No More Learning

"--On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And who
the devil also compels you to speak popularly!

38. As happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times with
the French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous when
judged close at hand, into which, however, the noble and visionary
spectators of all Europe have interpreted from a distance their own
indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately, UNTIL THE TEXT HAS
DISAPPEARED UNDER THE INTERPRETATION), so a noble posterity might once
more misunderstand the whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby make
ITS aspect endurable. --Or rather, has not this already happened? Have
not we ourselves been--that "noble posterity"? And, in so far as we now
comprehend this, is it not--thereby already past?

39. Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely because
it makes people happy or virtuous--excepting, perhaps, the amiable
"Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good, true, and beautiful,
and let all kinds of motley, coarse, and good-natured desirabilities
swim about promiscuously in their pond. Happiness and virtue are no
arguments. It is willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of
thoughtful minds, that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as
little counter-arguments. A thing could be TRUE, although it were in
the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental
constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full
knowledge of it--so that the strength of a mind might be measured by
the amount of "truth" it could endure--or to speak more plainly, by the
extent to which it REQUIRED truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped,
and falsified. But there is no doubt that for the discovery of certain
PORTIONS of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more favourably
situated and have a greater likelihood of success; not to speak of the
wicked who are happy--a species about whom moralists are silent. Perhaps
severity and craft are more favourable conditions for the development of
strong, independent spirits and philosophers than the gentle, refined,
yielding good-nature, and habit of taking things easily, which are
prized, and rightly prized in a learned man. Presupposing always,
to begin with, that the term "philosopher" be not confined to the
philosopher who writes books, or even introduces HIS philosophy into
books! --Stendhal furnishes a last feature of the portrait of the
free-spirited philosopher, which for the sake of German taste I will
not omit to underline--for it is OPPOSED to German taste. "Pour etre
bon philosophe," says this last great psychologist, "il faut etre sec,
clair, sans illusion. Un banquier, qui a fait fortune, a une partie du
caractere requis pour faire des decouvertes en philosophie, c'est-a-dire
pour voir clair dans ce qui est. "

40. Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things
have a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the CONTRARY only
be the right disguise for the shame of a God to go about in? A question
worth asking! --it would be strange if some mystic has not already
ventured on the same kind of thing. There are proceedings of such a
delicate nature that it is well to overwhelm them with coarseness
and make them unrecognizable; there are actions of love and of an
extravagant magnanimity after which nothing can be wiser than to take
a stick and thrash the witness soundly: one thereby obscures his
recollection. Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory, in
order at least to have vengeance on this sole party in the secret:
shame is inventive. They are not the worst things of which one is
most ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a mask--there is so much
goodness in craft. I could imagine that a man with something costly and
fragile to conceal, would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like
an old, green, heavily-hooped wine-cask: the refinement of his shame
requiring it to be so. A man who has depths in his shame meets his
destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach,
and with regard to the existence of which his nearest and most intimate
friends may be ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from their
eyes, and equally so his regained security. Such a hidden nature,
which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment, and is
inexhaustible in evasion of communication, DESIRES and insists that a
mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his
friends; and supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will some day be
opened to the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of him there--and
that it is well to be so. Every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more,
around every profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to
the constantly false, that is to say, SUPERFICIAL interpretation
of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he
manifests.

41. One must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is destined
for independence and command, and do so at the right time. One must not
avoid one's tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous
game one can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves
and before no other judge. Not to cleave to any person, be it even the
dearest--every person is a prison and also a recess. Not to cleave to
a fatherland, be it even the most suffering and necessitous--it is even
less difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not
to cleave to a sympathy, be it even for higher men, into whose peculiar
torture and helplessness chance has given us an insight. Not to cleave
to a science, though it tempt one with the most valuable discoveries,
apparently specially reserved for us. Not to cleave to one's own
liberation, to the voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which
always flies further aloft in order always to see more under it--the
danger of the flier. Not to cleave to our own virtues, nor become as
a whole a victim to any of our specialties, to our "hospitality" for
instance, which is the danger of dangers for highly developed
and wealthy souls, who deal prodigally, almost indifferently with
themselves, and push the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes
a vice. One must know how TO CONSERVE ONESELF--the best test of
independence.

42. A new order of philosophers is appearing; I shall venture to baptize
them by a name not without danger. As far as I understand them, as far
as they allow themselves to be understood--for it is their nature to
WISH to remain something of a puzzle--these philosophers of the
future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as
"tempters. " This name itself is after all only an attempt, or, if it be
preferred, a temptation.

43. Will they be new friends of "truth," these coming philosophers? Very
probably, for all philosophers hitherto have loved their truths. But
assuredly they will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary to their
pride, and also contrary to their taste, that their truth should still
be truth for every one--that which has hitherto been the secret wish
and ultimate purpose of all dogmatic efforts. "My opinion is MY opinion:
another person has not easily a right to it"--such a philosopher of the
future will say, perhaps. One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to
agree with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour
takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a "common good"! The
expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of
small value. In the end things must be as they are and have always
been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the
profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up
shortly, everything rare for the rare.


44. Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, VERY
free spirits, these philosophers of the future--as certainly also they
will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater,
and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and
mistaken? But while I say this, I feel under OBLIGATION almost as much
to them as to ourselves (we free spirits who are their heralds and
forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves altogether a stupid old
prejudice and misunderstanding, which, like a fog, has too long made the
conception of "free spirit" obscure. In every country of Europe, and the
same in America, there is at present something which makes an abuse of
this name a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits,
who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts
prompt--not to mention that in respect to the NEW philosophers who are
appearing, they must still more be closed windows and bolted doors.
Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the LEVELLERS, these wrongly
named "free spirits"--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of
the democratic taste and its "modern ideas" all of them men without
solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom
neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only, they
are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their
innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost ALL human misery and
failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a notion
which happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain
with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the
herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life
for every one, their two most frequently chanted songs and doctrines
are called "Equality of Rights" and "Sympathy with All Sufferers"--and
suffering itself is looked upon by them as something which must be
DONE AWAY WITH. We opposite ones, however, who have opened our eye and
conscience to the question how and where the plant "man" has hitherto
grown most vigorously, believe that this has always taken place under
the opposite conditions, that for this end the dangerousness of his
situation had to be increased enormously, his inventive faculty and
dissembling power (his "spirit") had to develop into subtlety and daring
under long oppression and compulsion, and his Will to Life had to be
increased to the unconditioned Will to Power--we believe that severity,
violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy,
stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind,--that everything
wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves
as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite--we do
not even say enough when we only say THIS MUCH, and in any case we
find ourselves here, both with our speech and our silence, at the OTHER
extreme of all modern ideology and gregarious desirability, as their
antipodes perhaps? What wonder that we "free spirits" are not exactly
the most communicative spirits? that we do not wish to betray in every
respect WHAT a spirit can free itself from, and WHERE perhaps it will
then be driven? And as to the import of the dangerous formula, "Beyond
Good and Evil," with which we at least avoid confusion, we ARE something
else than "libres-penseurs," "liben pensatori" "free-thinkers,"
and whatever these honest advocates of "modern ideas" like to call
themselves. Having been at home, or at least guests, in many realms of
the spirit, having escaped again and again from the gloomy, agreeable
nooks in which preferences and prejudices, youth, origin, the accident
of men and books, or even the weariness of travel seemed to confine us,
full of malice against the seductions of dependency which he concealed
in honours, money, positions, or exaltation of the senses, grateful even
for distress and the vicissitudes of illness, because they always free
us from some rule, and its "prejudice," grateful to the God, devil,
sheep, and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the
point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with
teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for any business
that requires sagacity and acute senses, ready for every adventure,
owing to an excess of "free will", with anterior and posterior souls,
into the ultimate intentions of which it is difficult to pry, with
foregrounds and backgrounds to the end of which no foot may run, hidden
ones under the mantles of light, appropriators, although we resemble
heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors from morning till
night, misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers, economical
in learning and forgetting, inventive in scheming, sometimes proud of
tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of
work even in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows--and it is
necessary nowadays, that is to say, inasmuch as we are the born, sworn,
jealous friends of SOLITUDE, of our own profoundest midnight and midday
solitude--such kind of men are we, we free spirits! And perhaps ye are
also something of the same kind, ye coming ones? ye NEW philosophers?



CHAPTER III. THE RELIGIOUS MOOD


45. The human soul and its limits, the range of man's inner experiences
hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distances of these
experiences, the entire history of the soul UP TO THE PRESENT TIME,
and its still unexhausted possibilities: this is the preordained
hunting-domain for a born psychologist and lover of a "big hunt". But
how often must he say despairingly to himself: "A single individual!
alas, only a single individual! and this great forest, this virgin
forest! " So he would like to have some hundreds of hunting assistants,
and fine trained hounds, that he could send into the history of the
human soul, to drive HIS game together. In vain: again and again he
experiences, profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find
assistants and dogs for all the things that directly excite his
curiosity. The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous
hunting-domains, where courage, sagacity, and subtlety in every sense
are required, is that they are no longer serviceable just when the "BIG
hunt," and also the great danger commences,--it is precisely then that
they lose their keen eye and nose. In order, for instance, to divine and
determine what sort of history the problem of KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIENCE
has hitherto had in the souls of homines religiosi, a person would
perhaps himself have to possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an
experience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal; and then he would
still require that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality,
which, from above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively
formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences. --But who
could do me this service! And who would have time to wait for such
servants! --they evidently appear too rarely, they are so improbable at
all times! Eventually one must do everything ONESELF in order to know
something; which means that one has MUCH to do! --But a curiosity like
mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices--pardon me! I mean to
say that the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and already upon
earth.

46. Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not infrequently
achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited world,
which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind
it and in it, counting besides the education in tolerance which
the Imperium Romanum gave--this faith is NOT that sincere, austere
slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other
northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his God and
Christianity, it is much rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in
a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason--a tough, long-lived,
worm-like reason, which is not to be slain at once and with a single
blow. The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice
of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at
the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. There is
cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is adapted to a
tender, many-sided, and very fastidious conscience, it takes for granted
that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably PAINFUL, that all the
past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in
the form of which "faith" comes to it. Modern men, with their obtuseness
as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the
terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by
the paradox of the formula, "God on the Cross". Hitherto there had never
and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once so
dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a
transvaluation of all ancient values--It was the Orient, the PROFOUND
Orient, it was the Oriental slave who thus took revenge on Rome and its
noble, light-minded toleration, on the Roman "Catholicism" of non-faith,
and it was always not the faith, but the freedom from the faith, the
half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of the faith,
which made the slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against
them. "Enlightenment" causes revolt, for the slave desires the
unconditioned, he understands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals,
he loves as he hates, without NUANCE, to the very depths, to the point
of pain, to the point of sickness--his many HIDDEN sufferings make
him revolt against the noble taste which seems to DENY suffering. The
skepticism with regard to suffering, fundamentally only an attitude of
aristocratic morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of the
last great slave-insurrection which began with the French Revolution.

47. Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far,
we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen:
solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence--but without its being possible
to determine with certainty which is cause and which is effect, or IF
any relation at all of cause and effect exists there. This latter doubt
is justified by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms among
savage as well as among civilized peoples is the most sudden and
excessive sensuality, which then with equal suddenness transforms into
penitential paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both
symptoms perhaps explainable as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere is it
MORE obligatory to put aside explanations around no other type has there
grown such a mass of absurdity and superstition, no other type seems to
have been more interesting to men and even to philosophers--perhaps it
is time to become just a little indifferent here, to learn caution, or,
better still, to look AWAY, TO GO AWAY--Yet in the background of the
most recent philosophy, that of Schopenhauer, we find almost as the
problem in itself, this terrible note of interrogation of the religious
crisis and awakening. How is the negation of will POSSIBLE? how is the
saint possible? --that seems to have been the very question with which
Schopenhauer made a start and became a philosopher. And thus it was a
genuine Schopenhauerian consequence, that his most convinced adherent
(perhaps also his last, as far as Germany is concerned), namely, Richard
Wagner, should bring his own life-work to an end just here, and should
finally put that terrible and eternal type upon the stage as Kundry,
type vecu, and as it loved and lived, at the very time that the
mad-doctors in almost all European countries had an opportunity to study
the type close at hand, wherever the religious neurosis--or as I call
it, "the religious mood"--made its latest epidemical outbreak and
display as the "Salvation Army"--If it be a question, however, as to
what has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages,
and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the saint, it
is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein--namely, the
immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states of the soul regarded as
morally antithetical: it was believed here to be self-evident that
a "bad man" was all at once turned into a "saint," a good man. The
hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point, is it not
possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed
itself under the dominion of morals, because it BELIEVED in oppositions
of moral values, and saw, read, and INTERPRETED these oppositions
into the text and facts of the case? What? "Miracle" only an error of
interpretation? A lack of philology?

48. It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply attached to their
Catholicism than we Northerners are to Christianity generally, and
that consequently unbelief in Catholic countries means something quite
different from what it does among Protestants--namely, a sort of revolt
against the spirit of the race, while with us it is rather a return to
the spirit (or non-spirit) of the race.

We Northerners undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous races, even
as regards our talents for religion--we have POOR talents for it. One
may make an exception in the case of the Celts, who have theretofore
furnished also the best soil for Christian infection in the North: the
Christian ideal blossomed forth in France as much as ever the pale sun
of the north would allow it. How strangely pious for our taste are still
these later French skeptics, whenever there is any Celtic blood in their
origin! How Catholic, how un-German does Auguste Comte's Sociology
seem to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts! How Jesuitical, that
amiable and shrewd cicerone of Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all
his hostility to Jesuits! And even Ernest Renan: how inaccessible to
us Northerners does the language of such a Renan appear, in whom
every instant the merest touch of religious thrill throws his refined
voluptuous and comfortably couching soul off its balance! Let us repeat
after him these fine sentences--and what wickedness and haughtiness is
immediately aroused by way of answer in our probably less beautiful but
harder souls, that is to say, in our more German souls! --"DISONS DONC
HARDIMENT QUE LA RELIGION EST UN PRODUIT DE L'HOMME NORMAL, QUE L'HOMME
EST LE PLUS DANS LE VRAI QUANT IL EST LE PLUS RELIGIEUX ET LE PLUS
ASSURE D'UNE DESTINEE INFINIE. . . . C'EST QUAND IL EST BON QU'IL VEUT QUE
LA VIRTU CORRESPONDE A UN ORDER ETERNAL, C'EST QUAND IL CONTEMPLE LES
CHOSES D'UNE MANIERE DESINTERESSEE QU'IL TROUVE LA MORT REVOLTANTE ET
ABSURDE. COMMENT NE PAS SUPPOSER QUE C'EST DANS CES MOMENTS-LA, QUE
L'HOMME VOIT LE MIEUX? ". . . These sentences are so extremely ANTIPODAL
to my ears and habits of thought, that in my first impulse of rage
on finding them, I wrote on the margin, "LA NIAISERIE RELIGIEUSE PAR
EXCELLENCE! "--until in my later rage I even took a fancy to them, these
sentences with their truth absolutely inverted! It is so nice and such a
distinction to have one's own antipodes!

49. That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient
Greeks is the irrestrainable stream of GRATITUDE which it pours
forth--it is a very superior kind of man who takes SUCH an attitude
towards nature and life. --Later on, when the populace got the upper hand
in Greece, FEAR became rampant also in religion; and Christianity was
preparing itself.

50. The passion for God: there are churlish, honest-hearted, and
importunate kinds of it, like that of Luther--the whole of Protestantism
lacks the southern DELICATEZZA. There is an Oriental exaltation of the
mind in it, like that of an undeservedly favoured or elevated slave, as
in the case of St. Augustine, for instance, who lacks in an offensive
manner, all nobility in bearing and desires. There is a feminine
tenderness and sensuality in it, which modestly and unconsciously longs
for a UNIO MYSTICA ET PHYSICA, as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In
many cases it appears, curiously enough, as the disguise of a girl's
or youth's puberty; here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid,
also as her last ambition. The Church has frequently canonized the woman
in such a case.

51. The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently before
the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter voluntary
privation--why did they thus bow? They divined in him--and as it were
behind the questionableness of his frail and wretched appearance--the
superior force which wished to test itself by such a subjugation; the
strength of will, in which they recognized their own strength and
love of power, and knew how to honour it: they honoured something
in themselves when they honoured the saint. In addition to this, the
contemplation of the saint suggested to them a suspicion: such an
enormity of self-negation and anti-naturalness will not have been
coveted for nothing--they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a
reason for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might
wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors and
visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the world learned to have a new
fear before him, they divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered
enemy:--it was the "Will to Power" which obliged them to halt before the
saint. They had to question him.

52. In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice, there are
men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian
literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and
reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and
one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little out-pushed peninsula
Europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the
"Progress of Mankind. " To be sure, he who is himself only a slender,
tame house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like
our cultured people of today, including the Christians of "cultured"
Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins--the
taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and
"small": perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of grace,
still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the
genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound
up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along
with the Old Testament into one book, as the "Bible," as "The Book in
Itself," is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against the Spirit"
which literary Europe has upon its conscience.

53. Why Atheism nowadays? "The father" in God is thoroughly refuted;
equally so "the judge," "the rewarder. " Also his "free will": he does
not hear--and even if he did, he would not know how to help. The worst
is that he seems incapable of communicating himself clearly; is he
uncertain? --This is what I have made out (by questioning and listening
at a variety of conversations) to be the cause of the decline of
European theism; it appears to me that though the religious instinct is
in vigorous growth,--it rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound
distrust.

54. What does all modern philosophy mainly do? Since Descartes--and
indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure--an
ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old
conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject
and predicate conception--that is to say, an ATTENTAT on the
fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy,
as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN,
although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious.
Formerly, in effect, one believed in "the soul" as one believed in
grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, "I" is the condition,
"think" is the predicate and is conditioned--to think is an activity for
which one MUST suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then made,
with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out
of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps true: "think" the
condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I," therefore, only a synthesis
which has been MADE by thinking itself. KANT really wished to prove
that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved--nor
the object either: the possibility of an APPARENT EXISTENCE of the
subject, and therefore of "the soul," may not always have been strange
to him,--the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the
Vedanta philosophy.

55. There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rounds; but
three of these are the most important. Once on a time men sacrificed
human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they loved the
best--to this category belong the firstling sacrifices of all primitive
religions, and also the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the
Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri, that most terrible of all Roman
anachronisms. Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed
to their God the strongest instincts they possessed, their "nature";
THIS festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and
"anti-natural" fanatics. Finally, what still remained to be sacrificed?
Was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything
comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in
future blessedness and justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God
himself, and out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity,
gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness--this
paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the
rising generation; we all know something thereof already.

56. Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatical desire, has long
endeavoured to go to the bottom of the question of pessimism and free it
from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and stupidity in which
it has finally presented itself to this century, namely, in the form of
Schopenhauer's philosophy; whoever, with an Asiatic and super-Asiatic
eye, has actually looked inside, and into the most world-renouncing of
all possible modes of thought--beyond good and evil, and no longer
like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the dominion and delusion of
morality,--whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby, without
really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold the opposite ideal: the
ideal of the most world-approving, exuberant, and vivacious man, who has
not only learnt to compromise and arrange with that which was and
is, but wishes to have it again AS IT WAS AND IS, for all eternity,
insatiably calling out da capo, not only to himself, but to the whole
piece and play; and not only the play, but actually to him who requires
the play--and makes it necessary; because he always requires
himself anew--and makes himself necessary. --What? And this would not
be--circulus vitiosus deus?

57. The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows with the
strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world becomes
profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever coming into
view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised
its acuteness and profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise,
something of a game, something for children and childish minds. Perhaps
the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and
suffering, the conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of
no more importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to
an old man;--and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then
be necessary once more for "the old man"--always childish enough, an
eternal child!

58. Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or
semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for its
favourite microscopic labour of self-examination, and for its soft
placidity called "prayer," the state of perpetual readiness for the
"coming of God"), I mean the idleness with a good conscience, the
idleness of olden times and of blood, to which the aristocratic
sentiment that work is DISHONOURING--that it vulgarizes body and
soul--is not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently the modern, noisy,
time-engrossing, conceited, foolishly proud laboriousness educates
and prepares for "unbelief" more than anything else? Among these, for
instance, who are at present living apart from religion in Germany, I
find "free-thinkers" of diversified species and origin, but above all
a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to generation
has dissolved the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what
purpose religions serve, and only note their existence in the world
with a kind of dull astonishment. They feel themselves already fully
occupied, these good people, be it by their business or by their
pleasures, not to mention the "Fatherland," and the newspapers, and
their "family duties"; it seems that they have no time whatever left
for religion; and above all, it is not obvious to them whether it is a
question of a new business or a new pleasure--for it is impossible, they
say to themselves, that people should go to church merely to spoil
their tempers. They are by no means enemies of religious customs;
should certain circumstances, State affairs perhaps, require their
participation in such customs, they do what is required, as so many
things are done--with a patient and unassuming seriousness, and without
much curiosity or discomfort;--they live too much apart and outside
to feel even the necessity for a FOR or AGAINST in such matters. Among
those indifferent persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority of
German Protestants of the middle classes, especially in the great
laborious centres of trade and commerce; also the majority of laborious
scholars, and the entire University personnel (with the exception of
the theologians, whose existence and possibility there always gives
psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to solve). On the part of
pious, or merely church-going people, there is seldom any idea of HOW
MUCH good-will, one might say arbitrary will, is now necessary for a
German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously; his whole
profession (and as I have said, his whole workmanlike laboriousness, to
which he is compelled by his modern conscience) inclines him to a
lofty and almost charitable serenity as regards religion, with which is
occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the "uncleanliness" of spirit
which he takes for granted wherever any one still professes to belong
to the Church. It is only with the help of history (NOT through his own
personal experience, therefore) that the scholar succeeds in bringing
himself to a respectful seriousness, and to a certain timid deference
in presence of religions; but even when his sentiments have reached the
stage of gratitude towards them, he has not personally advanced one
step nearer to that which still maintains itself as Church or as piety;
perhaps even the contrary. The practical indifference to religious
matters in the midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually
sublimates itself in his case into circumspection and cleanliness, which
shuns contact with religious men and things; and it may be just the
depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts him to avoid the
delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings with it. --Every age has
its own divine type of naivete, for the discovery of which other ages
may envy it: and how much naivete--adorable, childlike, and boundlessly
foolish naivete is involved in this belief of the scholar in
his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the
unsuspecting, simple certainty with which his instinct treats the
religious man as a lower and less valuable type, beyond, before, and
ABOVE which he himself has developed--he, the little arrogant dwarf
and mob-man, the sedulously alert, head-and-hand drudge of "ideas," of
"modern ideas"!

59. Whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless divined what
wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial. It is their
preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, and
false. Here and there one finds a passionate and exaggerated adoration
of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as in artists: it is not to be
doubted that whoever has NEED of the cult of the superficial to that
extent, has at one time or another made an unlucky dive BENEATH it.
Perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those burnt
children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying
to FALSIFY its image (as if taking wearisome revenge on it), one might
guess to what degree life has disgusted them, by the extent to which
they wish to see its image falsified, attenuated, ultrified, and
deified,--one might reckon the homines religiosi among the artists, as
their HIGHEST rank. It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable
pessimism which compels whole centuries to fasten their teeth into a
religious interpretation of existence: the fear of the instinct which
divines that truth might be attained TOO soon, before man has become
strong enough, hard enough, artist enough. . . . Piety, the "Life in God,"
regarded in this light, would appear as the most elaborate and
ultimate product of the FEAR of truth, as artist-adoration
and artist-intoxication in presence of the most logical of all
falsifications, as the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at
any price. Perhaps there has hitherto been no more effective means of
beautifying man than piety, by means of it man can become so artful, so
superficial, so iridescent, and so good, that his appearance no longer
offends.

60.
To love mankind FOR GOD'S SAKE--this has so far been the noblest and
remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained. That love to mankind,
without any redeeming intention in the background, is only an ADDITIONAL
folly and brutishness, that the inclination to this love has first to
get its proportion, its delicacy, its gram of salt and sprinkling
of ambergris from a higher inclination--whoever first perceived
and "experienced" this, however his tongue may have stammered as it
attempted to express such a delicate matter, let him for all time be
holy and respected, as the man who has so far flown highest and gone
astray in the finest fashion!

61. The philosopher, as WE free spirits understand him--as the man of
the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for the general
development of mankind,--will use religion for his disciplining and
educating work, just as he will use the contemporary political
and economic conditions. The selecting and disciplining
influence--destructive, as well as creative and fashioning--which can be
exercised by means of religion is manifold and varied, according to the
sort of people placed under its spell and protection. For those who are
strong and independent, destined and trained to command, in whom the
judgment and skill of a ruling race is incorporated, religion is
an additional means for overcoming resistance in the exercise of
authority--as a bond which binds rulers and subjects in common,
betraying and surrendering to the former the conscience of the latter,
their inmost heart, which would fain escape obedience. And in the
case of the unique natures of noble origin, if by virtue of superior
spirituality they should incline to a more retired and contemplative
life, reserving to themselves only the more refined forms of government
(over chosen disciples or members of an order), religion itself may
be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and trouble of
managing GROSSER affairs, and for securing immunity from the UNAVOIDABLE
filth of all political agitation. The Brahmins, for instance, understood
this fact. With the help of a religious organization, they secured to
themselves the power of nominating kings for the people, while their
sentiments prompted them to keep apart and outside, as men with a higher
and super-regal mission. At the same time religion gives inducement and
opportunity to some of the subjects to qualify themselves for future
ruling and commanding the slowly ascending ranks and classes, in which,
through fortunate marriage customs, volitional power and delight in
self-control are on the increase. To them religion offers sufficient
incentives and temptations to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to
experience the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of silence, and
of solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of
educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its hereditary
baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy. And finally, to
ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and
general utility, and are only so far entitled to exist, religion gives
invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition, peace of heart,
ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy,
with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of
justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all
the semi-animal poverty of their souls. Religion, together with the
religious significance of life, sheds sunshine over such perpetually
harassed men, and makes even their own aspect endurable to them, it
operates upon them as the Epicurean philosophy usually operates upon
sufferers of a higher order, in a refreshing and refining manner,
almost TURNING suffering TO ACCOUNT, and in the end even hallowing and
vindicating it. There is perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity
and Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate
themselves by piety to a seemingly higher order of things, and thereby
to retain their satisfaction with the actual world in which they find it
difficult enough to live--this very difficulty being necessary.

62. To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such
religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost is
always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate as an
educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but
rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they wish to be the final end,
and not a means along with other means. Among men, as among all other
animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating,
infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases,
among men also, are always the exception; and in view of the fact that
man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare
exception. But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the
greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the
law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests
itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of
men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult
to determine. What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions
above-mentioned to the SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour
to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the
religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle;
they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a
disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as
false and impossible. However highly we may esteem this indulgent and
preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied,
and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of
man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions--to give a general appreciation
of them--are among the principal causes which have kept the type of
"man" upon a lower level--they have preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD
HAVE PERISHED. One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is
sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation
of all that the "spiritual men" of Christianity have done for Europe
hitherto! But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to
the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless,
and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual
penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they
to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good
conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which
means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE
EUROPEAN RACE? To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they
had to do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast
suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous,
manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the
highest and most successful type of "man"--into uncertainty, distress
of conscience, and self-destruction; forsooth, to invert all love of the
earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and
earthly things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and
was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value,
"unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one
sentiment. If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse
and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and
impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease
marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will
has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME
ABORTION of man? He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer
Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this
almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in
the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to
cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous
pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands?
How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed
to do! "--I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most
portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough,
to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men,
not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime
self-constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and
perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically
different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from
man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed
the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species
has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly,
mediocre, the European of the present day.



CHAPTER IV. APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES


63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously--and even
himself--only in relation to his pupils.

64. "Knowledge for its own sake"--that is the last snare laid by
morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more.

65. The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much shame has
to be overcome on the way to it.

65A. We are most dishonourable towards our God: he is not PERMITTED to
sin.

66. The tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded, robbed,
deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence of a God among men.

67. Love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised at the expense
of all others. Love to God also!

68. "I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my
pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually--the memory yields.

69. One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed to see the hand
that--kills with leniency.

70. If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which
always recurs.

71. THE SAGE AS ASTRONOMER. --So long as thou feelest the stars as an
"above thee," thou lackest the eye of the discerning one.

72. It is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments that
makes great men.

73. He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.

73A. Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye--and calls it his
pride.

74. A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things
besides: gratitude and purity.

75. The degree and nature of a man's sensuality extends to the highest
altitudes of his spirit.

76. Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself.

77. With his principles a man seeks either to dominate, or justify,
or honour, or reproach, or conceal his habits: two men with the same
principles probably seek fundamentally different ends therewith.

78. He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a
despiser.

79. A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not itself love,
betrays its sediment: its dregs come up.

80. A thing that is explained ceases to concern us--What did the God
mean who gave the advice, "Know thyself! " Did it perhaps imply "Cease to
be concerned about thyself! become objective! "--And Socrates? --And the
"scientific man"?

81. It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary that you
should so salt your truth that it will no longer--quench thirst?

82. "Sympathy for all"--would be harshness and tyranny for THEE, my good
neighbour.

83. INSTINCT--When the house is on fire one forgets even the
dinner--Yes, but one recovers it from among the ashes.

84. Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she--forgets how to charm.

85. The same emotions are in man and woman, but in different TEMPO, on
that account man and woman never cease to misunderstand each other.

86. In the background of all their personal vanity, women themselves
have still their impersonal scorn--for "woman".

87. FETTERED HEART, FREE SPIRIT--When one firmly fetters one's heart
and keeps it prisoner, one can allow one's spirit many liberties: I said
this once before But people do not believe it when I say so, unless they
know it already.

88. One begins to distrust very clever persons when they become
embarrassed.

89. Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences
them is not something dreadful also.

90. Heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come temporarily to their
surface, precisely by that which makes others heavy--by hatred and love.

91. So cold, so icy, that one burns one's finger at the touch of him!
Every hand that lays hold of him shrinks back! --And for that very reason
many think him red-hot.

92. Who has not, at one time or another--sacrificed himself for the sake
of his good name?

93. In affability there is no hatred of men, but precisely on that
account a great deal too much contempt of men.

94. The maturity of man--that means, to have reacquired the seriousness
that one had as a child at play.

95. To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on the ladder at the end
of which one is ashamed also of one's morality.

96. One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa--blessing
it rather than in love with it.

97. What? A great man? I always see merely the play-actor of his own
ideal.

98. When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one while it bites.

99. THE DISAPPOINTED ONE SPEAKS--"I listened for the echo and I heard
only praise. "

100. We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler than we are, we thus
relax ourselves away from our fellows.

101. A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the
animalization of God.

102. Discovering reciprocal love should really disenchant the lover with
regard to the beloved. "What! She is modest enough to love even you? Or
stupid enough? Or--or---"

103. THE DANGER IN HAPPINESS. --"Everything now turns out best for me, I
now love every fate:--who would like to be my fate? "

104. Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love,
prevents the Christians of today--burning us.

105. The pia fraus is still more repugnant to the taste (the "piety")
of the free spirit (the "pious man of knowledge") than the impia fraus.
Hence the profound lack of judgment, in comparison with the Church,
characteristic of the type "free spirit"--as ITS non-freedom.

106. By means of music the very passions enjoy themselves.

107. A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been
taken, to shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments. Occasionally,
therefore, a will to stupidity.

108. There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral
interpretation of phenomena.

109. The criminal is often enough not equal to his deed: he extenuates
and maligns it.

110. The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the
beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.

111. Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been
wounded.

112. To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to
belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against
them.

113. "You want to prepossess him in your favour? Then you must be
embarrassed before him. "

114. The immense expectation with regard to sexual love, and the coyness
in this expectation, spoils all the perspectives of women at the outset.

115. Where there is neither love nor hatred in the game, woman's play is
mediocre.

116. The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage
to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.

117. The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of
another, or of several other, emotions.

118. There is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom
it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired some day.

119. Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning
ourselves--"justifying" ourselves.

120. Sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that its
root remains weak, and is easily torn up.

121. It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn
author--and that he did not learn it better.

122. To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases merely politeness
of heart--and the very opposite of vanity of spirit.

123. Even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage.

124. He who exults at the stake, does not triumph over pain, but because
of the fact that he does not feel pain where he expected it. A parable.

125. When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily
to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.

126. A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great
men. --Yes, and then to get round them.

127. In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to the sense of
shame. They feel as if one wished to peep under their skin with it--or
worse still! under their dress and finery.

128. The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you
allure the senses to it.

129. The devil has the most extensive perspectives for God; on that
account he keeps so far away from him:--the devil, in effect, as the
oldest friend of knowledge.

130. What a person IS begins to betray itself when his talent
decreases,--when he ceases to show what he CAN do. Talent is also an
adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.

131.