06. CHAPTER VI
WE SCHOLARS
204. At the risk that moralizing may also reveal itself here as
that which it has always been--namely, resolutely MONTRER SES
PLAIES, according to Balzac--I would venture to protest against
an improper and injurious alteration of rank, which quite
unnoticed, and as if with the best conscience, threatens nowadays
to establish itself in the relations of science and philosophy. I
mean to say that one must have the right out of one's own
EXPERIENCE--experience, as it seems to me, always implies
unfortunate experience?--to treat of such an important question
of rank, so as not to speak of colour like the blind, or AGAINST
science like women and artists ("Ah! this dreadful science!" sigh
their instinct and their shame, "it always FINDS THINGS OUT!").
The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his
emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects
of democratic organization and disorganization: the self-
glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now
everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime--which does
not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet.
Here also the instinct of the populace
cries, "Freedom from all
masters!" and after science has, with the happiest results,
resisted theology, whose "hand-maid" it had been too long, it now
proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for
philosophy, and in its turn to play the "master"--what am I
saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account. My memory--
the memory of a scientific man, if you please!--teems with the
naivetes of insolence which I have heard about philosophy and
philosophers from young naturalists and old physicians (not to
mention the most cultured and most conceited of all learned men,
the philologists and schoolmasters, who are both the one and the
other by profession). On one occasion it was the specialist and
the Jack Horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against
all synthetic tasks and capabilities; at another time it was the
industrious worker who had got a scent of OTIUM and refined
luxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher, and
felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby. On another occasion
it was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing
in philosophy but a series of REFUTED systems, and an extravagant
expenditure which "does nobody any good". At another time the
fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment of
knowledge became conspicuous, at another time the disregard of
individual philosophers, which had involuntarily extended to
disregard of philosophy generally. In fine, I found most
frequently, behind the proud disdain of philosophy in young
scholars, the evil after-effect of some particular philosopher,
to whom on the whole obedience
had been foresworn, without,
however, the spell of his scornful estimates of other
philosophers having been got rid of--the result being a general
ill-will to all philosophy. (Such seems to me, for instance, the
after-effect of Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany: by his
unintelligent rage against Hegel, he has succeeded in severing
the whole of the last generation of Germans from its connection
with German culture, which culture, all things considered, has
been an elevation and a divining refinement of the HISTORICAL
SENSE, but precisely at this point Schopenhauer himself was poor,
irreceptive, and un-German to the extent of ingeniousness.) On
the whole, speaking generally, it may just have been the
humanness, all-too-humanness of the modern philosophers
themselves, in short, their contemptibleness, which has injured
most radically the reverence for philosophy and opened the doors
to the instinct of the populace. Let it but be acknowledged to
what an extent our modern world diverges from the whole style of
the world of Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever else all
the royal and magnificent anchorites of the spirit were called,
and with what justice an honest man of science MAY feel himself
of a better family and origin, in view of such representatives of
philosophy, who, owing to the fashion of the present day, are
just as much aloft as they are down below--in Germany, for
instance, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Duhring
and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann. It is especially the
sight of those hotch-potch philosophers, who call themselves
"realists," or "positivists," which is calculated to
implant a
dangerous distrust in the soul of a young and ambitious scholar
those philosophers, at the best, are themselves but scholars and
specialists, that is very evident! All of them are persons who
have been vanquished and BROUGHT BACK AGAIN under the dominion of
science, who at one time or another claimed more from themselves,
without having a right to the "more" and its responsibility--and
who now, creditably, rancorously, and vindictively, represent in
word and deed, DISBELIEF in the master-task and supremacy of
philosophy After all, how could it be otherwise? Science
flourishes nowadays and has the good conscience clearly visible
on its countenance, while that to which the entire modern
philosophy has gradually sunk, the remnant of philosophy of the
present day, excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and
pity Philosophy reduced to a "theory of knowledge," no more in
fact than a diffident science of epochs and doctrine of
forbearance a philosophy that never even gets beyond the
threshold, and rigorously DENIES itself the right to enter--that
is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something
that awakens pity. How could such a philosophy--RULE!
205. The dangers that beset the evolution of the philosopher are,
in fact, so manifold nowadays, that one might doubt whether this
fruit could still come to maturity. The extent and towering
structure of the sciences have increased enormously, and
therewith also the probability that the philosopher will
grow
tired even as a learner, or will attach himself somewhere and
"specialize" so that he will no longer attain to his elevation,
that is to say, to his superspection, his circumspection, and his
DESPECTION. Or he gets aloft too late, when the best of his
maturity and strength is past, or when he is impaired, coarsened,
and deteriorated, so that his view, his general estimate of
things, is no longer of much importance. It is perhaps just the
refinement of his intellectual conscience that makes him hesitate
and linger on the way, he dreads the temptation to become a
dilettante, a millepede, a milleantenna, he knows too well that
as a discerner, one who has lost his self-respect no longer
commands, no longer LEADS, unless he should aspire to become a
great play-actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and spiritual rat-
catcher--in short, a misleader. This is in the last instance a
question of taste, if it has not really been a question of
conscience. To double once more the philosopher's difficulties,
there is also the fact that he demands from himself a verdict, a
Yea or Nay, not concerning science, but concerning life and the
worth of life--he learns unwillingly to believe that it is his
right and even his duty to obtain this verdict, and he has to
seek his way to the right and the belief only through the most
extensive (perhaps disturbing and destroying) experiences, often
hesitating, doubting, and dumbfounded. In fact, the philosopher
has long been mistaken and confused by the multitude, either with
the scientific man and ideal scholar, or with the religiously
elevated, desensualized, desecularized visionary and God-
intoxicated man; and even yet
when one hears anybody praised,
because he lives "wisely," or "as a philosopher," it hardly means
anything more than "prudently and apart." Wisdom: that seems to
the populace to be a kind of flight, a means and artifice for
withdrawing successfully from a bad game; but the GENUINE
philosopher--does it not seem so to US, my friends?--lives
"unphilosophically" and "unwisely," above all, IMPRUDENTLY, and
feels the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts and
temptations of life--he risks HIMSELF constantly, he plays THIS
bad game.
206. In relation to the genius, that is to say, a being who
either ENGENDERS or PRODUCES--both words understood in their
fullest sense--the man of learning, the scientific average man,
has always something of the old maid about him; for, like her, he
is not conversant with the two principal functions of man. To
both, of course, to the scholar and to the old maid, one concedes
respectability, as if by way of indemnification--in these cases
one emphasizes the respectability--and yet, in the compulsion of
this concession, one has the same admixture of vexation. Let us
examine more closely: what is the scientific man? Firstly, a
commonplace type of man, with commonplace virtues: that is to
say, a non-ruling, non-authoritative, and non-self-sufficient
type of man; he possesses industry, patient adaptableness to rank
and file, equability and moderation in capacity and requirement;
he has the instinct for people like himself, and for that which
they require--for instance: the portion of independence and green
meadow without which there is no rest from labour, the claim to
honour and consideration (which first and foremost presupposes
recognition and recognisability), the sunshine of a good name,
the perpetual ratification of his value and usefulness, with
which the inward DISTRUST which lies at the bottom of the heart
of all dependent men and gregarious animals, has again and again
to be overcome. The learned man, as is appropriate, has also
maladies and faults of an ignoble kind: he is full of petty envy,
and has a lynx-eye for the weak points in those natures to whose
elevations he cannot attain. He is confiding, yet only as one who
lets himself go, but does not FLOW; and precisely before the man
of the great current he stands all the colder and more reserved--
his eye is then like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is no
longer moved by rapture or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous
thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of
mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which
labours instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man,
and endeavours to break--or still better, to relax--every bent
bow To relax, of course, with consideration, and naturally with
an indulgent hand--to RELAX with confiding sympathy that is the
real art of Jesuitism, which has always understood how to
introduce itself as the religion of sympathy.
207. However gratefully one may welcome the OBJECTIVE spirit--and
who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its
confounded IPSISIMOSITY!--in
the end, however, one must learn
caution even with regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to
the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of
the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal
in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification--as is
especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school, which
has also in its turn good reasons for paying the highest honours
to "disinterested knowledge" The objective man, who no longer
curses and scolds like the pessimist, the IDEAL man of learning
in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a
thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly one of the
most costly instruments that exist, but his place is in the hand
of one who is more powerful He is only an instrument, we may say,
he is a MIRROR--he is no "purpose in himself" The objective man
is in truth a mirror accustomed to prostration before everything
that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing or
"reflecting" implies--he waits until something comes, and then
expands himself sensitively, so that even the light footsteps and
gliding-past of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface
and film Whatever "personality" he still possesses seems to him
accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing, so much has
he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection of
outside forms and events He calls up the recollection of
"himself" with an effort, and not infrequently wrongly, he
readily confounds himself with other persons, he makes mistakes
with regard to his own needs, and here only is he unrefined and
negligent Perhaps he is troubled about
the health, or the
pettiness and confined atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack
of companions and society--indeed, he sets himself to reflect on
his suffering, but in vain! His thoughts already rove away to the
MORE GENERAL case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew
yesterday how to help himself He does not now take himself
seriously and devote time to himself he is serene, NOT from lack
of trouble, but from lack of capacity for grasping and dealing
with HIS trouble The habitual complaisance with respect to all
objects and experiences, the radiant and impartial hospitality
with which he receives everything that comes his way, his habit
of inconsiderate good-nature, of dangerous indifference as to Yea
and Nay: alas! there are enough of cases in which he has to atone
for these virtues of his!--and as man generally, he becomes far
too easily the CAPUT MORTUUM of such virtues. Should one wish
love or hatred from him--I mean love and hatred as God, woman,
and animal understand them--he will do what he can, and furnish
what he can. But one must not be surprised if it should not be
much--if he should show himself just at this point to be false,
fragile, questionable, and deteriorated. His love is constrained,
his hatred is artificial, and rather UNN TOUR DE FORCE, a slight
ostentation and exaggeration. He is only genuine so far as he can
be objective; only in his serene totality is he still "nature"
and "natural." His mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no
longer knows how to affirm, no longer how to deny; he does not
command; neither does he destroy. "JE NE MEPRISE PRESQUE RIEN"--
he says, with Leibniz: let us not
overlook nor undervalue the
PRESQUE! Neither is he a model man; he does not go in advance of
any one, nor after, either; he places himself generally too far
off to have any reason for espousing the cause of either good or
evil. If he has been so long confounded with the PHILOSOPHER,
with the Caesarian trainer and dictator of civilization, he has
had far too much honour, and what is more essential in him has
been overlooked--he is an instrument, something of a slave,
though certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but nothing in
himself--PRESQUE RIEN! The objective man is an instrument, a
costly, easily injured, easily tarnished measuring instrument and
mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of and respected;
but he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man
in whom the REST of existence justifies itself, no termination--
and still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause,
nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master;
but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's-
form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to
"shape" itself thereto--for the most part a man without frame and
content, a "selfless" man. Consequently, also, nothing for women,
IN PARENTHESI.
208. When a philosopher nowadays makes known that he is not a
skeptic--I hope that has been gathered from the foregoing
description of the objective spirit?--people all hear it
impatiently; they regard him on that account with some
apprehension, they would like to ask so many, many
questions . . .
indeed among timid hearers, of whom there are now so many, he is
henceforth said to be dangerous. With his repudiation of
skepticism, it seems to them as if they heard some evil-
threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind of explosive
were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a
newly discovered Russian NIHILINE, a pessimism BONAE VOLUNTATIS,
that not only denies, means denial, but-dreadful thought!
PRACTISES denial. Against this kind of "good-will"--a will to the
veritable, actual negation of life--there is, as is generally
acknowledged nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than
skepticism, the mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism; and
Hamlet himself is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an
antidote to the "spirit," and its underground noises. "Are not
our ears already full of bad sounds?" say the skeptics, as lovers
of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police; "this
subterranean Nay is terrible! Be still, ye pessimistic moles!"
The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily
frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start at every
Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels something
like a bite thereby. Yea! and Nay!--they seem to him opposed to
morality; he loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to his
virtue by a noble aloofness, while perhaps he says with
Montaigne: "What do I know?" Or with Socrates: "I know that I
know nothing." Or: "Here I do not trust myself, no door is open
to me." Or: "Even if the door were open, why should I enter
immediately?" Or:
"What is the use of any hasty hypotheses? It
might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses at all.
Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is crooked?
to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum? Is there not time
enough for that? Has not the time leisure? Oh, ye demons, can ye
not at all WAIT? The uncertain also has its charms, the Sphinx,
too, is a Circe, and Circe, too, was a philosopher."--Thus does a
skeptic console himself; and in truth he needs some consolation.
For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain
many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language
is called nervous debility and sickliness; it arises whenever
races or classes which have been long separated, decisively and
suddenly blend with one another. In the new generation, which has
inherited as it were different standards and valuations in its
blood, everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and
tentativeness; the best powers operate restrictively, the very
virtues prevent each other growing and becoming strong,
equilibrium, ballast, and perpendicular stability are lacking in
body and soul. That, however, which is most diseased and
degenerated in such nondescripts is the WILL; they are no longer
familiar with independence of decision, or the courageous feeling
of pleasure in willing--they are doubtful of the "freedom of the
will" even in their dreams Our present-day Europe, the scene of a
senseless, precipitate attempt at a radical blending of classes,
and CONSEQUENTLY of races, is therefore skeptical in all its
heights and depths, sometimes exhibiting the mobile skepticism
which springs impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch,
sometimes with gloomy aspect, like a cloud over-charged with
interrogative signs--and often sick unto death of its will!
Paralysis of will, where do we not find this cripple sitting
nowadays! And yet how bedecked oftentimes' How seductively
ornamented! There are the finest gala dresses and disguises for
this disease, and that, for instance, most of what places itself
nowadays in the show-cases as "objectiveness," "the scientific
spirit," "L'ART POUR L'ART," and "pure voluntary knowledge," is
only decked-out skepticism and paralysis of will--I am ready to
answer for this diagnosis of the European disease--The disease of
the will is diffused unequally over Europe, it is worst and most
varied where civilization has longest prevailed, it decreases
according as "the barbarian" still--or again--asserts his claims
under the loose drapery of Western culture It is therefore in the
France of today, as can be readily disclosed and comprehended,
that the will is most infirm, and France, which has always had a
masterly aptitude for converting even the portentous crises of
its spirit into something charming and seductive, now manifests
emphatically its intellectual ascendancy over Europe, by being
the school and exhibition of all the charms of skepticism The
power to will and to persist, moreover, in a resolution, is
already somewhat stronger in Germany, and again in the North of
Germany it is stronger than in Central Germany, it is
considerably stronger in England, Spain, and Corsica, associated
with phlegm in the former and
with hard skulls in the latter--not
to mention Italy, which is too young yet to know what it wants,
and must first show whether it can exercise will, but it is
strongest and most surprising of all in that immense middle
empire where Europe as it were flows back to Asia--namely, in
Russia There the power to will has been long stored up and
accumulated, there the will--uncertain whether to be negative or
affirmative--waits threateningly to be discharged (to borrow
their pet phrase from our physicists) Perhaps not only Indian
wars and complications in Asia would be necessary to free Europe
from its greatest danger, but also internal subversion, the
shattering of the empire into small states, and above all the
introduction of parliamentary imbecility, together with the
obligation of every one to read his newspaper at breakfast I do
not say this as one who desires it, in my heart I should rather
prefer the contrary--I mean such an increase in the threatening
attitude of Russia, that Europe would have to make up its mind to
become equally threatening--namely, TO ACQUIRE ONE WILL, by means
of a new caste to rule over the Continent, a persistent, dreadful
will of its own, that can set its aims thousands of years ahead;
so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-statism, and its
dynastic as well as its democratic many-willed-ness, might
finally be brought to a close. The time for petty politics is
past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion
of the world--the COMPULSION to great politics.
209. As to how far the new warlike age on which we Europeans have
evidently entered may perhaps favour the growth of another and
stronger kind of skepticism, I should like to express myself
preliminarily merely by a parable, which the lovers of German
history will already understand. That unscrupulous enthusiast for
big, handsome grenadiers (who, as King of Prussia, brought into
being a military and skeptical genius--and therewith, in reality,
the new and now triumphantly emerged type of German), the
problematic, crazy father of Frederick the Great, had on one
point the very knack and lucky grasp of the genius: he knew what
was then lacking in Germany, the want of which was a hundred
times more alarming and serious than any lack of culture and
social form--his ill-will to the young Frederick resulted from
the anxiety of a profound instinct. MEN WERE LACKING; and he
suspected, to his bitterest regret, that his own son was not man
enough. There, however, he deceived himself; but who would not
have deceived himself in his place? He saw his son lapsed to
atheism, to the ESPRIT, to the pleasant frivolity of clever
Frenchmen--he saw in the background the great bloodsucker, the
spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a
heart no longer hard enough either for evil or good, and of a
broken will that no longer commands, is no longer ABLE to
command. Meanwhile, however, there grew up in his son that new
kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism--who knows TO WHAT
EXTENT it was encouraged
just by his father's hatred and the icy
melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?--the skepticism of
daring manliness, which is closely related to the genius for war
and conquest, and made its first entrance into Germany in the
person of the great Frederick. This skepticism despises and
nevertheless grasps; it undermines and takes possession; it does
not believe, but it does not thereby lose itself; it gives the
spirit a dangerous liberty, but it keeps strict guard over the
heart. It is the GERMAN form of skepticism, which, as a continued
Fredericianism, risen to the highest spirituality, has kept
Europe for a considerable time under the dominion of the German
spirit and its critical and historical distrust Owing to the
insuperably strong and tough masculine character of the great
German philologists and historical critics (who, rightly
estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction and
dissolution), a NEW conception of the German spirit gradually
established itself--in spite of all Romanticism in music and
philosophy--in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was
decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness of
gaze, as courage and sternness of the dissecting hand, or as
resolute will to dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized
North Pole expeditions under barren and dangerous skies. There
may be good grounds for it when warm-blooded and superficial
humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit, CET ESPRIT
FATALISTE, IRONIQUE, MEPHISTOPHELIQUE, as Michelet calls it, not
without a shudder. But if one would realize how characteristic is
this fear of the "man" in the German spirit which
awakened Europe
out of its "dogmatic slumber," let us call to mind the former
conception which had to be overcome by this new one--and that it
is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman could dare,
with unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans to the
interest of Europe as gentle, goodhearted, weak-willed, and
poetical fools. Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough
Napoleon's astonishment when he saw Goethe it reveals what had
been regarded for centuries as the "German spirit" "VOILA UN
HOMME!"--that was as much as to say "But this is a MAN! And I
only expected to see a German!"
Supposing, then, that in the picture of the philosophers of the
future, some trait suggests the question whether they must not
perhaps be skeptics in the last-mentioned sense, something in
them would only be designated thereby--and not they themselves.
With equal right they might call themselves critics, and
assuredly they will be men of experiments. By the name with which
I ventured to baptize them, I have already expressly emphasized
their attempting and their love of attempting is this because, as
critics in body and soul, they will love to make use of
experiments in a new, and perhaps wider and more dangerous sense?
In their passion for knowledge, will they have to go further in
daring and painful attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste
of a democratic century can approve of?--There is no doubt these
coming ones will be least able to dispense with the serious
and
not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the
skeptic I mean the certainty as to standards of worth, the
conscious employment of a unity of method, the wary courage, the
standing-alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility, indeed,
they will avow among themselves a DELIGHT in denial and
dissection, and a certain considerate cruelty, which knows how to
handle the knife surely and deftly, even when the heart bleeds
They will be STERNER (and perhaps not always towards themselves
only) than humane people may desire, they will not deal with the
"truth" in order that it may "please" them, or "elevate" and
"inspire" them--they will rather have little faith in "TRUTH"
bringing with it such revels for the feelings. They will smile,
those rigourous spirits, when any one says in their presence
"That thought elevates me, why should it not be true?" or "That
work enchants me, why should it not be beautiful?" or "That
artist enlarges me, why should he not be great?" Perhaps they
will not only have a smile, but a genuine disgust for all that is
thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic, and if
any one could look into their inmost hearts, he would not easily
find therein the intention to reconcile "Christian sentiments"
with "antique taste," or even with "modern parliamentarism" (the
kind of reconciliation necessarily found even among philosophers
in our very uncertain and consequently very conciliatory
century). Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces to
purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not only be
demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future,
they may even make a display
thereof as their special adornment--
nevertheless they will not want to be called critics on that
account. It will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to
have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that "philosophy
itself is criticism and critical science--and nothing else
whatever!" Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the
approval of all the Positivists of France and Germany (and
possibly it even flattered the heart and taste of KANT: let us
call to mind the titles of his principal works), our new
philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics are
instruments of the philosopher, and just on that account, as
instruments, they are far from being philosophers themselves!
Even the great Chinaman of Konigsberg was only a great critic.
211. I insist upon it that people finally cease confounding
philosophical workers, and in general scientific men, with
philosophers--that precisely here one should strictly give "each
his own," and not give those far too much, these far too little.
It may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher
that he himself should have once stood upon all those steps upon
which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy, remain
standing, and MUST remain standing he himself must perhaps have
been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and besides, poet, and
collector, and traveler, and riddle-reader, and moralist, and
seer, and "free spirit," and almost everything, in order to
traverse the whole range of human values and estimations,
and
that he may BE ABLE with a variety of eyes and consciences to
look from a height to any distance, from a depth up to any
height, from a nook into any expanse. But all these are only
preliminary conditions for his task; this task itself demands
something else--it requires him TO CREATE VALUES. The
philosophical workers, after the excellent pattern of Kant and
Hegel, have to fix and formalize some great existing body of
valuations--that is to say, former DETERMINATIONS OF VALUE,
creations of value, which have become prevalent, and are for a
time called "truths"--whether in the domain of the LOGICAL, the
POLITICAL (moral), or the ARTISTIC. It is for these investigators
to make whatever has happened and been esteemed hitherto,
conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to
shorten everything long, even "time" itself, and to SUBJUGATE the
entire past: an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying out
of which all refined pride, all tenacious will, can surely find
satisfaction. THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND
LAW-GIVERS; they say: "Thus SHALL it be!" They determine first
the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the
previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators
of the past--they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and
whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an
instrument, and a hammer. Their "knowing" is CREATING, their
creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is--WILL TO POWER.
--Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been
such philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some day?
. . .
212. It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a
man INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow,
has ever found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in
contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always
been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary
furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers--who rarely
regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as
disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found their
mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end,
however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad
conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the
breast of the very VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their
own secret; it has been for the sake of a NEW greatness of man, a
new untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They have always
disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and
self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most
venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was
OUTLIVED, they have always said "We must remove hence to where
YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern ideas,"
which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a
"specialty," a philosopher, if there could be philosophers
nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the
conception of "greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness and
multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine
worth and rank according to the
amount and variety of that which
a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the EXTENT
to which a man could stretch his responsibility Nowadays the
taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will,
nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of
will consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of
will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must
specially be included in the conception of "greatness", with as
good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly,
renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite
age--such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its
accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and
floods of selfishness In the time of Socrates, among men only of
worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves
go--"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of
pleasure, as their conduct indicated--and who had continually on
their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited
the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for
greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old
physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as
into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said
plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here--we are equal!"
At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding-
animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when
"equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality
in wrong--I mean to say into general war against everything rare,
strange, and privileged,
against the higher man, the higher soul,
the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative
plenipotence and lordliness--at present it belongs to the
conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be
capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by
personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of
his own ideal when he asserts "He shall be the greatest who can
be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the
man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of
super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called
GREATNESS: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be
full." And to ask once more the question: Is greatness POSSIBLE--
nowadays?
213. It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it
cannot be taught: one must "know" it by experience--or one should
have the pride NOT to know it. The fact that at present people
all talk of things of which they CANNOT have any experience, is
true more especially and unfortunately as concerns the
philosopher and philosophical matters:--the very few know them,
are permitted to know them, and all popular ideas about them are
false. Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical combination of
a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs at presto pace, and a
dialectic rigour and necessity which makes no false step, is
unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience,
and therefore, should any one speak of it in their presence, it
is incredible to them. They
conceive of every necessity as
troublesome, as a painful compulsory obedience and state of
constraint; thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow
and hesitating, almost as a trouble, and often enough as "worthy
of the SWEAT of the noble"--but not at all as something easy and
divine, closely related to dancing and exuberance! "To think" and
to take a matter "seriously," "arduously"--that is one and the
same thing to them; such only has been their "experience."--
Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only
too well that precisely when they no longer do anything
"arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of
freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing,
and shaping, reaches its climax--in short, that necessity and
"freedom of will" are then the same thing with them. There is, in
fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the
gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest
problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them,
without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and
power of his spirituality. Of what use is it for nimble, everyday
intellects, or clumsy, honest mechanics and empiricists to press,
in their plebeian ambition, close to such problems, and as it
were into this "holy of holies"--as so often happens nowadays!
But coarse feet must never tread upon such carpets: this is
provided for in the primary law of things; the doors remain
closed to those intruders, though they may dash and break their
heads thereon. People have always to be born to a high station,
or, more definitely,
they have to be BRED for it: a person has
only a right to philosophy--taking the word in its higher
significance--in virtue of his descent; the ancestors, the
"blood," decide here also. Many generations must have prepared
the way for the coming of the philosopher; each of his virtues
must have been separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted, and
embodied; not only the bold, easy, delicate course and current of
his thoughts, but above all the readiness for great
responsibilities, the majesty of ruling glance and contemning
look, the feeling of separation from the multitude with their
duties and virtues, the kindly patronage and defense of whatever
is misunderstood and calumniated, be it God or devil, the delight
and practice of supreme justice, the art of commanding, the
amplitude of will, the lingering eye which rarely admires, rarely
looks up, rarely loves. . . .