No More Learning

To look upon nature as if it
were a proof of the goodness and care of a God;
to interpret history in honour of a divine reason,
as a constant testimony to a moral order in the
world and a moral final purpose; to explain
personal experiences as pious men have long
enough explained them, as if everything were a
dispensation or intimation of Providence, some-
thing planned and sent on behalf of the salvation
of the soul: all that is now past, it has conscience
against it, it is regarded by all the more acute
consciences as disreputable and dishonourable,
as mendaciousness, femininism, weakness, and
cowardice,—by virtue of this severity, if by any-
thing, we are good Europeans, the heirs of Europe's
longest and bravest self-conquest. When we thus


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WE FEARLESS ONES 309
reject the Christian interpretation, and condemn
its "significance" as a forgery, we are immediately
confronted in a striking manner with the Schopen-
hauerian question: Has existence then a significance
at all? —the question which will require a couple of
centuries even to be completely heard in all its
profundity. Schopenhauer's own answer to this
question was—if I may be forgiven for saying so—
a premature, juvenile reply, a mere compromise,
a stoppage and sticking in the very same Christian-
ascetic, moral perspectives, the belief in which had
got notice to quit along with the belief in God. . . .
But he raised the question—as a good European,
as we have said, and not as a German. —Or did the
Germans prove at least by the way in which they
seized on the Schopenhauerian question, their
inner connection and relationship to him, their
preparation for his problem, and their need of it?
That there has been thinking and printing even
in Germany since Schopenhauer's time on the
problem raised by him,—it was late enough! —
does not at all suffice to enable us to decide in
favour of this closer relationship; one could, on
the contrary, lay great stress on the peculiar awk-
wardness of this post-Schopenhauerian Pessimism
—Germans evidently do not behave themselves
there as in their element. I do not at all allude
here to Eduard von Hartmann; on the contrary,
my old suspicion is not vanished even at present
that he is too clever for us; I mean to say that as
arrant rogue from the very first, he did not perhaps
make merry solely over German Pessimism—and
that in the end he might probably "bequeathe"


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3IO THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
to them the truth as to how far a person could
bamboozle the Germans themselves in the age of
bubble companies. But further, are we perhaps
to reckon to the honour of Germans, the old
humming-top, Bahnsen, who all his life spun about
with the greatest pleasure around his realistically
dialectic misery and "personal ill-luck,"—was that
German? (In passing I recommend his writings
for the purpose for which I myself have used them,
as anti-pessimistic fare, especially on account of his
elegantia psychologies which, it seems to me, could
alleviate even the most constipated body and soul).
Or would it be proper to count such dilettanti and
old maids as the mawkish apostle of virginity,
Mainlander, among the genuine Germans? After
all he was probably a Jew (all Jews become
mawkish when they moralise). Neither Bahnsen,
nor Mainlander, nor even Eduard von Hartmann,
give us a reliable grasp of the question whether the
pessimism of Schopenhauer (his frightened glance
into an undeified world, which has become stupid,
blind, deranged and problematic, his honourable
fright) was not only an exceptional case among
Germans, but a German event: while everything
else which stands in the foreground, like our
valiant politics and our joyful' Jingoism (which
decidedly enough regards everything with refer-
ence to a principle sufficiently unphilosophical:
"Deutschland, Deutschland, fiber Alles," * conse-
quently sub specie speciei, namely, the German
species), testifies very plainly to the contrary. No!
* "Germany, Germany, above all": the first line of the
German national song. —TR,


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WE FEARLESS ONES 311
The Germans of to-day are not pessimists! And
Schopenhauer was a pessimist, I repeat it once
more, as a good European, and not as a German.
358.
The Peasant Revolt of the Spirit. —We Europeans
find ourselves in view of an immense world of ruins,
where some things still tower aloft, while other
objects stand mouldering and dismal, where most
things however already lie on the ground, pic-
turesque enough—where were there ever finer
ruins? —overgrown with weeds, large and small.
It is the Church which is this city of decay: we
see the religious organisation of Christianity
shaken to its deepest foundations. The belief in
God is overthrown, the belief in the Christian
ascetic ideal is now fighting its last fight. Such a
long and solidly built work as Christianity—it was
the last construction of the Romans! —could not
of course be demolished all at once; every sort
of earthquake had to shake it, every sort of spirit
which perforates, digs, gnaws and moulders had
to assist in the work of destruction. But that
which is strangest is that those who have exerted
themselves most to retain and preserve Christianity,
have been precisely those who did most to destroy
it,—the Germans. It seems that the Germans do
not understand the essence of a Church. Are they
not spiritual enough, or not distrustful enough to
do so? In any case the structure of the Church
rests on a southern freedom and liberality of spirit,
and similarly on a southern suspicion of nature,
man, and spirit,—it rests on a knowledge of man,


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312 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
an experience of man, entirely different from what
the north has had. The Lutheran Reformation
in all its length and breadth was the indignation
of the simple against something "complicated. "
To speak cautiously, it was a coarse, honest mis-
understanding, in which much is to be forgiven,—
people did not understand the mode of expression
of a victorious Church, and only saw corruption;
they misunderstood the noble scepticism, the luxury
of scepticism and toleration which every victorious,
self-confident power permits. . . . One overlooks
the fact readily enough at present that as regards
all cardinal questions concerning power Luther
was badly endowed; he was fatally short-sighted,
superficial and imprudent—and above all, as a
man sprung from the people, he lacked all the
hereditary qualities of a ruling caste, and all the
instincts for power; so that his work, his intention
to restore the work of the Romans, merely became
involuntarily and unconsciously the commencement
of a work of destruction. He unravelled, he tore
asunder with honest rage, where the old spider had
woven longest and most carefully. He gave the
sacred books into the hands of everyone,—they
thereby got at last into the hands of the philologists,
that is to say, the annihilators of every belief based
upon books. He demolished the conception of
"the Church" in that he repudiated the belief in
the inspiration of the Councils: for only under the
supposition that the inspiring spirit which had
founded the Church still lives in it, still builds it,
still goes on building its house, does the conception
of "the Church" retain its power. He gave back


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WE FEARLESS ONES 313
to the priest sexual intercourse: but three-fourths
of the reverence of which the people (and above
all the women of the people) are capable, rests on
the belief that an exceptional man in this respect
will also be an exceptional man in other respects.
It is precisely here that the popular belief in some-
thing superhuman in man, in a miracle, in the
saving God in man, has its most subtle and insidi-
ous advocate. After Luther had given a wife to
the priest, he had to take from him auricular confes-
sion ; that was psychologically right: but thereby he
practically did away with the Christian priest him-
self, whose profoundest utility has ever consisted
in his being a sacred ear, a silent well, and a grave
for secrets. "Every man his own priest"—behind
such formulae and their bucolic slyness, there was
concealed in Luther the profoundest hatred of
"higher men" and the rule of "higher men," as
the Church had conceived them. Luther disowned
an ideal which he did not know how to attain,
while he seemed to combat and detest the degenera-
tion thereof. As a matter of fact, he, the impossible
monk, repudiated the rule of the homines religiosi;
he consequently brought about precisely the same
thing within the ecclesiastical social order that
he combated so impatiently in the civic order,—
namely a "peasant insurrection. "—As to all that
grew out of his Reformation afterwards, good and
bad, which can at present be almost counted up,—
who would be naYve enough to praise or blame
Luther simply on account of these results? He
is innocent of all; he knew not what he did.
The art of making the European spirit shallower,
'


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314 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
especially in the north, or more good-natured, if
people would rather hear it designated by a moral
expression, undoubtedly took a clever step in
advance in the Lutheran Reformation ; and similarly
there grew out of it the mobility and disquietude
of the spirit, its thirst for independence, its belief
in the right to freedom, and its "naturalness. " If
people wish to ascribe to the Reformation in the
last instance the merit of having prepared and
favoured that which we at present honour as
"modern science," they must of course add that it
is also accessory to bringing about the degenera-
tion of the modern scholar with his lack of
reverence, of shame and of profundity; and that
it is also responsible for all natve candour
and plain-dealing in matters of knowledge, in
short for the plebeianism of the spirit which is
peculiar to the last two centuries, and from which
even pessimism hitherto, has not in any way
delivered us. "Modern ideas" also belong to this
peasant insurrection of the north against the colder,
more ambiguous, more suspicious spirit of the south,
which has built itself its greatest monument in the
Christian Church. Let us not forget in the end
what a Church is, and especially, in contrast to every
"State": a Church is above all an authoritative
organisation which secures to the most spiritual
men the highest rank, and believes in the power of
spirituality so far as to forbid all grosser appliances
of authority. Through this alone the Church is
under all circumstances a nobler institution than
the State. —


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WE FEARLESS ONES 315
359-
Vengeance on Intellect and other Backgrounds of
Morality. —Morality—where do you think it has
its most dangerous and rancorous advocates? —
There, for example, is an ill-constituted man, who
does not possess enough of intellect to be able to
take pleasure in it, and just enough of culture to
be aware of the fact; bored, satiated, and a self-
despiser; besides being cheated unfortunately by
some hereditary property out of the last consolation,
the "blessing of labour," the self-forgetfulness in
the "day's work "; one who is thoroughly ashamed
of his existence—perhaps also harbouring some
vices,—and who on the other hand (by means of
books to which he has no right, or more intellectual
society than he can digest), cannot help vitiating
himself more and more, and making himself vain
and irritable: such a thoroughly poisoned man—
for intellect becomes poison, culture becomes
poison, possession becomes poison, solitude becomes
poison, to such ill-constituted beings—gets at last
into a habitual state of vengeance and inclination
to vengeance. . . . What do you think he finds
necessary, absolutely necessary in order to give
himself the appearance in his own eyes of superi-
ority over more intellectual men, so as to give
himself the delight of perfect revenge, at least in
imagination? It is always morality that he
requires, one may wager on it; always the big moral
words, always the high-sounding words: justice,
wisdom, holiness, virtue; always the stoicism of
gestures (how well stoicism hides what one does not


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316 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
possess! ); always the mantle of wise silence, of
affability, of gentleness, and whatever else the
idealist-mantle is called in which the incurable
self-despisers and also the incurably conceited walk
about. Let me not be misunderstood: out of such
born enemies of the spirit there arises now and then
that rare specimen of humanity who is honoured
by the people under the name of saint or sage: it
is out of such men that there arise those prodigies
of morality that make a noise, that make history,—
St Augustine was one of these men. Fear of the
intellect, vengeance on the intellect—Oh! how often
have these powerfully impelling vices become the
root of virtues! Yea, virtue itself! —And asking
the question among ourselves, even the philosopher's
pretension to wisdom, which has occasionally been
made here and there on the earth, the maddest
and most immodest of all pretensions,—has it not
always been, in India as well as in Greece, above all
a means of concealment? Sometimes, perhaps, from
the point of view of education which hallows so
many lies, it has been a tender regard for growing
and evolving persons, for disciples who have often to
be guarded against themselves by means of the belief
in a person (by means of an error). In most cases,
however, it is a means of concealment for a philo-
sopher, behind which he seeks protection, owing to
exhaustion, age, chilliness, or hardening; as a feeling
of the approaching end, as the sagacity of the instinct
which animals have before their death,—they go
apart, remain at rest, choose solitude, creep into
caves, become wise. . . . What? Wisdom a means of
concealment of the philosopher from—intellect ? -—


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360.
Two Kinds of Causes which are Confounded. —
It seems to mc one of my most essential steps and
advances that I have learned to distinguish the
cause of the action generally from the cause of
action in a particular manner, say, in this direction,
with this aim. The first kind of cause is a quantum
of stored-up force, which waits to be used in some
manner, for some purpose; the second kind of
cause, on the contrary, is something quite unim-
portant in comparison with the first, an insignifi-
cant hazard for the most part, in conformity with
which the quantum of force in question " discharges"
itself in some unique and definite manner: the
lucifer-match in relation to the barrel of gunpowder.
Among those insignificant hazards and lucifer-
matches I count all the so-called "aims," and
similarly the still more so-called "occupations" of
people: they are relatively optional, arbitrary, and
almost indifferent in relation to the immense
quantum of force which presses on, as we have
said, to be used up in any way whatever. One
generally looks at the matter in a different manner:
one is accustomed to see the impelling force pre-
cisely in the aim (object, calling, &c), according to
a primeval error,—but it is only the directing force;
the steersman and the steam have thereby been
confounded. And yet it is not even always the
steersman, the directing force. . . . Is the "aim,"
the "purpose," not often enough only an ex-
tenuating pretext, an additional self-blinding of
conceit, which does not wish it to be said that the


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318 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
ship follows the stream into which it has accidentally
run? That it " wishes" to go that way, because it
must go that way? That it has a direction, sure
enough, but—not a steersman? We still require
a criticism of the conception of " purpose. "
361.
The Problem of the Actor. —The problem of the
actor has disquieted me the longest; I was uncer-
tain (and am sometimes so still) whether one could
not get at the dangerous conception of " artist "—
a conception hitherto treated with unpardonable
leniency—from this point of view. Falsity with a
good conscience; delight in dissimulation breaking
forth as power, pushing aside, overflowing, and
sometimes extinguishing the so-called "character";
the inner longing to play a role, to assume a mask,
to put on an appearance; a surplus of capacity for
adaptations of every kind, which can no longer
gratify themselves in the service of the nearest
and narrowest utility: all that perhaps does not
pertain solely to the actor in himself? . . . Such an
instinct would develop most readily in families of
the lower class of the people, who have had to pass
their lives in absolute dependence, under shifting
pressure and constraint, who (to accommodate
themselves to their conditions, to adapt themselves
always to new circumstances) had again and again
to pass themselves off and represent themselves as
different persons, — thus having gradually quali-
fied themselves to adjust the mantle to every wind,
thereby almost becoming the mantle itself, as


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WE FEARLESS ONES 319
masters of the embodied and incarnated art of
eternally playing the game of hide and seek, which
one calls Mimicry among the animals :—until at last
this ability, stored up from generation to genera-
tion, has become domineering, irrational and
intractable, till as instinct it begins to command
the other instincts, and begets the actor, the
"artist" (the buffoon, the pantaloon, the Jack-
Pudding, the fool, and the clown in the first place,
also the classical type of servant, Gil Bias: for in
such types one has the precursors of the artist,
and often enough even of the "genius"). Also
under higher social conditions there grows under
similar pressure a similar species of men. Only the
histrionic instinct is there for the most part held
strictly in check by another instinct, for example,
among "diplomatists";—for the rest, I should think
that it would always be open to a good diplomat-
ist to become a good actor on the stage, provided
his dignity "allowed" it. As regards the Jews,
however, the adaptable people par excellence, we
should, in conformity to this line of thought,
expect to see among them a world-historical
institution from the very beginning, for the rearing
of actors, a genuine breeding-place for actors; and
in fact the question is very pertinent just now:
what good actor at present is not—a Jew? The
Jew also, as a born literary man, as the actual
ruler of the European press, exercises this power
on the basis of his histrionic capacity: for the
literary man is essentially an actor, — he plays
the part of "expert," of "specialist. " — Finally
women. If we consider the whole history of


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320 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
women, are they not obliged first of all, and above
all to be actresses? If we listen to doctors who have
hypnotised women, or, finally, if we love them—
and let ourselves be " hypnotised " by them,—what
is always divulged thereby? That they "give
themselves airs," even when they—"give them-
selves. " . . . Woman is so artistic . . .
362.
My Belief in the Virilising of Europe. —We owe
it to Napoleon (and not at all to the French
Revolution, which had in view the "fraternity" of
the nations, and the florid interchange of good
graces among people generally) that several warlike
centuries, which have not had their like in past
history, may now follow one another—in short, that
we have entered upon the classical age of war, war
at the same time scientific and popular, on the
grandest scale (as regards means, talents and
discipline), to which all coming millenniums will
look back with envy and awe as a work of perfec-
tion :—for the national movement out of which
this martial glory springs, is only the counter-choc
against Napoleon, and would not have existed
without him. To him, consequently, one will one
day be able to attribute the fact that man in Europe
has again got the upper hand of the merchant and
the Philistine; perhaps even of "woman" also,
who has become pampered owing to Christianity
and the extravagant spirit of the eighteenth
century, and still more owing to "modern ideas. "
Napoleon, who saw in modern ideas, and accord-
ingly in civilisation, something like a personal


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WE FEARLESS ONES 321
enemy, has by this hostility proved himself one of
the greatest continuators of the Renaissance: he
has brought to the surface a whole block of the
ancient character, the decisive block perhaps, the
block of granite. And who knows but that this
block of ancient character will in the end get the
upper hand of the national movement, and will
have to make itself in a positive sense the heir and
continuator of Napoleon :—who, as one knows,
wanted one Europe, which was to be mistress of
the world. —
363-
How each Sex has its Prejudice about Love. —
Notwithstanding all the concessions which I am
inclined to make to the monogamic prejudice, I
will never admit that we should speak of equal
rights in the love of man and woman: there are
no such equal rights. The reason is that man and
woman understand something different by the
term love,—and it belongs to the conditions of love
in both sexes that the one sex does not presuppose
the same feeling, the same conception of " love," in
the other sex. What woman understands by love
is clear enough: complete surrender (not merely
devotion) of soul and body, without any motive,
without any reservation, rather with shame and
terror at the thought of a devotion restricted by
clauses or associated with conditions. In this
absence of conditions her love is precisely a faith:
woman has no other. —Man, when he loves a
woman, wants precisely this love from her; he
is consequently, as regards himself, furthest re-
moved from the prerequisites of feminine love;
21


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322 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
granted, however, that there should also be men
to whom on their side the demand for complete
devotion is not unfamiliar,—well, they are really—
not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes
thereby a slave; a woman, however, who loves like
a woman becomes thereby a more perfect woman.
. . . The passion of woman in its unconditional
renunciation of its own rights presupposes in fact
that there does not exist on the other side an equal
pathos, an equal desire for renunciation: for if both
renounced themselves out of love, there would
result—well, I don't know what, perhaps a horror
vacui? Woman wants to be taken and accepted
as a possession, she wishes to be merged in the
conceptions of "possession" and "possessed ";
consequently she wants one who takes, who does
not offer and give himself away, but who reversely
is rather to be made richer in "himself"—by the
increase of power, happiness and faith which the
woman herself gives to him. Woman gives herself,
man takes her. — I do not think one will get
over this natural contrast by any social contract,
or with the very best will to do justice, however
desirable it may be to avoid bringing the severe,
frightful, enigmatical, and unmoral elements of this
antagonism constantly before our eyes. For love,
regarded as complete, great, and full, is nature, and
as nature, is to all eternity something " unmoral. "
—Fidelity is accordingly included in woman's love,
it follows from the definition thereof; with man
fidelity may readily result in consequence of his
love, perhaps as gratitude or idiosyncrasy of taste,
and so-called elective affinity, but it does not


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WE FEARLESS ONES 323
belong to the essence of his love—and indeed so
little, that one might almost be entitled to speak
of a natural opposition between love and fidelity
in man, whose love is just a desire to possess, and
not a renunciation and giving away; the desire to
possess, however, comes to an end every time with
the possession. . . . As a matter of fact it is the
more subtle and jealous thirst for possession in the
man (who is rarely and tardily convinced of having
this " possession "), which makes his love continue;
in that case it is even possible that the love may
increase after the surrender,—he does not readily
own that a woman has nothing more to " surrender"
to him. —
364-
The Anchorite Speaks. —The art of associating
with men rests essentially on one's skilfulness
(which presupposes long exercise) in accepting a
repast, in taking a repast in the cuisine of which
one has no confidence. Provided one comes to the
table with the hunger of a wolf everything is easy
(" the worst society gives thee experience" — as
Mephistopheles says); but one has not got this
wolf s-hunger when one needs it! Alas! how diffi-
cult are our fellow-men to digest! First principle:
to stake one's courage as in a misfortune, to seize
boldly, to admire oneself at the same time, to take
one's repugnance between one's teeth, to cram down
one's disgust. Second principle: to "improve" one's
fellow-man, by praise for example, so that he may
begin to sweat out his self-complacency; or to seize
a tuft of his good or "interesting" qualities, and
pull at it till one gets his whole virtue out, and can


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324 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
put him under the folds of it. Third principle:
self-hypnotism. To fix one's eye on the object
of one's intercourse, as on a glass knob, until, ceas-
ing to feel pleasure or pain thereat, one falls asleep
unobserved, becomes rigid, and acquires a fixed
pose: a household recipe used in married life and
in friendship, well tested and prized as indispens-
able, but not yet scientifically formulated. Its
proper name is—patience. —
365-
The Anchorite Speaks once more. —We also have
intercourse with "men," we also modestly put on
the clothes in which people know us (as such),
respect us and seek us; and we thereby mingle in
society, that is to say, among the disguised who
do not wish to be so called; we also do like all
prudent masqueraders, and courteously dismiss all
curiosity which has not reference merely to our
"clothes. " There are however other modes and
artifices for "going about" among men and associ-
ating with them: for example, as a ghost,—which
is very advisable when one wants to scare them,
and get rid of them easily. An example: a person
grasps at us, and is unable to seize us. That
frightens him. Or we enter by a closed door. Or
when the lights are extinguished. Or after we are
dead. The latter is the artifice of posthumous men
par excellence. (" What? " said such a one once im-
patiently, "do you think we should delight in en-
during this strangeness, coldness, death-stillness
about us, all this subterranean, hidden, dim, undis-
covered solitude, which is called life with us, and


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WE FEARLESS ONES 325
might just as well be called death, if we were not
conscious of what will arise out of us,—and that
only after our death shall we attain to our life and
become living, ah! very living! we posthumous
men ! "—)
366.
At the Sight of a Learned Book. —We do not
belong to those who only get their thoughts from
books, or at the prompting of books,—it is our
custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping,
climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by
preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths
become thoughtful. Our first question concerning
the value of a book, a man, or a piece of music is:
Can it walk? or still better: Can it dance? . . .
We seldom read; we do not read the worse for that
—oh, how quickly do we divine how a person has
arrived at his thoughts :—whether sitting before an
ink-bottle with compressed belly and head bent
over the paper: oh, how quickly we are then done
with his book! The constipated bowels betray
themselves, one may wager on it, just as the atmo-
sphere of the room, the ceiling of the room, the
smallness of the room, betray themselves. —These
were my feelings as I was closing a straightforward,
learned book, thankful, very thankful, but also
relieved. . . . In the book of a learned man there is
almost always something oppressive and oppressed:
the "specialist" comes to light somewhere, his
ardour, his seriousness, his wrath, his over-estimation
of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hump—
every specialist has his hump. A learned book
also always mirrors a distorted soul: every trade


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326 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
distorts. Look at our friends again with whom
we have spent our youth, after they have taken
possession of their science: alas! how the reverse
has always taken place! Alas! how they them-
selves are now for ever occupied and possessed by
their science! Grown into their nook, crumpled into
unrecognisability, constrained, deprived of their
equilibrium, emaciated and angular everywhere,
perfectly round only in one place,—we are moved
and silent when we find them so.
Every handi-
craft, granting even that it has a golden floor,* has
also a leaden ceiling above it, which presses and
presses on the soul, till it is pressed into a strange
and distorted shape. There is nothing to alter
here. We need not think that it is at all possible
to obviate this disfigurement by any educational
artifice whatever. Every kind of perfection is pur-
chased at a high price on earth, where everything
is perhaps purchased too dear; one is an expert
in one's department at the price of being also a
victim of one's department. But you want to have
it otherwise—" more reasonable," above all more
convenient—is it not so, my dear contemporaries?
Very well! But then you will also immediately
get something different: that is to say, instead
of the craftsman and expert, the literary man, the
versatile, " many-sided " litterateur, who to be sure
lacks the hump—not taking account of the hump
or bow which he makes before you as the shopman
of the intellect and the " porter" of culture—, the
litterateur, who is really nothing, but " represents"
* An allusion to the German Proverb, "Handwerk hat
einen goldenen Boden. "—Tr.


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WE FEARLESS ONES 327
almost everything: he plays and "represents" the
expert, he also takes it upon himself in all modesty
to see that he is paid, honoured and celebrated in
this position. —No, my learned friends! I bless
you even on account of your humps! And also
because like me you despise the litterateurs and
parasites of culture! And because you do not
know how to make merchandise of your intellect!
And have so many opinions which cannot be ex-
pressed in money value! And because you do not
represent anything which you are not! Because
your sole desire is to become masters of your craft;
because you reverence every kind of mastership and
ability, and repudiate with the most relentless
scorn everything of a make-believe, half-genuine,
dressed-up, virtuoso, demagogic, histrionic nature
in litteris et artibus—all that which does not con-
vince you by its absolute genuineness of discipline
and preparatory training, or cannot stand your
test! (Even genius does not help a person to get
over such a defect, however well it may be able
to deceive with regard to it: one understands this
if one has once looked closely at our most gifted
painters and musicians,—who almost without ex-
ception, can artificially and supplementarily appro-
priate to themselves (by means of artful inventions
of style, make-shifts, and even principles), the
appearance of that genuineness, that solidity of
training and culture; to be sure, without thereby
deceiving themselves, without thereby imposing
perpetual silence on their bad consciences. For
you know well enough that all great modern artists
suffer from bad consciences? . . . )


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328 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
367.
How one has to Distinguish first of all in
Works of Art. —Everything that is thought, versi-
fied, painted and composed, yea, even built and
moulded, belongs either to monologic art, or to
art before witnesses. Under the latter there is also
to be included the apparently monologic art which
involves the belief in God, the whole lyric of prayer;
because for a pious man there is no solitude,—we,
the godless, have been the first to devise this inven-
tion. I know of no profounder distinction in all the
perspective of the artist than this: Whether he
looks at his growing work of art (at "himself—")
with the eye of the witness; or whether he "has
forgotten the world," as is the essential thing in all
monologic art,—it rests on forgetting, it is the music
of forgetting.
368.
The Cynic Speaks. —My objections to Wagner's
music are physiological objections. Why should I
therefore begin by disguising them under aesthetic
formulae? My "point" is that I can no longer
breathe freely when this music begins to operate
on me; my foot immediately becomes indignant
at it and rebels: for what it needs is time, dance
and march; it demands first of all from music the
ecstasies which are in good walking, striding, leap-
ing and dancing. But do not my stomach, my
heart, my blood and my bowels also protest?
Do I not become hoarse unawares under its
influence? And then I ask myself what it is
really that my body wants from music generally.


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WE FEARLESS ONES 329
I believe it wants to have relief: so that all animal
functions should be accelerated by means of light,
bold, unfettered, self-assured rhythms; so that
brazen, leaden life should be gilded by means of
golden, good, tender harmonies. My melancholy
would fain rest its head in the hiding-places and
abysses of perfection: for this reason I need music.
What do I care for the drama! What do I care
for the spasms of its moral ecstasies, in which the
"people" have their satisfaction! What do I
care for the whole pantomimic hocus-pocus of the
actor! . . . It will now be divined that I am
essentially anti-theatrical at heart,—but Wagner on
the contrary, was essentially a man of the stage and
an actor, the most enthusiastic mummer-worshipper
that has ever existed, even among musicians! . . .
And let it be said in passing that if Wagner's
theory was that " drama is the object, and music is
only the means to it,"—his practice on the contrary
from beginning to end has been to the effect that
"attitude is the object, drama and even music can
never be anything else but means to that" Music
as a means of elucidating, strengthening and inten-
sifying dramatic poses and the actor's appeal to the
senses, and Wagnerian drama only an opportunity
for a number of dramatic attitudes! Wagner
possessed, along with all other instincts, the dicta-
torial instinct of a great actor in all and everything,
and as has been said, also as a musician. —I once
made this clear with some trouble to a thorough-
going Wagnerian, and I had reasons for adding:—
"Do be a little more honest with yourself: we are
not now in the theatre. In the theatre we are only


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330 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
honest in the mass; as individuals we lie, we belie
even ourselves. We leave ourselves at home when
we go to the theatre; we there renounce the right
to our own tongue and choice, to our taste, and
even to our courage as we possess it and practise
it within our own four walls in relation to God and
man. No one takes his finest taste in art into the
theatre with him, not even the artist who works
for the theatre: there one is people, public,
herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, democrat,
neighbour, and fellow-creature; there even the
most personal conscience succumbs to the levelling
charm of the 'great multitude'; there stupidity
operates as wantonness and contagion; there the
neighbour rules, there one becomes a neighbour. . . . "
(I have forgotten to mention what my enlightened
Wagnerian answered to my physiological objec-
tions: "So the fact is that you are really not
healthy enough for our music ? "—)
369-
Juxtapositions in us. —Must we not acknowledge
to ourselves, we artists, that there is a strange
discrepancy in us; that on the one hand our taste,
and on the other hand our creative power, keep
apart in an extraordinary manner, continue apart,
and have a separate growth ;—I mean to say that
they have entirely different gradations and tempi
of age, youth, maturity, mellowness and rotten-
ness? So that, for example, a musician could all
his life create things which contradict all that
his ear and heart, spoilt as they are for listening,
prize, relish and prefer:—he would not even re-


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WE FEARLESS ONES 331
quire to be aware of the contradiction! As an
almost painfully regular experience shows, a
person's taste can easily outgrow the taste of
his power, even without the latter being thereby
paralysed or checked in its productivity. The
reverse, however, can also to some extent take
place,—and it is to this especially that I should
like to direct the attention of artists. A constant
producer, a man who is a "mother" in the grand
sense of the term, one who no longer knows or
hears of anything except pregnancies and child-
beds of his spirit, who has no time at all to reflect
and make comparisons with regard to himself and
his work, who is also no longer inclined to exercise
his taste, but simply forgets it, letting it take its
chance of standing, lying or falling,—perhaps such
a man at last produces works on which he is then
not at all fit to pass a judgment: so that he
speaks and thinks foolishly about them and about
himself. This seems to me almost the normal
condition with fruitful artists,—nobody knows a
child worse than its parents—and the rule applies
even (to take an immense example) to the entire
Greek world of poetry and art, which was never
"conscious " of what it had done. . . .
370.
What is Romanticism ? —It will be remembered
perhaps, at least among my friends, that at first
I assailed the modern world with some gross
errors and exaggerations, but at any rate with hope
in my heart. I recognised—who knows from what
personal experiences? —the philosophical pessimism


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332 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a
higher power of thought, a more daring courage
and a more triumphant plenitude of life than had
been characteristic of the eighteenth century, the
age of Hume, Kant, Condillac, and the sensualists:
so that the tragic view of things seemed to me the
peculiar luxury of our culture, its most precious,
noble, and dangerous mode of prodigality; but
nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, a
justifiable luxury. In the same way I interpreted
for myself German music as the expression of a
Dionysian power in the German soul: I thought
I heard in it the earthquake by means of which a
primeval force that had been imprisoned for ages
was finally finding vent—indifferent as to whether
all that usually calls itself culture was thereby
made to totter. It is obvious that I then mis-
understood what constitutes the veritable character
both of philosophical pessimism and of German
music, — namely, their Romanticism. What is
Romanticism? Every art and every philosophy
may be regarded as a healing and helping appli-
ance in the service of growing, struggling life:
they always presuppose suffering and sufferers.
But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one
hand those that suffer from overflowing vitality, who
need Dionysian art, and require a tragic view and
insight into life; and on the other hand those who
suffer from reduced vitality, who seek repose, quiet-
ness, calm seas, and deliverance from themselves
through art or knowledge, or else intoxication,
spasm, bewilderment and madness. All Romanti-
cism in art and knowledge responds to the twofold


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WE FEARLESS ONES 333
craving of the latter; to them Schopenhauer as well
as Wagner responded (and responds),—to name
those most celebrated and decided romanticists who
were then misunderstood by me {not however to their
disadvantage, as may be reasonably conceded to
me). The being richest in overflowing vitality,
the Dionysian God and man, may not only allow
himself the spectacle of the horrible and question-
able, but even the fearful deed itself, and all the
luxury of destruction, disorganisation and negation.
With him evil, senselessness and ugliness seem as
it were licensed, in consequence of the overflowing
plenitude of procreative, fructifying power, which
can convert every desert into a luxuriant orchard.
Conversely, the greatest sufferer, the man poorest
in vitality, would have most need of mildness, peace
and kindliness in thought and action: he would
need, if possible, a God who is specially the God
of the sick, a " Saviour"; similarly he would have
need of logic, the abstract intelligibility of exist-
ence—for logic soothes and gives confidence;—in
short he would need a certain warm, fear-dispelling
narrowness and imprisonment within optimistic
horizons. In this manner I gradually began to
understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian
pessimist;— in a similar manner also the "Christian,"
who in fact is only a type of Epicurean, and like
him essentially a romanticist:—and my vision has
always become keener in tracing that most diffi-
cult and insidious of all forms of retrospective
inference, in which most mistakes have been made—
the inference from the work to its author from
the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who


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334 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
needs it, from every mode of thinking and valuing
to the imperative want behind it. —In regard to all
aesthetic values I now avail myself of this radical
distinction: I ask in every single case, " Has hunger
or superfluity become creative here? " At the out-
set another distinction might seem to recommend
itself more—it is far more conspicuous,—namely,
to have in view whether the desire for rigidity, for
perpetuation, for being is the cause of the creating,
or the desire for destruction, for change, for the
new, for the future—for becoming. But when looked
at more carefully, both these kinds of desire prove
themselves ambiguous, and are explicable precisely
according to the before-mentioned and, as it seems
to me, rightly preferred scheme. The desire for
destruction, change and becoming, may be the
expression of overflowing power, pregnant with
futurity (my terminus for this is of course the word
"Dionysian"); but it may also be the hatred of the
ill-constituted, destitute and unfortunate, which
destroys, and must destroy, because the enduring,
yea, all that endures, in fact all being, excites and
provokes it. To understand this emotion we have
but to look closely at our anarchists. The will
to perpetuation requires equally a double inter-
pretation. It may on the one hand proceed from
gratitude and love:—art of this origin will always
be an art of apotheosis, perhaps dithyrambic, as
with Rubens, mocking divinely, as with Hafiz, or
clear and kind-hearted as with Goethe, and spread-
ing a Homeric brightness and glory over every-
thing (in this case I speak of Apollonian art). It
may also, however, be the tyrannical will of a


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WE FEARLESS ONES 335
sorely-suffering, struggling or tortured being, who
would like to stamp his most personal, individual
and narrow characteristics, the very idiosyn-
crasy of his suffering, as an obligatory law and
constraint on others; who, as it were, takes
revenge on all things, in that he imprints, enforces
and brands his image, the image of his torture,
upon them. The latter is romantic pessimism in
its most extreme form, whether it be as Schopen-
hauerian will-philosophy, or as Wagnerian music :—
romantic pessimism, the last great event in the
destiny of our civilisation. (That there may be
quite a different kind of pessimism, a classical
pessimism—this presentiment and vision belongs
to me, as something inseparable from me, as my
proprium and ipsissimum; only that the word
"classical " is repugnant to my ears, it has become
far too worn, too indefinite and indistinguish-
able. I call that pessimism of the future,—for it
is coming! I see it coming ! —Dionysian pessimism. )
371-
We Unintelligible Ones. —Have we ever com-
plained among ourselves of being misunderstood,
misjudged, and confounded with others; of being
calumniated, misheard, and not heard? That is just
our lot—alas, for a long time yet! say, to be modest,
until 1901—, it is also our distinction ; we should not
have sufficient respect for ourselves if we wished
it otherwise. People confound us with others—
the reason of it is that we ourselves grow, we
change continually, we cast off old bark, we still
slough every spring, we always become younger,


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336 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
higher, stronger, as men of the future, we thrust
our roots always more powerfully into the deep—
into evil—, while at the same time %ve embrace
the heavens ever more lovingly, more extensively,
and suck in their light ever more eagerly with
all our branches and leaves. We grow like trees
—that is difficult to understand, like all life ! —not
in one place, but everywhere, not in one direction
only, but upwards and outwards, as well as inwards
and downwards. At the same time our force
shoots forth in stem, branches, and roots; we are
really no longer free to do anything separately, or
to be anything separately. . . . Such is our lot, as
we have said: we grow in height; and even should
it be our calamity—for we dwell ever closer to
the lightning! —well, we honour it none the less
on that account; it is that which we do not wish
to share with others, which we do not wish to
bestow upon others, the fate of all elevation, our
fate. . . .
372.
Why we are not Idealists. —Formerly philosophers
were afraid of the senses: have we, perhaps, been
far too forgetful of this fear? We are at present
all of us sensualists, we representatives of the
present and of the future in philosophy,—not
according to theory, however, but in praxis, in
practice. . . . Those former philosophers, on the
contrary, thought that the senses lured them out
of their world, the cold realm of" ideas," to a dan-
gerous southern island where they were afraid that
their philosopher-virtues would melt away like snow
in the sun. "Wax in the ears," was then almost a


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WE FEARLESS ONES 337
condition of philosophising; a genuine philosopher
no longer listened to life, in so far as life is music,
he denied the music of life—it is an old philoso-
phical superstition that all music is Sirens' music. —
Now we should be inclined at the present day to
judge precisely in the opposite manner (which in
itself might be just as false), and to regard ideas,
with their cold, anaemic appearance, and not even
in spite of this appearance, as worse seducers
than the senses. They have always lived on the
"blood" of the philosopher, they always consumed
his senses, and indeed, if you will believe me,
his " heart" as well. Those old philosophers were
heartless: philosophising was always a species of
vampirism. At the sight of such figures even as
Spinoza, do you not feel a profoundly enigma-
tical and disquieting sort of impression? Do you
not see the drama which is here performed, the
constantly increasing pallor—, the spiritualisation
always more ideally displayed? Do you not
imagine some long-concealed blood-sucker in the
background, which makes its beginning with the
senses, and in the end retains or leaves behind
nothing but bones and their rattling? —I mean
categories, formulae, and words (for you will pardon
me in saying that what remains of Spinoza, amor
intellectualis dei, is rattling and nothing more!
What is amor, what is deus, when they have lost
every drop of blood? . . . ) In summa: all philo-
sophical idealism has hitherto been something like
a disease, where it has not been, as in the case of
Plato, the prudence of superabundant and danger-
ous healthfulness, the fear of overpowerful senses,
39


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338 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
and the wisdom of a wise Socratic. —Perhaps, is it
the case that we moderns are merely not sufficiently
sound to require Plato's idealism? And we do not
fear the senses because
373-
"Science" as Prejudice. —It follows from the
laws of class distinction that the learned, in so
far as they belong to the intellectual middle-class,
are debarred from getting even a sight of the really
great problems and notes of interrogation. Besides,
their courage, and similarly their outlook, does not
reach so far,—and above all, their need, which
makes them investigators, their innate anticipation
and desire that things should be constituted in such
and such a way, their fears and hopes are too soon
quieted and set at rest. For example, that which
makes the pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer,
so enthusiastic in his way, and impels him to
draw a line of hope, a horizon of desirability, the
final reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" of
which he dreams,—that almost causes nausea to
people like us:—a humanity with such Spencerian
perspectives as ultimate perspectives would seem
to us deserving of contempt, of extermination!
But the fact that something has to be taken by
him as his highest hope, which is regarded, and
may well be regarded, by others merely as a
distasteful possibility, is a note of interrogation
which Spencer could not have foreseen. . . . It is
just the same with the belief with which at present
so many materialistic natural-scientists are content,
the belief in a world which is supposed to have its


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WE FEARLESS ONES 339
equivalent and measure in human thinking and
human valuations, a "world of truth" at which we
might be able ultimately to arrive with the help
of our insignificant, four-cornered human reason!
What? do we actually wish to have existence
debased in that fashion to a ready-reckoner
exercise and calculation for stay-at-home mathe-
maticians? We should not, above all, seek to
divest existence of its ambiguous character: good
taste forbids it, gentlemen, the taste of reverence
for everything that goes beyond your horizon!
That a world-interpretation is alone right by which
you maintain your position, by which investigation
and work can go on scientifically in your sense
(you really mean mechanically ? ), an interpretation
which acknowledges numbering, calculating, weigh-
ing, seeing and handling, and nothing more—such
an idea is a piece of grossness and naivety, pro-
vided it is not lunacy and idiocy. Would the
reverse not be quite probable, that the most super-
ficial and external characters of existence—its most
apparent quality, its outside, its embodiment—
should let themselves be apprehended first? per-
haps alone allow themselves to be apprehended?
A "scientific" interpretation of the world as you
understand it might consequently still be one of
the stupidest, that is to say, the most destitute
of significance, of all possible world-interpreta-
tions :—I say this in confidence to my friends the
Mechanicians, who to-day like to hobnob with
philosophers, and absolutely believe that mechanics
is the teaching of the first and last laws upon which,
as upon a ground-floor, all existence must be


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340 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
built. But an essentially mechanical world would
be an essentially meaningless world! Supposing we
valued the worth of a music with reference to how
much it could be counted, calculated, or formulated
—how absurd such a " scientific " estimate of music
would be! What would one have apprehended,
understood, or discerned in it! Nothing, absolutely
nothing of what is really " music" in it! . . .
374-
Our new "Infinite"—How far the perspective
character of existence extends, or whether it have
any other character at all, whether an existence
without explanation, without "sense" does not
just become "nonsense," whether, on the other
hand, all existence is not essentially an explaining
existence—these questions, as is right and proper,
cannot be determined even by the most diligent
and severely conscientious analysis and self-
examination of the intellect, because in this
analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing
itself in its perspective forms, and only in them.
We cannot see round our corner: it is hopeless
curiosity to want to know what other modes of
intellect and perspective there might be: for
example, whether any kind of being could perceive
time backwards, or alternately forwards and back-
wards (by which another direction of life and another
conception of cause and effect would be given).
But I think that we are to-day at least far from
the ludicrous immodesty of decreeing from our
nook that there can only be legitimate perspectives
from that nook. The world, on the contrary, has


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WE FEARLESS ONES 341
once more become "infinite" to us: in so far we
cannot dismiss the possibility that it contains
infinite interpretations. Once more the great horror
seizes us—but who would desire forthwith to deify
once more this monster of an unknown world in
the old fashion? And perhaps worship the unknown
thing as the "unknown person" in future? Ah!
there are too many ungodly possibilities of inter-
pretation comprised in this unknown, too much
devilment, stupidity and folly of interpretation,—
also our own human, all too human interpretation
itself, which we know. . . .
375-
Why we Seem to be Epicureans. —We are cautious,
we modern men, with regard to final convictions,
our distrust lies in wait for the enchantments and
tricks of conscience involved in every strong
belief, in every absolute Yea and Nay: how is this
explained? Perhaps one may see in it a good
deal of the caution of the "burnt child," of the
disillusioned idealist; but one may also see in it
another and better element, the joyful curiosity
of a former lingerer in the corner, who has
been brought to despair by his nook, and now
luxuriates and revels in its antithesis, in the un-
bounded, in the "open air in itself. " Thus there
is developed an almost Epicurean inclination for
knowledge, which does not readily lose sight of
the questionable character of things; likewise
also a repugnance to pompous moral phrases and
attitudes, a taste that repudiates all coarse, square
contrasts, and is proudly conscious of its habitual


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342 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
reserve. For this too constitutes our pride, this
easy tightening of the reins in our headlong im-
pulse after certainty, this self-control of the rider in
his most furious riding: for now, as of old we have
mad, fiery steeds under us, and if we delay, it is
certainly least of all the danger which causes us
to delay. . . .
376.
Our Slow Periods. —It is thus that artists feel,
and all men of "works," the maternal species of
men: they always believe at every chapter of their
life—a work always makes a chapter—that they
have already reached the goal itself; they would
always patiently accept death with the feeling:
"we are ripe for it. " This is not the expression
of exhaustion,—but rather that of a certain
autumnal sunniness and mildness, which the work
itself, the maturing of the work, always leaves
behind in its originator. Then the tempo of life
slows down—turns thick and flows with honey—into
long pauses, into the belief in the long pause. . . .
377-
We Homeless Ones. —Among the Europeans of
to-day there are not lacking those who may call
themselves homeless ones in a way which is at once
a distinction and an honour; it is by them that my
secret wisdom and gaya scienza is expressly to be
laid to heart.