07. CHAPTER VII
OUR VIRTUES
214. OUR Virtues?--It is probable that we, too, have still our
virtues, althoughnaturally they are not those sincere and massive
virtues on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem
and also at a little distance from us. We Europeans of the day
after tomorrow, we firstlings of the twentieth century--with all
our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness and art of
disguising, our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense
and spirit--we shall presumably, IF we must have virtues, have
those only which have come to agreement with our most secret and
heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements: well,
then, let us look for them in our labyrinths!--where, as we know,
so many things lose themselves, so many things get quite lost!
And is there anything finer than to SEARCH for one's own virtues?
Is it not almost to BELIEVE in one's own virtues? But this
"believing in one's own virtues"--is it not practically the same
as what was formerly called one's "good conscience," that long,
respectable pigtail of an idea, which our grandfathers used to
hang behind
their heads, and often enough also behind their
understandings? It seems, therefore, that however little we may
imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned and grandfatherly
respectable in other respects, in one thing we are nevertheless
the worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers, we last Europeans
with good consciences: we also still wear their pigtail.--Ah! if
you only knew how soon, so very soon--it will be different!
215. As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns
which determine the path of one planet, and in certain cases suns
of different colours shine around a single planet, now with red
light, now with green, and then simultaneously illumine and flood
it with motley colours: so we modern men, owing to the
complicated mechanism of our "firmament," are determined by
DIFFERENT moralities; our actions shine alternately in different
colours, and are seldom unequivocal--and there are often cases,
also, in which our actions are MOTLEY-COLOURED.
216. To love one's enemies? I think that has been well learnt: it
takes place thousands of times at present on a large and small
scale; indeed, at times the higher and sublimer thing takes
place:--we learn to DESPISE when we love, and precisely when we
love best; all of it, however, unconsciously, without noise,
without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness,
which forbids the utterance
of the pompous word and the formula
of virtue. Morality as attitude--is opposed to our taste
nowadays. This is ALSO an advance, as it was an advance in our
fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to
their taste, including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness
against religion (and all that formerly belonged to freethinker-
pantomime). It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our
spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody-
goodness won't chime.
217. Let us be careful in dealing with those who attach great
importance to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in
moral discernment! They never forgive us if they have once made a
mistake BEFORE us (or even with REGARD to us)--they inevitably
become our instinctive calumniators and detractors, even when
they still remain our "friends."--Blessed are the forgetful: for
they "get the better" even of their blunders.
218. The psychologists of France--and where else are there still
psychologists nowadays?--have never yet exhausted their bitter
and manifold enjoyment of the betise bourgeoise, just as
though . . . in short, they betray something thereby. Flaubert,
for instance, the honest citizen of Rouen, neither saw, heard, nor
tasted anything else in the end; it was his mode of self-torment
and refined cruelty. As this is growing wearisome, I would now
recommend
for a change something else for a pleasure--namely, the
unconscious astuteness with which good, fat, honest mediocrity
always behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to
perform, the subtle, barbed, Jesuitical astuteness, which is a
thousand times subtler than the taste and understanding of the
middle-class in its best moments--subtler even than the
understanding of its victims:--a repeated proof that "instinct" is
the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have
hitherto been discovered. In short, you psychologists, study the
philosophy of the "rule" in its struggle with the "exception":
there you have a spectacle fit for Gods and godlike malignity! Or,
in plainer words, practise vivisection on "good people," on the
"homo bonae voluntatis," ON YOURSELVES!
219. The practice of judging and condemning morally, is the
favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are
less so, it is also a kind of indemnity for their being badly
endowed by nature, and finally, it is an opportunity for
acquiring spirit and BECOMING subtle--malice spiritualises. They
are glad in their inmost heart that there is a standard according
to which those who are over-endowed with intellectual goods and
privileges, are equal to them, they contend for the "equality of
all before God," and almost NEED the belief in God for this
purpose. It is among them that the most powerful antagonists of
atheism are found. If any one were to say to them "A lofty
spirituality is
beyond all comparison with the honesty and
respectability of a merely moral man"--it would make them
furious, I shall take care not to say so. I would rather flatter
them with my theory that lofty spirituality itself exists only as
the ultimate product of moral qualities, that it is a synthesis
of all qualities attributed to the "merely moral" man, after they
have been acquired singly through long training and practice,
perhaps during a whole series of generations, that lofty
spirituality is precisely the spiritualising of justice, and the
beneficent severity which knows that it is authorized to maintain
GRADATIONS OF RANK in the world, even among things--and not only
among men.
220. Now that the praise of the "disinterested person" is so
popular one must--probably not without some danger--get an idea
of WHAT people actually take an interest in, and what are the
things generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern
ordinary men--including the cultured, even the learned, and
perhaps philosophers also, if appearances do not deceive. The
fact thereby becomes obvious that the greater part of what
interests and charms higher natures, and more refined and
fastidious tastes, seems absolutely "uninteresting" to the
average man--if, notwithstanding, he perceive devotion to these
interests, he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how it is
possible to act "disinterestedly." There have been philosophers
who could give this popular astonishment a seductive and
mystical, other-worldly expression
(perhaps because they did not
know the higher nature by experience?), instead of stating the
naked and candidly reasonable truth that "disinterested" action
is very interesting and "interested" action, provided that. . .
"And love?"--What! Even an action for love's sake shall be
"unegoistic"? But you fools--! "And the praise of the self-
sacrificer?"--But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that
he wanted and obtained something for it--perhaps something from
himself for something from himself; that he relinquished here in
order to have more there, perhaps in general to be more, or even
feel himself "more." But this is a realm of questions and answers
in which a more fastidious spirit does not like to stay: for here
truth has to stifle her yawns so much when she is obliged to
answer. And after all, truth is a woman; one must not use force
with her.
221. "It sometimes happens," said a moralistic pedant and trifle-
retailer, "that I honour and respect an unselfish man: not,
however, because he is unselfish, but because I think he has a
right to be useful to another man at his own expense. In short,
the question is always who HE is, and who THE OTHER is. For
instance, in a person created and destined for command, self-
denial and modest retirement, instead of being virtues, would be
the waste of virtues: so it seems to me. Every system of
unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and
appeals to every one, not only sins against good taste, but is
also an incentive to sins of omission, an ADDITIONAL
seduction
under the mask of philanthropy--and precisely a seduction and
injury to the higher, rarer, and more privileged types of men.
Moral systems must be compelled first of all to bow before the
GRADATIONS OF RANK; their presumption must be driven home to
their conscience--until they thoroughly understand at last that
it is IMMORAL to say that 'what is right for one is proper for
another.'"--So said my moralistic pedant and bonhomme. Did he
perhaps deserve to be laughed at when he thus exhorted systems of
morals to practise morality? But one should not be too much in
the right if one wishes to have the laughers on ONE'S OWN side; a
grain of wrong pertains even to good taste.
222. Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays--
and, if I gather rightly, no other religion is any longer
preached--let the psychologist have his ears open through all the
vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these preachers
(as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine
note of SELF-CONTEMPT. It belongs to the overshadowing and
uglifying of Europe, which has been on the increase for a century
(the first symptoms of which are already specified documentarily
in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to Madame d'Epinay)--IF IT IS
NOT REALLY THE CAUSE THEREOF! The man of "modern ideas," the
conceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself-this is
perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity wants him only "to
suffer with his fellows."
223. The hybrid European--a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in
all--absolutely requires a costume: he needs history as a
storeroom of costumes. To be sure, he notices that none of the
costumes fit him properly--he changes and changes. Let us look at
the nineteenth century with respect to these hasty preferences
and changes in its masquerades of style, and also with respect to
its moments of desperation on account of "nothing suiting" us. It
is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or classical, or
Christian, or Florentine, or barocco, or "national," in moribus
et artibus: it does not "clothe us"! But the "spirit," especially
the "historical spirit," profits even by this desperation: once
and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested,
put on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied--we are the
first studious age in puncto of "costumes," I mean as concerns
morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we
are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the
grand style, for the most spiritual festival--laughter and
arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and
Aristophanic ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still
discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain
where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the
world's history and as God's Merry-Andrews,--perhaps, though
nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself
may have a future!
224. The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly
the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people,
a community, or an individual has lived, the "divining instinct"
for the relationships of these valuations, for the relation of
the authority of the valuations to the authority of the operating
forces),--this historical sense, which we Europeans claim as our
specialty, has come to us in the train of the enchanting and mad
semi-barbarity into which Europe has been plunged by the
democratic mingling of classes and races--it is only the
nineteenth century that has recognized this faculty as its sixth
sense. Owing to this mingling, the past of every form and mode of
life, and of cultures which were formerly closely contiguous and
superimposed on one another, flows forth into us "modern souls";
our instincts now run back in all directions, we ourselves are a
kind of chaos: in the end, as we have said, the spirit perceives
its advantage therein. By means of our semi-barbarity in body and
in desire, we have secret access everywhere, such as a noble age
never had; we have access above all to the labyrinth of imperfect
civilizations, and to every form of semi-barbarity that has at
any time existed on earth; and in so far as the most considerable
part of human civilization hitherto has just been semi-barbarity,
the "historical sense" implies almost the sense and instinct for
everything, the taste and tongue for everything: whereby it
immediately proves itself to be an IGNOBLE sense. For instance,
we enjoy Homer once more: it is perhaps our happiest acquisition
that we know how to appreciate Homer, whom men of distinguished
culture (as the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint-
Evremond, who reproached him for his ESPRIT VASTE, and even
Voltaire, the last echo of the century) cannot and could not so
easily appropriate--whom they scarcely permitted themselves to
enjoy. The very decided Yea and Nay of their palate, their
promptly ready disgust, their hesitating reluctance with regard
to everything strange, their horror of the bad taste even of
lively curiosity, and in general the averseness of every
distinguished and self-sufficing culture to avow a new desire, a
dissatisfaction with its own condition, or an admiration of what
is strange: all this determines and disposes them unfavourably
even towards the best things of the world which are not their
property or could not become their prey--and no faculty is more
unintelligible to such men than just this historical sense, with
its truckling, plebeian curiosity. The case is not different with
Shakespeare, that marvelous Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of
taste, over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of Eschylus
would have half-killed himself with laughter or irritation: but
we--accept precisely this wild motleyness, this medley of the
most delicate, the most coarse, and the most artificial, with a
secret confidence and cordiality; we enjoy it as a refinement of
art reserved expressly for us, and allow ourselves to be as
little disturbed by the repulsive fumes and the proximity of the
English populace in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives,
as
perhaps on the Chiaja of Naples, where, with all our senses
awake, we go our way, enchanted and voluntarily, in spite of the
drain-odour of the lower quarters of the town. That as men of the
"historical sense" we have our virtues, is not to be disputed:--
we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to
self-control and self-renunciation, very grateful, very patient,
very complaisant--but with all this we are perhaps not very
"tasteful." Let us finally confess it, that what is most
difficult for us men of the "historical sense" to grasp, feel,
taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and
almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity
in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works and men,
their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the
goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected
themselves. Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is
in necessary contrast to GOOD taste, at least to the very bad
taste; and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly,
hesitatingly, and with compulsion the small, short, and happy
godsends and glorifications of human life as they shine here and
there: those moments and marvelous experiences when a great power
has voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and
infinite,--when a super-abundance of refined delight has been
enjoyed by a sudden checking and petrifying, by standing firmly
and planting oneself fixedly on still trembling ground.
PROPORTIONATENESS is strange to us, let us confess it to
ourselves; our itching is really the itching for the infinite,
the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward
panting horse, we
let the reins fall before the infinite, we modern men, we semi-
barbarians--and are only in OUR highest bliss when we--ARE IN
MOST DANGER.
225. Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or
eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth
of things according to PLEASURE and PAIN, that is, according to
accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are
plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which every one
conscious of CREATIVE powers and an artist's conscience will look
down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy. Sympathy for
you!--to be sure, that is not sympathy as you understand it: it
is not sympathy for social "distress," for "society" with its
sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective
who lie on the ground around us; still less is it sympathy for
the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive
after power--they call it "freedom." OUR sympathy is a loftier
and further-sighted sympathy:--we see how MAN dwarfs himself, how
YOU dwarf him! and there are moments when we view YOUR sympathy
with an indescribable anguish, when we resist it,--when we regard
your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. You
want, if possible--and there is not a more foolish "if possible"
--TO DO AWAY WITH SUFFERING; and we?--it really seems that WE
would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever
been! Well-being, as you understand it--
is certainly not a goal;
it seems to us an END; a condition which at once renders man
ludicrous and contemptible--and makes his destruction DESIRABLE!
The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering--know ye not that
it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations
of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which
communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and
ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring,
interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth,
mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been
bestowed upon the soul--has it not been bestowed through
suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man
CREATURE and CREATOR are united: in man there is not only matter,
shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the
creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity
of the spectator, and the seventh day--do ye understand this
contrast? And that YOUR sympathy for the "creature in man"
applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged,
stretched, roasted, annealed, refined--to that which must
necessarily SUFFER, and IS MEANT to suffer? And our sympathy--do
ye not understand what our REVERSE sympathy applies to, when it
resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering and
enervation?--So it is sympathy AGAINST sympathy!--But to repeat
it once more, there are higher problems than the problems of
pleasure and pain and sympathy; and all systems of philosophy
which deal only with these are naivetes.
226. WE IMMORALISTS.-This world with which WE are concerned, in
which we have to fear and love, this almost invisible, inaudible
world of delicate command and delicate obedience, a world of
"almost" in every respect, captious, insidious, sharp, and
tender--yes, it is well protected from clumsy spectators and
familiar curiosity! We are woven into a strong net and garment of
duties, and CANNOT disengage ourselves--precisely here, we are
"men of duty," even we! Occasionally, it is true, we dance in our
"chains" and betwixt our "swords"; it is none the less true that
more often we gnash our teeth under the circumstances, and are
impatient at the secret hardship of our lot. But do what we will,
fools and appearances say of us: "These are men WITHOUT duty,"--
we have always fools and appearances against us!
227. Honesty, granting that it is the virtue of which we cannot
rid ourselves, we free spirits--well, we will labour at it with
all our perversity and love, and not tire of "perfecting"
ourselves in OUR virtue, which alone remains: may its glance some
day overspread like a gilded, blue, mocking twilight this aging
civilization with its dull gloomy seriousness! And if,
nevertheless, our honesty should one day grow weary, and sigh,
and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and would fain have
it pleasanter, easier, and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let
us
remain HARD, we latest Stoics, and let us send to its help
whatever devilry we have in us:--our disgust at the clumsy and
undefined, our "NITIMUR IN VETITUM," our love of adventure, our
sharpened and fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised,
intellectual Will to Power and universal conquest, which rambles
and roves avidiously around all the realms of the future--let us
go with all our "devils" to the help of our "God"! It is probable
that people will misunderstand and mistake us on that account:
what does it matter! They will say: "Their 'honesty'--that is
their devilry, and nothing else!" What does it matter! And even
if they were right--have not all Gods hitherto been such
sanctified, re-baptized devils? And after all, what do we know of
ourselves? And what the spirit that leads us wants TO BE CALLED?
(It is a question of names.) And how many spirits we harbour? Our
honesty, we free spirits--let us be careful lest it become our
vanity, our ornament and ostentation, our limitation, our
stupidity! Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to
virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in Russia,--
let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become
saints and bores! Is not life a hundred times too short for us--
to bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal life in
order to . . .
228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral
philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the
soporific appliances--and that
"virtue," in my opinion, has been
MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything
else; at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook
their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as
possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very
desirable that morals should not some day become interesting! But
let us not be afraid! Things still remain today as they have
always been: I see no one in Europe who has (or DISCLOSES) an
idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be
conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner--that
CALAMITY might be involved therein. Observe, for example, the
indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously
and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor
expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had
already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius!
(no, he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR
POCOCURANTE, to use an expression of Galiani). No new thought,
nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of
an old thought, not even a proper history of what has been
previously thought on the subject: an IMPOSSIBLE literature,
taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some
mischief. In effect, the old English vice called CANT, which is
MORAL TARTUFFISM, has insinuated itself also into these moralists
(whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one
MUST read them), concealed this time under the new form of the
scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a
secret struggle with the pangs of conscience,
from which a race
of former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific
tinkering with morals. (Is not a moralist the opposite of a
Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as
questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem?
Is moralizing not-immoral?) In the end, they all want English
morality to be recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind,
or the "general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest
number,"--no! the happiness of ENGLAND, will be best served
thereby. They would like, by all means, to convince themselves
that the striving after English happiness, I mean after COMFORT
and FASHION (and in the highest instance, a seat in Parliament),
is at the same time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so
far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just
consisted in such striving. Not one of those ponderous,
conscience-stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate
the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants to
have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general
welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all
grasped, but is only a nostrum,--that what is fair to one MAY NOT
at all be fair to another, that the requirement of one morality
for all is really a detriment to higher men, in short, that there
is a DISTINCTION OF RANK between man and man, and consequently
between morality and morality. They are an unassuming and
fundamentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian
Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as they are
tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility. One
ought even to ENCOURAGE them,
as has been partially attempted in
the following rhymes:--
Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,
"Longer--better," aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee;
Unenraptured, never jesting,
Mediocre everlasting,
SANS GENIE ET SANS ESPRIT!
229. In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity,
there still remains so much fear, so much SUPERSTITION of the
fear, of the "cruel wild beast," the mastering of which
constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages--that even
obvious truths, as if by the agreement of centuries, have long
remained unuttered, because they have the appearance of helping
the finally slain wild beast back to life again. I perhaps risk
something when I allow such a truth to escape; let others capture
it again and give it so much "milk of pious sentiment"
[FOOTNOTE: An expression from Schiller's William Tell, Act IV,
Scene 3.] to drink, that it will lie down quiet and forgotten, in
its old corner.--One ought to learn anew about cruelty, and open
one's eyes; one ought at last to learn impatience, in order that
such immodest gross errors--as, for instance, have been fostered
by ancient and modern philosophers with regard to tragedy--may no
longer wander about virtuously and boldly. Almost everything that
we call "higher culture" is based upon the spiritualising
and
intensifying of CRUELTY--this is my thesis; the "wild beast" has
not been slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been--
transfigured. That which constitutes the painful delight of
tragedy is cruelty; that which operates agreeably in so-called
tragic sympathy, and at the basis even of everything sublime, up
to the highest and most delicate thrills of metaphysics, obtains
its sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty.
What the Roman enjoys in the arena, the Christian in the
ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the faggot
and stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day Japanese who
presses his way to the tragedy, the workman of the Parisian
suburbs who has a homesickness for bloody revolutions, the
Wagnerienne who, with unhinged will, "undergoes" the performance
of "Tristan and Isolde"--what all these enjoy, and strive with
mysterious ardour to drink in, is the philtre of the great Circe
"cruelty." Here, to be sure, we must put aside entirely the
blundering psychology of former times, which could only teach
with regard to cruelty that it originated at the sight of the
suffering of OTHERS: there is an abundant, super-abundant
enjoyment even in one's own suffering, in causing one's own
suffering--and wherever man has allowed himself to be persuaded
to self-denial in the RELIGIOUS sense, or to self-mutilation, as
among the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general, to
desensualisation, decarnalisation, and contrition, to Puritanical
repentance-spasms, to vivisection of conscience and to Pascal-
like SACRIFIZIA DELL' INTELLETO, he is secretly allured and
impelled forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of
cruelty TOWARDS HIMSELF.--Finally, let us consider that even the
seeker of knowledge operates as an artist and glorifier of
cruelty, in that he compels his spirit to perceive AGAINST its
own inclination, and often enough against the wishes of his
heart:--he forces it to say Nay, where he would like to affirm,
love, and adore; indeed, every instance of taking a thing
profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an intentional
injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit, which
instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,--even in
every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty.
230. Perhaps what I have said here about a "fundamental will of
the spirit" may not be understood without further details; I may
be allowed a word of explanation.--That imperious something which
is popularly called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally
and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a
multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and
essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities here,
are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything
that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power of the spirit to
appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency
to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to
overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it
arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for
itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every
portion of the "outside world." Its object thereby is the
incorporation of new "experiences,"
the assortment of new things
in the old arrangements--in short, growth; or more properly, the
FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power--is its object.
This same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse
of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of
arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of
this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive
attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with
obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and
approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according
to the degree of its appropriating power, its "digestive power,"
to speak figuratively (and in fact "the spirit" resembles a
stomach more than anything else). Here also belong an occasional
propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived (perhaps with
a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and so, but is only allowed
to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an
exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and
mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified,
the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified--an enjoyment of
the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. Finally,
in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of
the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them--
the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping,
changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and
its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security
therein--it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best
protected and concealed!--COUNTER TO this propensity for
appearance, for simplification, for
a disguise, for a cloak, in
short, for an outside--for every outside is a cloak--there
operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which
takes, and INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and
thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience
and taste, which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in
himself, provided, as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and
hardened his eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is
accustomed to severe discipline and even severe words. He will
say: "There is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit": let
the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not so!
In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty,
perhaps our "extravagant honesty" were talked about, whispered
about, and glorified--we free, VERY free spirits--and some day
perhaps SUCH will actually be our--posthumous glory! Meanwhile--
for there is plenty of time until then--we should be least
inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral
verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this
taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are beautiful,
glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love
of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful--
there is something in them that makes one's heart swell with
pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded
ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that
this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false
adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity,
and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the
terrible original text HOMO NATURA
must again be recognized. In
effect, to translate man back again into nature; to master the
many vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings
which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over the eternal
original text, HOMO NATURA; to bring it about that man shall
henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline
of science, stands before the OTHER forms of nature, with
fearless Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-ears, deaf to the
enticements of old metaphysical bird-catchers, who have piped to
him far too long: "Thou art more! thou art higher! thou hast a
different origin!"--this may be a strange and foolish task, but
that it is a TASK, who can deny! Why did we choose it, this
foolish task? Or, to put the question differently: "Why knowledge
at all?" Every one will ask us about this. And thus pressed, we,
who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have not
found and cannot find any better answer. . . .
231. Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that
does not merely "conserve"--as the physiologist knows. But at the
bottom of our souls, quite "down below," there is certainly
something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of
predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen
questions. In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable
"I am this"; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for
instance, but can only learn fully--he can only follow to the end
what is "fixed" about them in himself. Occasionally
we find
certain solutions of problems which make strong beliefs for us;
perhaps they are henceforth called "convictions." Later on--one
sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge, guide-posts to the
problem which we ourselves ARE--or more correctly to the great
stupidity which we embody, our spiritual fate, the UNTEACHABLE in
us, quite "down below."--In view of this liberal compliment which
I have just paid myself, permission will perhaps be more readily
allowed me to utter some truths about "woman as she is," provided
that it is known at the outset how literally they are merely--MY
truths.
232. Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to
enlighten men about "woman as she is"--THIS is one of the worst
developments of the general UGLIFYING of Europe. For what must
these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and self-
exposure bring to light! Woman has so much cause for shame; in
woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality,
schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and
indiscretion concealed--study only woman's behaviour towards
children!--which has really been best restrained and dominated
hitherto by the FEAR of man. Alas, if ever the "eternally tedious
in woman"--she has plenty of it!--is allowed to venture forth! if
she begins radically and on principle to unlearn her wisdom and
art-of charming, of playing, of frightening away sorrow, of
alleviating and taking easily; if she forgets her delicate
aptitude for
agreeable desires! Female voices are already raised,
which, by Saint Aristophanes! make one afraid:--with medical
explicitness it is stated in a threatening manner what woman
first and last REQUIRES from man. Is it not in the very worst
taste that woman thus sets herself up to be scientific?
Enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men's affair, men's
gift-we remained therewith "among ourselves"; and in the end, in
view of all that women write about "woman," we may well have
considerable doubt as to whether woman really DESIRES
enlightenment about herself--and CAN desire it. If woman does not
thereby seek a new ORNAMENT for herself--I believe ornamentation
belongs to the eternally feminine?--why, then, she wishes to make
herself feared: perhaps she thereby wishes to get the mastery.
But she does not want truth--what does woman care for truth? From
the very first, nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more
hostile to woman than truth--her great art is falsehood, her
chief concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we
men: we honour and love this very art and this very instinct in
woman: we who have the hard task, and for our recreation gladly
seek the company of beings under whose hands, glances, and
delicate follies, our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity
appear almost like follies to us. Finally, I ask the question:
Did a woman herself ever acknowledge profundity in a woman's
mind, or justice in a woman's heart? And is it not true that on
the whole "woman" has hitherto been most despised by woman
herself, and not at all by us?--We men
desire that woman should
not continue to compromise herself by enlightening us; just as it
was man's care and the consideration for woman, when the church
decreed: mulier taceat in ecclesia. It was to the benefit of
woman when Napoleon gave the too eloquent Madame de Stael to
understand: mulier taceat in politicis!--and in my opinion, he is
a true friend of woman who calls out to women today: mulier
taceat de mulierel.
233. It betrays corruption of the instincts--apart from the fact
that it betrays bad taste--when a woman refers to Madame Roland,
or Madame de Stael, or Monsieur George Sand, as though something
were proved thereby in favour of "woman as she is." Among men,
these are the three comical women as they are--nothing more!--and
just the best involuntary counter-arguments against feminine
emancipation and autonomy.
234. Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible
thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the
master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand what
food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a
thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of
years, have discovered the most important physiological facts,
and should likewise have got possession of the healing art!
Through bad female cooks--through the entire lack of reason in
the kitchen--the development of mankind has
been longest retarded
and most interfered with: even today matters are very little
better. A word to High School girls.
235. There are turns and casts of fancy, there are sentences,
little handfuls of words, in which a whole culture, a whole
society suddenly crystallises itself. Among these is the
incidental remark of Madame de Lambert to her son: "MON AMI, NE
VOUS PERMETTEZ JAMAIS QUE DES FOLIES, QUI VOUS FERONT GRAND
PLAISIR"--the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way, that was
ever addressed to a son.
236. I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what
Dante and Goethe believed about woman--the former when he sang,
"ELLA GUARDAVA SUSO, ED IO IN LEI," and the latter when he
interpreted it, "the eternally feminine draws us ALOFT"; for THIS
is just what she believes of the eternally masculine.
237.
SEVEN APOPHTHEGMS FOR WOMEN
How the longest ennui flees, When a man comes to our knees!
Age, alas! and science staid, Furnish even weak virtue aid.
Sombre garb and silence meet: Dress for every dame--discreet.
Whom I thank when in my bliss? God!--and my good tailoress!
Young, a flower-decked cavern home; Old, a dragon thence doth,roam.
Noble title, leg that's fine, Man as well: Oh, were HE mine!
Speech in brief and sense in mass--Slippery for the jenny-ass!
237A. Woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds, which,
losing their way, have come down among them from an elevation: as
something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet, and animating-
-but as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it
flying away.
238. To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of "man and
woman," to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity
for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal
rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a
TYPICAL sign of shallow-mindedness; and a thinker who has proved
himself shallow at this dangerous spot--shallow in instinct!--may
generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, as
discovered; he will probably prove too "short" for all
fundamental questions of life, future as well as present, and
will be unable to descend into ANY of the depths. On the other
hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and
has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity
and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of
woman as ORIENTALS do: he must conceive of her as a possession,
as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and
accomplishing her mission therein--he must take his stand in this
matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority
of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did formerly; those best
heirs and scholars of Asia--who, as is well known, with their
INCREASING culture and amplitude of power, from Homer to the time
of Pericles, became gradually STRICTER towards woman, in short,
more Oriental. HOW necessary, HOW logical, even HOW humanely
desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves!
239. The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so
much respect by men as at present--this belongs to the tendency
and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as
disrespectfulness to old age--what wonder is it that abuse should
be immediately made of this respect? They want more, they learn
to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be
well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife
itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty.
And let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is
unlearning to FEAR man: but the woman who "unlearns to fear"
sacrifices her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture
forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man--or more
definitely, the MAN in man--is no longer either desired or fully
developed, is reasonable enough and
also intelligible enough;
what is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby--
woman deteriorates. This is what is happening nowadays: let us
not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit
has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman
strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk:
"woman as clerkess" is inscribed on the portal of the modern
society which is in course of formation. While she thus
appropriates new rights, aspires to be "master," and inscribes
"progress" of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite
realises itself with terrible obviousness: WOMAN RETROGRADES.
Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has
DECLINED in proportion as she has increased her rights and
claims; and the "emancipation of woman," insofar as it is desired
and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine
shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the
increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts.
There is STUPIDITY in this movement, an almost masculine
stupidity, of which a well-reared woman--who is always a sensible
woman--might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition as to the
ground upon which she can most surely achieve victory; to neglect
exercise in the use of her proper weapons; to let-herself-go
before man, perhaps even "to the book," where formerly she kept
herself in control and in refined, artful humility; to neutralize
with her virtuous audacity man's faith in a VEILED, fundamentally
different ideal in woman, something eternally, necessarily
feminine; to emphatically
and loquaciously dissuade man from the
idea that woman must be preserved, cared for, protected, and
indulged, like some delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant
domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant collection of
everything of the nature of servitude and bondage which the
position of woman in the hitherto existing order of society has
entailed and still entails (as though slavery were a counter-
argument, and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of
every elevation of culture):--what does all this betoken, if not
a disintegration of womanly instincts, a defeminising? Certainly,
there are enough of idiotic friends and corrupters of woman among
the learned asses of the masculine sex, who advise woman to
defeminize herself in this manner, and to imitate all the
stupidities from which "man" in Europe, European "manliness,"
suffers,--who would like to lower woman to "general culture,"
indeed even to newspaper reading and meddling with politics. Here
and there they wish even to make women into free spirits and
literary workers: as though a woman without piety would not be
something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a profound and
godless man;--almost everywhere her nerves are being ruined by
the most morbid and dangerous kind of music (our latest German
music), and she is daily being made more hysterical and more
incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of
bearing robust children. They wish to "cultivate" her in general
still more, and intend, as they say, to make the "weaker sex"
STRONG by culture: as if history did not teach in the most
emphatic manner that the "cultivating" of mankind
and his
weakening--that is to say, the weakening, dissipating, and
languishing of his FORCE OF WILL--have always kept pace with one
another, and that the most powerful and influential women in the
world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just to thank
their force of will--and not their schoolmasters--for their
power and ascendancy over men. That which inspires respect in
woman, and often enough fear also, is her NATURE, which is more
"natural" than that of man, her genuine, carnivora-like, cunning
flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove, her NAIVETE in
egoism, her untrainableness and innate wildness, the
incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and
virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for
the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is that she seems more
afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more
condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and
sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in
the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy,
which rends while it delights--What? And all that is now to be at
an end? And the DISENCHANTMENT of woman is in progress? The
tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? Oh Europe! Europe! We
know the horned animal which was always most attractive to thee,
from which danger is ever again threatening thee! Thy old fable
might once more become "history"--an immense stupidity might once
again overmaster thee and carry thee away! And no God concealed
beneath it--no! only an "idea," a "modern idea"!