No More Learning

Last Words. —It will be recollected that the
Emperor Augustus, that terrible man, who had
himself as much in his own power, and who could
be silent as well as any wise Socrates, became
indiscreet about himself in his last words; for


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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57-
To the Realists. —Ye sober beings, who feel your-
selves armed against passion and fantasy, and
would gladly make a pride and an ornament out
of your emptiness, ye call yourselves realists and
give to understand that the world is actually
constituted as it appears to you; before you alone
reality stands unveiled, and ye yourselves would
perhaps be the best part of it,—oh, ye dear images
of Sais! But are not ye also in your unveiled
condition still extremely passionate and dusky
beings compared with the fish, and still all too like
an enamoured artist ? *—and what is "reality" to
an enamoured artist! Ye still carry about with
you the valuations of things which had their origin
in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries!
There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunken-
ness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of
"reality," for example—oh, that is an old, primitive
"love"! In every feeling, in every sense-impres-
sion, there is a portion of this old love: and
similarly also some kind of fantasy, prejudice,
irrationality, ignorance, fear, and whatever else
has become mingled and woven into it. There
is that mountain! There is that cloud! What
* Schiller's poem, "The Veiled Image of Sais," is again
referred to here. —Tr.
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96 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
is "real" in them? Remove the phantasm and
the whole human element therefrom, ye sober
ones! Yes, if ye could do that! If ye could
forget your origin, your past, your preparatory
schooling,—your whole history as man and beast!
There is no " reality" for us—nor for you either, ye
sober ones,—we are far from being so alien to one
another as ye suppose, and perhaps our good-will
to get beyond drunkenness is just as respectable
as your belief that ye are altogether incapable of
drunkenness.
58.
Only as Creators !
—It has caused me the greatest
trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble,
to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon
what things are called, than on what they are.
The reputation, the name and appearance, the
importance, the usual measure and weight of
things — each being in origin most frequently
an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things
like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and
even to their exterior—have gradually, by the
belief therein and its continuous growth from
generation to generation, grown as it were on-
and-into things and become their very body; the
appearance at the very beginning becomes almost
always the essence in the end, and operates
as the essence! What a fool he would be who
would think it enough to refer here to this
origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order
to annihilate that which virtually passes for the
world—namely, so-called "reality"! It is only as


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

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

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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 99
ness, there appears before the portal of this hellish
labyrinth, only a few fathoms distant,—a great
sailing-ship gliding silently along like a ghost.
Oh, this ghostly beauty! With what enchantment
it seizes me! What? Has all the repose and
silence in the world embarked here? Does my
happiness itself sit in this quiet place, my happier
ego, my second immortalised self? Still not
dead, yet also no longer living? As a ghost-like,
calm, gazing, gliding, sweeping, neutral being?
Similar to the ship, which, with its white sails, like
an immense butterfly, passes over the dark sea!
Yes! Passing over existence! That is it! That
would be it! It seems that the noise here has
made me a visionary? All great noise causes one
to place happiness in the calm and the distance.
When a man is in the midst of his hubbub, in the
midst of the breakers of his plots and plans,
he there sees perhaps calm, enchanting beings
glide past him, for whose happiness and retirement
he longs—they are women. He almost thinks that
there with the women dwells his better self; that
in these calm places even the loudest breakers
become still as death, and life itself a dream of life.
But still! But still! My noble enthusiast, there
is also in the most beautiful sailing-ship so much
noise and bustling, and alas, so much petty, piti-
able bustling! The enchantment and the most
powerful effect of women is, to use the language
of philosophers, an effect at a distance, an actio in
distans; there belongs thereto, however, primarily
and above all,—distance!


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IOO • THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
61.
In Honour of Friendship. —That the sentiment
of friendship was regarded by antiquity as the
highest sentiment, higher even than the most
vaunted pride of the self-sufficient and wise, yea as
it were its sole and still holier brotherhood, is
very well expressed by the story of the Macedonian
king who made the present of a talent to a cynical
Athenian philosopher from whom he received it
back again. "What? " said the king, "has he then
no friend? " He therewith meant to say, " I honour
this pride of the wise and independent man, but
I should have honoured his humanity still higher
if the friend in him had gained the victory over his
pride. The philosopher has lowered himself in my
estimation, for he showed that he did not know
one of the two highest sentiments—and in fact the
higher of them! "
62.
Love. —Love pardons even the passion of the
beloved.
63.
Woman in Music. —How does it happen that
warm and rainy winds bring the musical mood
and the inventive delight in melody with them?
Are they not the same winds that fill the churches
and give women amorous thoughts?
64.
Sceptics. —I fear women who have become old
are more sceptical in the secret recesses of their


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II IOI
hearts than any of the men are; they believe in
the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and
all virtue and profundity is to them only the dis-
guising of this " truth," the very desirable disguising
of a pudendum,—an affair, therefore, of decency
and of modesty, and nothing more!
65.
Devotedness. —There are noble women with a
certain poverty of spirit, who, in order to express
their profoundest devotedness, have no other alter-
native but to offer their virtue and modesty: it is
the highest thing they have. And this present
is often accepted without putting the recipient
under such deep obligation as the giver supposed,
—a very melancholy story!
66.
The Strength of the Weak. —Women are all skil-
ful in exaggerating their weaknesses, indeed they are
inventive in weaknesses, so as to seem quite fragile
ornaments to which even a grain of dust does
harm; their existence is meant to bring home to
man's mind his coarseness, and to appeal to his
conscience. They thus defend themselves against
the strong and all " rights of might. "
67.
Self-dissembling. —She loves him now and has
since been looking forth with as quiet confidence
as a cow; but alas! It was precisely his delight
that she seemed so fitful and absolutely incompre-
hensible! He had rather too much steady weather


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102 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
in himself already! Would she not do well to
feign her old character? to feign indifference?
Does not—love itself advise her to do so? Vivat
comcedia!
68.
Will and Willingness. —Some one brought a
youth to a wise man and said, "See, this is one
who is being corrupted by women! " The wise
man shook his head and smiled. "It is men," he
called out, "who corrupt women: and everything
that women lack should be atoned for and improved
in men,—for man creates for himself the ideal of
woman, and woman moulds herself according to
this ideal. "—" You are too tender-hearted towards
women," said one of the bystanders, "you do not
know them! " The wise man answered: "Man's
attribute is will, woman's attribute is willingness,—
such is the law of the sexes, verily! a hard law for
woman! All human beings are innocent of their
existence, women, however, are doubly innocent;
who could have enough of salve and gentleness for
them ! "—"What about salve! What about gentle-
ness ! " called out another person in the crowd," we
must educate women better! "—" We must educate
men better," said the wise man, and made a sign
to the youth to follow him. —The youth, however,
did not follow him.
69.
Capacity for Revenge. —That a person cannot
and consequently will not defend himself, does
not yet cast disgrace upon him in our eyes; but


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 103
we despise the person who has neither the ability
nor the good-will for revenge — whether it be
a man or a woman. Would a woman be able
to captivate us (or, as people say, to "fetter"
us) whom we did not credit with knowing how
to employ the dagger (any kind of dagger)
skilfully against us under certain circumstances?
Or against herself; which in a certain case might
be the severest revenge (the Chinese revenge).
70.
The Mistresses of the Masters. —A powerful con-
tralto voice, as we occasionally hear it in the
theatre, raises suddenly for us the curtain on
possibilities in which we usually do not believe;
all at once we are convinced that somewhere in the
world there may be women with high, heroic, royal
souls, capable and prepared for magnificent remon-
strances, resolutions, and self-sacrifices, capable and
prepared for domination over men, because in
them the best in man, superior to sex, has become
a corporeal ideal. To be sure, it is not the inten-
tion of the theatre that such voices should give
such a conception of women; they are usually
intended to represent the ideal male lover,
for example, a Romeo; but, to judge by my
experience, the theatre regularly miscalculates here,
and the musician also, who expects such effects
from such a voice. People do not believe in these
lovers; these voices still contain a tinge of the
motherly and housewifely character, and most of
all when love is in their tone.


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104 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
71.
On Female Chastity. —There is something quite
astonishing and extraordinary in the education of
women of the higher class ; indeed, there is perhaps
nothing more paradoxical. All the world is agreed
to educate them with as much ignorance as possible
in eroticis, and to inspire their soul with a profound
shame of such things, and the extremest impatience
and horror at the suggestion of them. It is really
here only that all the "honour" of woman is at
stake; what would one not forgive them in other
respects! But here they are intended to remain
ignorant to the very backbone:—they are intended
to have neither eyes, ears, words, nor thoughts for
this, their " wickedness "; indeed knowledge here is
already evil. And then! To be hurled as with
an awful thunderbolt into reality and knowledge
with marriage—and indeed by him whom they
most love and esteem: to have to encounter love
and shame in contradiction, yea, to have to feel
rapture, abandonment, duty, sympathy, and fright
at the unexpected proximity of God and animal,
and whatever else besides! all at once! —There,
in fact, a psychic entanglement has been effected
which is quite unequalled! Even the sympathetic
curiosity of the wisest discerner of men does not
suffice to divine how this or that woman gets along
with the solution of this enigma and the enigma
of this solution; what dreadful, far-reaching sus-
picions must awaken thereby in the poor unhinged
soul; and forsooth, how the ultimate philosophy
and scepticism of the woman casts anchor at this



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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 105
point! —Afterwards the same profound silence as be-
fore: and often even a silence to herself, a shutting
of her eyes to herself. —Young wives on that account
make great efforts to appear superficial and thought-
less; the most ingenious of them simulate a kind
of impudence. —Wives easily feel their husbands as
a question-mark to their honour, and their children
as an apology or atonement,—they require children,
and wish for them in quite another spirit than a
husband wishes for them. —In short, one cannot
be gentle enough towards women!
72.
Mothers. —Animals think differently from men
with respect to females; with them the female is
regarded as the productive being. There is no
paternal love among them, but there is such a
thing as love of the children of a beloved, and
habituation to them. In the young, the females
find gratification for their lust of dominion; the
young are a property, an occupation, something
quite comprehensible to them, with which they
can chatter: all this conjointly is maternal love,—
it is to be compared to the love of the artist for
his work. Pregnancy has made the females gentler,
more expectant, more timid, more submissively
inclined; and similarly intellectual pregnancy en-
genders the character of the contemplative, who
are allied to women in character:—they are the
masculine mothers. —Among animals the masculine
sex is regarded as the beautiful sex.


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106 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
73-
Saintly Cruelty. —A man holding a newly born
child in his hands came to a saint. "What should
I do with the child," he asked, "it is wretched,
deformed, and has not even enough of life to
die. " "Kill it," cried the saint with a dreadful
voice, "kill it, and then hold it in thy arms for
three days and three nights to brand it on thy
memory:—thus wilt thou never again beget a child
when it is not the time for thee to beget. "—When
the man had heard this he went away disappointed;
and many found fault with the saint because he
had advised cruelty, for he had advised to kill the
child. "But is it not more cruel to let it live? "
asked the saint.
74-
The Unsuccessful. —Those poor women always fail
of success who become agitated and uncertain, and
talk too much in presence of him whom they love;
for men are most successfully seduced by a
certain subtle and phlegmatic tenderness.
75-
The Third Sex. —" A small man is a paradox,
but still a man,—but the small woman seems to
me to be of another sex in comparison with well-
grown ones"—said an old dancing-master. A
small woman is never beautiful—said old Aristotle.
76.
The greatest Danger. —Had there not at all times
been a larger number of men who regarded the


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 107
cultivation of their mind—their "rationality"—
as their pride, their obligation, their virtue, and
were injured or shamed by all play of fancy and
extravagance of thinking—as lovers of "sound
common sense ":—mankind would long ago have
perished! Incipient insanity has hovered, and
hovers continually over mankind as its greatest
danger: that is precisely the breaking out of in-
clination in feeling, seeing, and hearing; the enjoy-
ment of the unruliness of the mind; the delight in
human unreason. It is not truth and certainty
that is the antithesis of the world of the insane,
but the universality and all-obligatoriness of a
belief, in 1 short, non-voluntariness in forming
opinions. And the greatest labour of human be-
ings hitherto has been to agree with one another
regarding a great many things, and to impose
upon themselves a law of agreement—indifferent
whether these things are true or false. This is
the discipline of the mind which has preserved
mankind;—but the counter-impulses are still so
powerful that one can really speak of the future of
mankind with little confidence. The ideas of
things still continually shift and move, and will
perhaps alter more than ever in the future; it is
continually the most select spirits themselves who
strive against universal obligatoriness—the investi-
gators of truth above all! The accepted belief, as
the belief of all the world, continually engenders a
disgust and a new longing in the more ingenious
minds; and already the slow tempo which it de-
mands for all intellectual processes (the imitation
of the tortoise, which is here recognised as the rule)


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108 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
makes the artists and poets runaways:—it is in
these impatient spirits that a downright delight in
delirium breaks out, because delirium has such a
joyful tempo! Virtuous intellects, therefore, are
needed—ah I I want to use the least ambiguous
word,—virtuous stupidity is needed, imperturbable
conductors of the slow spirits are needed, in order
that the faithful of the great collective belief may
remain with one another and dance their dance
further: it is a necessity of the first importance
that here enjoins and demands. We others are the
exceptions and the danger,—we eternally need pro-
tection ! —Well, there can actually be something
said in favour of the exceptions provided that they
never want to become the rule.
77-
The Animal with good Conscience. —It is not
unknown to me that there is vulgarity in every-
thing that pleases Southern Europe—whether it
be Italian opera (for example, Rossini's and
Bellini's), or the Spanish adventure-romance (most
readily accessible to us in the French garb of Gil
Blas)—but it does not offend me, any more than
the vulgarity which one encounters in a walk
through Pompeii, or even in the reading of every
ancient book: what is the reason of this? Is
it because shame is lacking here, and because the
vulgar always comes forward just as sure and
certain of itself as anything noble, lovely, and
passionate in the same kind of music or romance?
"The animal has its rights like man, so let it
run about freely; and you, my dear fellow-man,


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 109
are still this animal, in spite of all! " — that
seems to me the moral of the case, and the
peculiarity of southern humanity. Bad taste has
its rights like good taste, and even a prerogative
over the latter when it is the great requisite, the
sure satisfaction, and as it were a universal language,
an immediately intelligible mask and attitude;
the excellent, select taste on the other hand has
always something of a seeking, tentative character,
not fully certain that it understands,—it is never,
and has never been popular! The masque is and
remains popular! So let all this masquerade
run along in the melodies and cadences, in the
leaps and merriment of the rhythm of these operas!
Quite the ancient life! What does one understand
of it, if one does not understand the delight in the
masque, the good conscience of all masquerade!
Here is the bath and the refreshment of the ancient
spirit: — and perhaps this bath was still more
necessary for the rare and sublime natures of the
ancient world than for the vulgar. —On the other
hand, a vulgar turn in northern works, for example
in German music, offends me unutterably. There
is shame in it, the artist has lowered himself in
his own sight, and could not even avoid blushing:
we are ashamed with him, and are so hurt because
we surmise that he believed he had to lower him-
self on our account.
78.
What we should be Grateful for. —It is only the
artists, and especially the theatrical artists who
have furnished men with eyes and ears to hear and


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1IO THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
see with some pleasure what everyone is in him-
self, what he experiences and aims at: it is only
they who have taught us how to estimate the hero
that is concealed in each of these common-place
men, and the art of looking at ourselves from a
distance as heroes, and as it were simplified and
transfigured,—the art of " putting ourselves on the
stage" before ourselves. It is thus only that we
get beyond some of the paltry details in ourselves!
Without that art we should be nothing but fore-
ground, and would live absolutely under the spell
of the perspective which makes the closest and the
commonest seem immensely large and like reality
in itself. —Perhaps there is merit of a similar kind
in the religion which commanded us to look at the
sinfulness of every individual man with a magnify-
ing-glass, and to make a great, immortal criminal
out of the sinner; in that it put eternal per-
spectives around man, it taught him to see himself
from a distance, and as something past, something
entire.
79-
The Charm of Imperfection. —I see here a poet,
who, like so many men, exercises a higher charm
by his imperfections than by all that is rounded off
and takes perfect shape under his hands,—indeed,
he derives his advantage and reputation far more
from his actual limitations than from his abun-
dant powers. His work never expresses altogether
what he would really like to express, what he
would like to have seen: he appears to have had
the foretaste of a vision and never the vision


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II III
itself:—but an extraordinary longing for this vision
has remained in his soul; and from this he
derives his equally extraordinary eloquence of
longing and craving. With this he raises those
who listen to him above his work and above all
"works," and gives them wings to rise higher than
hearers have ever risen before, thus making them
poets and seers themselves; they then show an ad-
miration for the originator of their happiness, as if
he had led them immediately to the vision of his
holiest and ultimate verities, as if he had reached
his goal, and had actually seen and communicated
his vision. It is to the advantage of his reputa-
tion that he has not really arrived at his goal.
80.
Art and Nature. —The Greeks (or at least the
Athenians) liked to hear good talking: indeed
they had an eager inclination for it, which dis-
tinguished them more than anything else from
non-Greeks. And so they required good talking
even from passion on the stage, and submitted to
the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with delight:
—in nature, forsooth, passion is so sparing of words!
so dumb and confused! Or if it finds words, so
embarrassed and irrational and a shame to itself!
We have now, all of us, thanks to the Greeks,
accustomed ourselves to this unnaturalness on the
stage, as we endure that other unnaturalness, the
singing passion, and willingly endure it, thanks to
the Italians. —It has become a necessity to us, which
we cannot satisfy out of the resources of actuality,
to hear men talk well and in full detail in the most


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IIO THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
see with some pleasure what everyone is in him-
self, what he experiences and aims at: it is only
they who have taught us how to estimate the hero
that is concealed in each of these common-place
men, and the art of looking at ourselves from a
distance as heroes, and as it were simplified and
transfigured,—the art of " putting ourselves on the
stage" before ourselves. It is thus only that we
get beyond some of the paltry details in ourselves!
Without that art we should be nothing but fore-
ground, and would live absolutely under the spell
of the perspective which makes the closest and the
commonest seem immensely large and like reality
in itself. —Perhaps there is merit of a similar kind
in the religion which commanded us to look at the
sinfulness of every individual man with a magnify-
ing-glass, and to make a great, immortal criminal
out of the sinner; in that it put eternal per-
spectives around man, it taught him to see himself
from a distance, and as something past, something
entire.
79-
The Charm of Imperfection. —I see here a poet,
who, like so many men, exercises a higher charm
by his imperfections than by all that is rounded off
and takes perfect shape under his hands,—indeed,
he derives his advantage and reputation far more
from his actual limitations than from his abun-
dant powers.