02. CHAPTER II
THE FREE SPIRIT
24. O sancta simplicitiatas! In what strange simplification and
falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once
one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made
everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! how we
have been able to give our senses a passport to everything
superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and
wrong inferences!--how from the beginning, we have contrived to
retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable
freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety--in
order to enjoy life! And only on this solidified, granitelike
foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the
will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will,
the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as
its opposite, but--as its refinement! It is to be hoped, indeed,
that LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere, will not get over its
awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of opposites where
there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation; it is
equally to be hoped that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals,
which now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and blood," will
turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones. Here
and there we understand it, and laugh at the way in which
precisely the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this
SIMPLIFIED, thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined, and
suitably falsified world: at the way in which, whether it will or
not, it loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life!
25. After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain
be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care, ye
philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom!
Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It
spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience;
it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it
stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with
danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse
consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as
protectors of truth upon earth--as though "the Truth" were such
an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!
and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance,
Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye
know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE
just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has
carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable
truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place
after your special words and favourite doctrines (and
occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime
and
trumping games before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out
of the way! Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your
ruses, that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat
feared! And pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with golden
trellis-work! And have people around you who are as a garden--or
as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes
a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome
solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in
any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does
every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of
force! How PERSONAL does a long fear make one, a long watching of
enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of society, these
long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones--also the compulsory
recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos--always become in the
end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps
without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers
and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's
ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral
indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that
the sense of philosophical humour has left him. The martyrdom of
the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces
into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him;
and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic
curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to
understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his
deterioration (deteriorated into a "martyr," into a stage-and-
tribune-bawler).
Only, that it is necessary with such a desire to
be clear WHAT spectacle one will see in any case--merely a
satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued
proof that the long, real tragedy IS AT AN END, supposing that
every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin.
26. Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a
privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority--
where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;--
exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to
such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the
great and exceptional sense. Whoever, in intercourse with men,
does not occasionally glisten in all the green and grey colours
of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and
solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes;
supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this
burden and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it,
and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his
citadel, one thing is then certain: he was not made, he was not
predestined for knowledge. For as such, he would one day have to
say to himself: "The devil take my good taste! but 'the rule' is
more interesting than the exception--than myself, the exception!"
And he would go DOWN, and above all, he would go "inside." The
long and serious study of the AVERAGE man--and consequently much
disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad intercourse (all
intercourse is bad intercourse
except with one's equals):--that
constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every
philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and
disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favourite
child of knowledge should be, he will meet with suitable
auxiliaries who will shorten and lighten his task; I mean so-
called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the
commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time
have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk
of themselves and their like BEFORE WITNESSES--sometimes they
wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the
only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty;
and the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer
cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes
shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out.
There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust--
namely, where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such
indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe
Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man
of his century--he was far profounder than Voltaire, and
consequently also, a good deal more silent. It happens more
frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed
on an ape's body, a fine exceptional understanding in a base
soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors
and moral physiologists. And whenever anyone speaks without
bitterness, or rather quite innocently, of man as a belly with
two requirements,
and a head with one; whenever any one sees,
seeks, and WANTS to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity
as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when any
one speaks "badly"--and not even "ill"--of man, then ought the
lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he
ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk
without indignation. For the indignant man, and he who
perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or,
in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed,
morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-
satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more
ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one
is such a LIAR as the indignant man.
27. It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks
and lives gangasrotogati [Footnote: Like the river Ganges:
presto.] among those only who think and live otherwise--namely,
kurmagati [Footnote: Like the tortoise: lento.], or at best
"froglike," mandeikagati [Footnote: Like the frog: staccato.] (I
do everything to be "difficultly understood" myself!)--and one
should be heartily grateful for the good will to some refinement
of interpretation. As regards "the good friends," however, who
are always too easy-going, and think that as friends they have a
right to ease, one does well at the very first to grant them a
play-ground and romping-place for misunderstanding--one can thus
laugh still; or get rid of them altogether, these good friends--
and laugh then also!
28. What is most difficult to render from one language into
another is the TEMPO of its style, which has its basis in the
character of the race, or to speak more physiologically, in the
average TEMPO of the assimilation of its nutriment. There are
honestly meant translations, which, as involuntary
vulgarizations, are almost falsifications of the original, merely
because its lively and merry TEMPO (which overleaps and obviates
all dangers in word and expression) could not also be rendered. A
German is almost incapacitated for PRESTO in his language;
consequently also, as may be reasonably inferred, for many of the
most delightful and daring NUANCES of free, free-spirited
thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in
body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are
untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and
pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style,
are developed in profuse variety among Germans--pardon me for
stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of
stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the
"good old time" to which it belongs, and as an expression of
German taste at a time when there was still a "German taste,"
which was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus. Lessing is an
exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much,
and was versed in many things; he who was not the translator of
Bayle to no purpose, who took refuge willingly in the shadow of
Diderot and Voltaire, and still more willingly
among the Roman
comedy-writers--Lessing loved also free-spiritism in the TEMPO,
and flight out of Germany. But how could the German language,
even in the prose of Lessing, imitate the TEMPO of Machiavelli,
who in his "Principe" makes us breathe the dry, fine air of
Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a
boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic
sense of the contrast he ventures to present--long, heavy,
difficult, dangerous thoughts, and a TEMPO of the gallop, and of
the best, wantonest humour? Finally, who would venture on a
German translation of Petronius, who, more than any great
musician hitherto, was a master of PRESTO in invention, ideas,
and words? What matter in the end about the swamps of the sick,
evil world, or of the "ancient world," when like him, one has the
feet of a wind, the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a
wind, which makes everything healthy, by making everything RUN!
And with regard to Aristophanes--that transfiguring,
complementary genius, for whose sake one PARDONS all Hellenism
for having existed, provided one has understood in its full
profundity ALL that there requires pardon and transfiguration;
there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on PLATO'S
secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit
fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no
"Bible," nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic--but a
book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life--a
Greek life which he repudiated--without an Aristophanes!
29. It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a
privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the
best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is
probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He
enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers
which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of
which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way,
becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of
conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far
from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor
sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot
even go back again to the sympathy of men!
30. Our deepest insights must--and should--appear as follies, and
under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come
unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and
predestined for them. The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were
formerly distinguished by philosophers--among the Indians, as
among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever
people believed in gradations of rank and NOT in equality and
equal rights--are not so much in contradistinction to one another
in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing,
estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from
the inside; the more
essential distinction is that the class in
question views things from below upwards--while the esoteric
class views things FROM ABOVE DOWNWARDS. There are heights of the
soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate
tragically; and if all the woe in the world were taken together,
who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would
NECESSARILY seduce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a
doubling of the woe? . . . That which serves the higher class of
men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an
entirely different and lower order of human beings. The virtues
of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a
philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man,
supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities
thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured
as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. There are
books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health
according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the
higher and more powerful, make use of them. In the former case
they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter
case they are herald-calls which summon the bravest to THEIR
bravery. Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling
books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the
populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is
accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if one
wishes to breathe PURE air.
31. In our youthful years we still venerate and despise without
the art of NUANCE, which is the best gain of life, and we have
rightly to do hard penance for having fallen upon men and things
with Yea and Nay. Everything is so arranged that the worst of all
tastes, THE TASTE FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL, is cruelly befooled and
abused, until a man learns to introduce a little art into his
sentiments, and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial,
as do the real artists of life. The angry and reverent spirit
peculiar to youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has
suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent its passion
upon them: youth in itself even, is something falsifying and
deceptive. Later on, when the young soul, tortured by continual
disillusions, finally turns suspiciously against itself--still
ardent and savage even in its suspicion and remorse of
conscience: how it upbraids itself, how impatiently it tears
itself, how it revenges itself for its long self-blinding, as
though it had been a voluntary blindness! In this transition one
punishes oneself by distrust of one's sentiments; one tortures
one's enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even the good conscience
to be a danger, as if it were the self-concealment and lassitude
of a more refined uprightness; and above all, one espouses upon
principle the cause AGAINST "youth."--A decade later, and one
comprehends that all this was also still--youth!
32. Throughout the longest period of human history--one calls it
the prehistoric period--the value or non-value of an action was
inferred from its CONSEQUENCES; the action in itself was not
taken into consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty
much as in China at present, where the distinction or disgrace of
a child redounds to its parents, the retro-operating power of
success or failure was what induced men to think well or ill of
an action. Let us call this period the PRE-MORAL period of
mankind; the imperative, "Know thyself!" was then still unknown.
--In the last ten thousand years, on the other hand, on certain
large portions of the earth, one has gradually got so far, that
one no longer lets the consequences of an action, but its origin,
decide with regard to its worth: a great achievement as a whole,
an important refinement of vision and of criterion, the
unconscious effect of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of
the belief in "origin," the mark of a period which may be
designated in the narrower sense as the MORAL one: the first
attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. Instead of the
consequences, the origin--what an inversion of perspective! And
assuredly an inversion effected only after long struggle and
wavering! To be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar
narrowness of interpretation, attained supremacy precisely
thereby: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most
definite sense possible, as origin out of an INTENTION; people
were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the
value of its intention. The intention as the sole origin and
antecedent history of an action: under the influence of this
prejudice moral praise and blame have been bestowed, and men have
judged and even philosophized almost up to the present day.--Is
it not possible, however, that the necessity may now have arisen
of again making up our minds with regard to the reversing and
fundamental shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness
and acuteness in man--is it not possible that we may be standing
on the threshold of a period which to begin with, would be
distinguished negatively as ULTRA-MORAL: nowadays when, at least
among us immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive
value of an action lies precisely in that which is NOT
INTENTIONAL, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen,
sensible, or "sensed" in it, belongs to its surface or skin--
which, like every skin, betrays something, but CONCEALS still
more? In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign or
symptom, which first requires an explanation--a sign, moreover,
which has too many interpretations, and consequently hardly any
meaning in itself alone: that morality, in the sense in which it
has been understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has been a
prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminariness, probably
something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy, but in any
case something which must be surmounted. The surmounting of
morality, in a certain sense even the self-mounting of morality--
let that be the name for the long-secret labour which has been
reserved for the most refined, the most upright, and also the
most wicked
consciences of today, as the living touchstones of
the soul.
33. It cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice
for one's neighbour, and all self-renunciation-morality, must be
mercilessly called to account, and brought to judgment; just as
the aesthetics of "disinterested contemplation," under which the
emasculation of art nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create
itself a good conscience. There is far too much witchery and
sugar in the sentiments "for others" and "NOT for myself," for
one not needing to be doubly distrustful here, and for one asking
promptly: "Are they not perhaps--DECEPTIONS?"--That they PLEASE--
him who has them, and him who enjoys their fruit, and also the
mere spectator--that is still no argument in their FAVOUR, but
just calls for caution. Let us therefore be cautious!
34. At whatever standpoint of philosophy one may place oneself
nowadays, seen from every position, the ERRONEOUSNESS of the
world in which we think we live is the surest and most certain
thing our eyes can light upon: we find proof after proof thereof,
which would fain allure us into surmises concerning a deceptive
principle in the "nature of things." He, however, who makes
thinking itself, and consequently "the spirit," responsible for
the falseness of the world--an honourable exit, which every
conscious or unconscious advocatus dei avails himself of--he who
regards this world, including
space, time, form, and movement, as
falsely DEDUCED, would have at least good reason in the end to
become distrustful also of all thinking; has it not hitherto been
playing upon us the worst of scurvy tricks? and what guarantee
would it give that it would not continue to do what it has always
been doing? In all seriousness, the innocence of thinkers has
something touching and respect-inspiring in it, which even
nowadays permits them to wait upon consciousness with the request
that it will give them HONEST answers: for example, whether it be
"real" or not, and why it keeps the outer world so resolutely at
a distance, and other questions of the same description. The
belief in "immediate certainties" is a MORAL NAIVETE which does
honour to us philosophers; but--we have now to cease being
"MERELY moral" men! Apart from morality, such belief is a folly
which does little honour to us! If in middle-class life an ever-
ready distrust is regarded as the sign of a "bad character," and
consequently as an imprudence, here among us, beyond the middle-
class world and its Yeas and Nays, what should prevent our being
imprudent and saying: the philosopher has at length a RIGHT to
"bad character," as the being who has hitherto been most befooled
on earth--he is now under OBLIGATION to distrustfulness, to the
wickedest squinting out of every abyss of suspicion.--Forgive me
the joke of this gloomy grimace and turn of expression; for I
myself have long ago learned to think and estimate differently
with regard to deceiving and being deceived, and I keep at least
a couple of pokes in the ribs ready for the blind rage
with which
philosophers struggle against being deceived. Why NOT? It is
nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than
semblance; it is, in fact, the worst proved supposition in the
world. So much must be conceded: there could have been no life at
all except upon the basis of perspective estimates and
semblances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and stupidity of
many philosophers, one wished to do away altogether with the
"seeming world"--well, granted that YOU could do that,--at least
nothing of your "truth" would thereby remain! Indeed, what is it
that forces us in general to the supposition that there is an
essential opposition of "true" and "false"? Is it not enough to
suppose degrees of seemingness, and as it were lighter and darker
shades and tones of semblance--different valeurs, as the painters
say? Why might not the world WHICH CONCERNS US--be a fiction? And
to any one who suggested: "But to a fiction belongs an
originator?"--might it not be bluntly replied: WHY? May not this
"belong" also belong to the fiction? Is it not at length
permitted to be a little ironical towards the subject, just as
towards the predicate and object? Might not the philosopher
elevate himself above faith in grammar? All respect to
governesses, but is it not time that philosophy should renounce
governess-faith?
35. O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish
in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes
about it too
humanely--"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le
bien"--I wager he finds nothing!
36. Supposing that nothing else is "given" as real but our world
of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other
"reality" but just that of our impulses--for thinking is only a
relation of these impulses to one another:--are we not permitted
to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is
"given" does not SUFFICE, by means of our counterparts, for the
understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or "material")
world? I do not mean as an illusion, a "semblance," a
"representation" (in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerian sense),
but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions
themselves--as a more primitive form of the world of emotions, in
which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity, which
afterwards branches off and develops itself in organic processes
(naturally also, refines and debilitates)--as a kind of
instinctive life in which all organic functions, including self-
regulation, assimilation, nutrition, secretion, and change of
matter, are still synthetically united with one another--as a
PRIMARY FORM of life?--In the end, it is not only permitted to
make this attempt, it is commanded by the conscience of LOGICAL
METHOD. Not to assume several kinds of causality, so long as the
attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its
furthest extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed to say so):
that is a morality of method which one may not repudiate
nowadays--it follows "from its
definition," as mathematicians
say. The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the
will as OPERATING, whether we believe in the causality of the
will; if we do so--and fundamentally our belief IN THIS is just
our belief in causality itself--we MUST make the attempt to posit
hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality.
"Will" can naturally only operate on "will"--and not on "matter"
(not on "nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be
hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever
"effects" are recognized--and whether all mechanical action,
inasmuch as a power operates therein, is not just the power of
will, the effect of will. Granted, finally, that we succeeded in
explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and
ramification of one fundamental form of will--namely, the Will to
Power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions
could be traced back to this Will to Power, and that the solution
of the problem of generation and nutrition--it is one problem--
could also be found therein: one would thus have acquired the
right to define ALL active force unequivocally as WILL TO POWER.
The world seen from within, the world defined and designated
according to its "intelligible character"--it would simply be
"Will to Power," and nothing else.
37. "What? Does not that mean in popular language: God is
disproved, but not the devil?"--On the contrary! On the contrary,
my friends! And who the devil also compels you to speak
popularly!
38. As happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times
with the French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite
superfluous when judged close at hand, into which, however, the
noble and visionary spectators of all Europe have interpreted
from a distance their own indignation and enthusiasm so long and
passionately, UNTIL THE TEXT HAS DISAPPEARED UNDER THE
INTERPRETATION), so a noble posterity might once more
misunderstand the whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby
make ITS aspect endurable.--Or rather, has not this already
happened? Have not we ourselves been--that "noble posterity"?
And, in so far as we now comprehend this, is it not--thereby
already past?
39. Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely
because it makes people happy or virtuous--excepting, perhaps,
the amiable "Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good,
true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley, coarse, and
good-natured desirabilities swim about promiscuously in their
pond. Happiness and virtue are no arguments. It is willingly
forgotten, however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, that to
make unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter-
arguments. A thing could be TRUE, although it were in the highest
degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental
constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a
full knowledge of it--so that the strength of
a mind might be
measured by the amount of "truth" it could endure--or to speak
more plainly, by the extent to which it REQUIRED truth
attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. But there
is no doubt that for the discovery of certain PORTIONS of truth
the wicked and unfortunate are more favourably situated and have
a greater likelihood of success; not to speak of the wicked who
are happy--a species about whom moralists are silent. Perhaps
severity and craft are more favourable conditions for the
development of strong, independent spirits and philosophers than
the gentle, refined, yielding good-nature, and habit of taking
things easily, which are prized, and rightly prized in a learned
man. Presupposing always, to begin with, that the term
"philosopher" be not confined to the philosopher who writes
books, or even introduces HIS philosophy into books!--Stendhal
furnishes a last feature of the portrait of the free-spirited
philosopher, which for the sake of German taste I will not omit
to underline--for it is OPPOSED to German taste. "Pour etre bon
philosophe," says this last great psychologist, "il faut etre
sec, clair, sans illusion. Un banquier, qui a fait fortune, a une
partie du caractere requis pour faire des decouvertes en
philosophie, c'est-a-dire pour voir clair dans ce qui est."
40. Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest
things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the
CONTRARY only be the right disguise for the shame of a God to go
about
in? A question worth asking!--it would be strange if some
mystic has not already ventured on the same kind of thing. There
are proceedings of such a delicate nature that it is well to
overwhelm them with coarseness and make them unrecognizable;
there are actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimity after
which nothing can be wiser than to take a stick and thrash the
witness soundly: one thereby obscures his recollection. Many a
one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory, in order at
least to have vengeance on this sole party in the secret: shame
is inventive. They are not the worst things of which one is most
ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a mask--there is so much
goodness in craft. I could imagine that a man with something
costly and fragile to conceal, would roll through life clumsily
and rotundly like an old, green, heavily-hooped wine-cask: the
refinement of his shame requiring it to be so. A man who has
depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions
upon paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence
of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant;
his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes, and equally so
his regained security. Such a hidden nature, which instinctively
employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustible
in evasion of communication, DESIRES and insists that a mask of
himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his
friends; and supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will some
day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of
him there--and that it is well to be so.
Every profound spirit
needs a mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there
continually grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is
to say, SUPERFICIAL interpretation of every word he utters, every
step he takes, every sign of life he manifests.
41. One must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is
destined for independence and command, and do so at the right
time. One must not avoid one's tests, although they constitute
perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the end
tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge. Not
to cleave to any person, be it even the dearest--every person is
a prison and also a recess. Not to cleave to a fatherland, be it
even the most suffering and necessitous--it is even less
difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not
to cleave to a sympathy, be it even for higher men, into whose
peculiar torture and helplessness chance has given us an insight.
Not to cleave to a science, though it tempt one with the most
valuable discoveries, apparently specially reserved for us. Not
to cleave to one's own liberation, to the voluptuous distance and
remoteness of the bird, which always flies further aloft in order
always to see more under it--the danger of the flier. Not to
cleave to our own virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any
of our specialties, to our "hospitality" for instance, which is
the danger of dangers for highly developed and wealthy souls, who
deal prodigally, almost
indifferently with themselves, and push
the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes a vice. One must
know how TO CONSERVE ONESELF--the best test of independence.
42. A new order of philosophers is appearing; I shall venture to
baptize them by a name not without danger. As far as I understand
them, as far as they allow themselves to be understood--for it is
their nature to WISH to remain something of a puzzle--these
philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly,
claim to be designated as "tempters." This name itself is after
all only an attempt, or, if it be preferred, a temptation.
43. Will they be new friends of "truth," these coming
philosophers? Very probably, for all philosophers hitherto have
loved their truths. But assuredly they will not be dogmatists. It
must be contrary to their pride, and also contrary to their
taste, that their truth should still be truth for every one--that
which has hitherto been the secret wish and ultimate purpose of
all dogmatic efforts. "My opinion is MY opinion: another person
has not easily a right to it"--such a philosopher of the future
will say, perhaps. One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to
agree with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's
neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a
"common good"! The expression contradicts itself; that which can
be common is always of
small value. In the end things must be as
they are and have always been--the great things remain for the
great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills
for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the
rare.
44. Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free,
VERY free spirits, these philosophers of the future--as certainly
also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more,
higher, greater, and fundamentally different, which does not wish
to be misunderstood and mistaken? But while I say this, I feel
under OBLIGATION almost as much to them as to ourselves (we free
spirits who are their heralds and forerunners), to sweep away
from ourselves altogether a stupid old prejudice and
misunderstanding, which, like a fog, has too long made the
conception of "free spirit" obscure. In every country of Europe,
and the same in America, there is at present something which
makes an abuse of this name a very narrow, prepossessed,
enchained class of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of
what our intentions and instincts prompt--not to mention that in
respect to the NEW philosophers who are appearing, they must
still more be closed windows and bolted doors. Briefly and
regrettably, they belong to the LEVELLERS, these wrongly named
"free spirits"--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the
democratic taste and its "modern ideas" all of them men without
solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom
neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to
be denied, only,
they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in
their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost ALL human
misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto
existed--a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What
they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal,
green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security,
safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their two
most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called "Equality
of Rights" and "Sympathy with All Sufferers"--and suffering
itself is looked upon by them as something which must be DONE
AWAY WITH. We opposite ones, however, who have opened our eye and
conscience to the question how and where the plant "man" has
hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this has always
taken place under the opposite conditions, that for this end the
dangerousness of his situation had to be increased enormously,
his inventive faculty and dissembling power (his "spirit") had to
develop into subtlety and daring under long oppression and
compulsion, and his Will to Life had to be increased to the
unconditioned Will to Power--we believe that severity, violence,
slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy,
stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind,--that
everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and
serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human
species as its opposite--we do not even say enough when we only
say THIS MUCH, and in any case we find ourselves here, both with
our speech and our silence, at the OTHER extreme
of all modern
ideology and gregarious desirability, as their anti-podes
perhaps? What wonder that we "free spirits" are not exactly the
most communicative spirits? that we do not wish to betray in
every respect WHAT a spirit can free itself from, and WHERE
perhaps it will then be driven? And as to the import of the
dangerous formula, "Beyond Good and Evil," with which we at least
avoid confusion, we ARE something else than "libres-penseurs,"
"liben pensatori" "free-thinkers," and whatever these honest
advocates of "modern ideas" like to call themselves. Having been
at home, or at least guests, in many realms of the spirit, having
escaped again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks in which
preferences and prejudices, youth, origin, the accident of men
and books, or even the weariness of travel seemed to confine us,
full of malice against the seductions of dependency which he
concealed in honours, money, positions, or exaltation of the
senses, grateful even for distress and the vicissitudes of
illness, because they always free us from some rule, and its
"prejudice," grateful to the God, devil, sheep, and worm in us,
inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the point of cruelty,
with unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth and
stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for any business that
requires sagacity and acute senses, ready for every adventure,
owing to an excess of "free will", with anterior and posterior
souls, into the ultimate intentions of which it is difficult to
pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds to the end of which no foot
may run, hidden ones under the mantles of light, appropriators,
although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and
collectors from morning till night, misers of our wealth and our
full-crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting,
inventive in scheming, sometimes proud of tables of categories,
sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work even in full day,
yea, if necessary, even scarecrows--and it is necessary nowadays,
that is to say, inasmuch as we are the born, sworn, jealous
friends of SOLITUDE, of our own profoundest midnight and midday
solitude--such kind of men are we, we free spirits! And perhaps
ye are also something of the same kind, ye coming ones? ye NEW
philosophers?