No More Learning

I am too inquisitive, too incredulous, too high
spirited, to be satisfied with such a palpably clumsy
solution of things. God is a too palpably clumsy
solution of things; a solution which shows a lack of
delicacy towards us thinkers—at bottom He is really
no more than a coarse and rude prohibition of us:
ye shall not think ! . . . I am much more interested
in another question,—a question upon which the
"salvation of humanity" depends to a far greater
degree than it does upon any piece of theological
curiosity: I refer to nutrition. For ordinary pur-
poses, it may be formulated as follows: "How pre-
cisely must thou feed thyself in order to attain to thy
maximum of power, or virtu in the Renaissance
style,—of virtue free from moralic acid? " My
experiences in regard to this matter have been as
bad as they possibly could be; I am surprised that
I set myself this question so late in life, and that it
took me so long to draw "rational " conclusions
from my experiences. Only the absolute worth-
lessness of German culture—its " idealism "—can
to some extent explain how it was that precisely in
this matter I was so backward that my ignorance
was almost saintly. This "culture," which from first
to last teaches one to lose sight of actual things and
to hunt after thoroughly problematic and so-called
ideal aims, as, for instance, " classical culture "—as
if it were not hopeless from the start to try to unite
"classical" and "German" in one concept. It is
even a little comical—try and imagine a " classic-
ally cultured " citizen of Leipzig ! —Indeed, I can
say, that up to a very mature age, my food was en-


## p. 30 (#56) ##############################################

30 ECCE HOMO
tirely bad—expressed morally, it was "impersonal,"
"selfless," "altruistic," to the glory of cooks and all
other fellow-Christians. It was through the cook-
ing in vogue at Leipzig, for instance, together
with my first study of Schopenhauer (1865), that
I earnestly renounced my "Will to Live. " To
spoil one's stomach by absorbing insufficient
nourishment—this problem seemed to my mind
solved with admirable felicity by the above-men-
tioned cookery. (It is said that in the year
1866 changes were introduced into this depart-
ment. ) But as to German cookery in general—
what has it not got on its conscience! Soup
before the meal (still called alia tedesca in the Vene-
tian cookery books of the sixteenth century); meat
boiled to shreds, vegetables cooked with fat and
flour; the degeneration of pastries into paper-
weights! And, if you add thereto the absolutely
bestial post-prandial drinking habits of the ancients,
and not alone of the ancient Germans, you will
understand where German intellect took its origin—
that is to say, in sadly disordered intestines. . . .
German intellect is indigestion; it can assimilate
nothing. But even English diet, which in com-
parison with German, and indeed with French ali-
mentation, seems to me to constitute a "return to
Nature,"—that is to say, to cannibalism,—is pro-
foundly opposed to my own instincts. It seems
to me to give the intellect heavy feet, in fact,
Englishwomen's feet. . . . The best cooking is
that of Piedmont. Alcoholic drinks do not agree
with me; a single glass of wine or beer a day is
amply sufficient to turn life into a valley of tears


## p. 31 (#57) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 31
for me;—in Munich live my antipodes. Although
I admit that this knowledge came to me somewhat
late, it already formed part of my experience even
as a child. As a boy I believed that the drinking
of wine and the smoking of tobacco were at first but
the vanities of youths, and later merely bad habits.
Maybe the poor wine of Naumburg was partly re-
sponsible for this poor opinion of wine in general.
In order to believe that wine was exhilarating, I
should have had to be a Christian—in other words,
I should have had to believe in what, to my mind, is
an absurdity. Strange to say, whereas small quan-
tities of alcohol, taken with plenty of water, suc-
ceed in making me feel out of sorts, large quanti-
ties turn me almost into a rollicking tar. Even as
a boy I showed my bravado in this respect. To
compose a long Latin essay in one night, to revise
and recopy it, to aspire with my pen to emulating
the exactitude and the terseness of my model,
Sallust, and to pour a few very strong grogs over
it all—this mode of procedure, while I was a pupil
at the venerable old school of Pforta, was not in the
least out of keeping with my physiology, nor per-
haps with that of Sallust, however much it may have
been alien to dignified Pforta. Later on, towards
the middle of my life, I grew more and more op-
posed to alcoholic drinks: I, an opponent of vege-
tarianism, who have experienced what vegetarian-
ism is,—just as Wagner, who converted me back
to meat, experienced it,—cannot with sufficient
earnestness advise all more spiritual natures to ab-
stain absolutely from alcohol. Water answers the
purpose. . . . I have a predilection in favour of


## p. 32 (#58) ##############################################

32 ECCE HOMO
those places where in all directions one has oppor-
tunities of drinking from running brooks (Nice,
Turin, Sils). In vino Veritas: it seems that here
once more I am at variance with the rest of the
world about the concept " Truth "—with me spirit
moves on the face of the waters. . . . Here are a
few more indications as to my morality. A heavy
meal is digested more easily than an inadequate one.
The first principle of a good digestion is that the
stomach should become active as a whole. A man
ought, therefore, to know the size of his stomach.
For the same reasons all those interminable meals,
which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts, and which
are to be had at any table d'hdte, are strongly
to be deprecated. Nothing should be eaten be-
tween meals, coffee should be given up—coffee
makes one gloomy. Tea is beneficial only in the
morning. It should be taken in small quantities,
but very strong. It may be very harmful, and indis-
pose you for the whole day, if it be taken the least
bit too weak. Everybody has his own standard
in this matter,often between the narrowest and most
delicate limits. In an enervating climate tea is not
a good beverage with which to start the day: an
hour before taking it an excellent thing is to drink
a cup of thick cocoa, freed from oil. Remain seated
as little as possible, put no trust in any thought
that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment
of free bodily motion—nor in one in which even
the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices
take their origin in the intestines. A sedentary life,
as I have already said elsewhere, is the real sin
against the Holy Spirit.


## p. 33 (#59) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 33
To the question of nutrition, that of locality and
climate is next of kin. Nobody is so constituted
as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere;
and he who has great duties to perform, which lay
claim to all his strength, has, in this respect, a very
limited choice. The influence of climate upon the
bodily functions, affecting their acceleration or re-
tardation, extends so far, that a blunder in the
choice of locality and climate is able not only to
alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to
withhold it from him altogether, so that he never
even comes face to face with it. Animal vigour
never acquires enough strength in him in order to
reach that pitch of artistic freedom which makes
his own soul whisper to him: I, alone, can do
that. . . . Ever so slight a tendency to laziness in
the intestines, once it has become a habit, is quite
sufficient to make something mediocre, something
"German " out of a genius; the climate of Germany,
alone, is enough to discourage the strongest and
most heroically disposed intestines. The tempo of
the body's functions is closely bound up with the
agility or the clumsiness of the spirit's feet; spirit
itself is indeed only a form of these organic func-
tions. Let anybody make a list of the places in
which men of great intellect have been found, and
are still found; where wit, subtlety, and malice
constitute happiness ; where genius is almost neces-
sarily at home: all of them rejoice in exceptionally
dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem,
Athens—these names prove something, namely:
c


## p. 34 (#60) ##############################################

34 ECCE HOMO
that genius is conditioned by dry air, by a pure
sky—that is to say, by rapid organic functions, by
the constant and ever-present possibility of procur-
ing for one's self great and even enormous quantities
of strength. I have a certain case in mind in which
a man of remarkable intellect and independent
spirit became a narrow, craven specialist and a
grumpy old crank,simply owing to a lack of subtlety
in his instinct for climate. And I myself might
have been an example of the same thing, if illness
had not compelled me to reason, and to reflect upon
reason realistically. Now that I have learnt through
long practice to read the effects of climatic and
meteorological influences, from my own body, as
though from a very delicate and reliable instrument,
and that I am able to calculate the change in de-
grees of atmospheric moisture by means of physio-
logical observations upon myself, even on so short
a journey as that from Turin to Milan; I think with
horror of the ghastly fact that my whole life, until
the last ten years,—the most perilous years,—has
always been spent in the wrong, and what to me
ought to have been the most forbidden, places.
Naumburg, Pforta, Thuringia in general, Leipzig,
Bale, Venice—so many ill-starred places for a con-
stitution like mine. If I cannot recall one single
happy reminiscence of my childhood and youth, it
is nonsense to suppose that so-called "moral"
causes could account for this—as, for instance, the
incontestable fact that I lacked companions that
could have satisfied me; for this fact is the same
to-day as it ever was, and it does not prevent me
from being cheerful and brave. But it was ignor-


## p. 35 (#61) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 35
ance in physiological matters—that confounded
"Idealism "—that was the real curse of my life.
This was the superfluous and foolish element in my
existence; something from which nothing could
spring, and for which there can be no settlement
and no compensation. As the outcome of this
"Idealism" I regard all the blunders, the great ab-
errations of instinct, and the "modest specialisa-
tions" which drew me aside from the task of my
life; as, for instance, the fact that I became a philo-
logist—why not at least a medical man or anything
else which might have opened my eyes? My days
at Bale, the whole of my intellectual routine, in-
cluding my daily time-table, was an absolutely
senseless abuse of extraordinary powers, without
the slightest compensation for the strength that I
spent, without even a thought of what I was squan-
dering and how its place might be filled. I lacked
all subtlety in egoism, all the fostering care of an
imperative instinct; I was in a state in which one
is ready to regard one's self as anybody's equal, a
state of " disinterestedness," a forgetting of one's
distance from others—something,in short, for which
I can never forgive myself. When I had well-nigh
reached the end of my tether, simply because I had
almost reached my end, I began to reflect upon the
fundamental absurdity of my life—" Idealism. " It
was illness that first brought me to reason.
After the choice of nutrition,the choice of climate
and locality, the third matter concerning which one


## p. 36 (#62) ##############################################

36 ECCE HOMO
must not on any account make a blunder, is the
choice of the manner in which one recuperates one's
strength. Here, again, according to the extent to
which a spirit is suigeneris, the limits of that which
he can allow himself—in other words, the limits of
that which is beneficial to him—become more and
more confined. As far as I in particular am con-
cerned, reading in general belongs to my means
of recuperation; consequently it belongs to that
which rids me of myself, to that which enables me
to wander in strange sciences and strange souls—
to that,in fact,about which I am no longer in earnest.
Indeed, it is while reading that I recover from my
earnestness. During the time that I am deeply
absorbed in my work, no books are found within my
reach; it would never occur to me to allow any one
to speak or even to think in my presence. For that
is what reading would mean. . . . Has any one ever
actually noticed, that, during the period of profound
tension to which the state of pregnancy condemns
not only the mind, but also, at bottom, the whole
organism, accident and every kind of external
stimulus acts too acutely and strikes too deep? Ac-
cident and external stimuli must, as far as possible,
be avoided: a sort of walling-of-one's-self-in is one
of the primary instinctive precautions of spiritual
pregnancy. Shall I allow a strange thought to steal
secretly over the wall? For that is what reading
would mean. . . . The periods of work and fruit-
fulness are followed by periods of recuperation:
come hither, ye delightful, intellectual, intelligent
books! Shall I read German books? . . . I must
go back six months to catch myself with a book in


## p. 37 (#63) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 37
/
my hand. What was it? An excellent study by
Victor Brochard upon the Greek sceptics, in which
my Laertiana* was used to advantage. The
sceptics ! —the only honourable types among that
double-faced and sometimes quintuple-faced throng,
the philosophers! . . . Otherwise I almost always
take refuge in the same books: altogether their
number is small; they are books which are precisely
my proper fare. It is not perhaps in my nature to
read much, and of all sorts: a library makes me ill.
Neither is it my nature to love much or many kinds
of things. Suspicion or even hostility towards new
books is much more akin to my instinctive feeling
than "toleration," largeur de cceur, and other forms
of " neighbour-love. " . . . It is to a small number
of old French authors, that I always return again
and again; I believe only in French culture, and
regard everything else in Europe which calls itself
"culture " as a misunderstanding. I do not even
take the German kind into consideration. . . . The
few instances of higher culture with which I have
* Nietzsche, as is well known, devoted much time when a
student at Leipzig to the study of three Greek philosophers,
Theognis, Diogenes Laertius, and Democritus. This study
first bore fruit in the case of a paper, Zur Geschichte der Theo-
gnideischen Spruchsammlung, which was subsequently pub-
lished by the most influential journal of classical philology in
Germany. Later, however, it enabled Nietzsche to enter for
the prize offered by the University of Leipzig for an essay, De
fontibus Diogenis Laertii. He was successful in gaining the
prize, and the treatise was afterwards published in the
Rheinisches Museum, and is still quoted as an authority. It
is to this essay, written when he was twenty-three years of age,
that he here refers. —Tr.


## p. 38 (#64) ##############################################

38 ECCE HOMO
met in Germany were all French in their origin.
The most striking example of this was Madame
Cosima Wagner, by far the most decisive voice in
matters of taste that I have ever heard. If I do
not read, but literally love Pascal, as the most in-
stinctive sacrifice to Christianity, killing himself inch
by inch, first bodily, then spiritually, according to
the terrible consistency of this most appalling form
of inhuman cruelty; if I have something of Mon-
taigne's mischievousness in my soul, and—who
knows ? —perhaps also in my body; if my artist's
taste endeavours to defend the names of Moliere,
Corneille, and Racine, and not without bitterness,
against such a wild genius as Shakespeare—all
this does not prevent me from regarding even the
latter-day Frenchmen also as charming companions.
I can think of absolutely no century in history, in
which a netful of more inquisitive and at the same
time more subtle psychologists could be drawn up
together than in the Paris of the present day. Let
me mention a few at random—for their number is
by no means small—Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti,
Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemattre; or,
to point to one of strong race, a genuine Latin, of
whom I am particularly fond, Guy de Maupassant.
Between ourselves, I prefer this generation even to
its masters, all of whom were corrupted by German
philosophy (Taine, for instance, by Hegel, whom he
has to thank for his misunderstanding of great men
and great periods). Wherever Germany extends
her sway, she ruins culture. It was the war which
first saved the spirit of France. . . . Stendhal is one
of the happiest accidents of my life—for everything


## p. 39 (#65) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 39
that marks an epoch in it has been brought to me
by accident and never by means of a recommenda-
tion. He is quite priceless, with his psychologist's
eye, quick at forestalling and anticipating; with his
grasp of facts, which is reminiscent of the same art
in the greatest of all masters of facts {ex ungue Napo-
leonem); and, last but not least, as an honest atheist
—a specimen which is both rare and difficult to
discover in France—all honour to Prosper MeVi-
mee! . . . Maybe that I am even envious of Stend-
hal? He robbed me of the best atheistic joke, which
I of all people could have perpetrated: "God's only
excuse is that He does not exist. " . . . I myself
have said somewhere—What has been the greatest
objection to Life hitherto? —God. . . .
It was Heinrich Heine who gave me the most
perfect idea of what a lyrical poet could be. In
vain do I search through all the kingdoms of an-
tiquity or of modern times for anything to resemble
his sweet and passionate music. He possessed that
divine wickedness, without which perfection itself
becomes unthinkable to me,—I estimate the value
of men, of races, according to the extent to which
they are unable to conceive of a god who has not a
dash of the satyr in him. And with what mastery he
wields his native tongue! One day it will be said
of Heine and me that we were by far the greatest
artists of the German language that have ever ex-
isted, and that we left all the efforts that mere Ger-
man's made in this language an incalculable distance


## p. 40 (#66) ##############################################

40 ECCE HOMO
behind us. I must be profoundly related to Byron's
Manfred: of all the dark abysses in this work I found
the counterparts in my own soul—at the age of
thirteen I was ripe for this book. Words fail me,
I have only a look, for those who dare to utter the
name of Faust in the presence of Manfred. The
Germans are incapable of conceiving anything sub-
lime: for a proof of this, look at Schumann! Out
of anger for this mawkish Saxon, I once deliber-
ately composed a counter-overture to Manfred, of
which Hans von Billow declared he had never
seen the like before on paper: such compositions
amounted to a violation of Euterpe. When I cast
about me for my highest formula of Shakespeare, I
find invariably but this one: that he conceived the
type of Caesar. Such things a man cannot guess—
he either is the thing, or he is not. The great poet
draws his creations only from out of his own reality.
This is so to such an extent, that often after a lapse
of time he can no longer endure his own work. . . .
After casting a glance between the pages of my
Zarathustra, I pace my room to and fro for half an
hour at a time, unable to overcome an insufferable
fit of tears. I know of no more heartrending read-
ing than Shakespeare: how a man must have
suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown!
Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt, but certi-
tude that drives one mad. . . . But in order to feel
this, one must be profound, one must be an abyss,
a philosopher. . . . We all fear the truth. . . . And,
to make a confession; I feel instinctively certain and
convinced that Lord Bacon is the originator, the
self-torturer, of this most sinister kind of litera-


## p.
41 (#67) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 41
ture: what do I care about the miserable gabble
of American muddlers and blockheads? But the
power for the greatest realism in vision is not only
compatible with the greatest realism in deeds, with
the monstrous in deeds, with crime—it actually pre-
supposes the latter. . . . We do not know half enough
about Lord Bacon—the first realist in all the highest
acceptation of this word—to be sure of everything
he did, everything he willed, and everything he ex-
perienced in his inmost soul. . . . Let the critics go
to hell! Suppose I had christened my Zarathustra
with a name not my own,—let us say with Richard
Wagner's name,—the acumen of two /thousand
years would not have sufficed to guess that the
author of Human, ail-too-Human was the visionary
of Zarathustra.
As I am speaking here of the recreations of my
life, I feel I must express a word or two of gratitude
for that which has refreshed me by far the most
heartily and most profoundly. This, without the
slightest doubt, was my intimate relationship with
Richard Wagner. All my other relationships with
men I treat quite lightly; but I would not have the
days I spent at Tribschen—those days of con-
fidence, of cheerfulness, of sublime flashes, and of
profound moments—blotted from my life at any
price. I know not what Wagner may have been
for others; but no cloud ever darkened our sky.
And this brings me back again to France,—I have
no arguments against Wagnerites, and hoc genus
omne, who believe that they do honour to Wagner


## p. 42 (#68) ##############################################

42 ECCE HOMO
by believing him to be like themselves; for such
people I have only a contemptuous curl of my lip.
With a nature like mine, which is so strange to
everything Teutonic, that even the presence of a
German retards my digestion, my first meeting with
Wagner was the first moment in my life in which
I breathed freely: I felt him, I honoured him, as
a foreigner, as the opposite and the incarnate con-
tradiction of all"German virtues. " We who as chil-
dren breathed the marshy atmosphere of the fifties,
are necessarily pessimists in regard to the concept
"German"; we cannot be anything else than revolu-
tionaries—we can assent to no state of affairs which
allows the canting bigot to be at the top. I care
not a jot whether this canting bigot acts in different
colours to-day, whether he dresses in scarlet or dons
the uniform of a hussar. * Very well, then! Wagner
was a revolutionary—he fled from the Germans. . . .
As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save
in Paris; that subtlety of all the five senses which
Wagner's art presupposes, those fingers that can de-
tect slight gradations, psychological morbidity—all
these things can be found only in Paris. Nowhere
else can you meet with this passion for questions of
form, this earnestness in matters of mise-en-scene,
which is the Parisian earnestness/ar excellence. In
Germany no one has any idea of the tremendous am-
bition that fills the heart of a Parisian artist. The
German is a good fellow. Wagner was by no means
a good fellow. . . . But I have already said quite
* The favourite uniform of the German Emperor, William
II. —Tr.


## p. 43 (#69) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 43
enough on the subject of Wagner's real nature (see
Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 269), and about
those to whom he is most closely related. He is one
of the late French romanticists, that high-soaring
and heaven-aspiring band of artists, like Delacroix
and Berlioz, who in their inmost natures are sick and
incurable, and who are all fanatics of expression, and
virtuosos through and through. . . . Who, in sooth,
was the first intelligent followerof Wagner? Charles
Baudelaire, the very man who first understood Dela-
croix—that typical decadent, in whom a whole gen-
eration of artists saw their reflection; he was per-
haps the last of them too. . . . What is it that I have
never forgiven Wagner? The fact that he conde-
scended to the Germans—that he became a German
Imperialist. . . . Wherever Germany spreads, she
ruins culture.
Taking everything into consideration, I could
never have survived my youth without Wagnerian
music. For I was condemned to the society of
Germans. If a man wish to get rid of a feeling of
insufferable oppression, he has to take to hashish.
Well, I had to take to Wagner. Wagner is the
counter-poison to everything essentially German—
the fact that he is a poison too, I do not deny. From
the moment that Tristan was arranged for the piano
—all honour to you, Herr von Bulow! —I was a
Wagnerite. Wagner's previous works seemed be-
neath me—they were too commonplace, too " Ger-
man. " . . . But to this day I am still seeking for
a work which would be a match to Tristan in


## p. 44 (#70) ##############################################

44 • ECCE HOMO
dangerous fascination, and possess the same grue-
some and dulcet quality of infinity; I seek among
all the arts in vain. All the quaint features of
Leonardo da Vinci's work lose their charm at the
sound of the first bar in Tristan. This work is
without question Wagner's non plus ultra; after its
creation, the composition of the Mastersingers and
of the Ring was a relaxation to him. To become
more healthy—this in a nature like Wagner's
amounts to going backwards. The curiosity of the
psychologist is so great in me, that I regard it as
quite a special privilege to have lived at the right,
time, and to have lived precisely among Germans,
in order to be ripe for this work. The world must
indeed be empty for him who has never been un-
healthy enough for this " infernal voluptuousness ":
it is allowable, it is even imperative, to employ a
mystic formula for this purpose. I suppose I know
better than any one the prodigious feats of which
Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange
ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar;
and as I am alive to-day and strong enough to turn
even the most suspicious and most dangerous things
to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger,
I declare Wagner to have been the greatest bene-
factor of my life. The bond which unites us is the
fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at
each other's hands, than most men are able to bear
nowadays, and this will always keep our names
associated in the minds of men. For, just as Wagner
is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so,
in truth, am I, and ever will be. Ye lack two
centuries of psychological and artistic discipline, my


## p. 45 (#71) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 45
dear countrymen! . . . But ye can never recover
the time lost.
To the most exceptional of my readers I should
like to say just one word about what I really exact
from music. It must be cheerful and yet profound,
like an October afternoon. It must be original,
exuberant, and tender, and like a dainty,soft woman
in roguishness and grace. . . . I shall never admit
that a German can understand what music is. Those
musicians who are called German, the greatest and
most famous foremost, are allforeigners,either Slavs,
Croats, Italians, Dutchmen—or Jews; or else, like
Heinrich Schiitz, Bach, and Handel, they are Ger-
mans of a strong race which is now extinct. For
my own part, I have still enough of the Pole left in
me to let all other music go, if only I can keep
Chopin. For three reasons I would except Wag-
ner's Siegfried Idyll, and perhaps also one or two
things of Liszt, who excelled all other musicians in
the noble tone of his orchestration; and finally
everything that has been produced beyond the Alps
—this side of the Alps. * I could not possibly dis-
pense with Rossini, and still less with my Southern
soul in music, the work of my Venetian maestro,
Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps, all
I really mean is Venice. If I try to find a new
word for music, I can never find any other than
Venice. I know not how to draw any distinction
* In the latter years of his life, Nietzsche practically made
Italy his home. —Tr.


## p. 46 (#72) ##############################################

46 ECCE HOMO
between tears and music. I do not know how to
think either of joy, or of the south, without a
shudder of fear.
On the bridge I stood
Lately, in gloomy night.
Came a distant song:
In golden drops it rolled
Over the glittering rim away.
Music, gondolas, lights—
Drunk, swam far forth in the gloom. . . .
A stringed instrument, my soul,
Sang, imperceptibly moved,
A gondola song by stealth,
Gleaming for gaudy blessedness.
—Hearkened any thereto?
8
In all these things—in the choice of food, place,
climate, and recreation—the instinct of self-pre-
servation is dominant, and this instinct manifests
itself with least ambiguity when it acts as an in-
stinct of defence. To close one's eyes to much,
to seal one's ears to much, to keep certain things
at a distance—this is the first principle of prudence,
the first proof of the fact that a man is not an
accident but a necessity. The popular word for
this instinct of defence is taste. A man's impera-
tive command is not only to say " no" in cases
where "yes " would be a sign of "disinterested-
ness," but also to say "no" as seldom as possible.
One must part with all that which compels one to
repeat "no," with ever greater frequency. The
rationale of this principle is that all discharges of


## p. 47 (#73) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 47
defensive forces, however slight they may be, in-
volve enormous and absolutely superfluous losses
when they become regular and habitual. Our
greatest expenditure of strength is made up of
those small and most frequent discharges of it.
The act of keeping things off, of holding them at
a distance, amounts to a discharge of strength,—
do not deceive yourselves on this point! —and an
expenditure of energy directed at purely negative
ends. Simply by being compelled to keep con-
stantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak as
to be unable any longer to defend himself. Sup-
pose I were to step out of my house, and, instead
of the quiet and aristocratic city of Turin, I were
to find a German provincial town, my instinct
would have to brace itself together in order to
repel all that which would pour in upon it from
this crushed-down and cowardly world. Or sup-
pose I were to find a large German city—that
structure of vice in which nothing grows, but
where every single thing, whether good or bad, is
squeezed in from outside. In such circumstances
should I not be compelled to become a hedgehog?
But to have prickles amounts to a squandering of
strength; they even constitute a twofold luxury,
when, if we only chose to do so, we could dispense
with them and open our hands instead. . . .
Another form of prudence and self-defence con-
sists in trying to react as seldom as possible, and
to keep one's self aloof from those circumstances
and conditions wherein one would be condemned,
as it were, to suspend one's "liberty " and one's
initiative, and become a mere reacting medium.


## p. 48 (#74) ##############################################

48 ECCE HOMO
As an example of this I point to the intercourse
with books. The scholar who, in sooth, does little
else than handle books—with the philologist of
average attainments their number may amount to
two hundred a day—ultimately forgets entirely
and completely the capacity of thinking for him-
self. When he has not a book between his fingers
he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to
a stimulus (a thought he has read),—finally all he
does is to react. The scholar exhausts his whole
strength in saying either " yes " or " no" to matter
which has already been thought out, or in criticis-
ing it—he is no longer capable of thought on his
own account. . . . In him the instinct of self-
defence has decayed, otherwise he would defend
himself against books. The scholar is a decadent.
With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly en-
dowed, and free-spirited natures already " read to
ruins" at thirty, and mere wax vestas that have
to be rubbed before they can give off any sparks
—or " thoughts. " To set to early in the morning,
at the break of day, in all the fulness and dawn
of one's strength, and to read a book—this I call
positively vicious!
At this point I can no longer evade a direct
answer to the question, how one becomes what one
is. And in giving it, I shall have to touch upon
that masterpiece in the art of self-preservation,
which is selfishness. . . . Granting that one's life-
task—the determination and the fate of one's life-
task—greatly exceeds the average measure of


## p. 49 (#75) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER 49
such things, nothing more dangerous could be
conceived than to come face to face with one's
self by the side of this life-task. The fact that
one becomes what one is, presupposes that one
has not the remotest suspicion of what one is.
From this standpoint even the blunders of one's
life have their own meaning and value, the tem-
porary deviations and aberrations, the moments of
hesitation and of modesty, the earnestness wasted
upon duties which lie outside the actual life-task.
In these matters great wisdom, perhaps even the
highest wisdom, comes into activity: in these cir-
cumstances, in which nosce teipsum would be the
sure road to ruin, forgetting one's self, misunder-
standing one's self, belittling one's self, narrowing
one's self, and making one's self mediocre, amount
to reason itself. Expressed morally, to love one's
neighbour and to live for others and for other
things may be the means of protection employed
to maintain the hardest kind of egoism. This is
the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my
principle and conviction, take the side of the altru-
istic instincts; for here they are concerned in sub-
serving selfishness and self-discipline. The whole
surface of consciousness—for consciousness is a
surface—must be kept free from any one of the
great imperatives. Beware even of every striking
word, of every striking attitude! They are all so
many risks which the instinct runs of" understand-
ing itself" too soon. Meanwhile the organising
"idea," which is destined to become master, grows
and continues to grow into the depths,—it begins
to command, it leads you slowly back from your


## p. 49 (#76) ##############################################

48
ECCE HOMO
As an example of this I point to the intercourse
with books. The scholar who, in sooth, does little
else than handle books—with the philologist of
average attainments their number may amount to
two hundred a day—ultimately forgets entirely
and completely the capacity of thinking for him-
self. When he has not a book between his fingers
he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to
a stimulus (a thought he has read),—finally all he
does is to react. The scholar exhausts his whole
strength in saying either “yes” or “no” to matter
which has already been thought out, or in criticis-
ing it—he is no longer capable of thought on his
own account. . . . In him the instinct of self-
defence has decayed, otherwise he would defend
himself against books. The scholar is a decadent.
With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly en-
dowed, and free-spirited natures already “read to
ruins” at thirty, and mere wax vestas that have
to be rubbed before they can give off any sparks
—or “thoughts. ” To set to early in the morning,
at the break of day, in all the fulness and dawn
of one's strength, and to read a book—this I call
positively vicious !
At this point I can no longer evade a direct
answer to the question, how one becomes what one
is. And in giving it, I shall have to touch upon
that masterpiece in the art of self-preservation,
which is selfishness. . . . Granting that one's life.
task—the determination and the fate of one's life-
task-greatly exceeds the average measure of


## p. 49 (#77) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER
49
such things, nothing more dangerous could be
conceived than to come face to face with one's
self by the side of this life-task. The fact that
one becomes what one is, presupposes that one
has not the remotest suspicion of what one is.
From this standpoint even the blunders of one's
life have their own meaning and value, the tem-
porary deviations and aberrations, the moments of
hesitation and of modesty, the earnestness wasted
upon duties which lie outside the actual life-task.
In these matters great wisdom, perhaps even the
highest wisdom, comes into activity : in these cir-
cumstances, in which nosce teipsum would be the
sure road to ruin, forgetting one's self, misunder-
standing one's self, belittling one's self, narrowing
one's self, and making one's self mediocre, amount
to reason itself. Expressed morally, to love one's
neighbour and to live for others and for other
things may be the means of protection employed
to maintain the hardest kind of egoism. This is
the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my
principle and conviction, take the side of the altru-
istic instincts; for here they are concerned in sub-
serving selfishness and self-discipline. The whole
surface of consciousness—for consciousness is a
surface-must be kept free from any one of the
great imperatives. Beware even of every striking
word, of every striking attitude! They are all so
many risks which the instinct runs of" understand-
ing itself” too soon. Meanwhile the organising
“idea,” which is destined to become master, grows
and continues to grow into the depths,-it begins
to command, it leads you slowly back from your


## p. 50 (#78) ##############################################

50 ECCE HOMO
deviations and aberrations, it prepares individual
qualities and capacities, which one day will make
themselves felt as indispensable to the whole of
your task,—step by step it cultivates all the ser-
viceable faculties, before it ever whispers a word
concerning the dominant task, the "goal," the
"object," and the "meaning" of it all. Looked
at from this standpoint my life is simply amazing.
For the task of transvaluing values, more capaci-
ties were needful perhaps than could well be found
side by side in one individual; and above all, an-
tagonistic capacities which had to be free from the
mutual strife and destruction which they involve.
An order of rank among capacities; distance; the
art of separating without creating hostility; to re-
frain from confounding things; to keep from re-
conciling things; to possess enormous multifarious-
ness and yet to be the reverse of chaos—all this
was the first condition, the long secret work, and
the artistic mastery of my instinct. Its superior
guardianship manifested itself with such ex-
ceeding strength, that not once did I ever dream
of what was growing within me—until suddenly
all my capacities were ripe, and one day burst
forth in all the perfection of their highest bloom.
I cannot remember ever having exerted myself, I
can point to no trace of struggle in my life; I am
the reverse of a heroic nature. To " will " some-
thing, to "strive" after something, to have an
"aim" or a "desire" in my mind—I know none
of these things from experience. Even at this
moment I look out upon my future—a broad
future ! —as upon a calm sea: no sigh of longing


## p. 51 (#79) ##############################################

WHY I AM SO CLEVER
51
makes a ripple on its surface. I have not the
slightest wish that anything should be otherwise
than it is : I myself would not be otherwise. . . .
But in this matter I have always been the same.
I have never had a desire. A man who, after his
four-and-fortieth year, can say that he has never
bothered himself about honours, women, or money!
--not that they did not come his way. .