No More Learning

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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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. For their lot is hard, their hope un-
certain; it is a clever feat to devise consolation for
them. But what good does it do! We children of
the future, how could we be at home in the present?


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WE FEARLESS ONES 343
We are unfavourable to all ideals which could
make us feel at home in this frail, broken-down,
transition period; and as regards the "realities"
thereof, we do not believe in their endurance. The
ice which still carries us has become very thin : the
thawing wind blows; we ourselves, the homeless
ones, are an influence that breaks the ice, and the
other all too thin "realities. " . . . We "preserve"
nothing, nor would we return to any past age; we
are not at all "liberal," we do not labour for " pro-
gress," we do not need first to stop our ears to
the song of the market-place and the sirens of
the future—their song of "equal rights," "free
society," "no longer either lords or slaves," does
not allure us! We do not by any means think it
desirable that the kingdom of righteousness and
peace should he established pn ea/th (because
under any i circumstances II . » . . . id be the
kingdom of the profoundest mediocrity and
Chinaism); we rejoice in all men, who, like our-
selves, love danger, war and adventure, who do
not make compromises, nor let themselves
be captured, conciliated and stunted; we count
ourselves among the conquerors; we ponder over
the need of a new order of things, even of a new
slavery—for every strengthening and elevation of the
type "man" also involves a new form of slavery.
Is it not obvious that with all this we must feel ill
at ease in an age which claims the honour of being
the most humane, gentle and just that the sun has
ever seen? What a pity that at the mere mention
of these fine words, the thoughts at the back
of our minds are all the more unpleasant, that we


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344 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
see therein only the expression—or the masquerade
—of profound weakening, exhaustion, age, and de-
clining power! What can it matter to us with what
kind of tinsel an invalid decks out his weakness?
He may parade it as his virtue; there is no doubt
whatever that weakness makes people gentle, alas,
so gentle, so just, so inoffensive, so "humane"! —
The " religion of pity," to which people would like
to persuade us—yes, we know sufficiently well the
hysterical little men and women who need this
religion at present as a cloak and adornment!
We are no humanitarians; we should not dare to
speak of our " love of mankind "; for that, a person
of our stamp is not enough of an actor! Or not
sufficiently Saint-Simonist, not sufficiently French.
A person must have been affected with a Gallic
excess-of erotic susceptibility . and amorous im-
patience everf to approach mankind honourably
with his lewdness. . . . Mankind! Was there
ever a more hideous old woman among all old
women (unless perhaps it were "the, Truth ": a
question for philosophers)? No, we Mo not love
Mankind! On the other hand, however, we are not
nearly " German " enough (in the sense irt^which the
word " German" is current at present) to advocate
nationalism and race-hatred, or take delight^Mi the
national heart-itch and blood-poisoning, on account
of which the nations of Europe are at presen^
bounded off and secluded from one another as i
by quarantines. We are too unprejudiced for that,
too perverse, too fastidious; also too well-informed,
and too much "travelled. " We prefer much rather
to live on mountains, apart and "out of season," in



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WE FEARLESS ONES 345
past or coming centuries, in order merely to spare
ourselves the silent rage to which we know we
should be condemned as witnesses of a system of
politics which makes the German nation barren
by making it vain, and which is a petty
system besides:—will it not be necessary for
this system to plant itself between two mortal
hatreds, lest its own creation should immedi-
ately collapse? Will it not be obliged to desire
the perpetuation of the petty-state system of
Europe? . . . We homeless ones are too diverse
and mixed in race and descent as "modern
men," and are consequently little tempted to
participate in the falsified racial self-admiration
and lewdness which at present display themselves
in Germany, as signs of German sentiment, and
which strike one as doubly false and unbecoming
in the people with the " historical sense. " We are,
in a word—and it shall be our word of honour! —
good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, over-
wealthy heirs, also the too deeply pledged heirs
of millenniums of European thought. As such,
we have also outgrown Christianity, and are
disinclined to it — and just because we have
grown out of it, because our forefathers were
Christians uncompromising in their Christian in-
tegrity, who willingly sacrificed possessions and
positions, blood and country, for the sake of their
belief. We—do the same. For what, then? For
our unbelief? For all sorts of unbelief? Nay, you
know better than that, my friends! The hidden
Yea in you is stronger than all the Nays and
Perhapses, of which you and your age are sick;


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346 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
and when you are obliged to put out to sea, you
emigrants, it is—once more a faith which urges
you thereto! . . .
378.
"And once more Grow Clear"—We, the generous
and rich in spirit, who stand at the sides of the
streets like open fountains and would hinder no
one from drinking from us: we do not know,
alas! how to defend ourselves when we should
like to do so; we have no means of preventing
ourselves being made turbid and dark,—we have
no means of preventing the age in which we live
casting its "up-to-date rubbish" into us, nor of
hindering filthy birds throwing their excrement,
the boys their trash, and fatigued resting travellers
their misery, great and small, into us. But we
do as we have always done: we take whatever
is cast into us down into our depths — for we
are deep, we do not forget—and once more grow
clear. . . .
379-
The Foofs Interruption. —It is not a misanthrope
who has written this book: the hatred of men costs
too dear to-day. To hate as they formerly hated
man, in the fashion of Timon, completely, without
qualification, with all the heart, from the pure love
of hatred — for that purpose one would have to
renounce contempt: — and how much refined
pleasure, how much patience, how much bene-
volence even, do we owe to contempt! Moreover
we are thereby the "elect of God ": refined con-
tempt is our taste and privilege, our art, our virtue


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WE FEARLESS ONES 347
perhaps, we, the most modern amongst the
moderns! . . . Hatred, on the contrary, makes
equal, it puts men face to face, in hatred there is
honour; finally, in hatred there is fear, quite a
large amount of fear. We fearless ones, however,
we, the most intellectual men of the period,
know our advantage well enough to live without
fear as the most intellectual persons of this age.
People will not easily behead us, shut us up,
or banish us; they will not even ban or burn
our books. The age loves intellect, it loves us,
and needs us, even when we have to give it to
understand that we are artists in despising; that
all intercourse with men is something of a horror
to us; that with all our gentleness, patience,
humanity and courteousness, we cannot persuade
our nose to abandon its prejudice against the
proximity of man ; that we love nature the more,
the less humanly things are done by her, and
that we love art when it is the flight of the artist
from man, or the raillery of the artist at man, or the
raillery of the artist at himself. . . .
380.
"The Wanderer" Speaks. —In order for once to
get a glimpse of our European morality from a
distance, in order to compare it with other earlier
or future moralities, one must do as the traveller
who wants to know the height of the towers of
a city: for that purpose he leaves the city.
"Thoughts concerning moral prejudices," if they
are not to be prejudices concerning prejudices,
presuppose a position outside of morality, some


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348 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
sort of world beyond good and evil, to which
one must ascend, climb, or fly—and in the given
case at any rate, a position beyond our good and
evil, an emancipation from all "Europe," under-
stood as a sum of inviolable valuations which have
become part and parcel of our flesh and blood.
That one wants in fact to get outside, or aloft,
is perhaps a sort of madness, a peculiarly un-
reasonable "thou must"—for even we thinkers
have our idiosyncrasies of "unfree will "—: the
question is whether one can really get there. That
may depend on manifold conditions: in the main
it is a question of how light or how heavy we
are, the problem of our "specific gravity. " One
must be very light in order to impel one's will to
knowledge to such a distance, and as it were beyond
one's age, in order to create eyes for oneself for the
survey of millenniums, and a pure heaven in these
eyes besides! One must have freed oneself from
many things by which we Europeans of to-day are
oppressed, hindered, held down, and made heavy.
The man of such a "Beyond," who wants to get
even in sight of the highest standards of worth of
his age, must first of all "surmount" this age in him-
self—it is the test of his power—and consequently
not only his age, but also his past aversion and
opposition to his age, his suffering caused by his
age, his unseasonableness, his Romanticism. . . .
381.
The Question of Intelligibility. —One not only
wants to be understood when one writes, but also
—quite as certainly—not to be understood. It is


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WE FEARLESS ONES 349
by no means an objection to a book when someone
finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have
been the intention of its author,—perhaps he did
not want to be understood by "anyone. " A
distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to
communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers;
by selecting them, it at the same time closes its
barriers against "the others. " It is there that all
the more refined laws of style have their origin:
they at the same time keep off, they create distance,
they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have
said,)—while they open the ears of those who
are acoustically related to them. And to say it
between ourselves and with reference to my own
case,—I do not desire that either my ignorance, or
the vivacity of my temperament, should prevent me
being understood by you, my friends: I certainly
do not desire that my vivacity should have that
effect, however much it may impel me to arrive
quickly at an object, in order to arrive at it at all.
For I think it is best to do with profound problems
as with a cold bath—quickly in, quickly out. That
one does not thereby get into the depths, that one
does not get deep enough down—is a superstition
of the hydrophobic, the enemies of cold water; they
speak without experience. Oh! the great cold
makes one quick! —And let me ask by the way:
Is it a fact that a thing has been misunderstood
and unrecognised when it has only been touched
upon in passing, glanced at, flashed at? Must
one absolutely sit upon it in the first place?
Must one have brooded on it as on an egg? Diu
noctuque incubando, as Newton said of himself? At


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35O THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
least there are truths of a peculiar shyness and
ticklishness which one can only get hold of suddenly,
and in no other way,—which one must either take
by surprise, or leave alone. . . . Finally, my brevity
has still another value: on those questions which
pre-occupy me, I must say a great deal briefly, in
order that it may be heard yet more briefly. For
as immoralist, one has to take care lest one ruins
innocence, I mean the asses and old maids of both
sexes, who get nothing from life but their in-
nocence; moreover my writings are meant to fill
them with enthusiasm, to elevate them, to encourage
them in virtue. I should be at a loss to know of
anything more amusing than to see enthusiastic
old asses and maids moved by the sweet feelings
of virtue: and "that have I seen "—spake Zara-
thustra. So much with respect to brevity; the
matter stands worse as regards my ignorance, of
which I make no secret to myself. There are hours
in which I am ashamed of it; to be sure there are
likewise hours in which I am ashamed of this
shame. Perhaps we philosophers, all of us, are
badly placed at present with regard to knowledge:
science is growing, the most learned of us are on
the point of discovering that we know too little.
But it would be worse still if it were otherwise,—
if we knew too much; our duty is and remains,
first of all, not to get into confusion about
ourselves. We are different from the learned;
although it cannot be denied that amongst other
things we are also learned. We have different
needs, a different growth, a different digestion: we
need more, we need also less. There is no formula


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WE FEARLESS ONES 351
as to how much an intellect needs for its nourish-
ment; if, however, its taste be in the direction of
independence, rapid coming and going, travelling,
and perhaps adventure for which only the swiftest
are qualified, it prefers rather to live free on poor
fare, than to be unfree and plethoric. Not fat, but
the greatest suppleness and power is what a good
dancer wishes from his nourishment,—and I know
not what the spirit of a philosopher would like
better than to be a good dancer. For the dance
is his ideal, and also his art, in the end likewise his
sole piety, his "divine service. " . . .
382.
Great Healthiness. — We, the new, the name-
less, the hard-to-understand, we firstlings of a yet
untried future—we require for a new end also a
new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger,
sharper, tougher, bolder and merrier than any
healthiness hitherto. He whose soul longs to ex-
perience the whole range of hitherto recognised
values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all
the coasts of this ideal " Mediterranean Sea," who,
from the adventures of his most personal experience,
wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror, and
discoverer of the ideal—as likewise how it is with
the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the
scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the godly
Nonconformist of the old style:—requires one
thing above all for that purpose,great healthiness—
such healthiness as one not only possesses, but
also constantly acquires and must acquire, because
one continually sacrifices it again, and must sacri-


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352 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, V
fice it! —And now, after having been long on the
way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the ideal, who
are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often
enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, neverthe-
less, as said above, healthier than people would
like to admit, dangerously healthy, always healthy
again,—it would seem, as if in recompense for it
all, that we have a still undiscovered country before
us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen,
a beyond to all countries and corners of the
ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the
beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful,
and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our
thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand—
alas! that nothing will now any longer satisfy us!
How could we still be content with the man of
the present day after such peeps, and with such a
craving in our conscience and consciousness?
What a pity; but it is unavoidable that we should
look on the worthiest aims and hopes of the man
of the present day with ill-concealed amusement,
and perhaps should no longer look at them.
Another ideal runs on before us, a strange, tempting
ideal, full of danger, to whicli we should not like
to persuade any one, because we do not so readily
acknowledge any one's right thereto: the ideal
of a spirit who plays naively (that is to say
involuntarily and from overflowing abundance and
power) with everything that has hitherto been
called holy, good, inviolable, divine; to whom the
loftiest conception which the people have reason-
ably made their measure of value, would already
imply danger, ruin, abasement, or at least relaxation,


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WE FEARLESS ONES 353
blindness, or temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal
of a humanly superhuman welfare and benevolence,
which may often enough appear inhuman, for
example, when put by the side of all past serious-
ness on earth, and in comparison with all past
solemnities in bearing, word, tone, look, morality
and pursuit, as their truest involuntary parody,—
but with which, nevertheless, perhaps the great
seriousness only commences, the proper interroga-
tion mark is set up, the fate of the soul changes,
the hour-hand moves, and tragedy begins. . . .
383.
Epilogue. —But while I slowly, slowly finish the
painting of this sombre interrogation-mark, and am
still inclined to remind my readers of the virtues of
right reading—oh, what forgotten and unknown
virtues—it comes to pass that the wickedest,
merriest, gnome-like laughter resounds around me:
the spirits of my book themselves pounce upon me,
pull me by the ears, and call me to order. "We
cannot endure it any longer," they shout to me,
"away, away with this raven-black music.