profoundly and
politely silent concerning Christianity: the latter
is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it denies all
aesthetic values, which are the only values that The
Birth of Tragedy recognises. Christianity is most
profoundly nihilistic, whereas in the Dionysian
symbol, the most extreme limits of a yea-saying
attitude to life are attained. In one part of the
book the Christian priesthood is referred to as a
"perfidious order of goblins," as " subterraneans. "
This start of mine was remarkable beyond meas-
ure. As a confirmation of my inmost personal ex-
perience I had discovered the only example of this
fact that history possesses,—with this I was the
first to understand the amazing Dionysian pheno-
menon. At the same time, by recognising Socrates
as a decadent, I proved most conclusively that the
certainty of my psychological grasp of things ran
very little risk at the hands of any sort of moral
idiosyncrasy: to regard morality itself as a symptom
of degeneration is an innovation, a unique event of
the first order in the history of knowledge. How
high I had soared above the pitifully foolish gabble
about Optimism and Pessimism with my two new
doctrines! I was the first to see the actual contrast:
the degenerate instinct which turns upon life with
a subterranean lust of vengeance (Christianity,


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WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 71
Schopenhauer's philosophy, and in some respects
too even Plato's philosophy—in short, the whole of
idealism in its typical forms)f as opposed to a
formula of the highest yea-saying to life, born of
an abundance and a superabundance of life—a
yea-saying free from all reserve, applying even to
suffering, and guilt, and all that is questionable and
strange in existence. . . . This last, most joyous,
most exuberant and exultant yea to life, is not only
the highest,but also the profoundest conception,and
one which is most strictly confirmed and supported
by truth and science. Nothing that exists must be
suppressed, nothing can be dispensed with. Those
aspects of life which Christians and other Nihilists
reject, belong to an incalculably higher order in the
hierarchy of values, than that which the instinct of
degeneration calls good, and may call good. In
order to understand this, a certain courage is neces-
sary, and, as a prerequisite of this, a certain super-
fluity of strength: for a man can approach only as
near to truth as he has the courage to advance—that
is to say, everything depends strictly upon the mea-
sure of his strength. Knowledge, and the affirmation
of reality, are just as necessary to the strong man
as cowardice, the flight from reality—in fact, the
"ideal"—are necessarytotheweak inspired by weak-
ness. . . . These people are not at liberty to "know,"
—decadents stand in need of lies,—it is one of their
self-preservative measures. He who not only under-
stands the word " Dionysian," but understands him-
self in that term, does not require any refutation of
Plato, or of Christianity, or of Schopenhauer—for
his nose scents decomposition.


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72 ECCE HOMO
The extent to which I had by means of these
doctrines discovered the idea of" tragedy," the ulti-
mate explanation of what the psychology of tragedy
is, I discussed finally in The Twilight of the Idols
(Aph. 5, part 10). . . . "The saying of yea to life,
and even to its weirdest and most difficult pro-
blems: the will to life rejoicing at its own infinite
vitality in the sacrifice of its highest types—that is
what I called Dionysian, that is what I meant as
the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.
Not to cast out terror and pity, or to purge one's self
of dangerous passion by discharging it with vehem-
ence,—this was Aristotle's* misunderstanding of
it,—but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be
the eternal lust of Becoming itself—that lust which
also involves the joy of destruction. " . . . In this
sense I have the right to regard myself as the first
tragic philosopher—that is to say, the most extreme
antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic philosopher.
Before my time no suchthingexisted as this transla-
tion of the Dionysian phenomenon into philosophic
emotion: tragic wisdom was lacking; in vain have
I sought for signs of it even among the great Greeks
in philosophy—those belonging to the two centuries
before Socrates. I still remained a little doubtful
about Heraclitus, in whose presence, alone, I felt
warmer and more at ease than anywhere else. The
yea-saying to the impermanence and annihilation
of things, which is the decisive feature of a Diony-
* Aristotle's Poetics, c. vi. —Tr.


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WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS 73
sian philosophy; the yea-saying to contradiction
and war, the postulation of Becoming, together with
the radical rejection even of the concept Being—
in all these things, at all events, I must recognise
him who has come nearest to me in thought hither
to. The doctrine of the " Eternal Recurrence "—
that is to say, of the absolute and eternal repetition
of all things in periodical cycles—this doctrine of
Zarathustra's might, it is true, have been taught be-
fore. In any case, the Stoics, who derived nearly
all their fundamental ideas from Heraclitus, show
traces of it.
A tremendous hope finds expression in this work.
After all, I have absolutely no reason to renounce
the hope for a Dionysian future of music. Let us
look a century ahead, and let us suppose that my
attempt to destroy two millenniums of hostility to
Nature and of the violation of humanity be crowned
with success That new party of life-advocates,
which will undertake the greatest of all tasks, the
elevation and perfection of mankind, as well as the
relentless destruction of all degenerate and para-
sitical elements, will make that superabundance of
life on earth once more possible, out of which the
Dionysian state will perforce arise again. I promise
the advent of a tragic age: the highest art in the
saying of yea to life, " tragedy," will be born again
when mankind has the knowledge of the hardest,
but most necessary of wars, behind it, without, how-
ever, suffering from that knowledge. . . . A psycho-
logist might add that what I heard in Wagnerian


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74 ECCE HOMO
music in my youth and early manhood had nothing
whatsoever to do with Wagner; that when I de-
scribed Dionysian music, I described merely what
/ personally had heard—that I was compelled in-
stinctively to translate and transfigure everything
into the new spirit which filled my breast. A proof
of this, and as strong a proof as you could have, is
my essay, Wagner in Bayreuth: in all its decisive
psychological passages I am the only person con-
cerned—without any hesitation you may read my
name or the word "Zarathustra " wherever the text
contains the name of Wagner. The whole pano-
rama of the dithyrambic artist is the representation
of the already existing author of Zarathustra, and
it is drawn with an abysmal depth which does not
even once come into contact with the real Wagner.
Wagner himself had a notion of the truth; he did
not recognise himself in the essay. —In this way,
"the idea of Bayreuth" was changed into something
which to those who are acquainted with my Zara-
thustra will be no riddle—that is to say, into the
\ Great Noon when the highest of the elect will conse-
crate themselves for the greatest of all duties—who
knows? the vision of a feast which I may live to
see. . . .