BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(trs. Helen Zimmern - full text)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
CHAPTER I: PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS
CHAPTER II: THE FREE SPIRIT
CHAPTER III: THE RELIGIOUS MOOD
CHAPTER IV: APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES
CHAPTER V: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS
CHAPTER VI: WE SCHOLARS
CHAPTER VII: OUR VIRTUES
CHAPTER VIII: PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
CHAPTER IX: WHAT IS NOBLE?
FROM THE HEIGHTS (POEM TRANSLATED BY L.A. MAGNUS)
 

PREFACE

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then? Is there not
ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they
have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that
the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they
have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled
and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has
never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of
dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien--IF, indeed, it
stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has
fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground--nay more, that it is at
its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for
hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn,
whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have
been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time
is at hand when it will be once and again understood WHAT has
actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute
philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared:
perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as
the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and egosuperstition,
has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some
play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an
audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very
human--all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists,
it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years
afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service
of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience
have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to
it, and to its "super- terrestrial" pretensions in Asia and Egypt,
the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe
themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims,
all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous
and awe- inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has
been a caricature of this kind--for instance, the Vedanta doctrine
in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it,
although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most
tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a
dogmatist error--namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the
Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when
Europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and
at least enjoy a healthier--sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS
ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the
struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very
inversion of truth, and the denial of the PERSPECTIVE--the fundamental
condition--of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as

Plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: "How
did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato?
Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him? Was Socrates
after all a corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock?" But
the struggle against Plato, or--to speak plainer, and for the
"people"--the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of
millenniums of Christianity (FOR CHRISTIANITY IS PLATONISM
FOR THE "PEOPLE"), produced in Europe a magnificent tension of
soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a
tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals. As a
matter of fact, the European feels this tension as a state of distress,
and twice attempts have been made in grand style to
unbend the bow: once by means of Jesuitism, and the second
time by means of democratic enlightenment--which, with the aid
of liberty of the press and newspaper-reading, might, in fact,
bring it about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in
"distress"! (The Germans invented gunpowder--all credit to
them! but they again made things square--they invented printing.)
But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even
sufficiently Germans, we GOOD EUROPEANS, and free, VERY free
spirits--we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension
of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who
knows? THE GOAL TO AIM AT. . . .
Sils Maria Upper Engadine, JUNE, 1885.
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CHAPTER I - PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS

1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous
enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers
have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will
to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable
questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it
were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow
distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this
Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it
really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to
Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to
the origin of this Will--until at last we came to an absolute standstill
before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about
the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY
NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The
problem of the value of truth presented itself before us--or was it
we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is
the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a
rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it
be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had
never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern
it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in
raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.

2. "HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example,
truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to
deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure
sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such
genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse
than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different
origin, an origin of THEIR own--in this transitory, seductive,
illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity,
they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in
the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself--
THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!"--This mode of
reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians
of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at
the back of all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of
theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for something
that is in the end solemnly christened "the Truth." The
fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES
OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of
them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, how-
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ever, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn
vow, "DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM." For it may be doubted,
firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the
popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians
have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial
estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably
made from some corner, perhaps from below--"frog perspectives,"
as it were, to borrow an expression current among
painters. In spite of all the value which may belong to the true,
the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher
and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned
to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity.
It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of
those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being
insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and
apparently opposed things--perhaps even in being essentially
identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself
with such dangerous "Perhapses"! For that investigation one
must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as
will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto
prevalent--philosophers of the dangerous "Perhaps" in every
sense of the term. And to speak in all seriousness, I see such
new philosophers beginning to appear.

3. Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read
between their lines long enough, I now say to myself that the
greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the
instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical
thinking; one has here to learn anew, as one learned anew about
heredity and "innateness." As little as the act of birth comes into
consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity,
just as little is "being-conscious" OPPOSED to the instinctive in
any decisive sense; the greater part of the conscious thinking of
a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced
into definite channels. And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty
of movement, there are valuations, or to speak more
plainly, physiological demands, for the maintenance of a definite
mode of life For example, that the certain is worth more than the
uncertain, that illusion is less valuable than "truth" such valuations,
in spite of their regulative importance for US, might notwithstanding
be only superficial valuations, special kinds of
maiserie, such as may be necessary for the maintenance of
beings such as ourselves. Supposing, in effect, that man is not
just the "measure of things."

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it
is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely.
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The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving,
species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are
fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to
which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most
indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions,
without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world
of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting
of the world by means of numbers, man could not live--that the
renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a
negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF
LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in
a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so,
has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

5. That which causes philosophers to be regarded half- distrustfully
and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how
innocent they are--how often and easily they make mistakes and
lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike they are,--but
that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they
all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness
is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose as
though their real opinions had been discovered and attained
through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent
dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher,
talk of "inspiration"), whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition,
idea, or "suggestion," which is generally their heart's
desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments
sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do
not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders,
also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths,"-- and VERY far
from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself,
very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so
far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or
in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. The spectacle of the
Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he
entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly
mislead) to his "categorical imperative"-- makes us fastidious
ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the
subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. Or, still more
so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which
Spinoza has, as it were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask--in
fact, the "love of HIS wisdom," to translate the term fairly and
squarely--in order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart
of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on that invincible
maiden, that Pallas Athene:--how much of personal timidity
and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!
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6. It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy
up till now has consisted of--namely, the confession of its
originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography;
and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in
every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which
the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how
the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have
been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself:
"What morality do they (or does he) aim at?" Accordingly, I do
not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of
philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has
only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an
instrument. But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of
man with a view to determining how far they may have here
acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find
that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another,
and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look
upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate
LORD over all the other impulses. For every impulse is imperious,
and as SUCH, attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the
case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be
otherwise--"better," if you will; there there may really be such a
thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent
clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away
industriously to that end, WITHOUT the rest of the scholarly
impulses taking any material part therein. The actual "interests"
of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction-
-in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is,
in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little
machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes
a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist;
he is not CHARACTERISED by becoming this or that. In the philosopher,
on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal;
and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and
decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS,--that is to say, in what
order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.

7. How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more
stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on
Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. In its
original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies "Flatterers
of Dionysius"--consequently, tyrants' accessories and lickspittles;
besides this, however, it is as much as to say, "They are
all ACTORS, there is nothing genuine about them" (for Dionysiokolax
was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really
the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was
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annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of
which Plato and his scholars were masters--of which Epicurus
was not a master! He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat
concealed in his little garden at Athens, and wrote three hundred
books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who
knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out who the gardengod
Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?

8. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction"
of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the
words of an ancient mystery:
Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.

9. You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics,
what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like
Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without
purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful
and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE
as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference?
To live--is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise
than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust,
being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that
your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the
same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY?
Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves
are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite
otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the
canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary,
you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your
pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to
Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it
shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything
to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification
and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth,
you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with
such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say,
Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise-- and to
crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the
Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over
yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself
to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? . . .
But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old
times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a
philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world
in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this ty-
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rannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will
to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.

10. The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness,
with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is
dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for
thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in
the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the
sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have
happened that such a Will to Truth--a certain extravagant and
adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn
hope--has participated therein: that which in the end always
prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful
possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience,
who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing,
rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and
the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding
the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems,
however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who
are still eager for life. In that they side AGAINST appearance,
and speak superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the
credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of
the ocular evidence that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently,
allowing with complacency their securest possession to
escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than
in one's body?),--who knows if they are not really trying to win
back something which was formerly an even securer possession,
something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps
the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old God," in short, ideas
by which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously
and more joyously, than by "modern ideas"? There is DISTRUST
of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief
in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is
perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can
no longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied
origin, such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the
market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair
motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in
whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness.
Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those
skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present
day; their instinct, which repels them from MODERN reality,
is unrefuted . . . what do their retrograde by-paths concern us!
The main thing about them is NOT that they wish to go "back,"
but that they wish to get AWAY therefrom. A little MORE
strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be
OFF--and not back!
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11. It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present
to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant
exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently
the value which he set upon himself. Kant was first and
foremost proud of his Table of Categories; with it in his hand he
said: "This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken
on behalf of metaphysics." Let us only understand this
"could be"! He was proud of having DISCOVERED a new faculty
in man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. Granting that
he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid
flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his
pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to
discover if possible something--at all events "new faculties"--of
which to be still prouder!--But let us reflect for a moment--it is
high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?"
Kant asks himself--and what is really his answer? "BY
MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"--but unfortunately not in five
words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display
of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether
loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an
answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this
new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant
further discovered a moral faculty in man--for at that time Germans
were still moral, not yet dabbling in the "Politics of hard
fact." Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the
young theologians of the Tubingen institution went immediately
into the groves--all seeking for "faculties." And what did they not
find--in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German
spirit, to which Romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and
sang, when one could not yet distinguish between "finding" and
"inventing"! Above all a faculty for the "transcendental"; Schelling
christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby gratified the
most earnest longings of the naturally pious-inclined Germans.
One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and
eccentric movement (which was really youthfulness, notwithstanding
that it disguised itself so boldly, in hoary and senile
conceptions), than to take it seriously, or even treat it with moral
indignation. Enough, however--the world grew older, and the
dream vanished. A time came when people rubbed their foreheads,
and they still rub them today. People had been dreaming,
and first and foremost--old Kant. "By means of a means (faculty)"--
he had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that--an
answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of
the question? How does opium induce sleep? "By means of a
means (faculty)," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor
in Moliere,
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Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.
But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high
time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments
a PRIORI possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in
such judgments necessary?"--in effect, it is high time that we
should understand that such judgments must be believed to be
true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves;
though they still might naturally be false judgments! Or, more
plainly spoken, and roughly and readily--synthetic judgments a
priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them;
in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of
course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as plausible belief
and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective view of life.
And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German
philosophy"--I hope you understand its right to inverted
commas (goosefeet)?--has exercised throughout the whole of
Europe, there is no doubt that a certain VIRTUS DORMITIVA had
a share in it; thanks to German philosophy, it was a delight to
the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, the artiste, the threefourths
Christians, and the political obscurantists of all nations,
to find an antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism which
overflowed from the last century into this, in short--"sensus
assoupire." . . .

12. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best- refuted
theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is
now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to
attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday
use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)-- thanks
chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have
hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of
ocular evidence. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe,
contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand
fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing
that "stood fast" of the earth--the belief in "substance," in "matter,"
in the earth-residuum, and particle- atom: it is the greatest
triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth.
One must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless
war to the knife, against the "atomistic requirements" which
still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects
them, like the more celebrated "metaphysical requirements":
one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other
and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best
and longest, the SOUL- ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to desig-
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nate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as
something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an
atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between
ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul"
thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated
hypotheses--as happens frequently to the clumsiness of
naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately
losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and
refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as
"mortal soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity," and "soul as
social structure of the instincts and passions," want henceforth
to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW psychologist
is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto
flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the
soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert
and a new distrust--it is possible that the older psychologists had
a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however,
he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT--
and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.

13. Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down
the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an
organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its
strength--life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only
one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short,
here, as everywhere else, let us beware of SUPERFLUOUS teleological
principles!--one of which is the instinct of self- preservation
(we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). It is thus, in effect,
that method ordains, which must be essentially economy of
principles.

14. It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural
philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-arrangement
(according to us, if I may say so!) and NOT a world-explanation;
but in so far as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded
as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more-
-namely, as an explanation. It has eyes and fingers of its own, it
has ocular evidence and palpableness of its own: this operates
fascinatingly, persuasively, and CONVINCINGLY upon an age
with fundamentally plebeian tastes--in fact, it follows instinctively
the canon of truth of eternal popular sensualism. What is
clear, what is "explained"? Only that which can be seen and felt--
one must pursue every problem thus far. Obversely, however,
the charm of the Platonic mode of thought, which was an ARISTOCRATIC
mode, consisted precisely in RESISTANCE to obvious
sense-evidence--perhaps among men who enjoyed even
stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries,
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but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters
of them: and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional
networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses--
the mob of the senses, as Plato said. In this overcoming of the
world, and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, there
was an ENJOYMENT different from that which the physicists of
today offer us--and likewise the Darwinists and anti-teleologists
among the physiological workers, with their principle of the
"smallest possible effort," and the greatest possible blunder.
"Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also
nothing more for men to do"--that is certainly an imperative
different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be
the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and
bridge- builders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH
work to perform.

15. To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist
on the fact that the sense-organs are not phenomena in the
sense of the idealistic philosophy; as such they certainly could
not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as regulative
hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle. What? And others say
even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then
our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of
our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work
of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete REDUCTIO
AD ABSURDUM, if the conception CAUSA SUI is something fundamentally
absurd. Consequently, the external world is NOT the
work of our organs--?

16. There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there
are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as the
superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though cognition
here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in
itself," without any falsification taking place either on the part of
the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred
times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge"
and the "thing in itself," involve a CONTRADICTIO IN
ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading
significance of words! The people on their part may think that
cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must
say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in
the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions,
the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps
impossible: for instance, that it is _I_ who think, that there must
necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity
and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a
cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already deter-
- 15 -
mined what is to be designated by thinking--that I KNOW what
thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it
is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just
happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion
'I think,' assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present
moment with other states of myself which I know, in order
to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection
with further 'knowledge,' it has, at any rate, no immediate
certainty for me."--In place of the "immediate certainty" in which
the people may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus
finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable
conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: "Whence did I
get the notion of 'thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and effect?
What gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of
an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?"
He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once
by an appeal to a sort of INTUITIVE perception, like the person
who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual,
and certain"--will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation
in a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher will perhaps
give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not
mistaken, but why should it be the truth?"

17. With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire
of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized
by these credulous minds--namely, that a thought comes
when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION
of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the
condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one"
is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a
supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate
certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one
thinks"--even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the
process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers
here according to the usual grammatical formula--"To think is an
activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"
. . . It was pretty much on the same lines that the older
atomism sought, besides the operating "power," the material
particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates--the
atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along
without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall
accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to
get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego"
has refined itself).

18. It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable;
it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle
- 16 -
minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the
"free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is
always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

19. Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it
were the best-known thing in the world; indeed, Schopenhauer
has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to
us, absolutely and completely known, without deduction or addition.
But it again and again seems to me that in this case
Schopenhauer also only did what philosophers are in the habit of
doing--he seems to have adopted a POPULAR PREJUDICE and
exaggerated it. Willing seems to me to be above all something
COMPLICATED, something that is a unity only in name--and it is
precisely in a name that popular prejudice lurks, which has got
the mastery over the inadequate precautions of philosophers in
all ages. So let us for once be more cautious, let us be "unphilosophical":
let us say that in all willing there is firstly a plurality
of sensations, namely, the sensation of the condition "AWAY
FROM WHICH we go," the sensation of the condition "TOWARDS
WHICH we go," the sensation of this "FROM" and "TOWARDS"
itself, and then besides, an accompanying muscular sensation,
which, even without our putting in motion "arms and legs,"
commences its action by force of habit, directly we "will" anything.
Therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of
sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, in
the second place, thinking is also to be recognized; in every act
of the will there is a ruling thought;--and let us not imagine it
possible to sever this thought from the "willing," as if the will
would then remain over! In the third place, the will is not only a
complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an EMOTION,
and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is
termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the emotion of supremacy
in respect to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must
obey"--this consciousness is inherent in every will; and equally
so the straining of the attention, the straight look which fixes
itself exclusively on one thing, the unconditional judgment that
"this and nothing else is necessary now," the inward certainty
that obedience will be rendered--and whatever else pertains to
the position of the commander. A man who WILLS commands
something within himself which renders obedience, or which he
believes renders obedience. But now let us notice what is the
strangest thing about the will,--this affair so extremely complex,
for which the people have only one name. Inasmuch as in the
given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding
AND the obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the
sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and
motion, which usually commence immediately after the act of
- 17 -
will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to
disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by
means of the synthetic term "I": a whole series of erroneous
conclusions, and consequently of false judgments about the will
itself, has become attached to the act of willing--to such a degree
that he who wills believes firmly that willing SUFFICES for
action. Since in the majority of cases there has only been exercise
of will when the effect of the command--consequently obedience,
and therefore action--was to be EXPECTED, the
APPEARANCE has translated itself into the sentiment, as if there
were a NECESSITY OF EFFECT; in a word, he who wills believes
with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow
one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to
the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of
power which accompanies all success. "Freedom of Will"--that is
the expression for the complex state of delight of the person
exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies
himself with the executor of the order-- who, as such, enjoys
also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it
was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the
person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his
successful executive instruments, the useful "underwills" or
under-souls--indeed, our body is but a social structure composed
of many souls--to his feelings of delight as commander. L'EFFET
C'EST MOI. what happens here is what happens in every wellconstructed
and happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing
class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth.
In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding
and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure
composed of many "souls", on which account a philosopher
should claim the right to include willing- as-such within the
sphere of morals--regarded as the doctrine of the relations of
supremacy under which the phenomenon of "life" manifests
itself.

20. That the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional
or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and
relationship with each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily
they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless
belong just as much to a system as the collective
members of the fauna of a Continent--is betrayed in the end by
the circumstance: how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers
always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of POSSIBLE
philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once
more in the same orbit, however independent of each other they
may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something
within them leads them, something impels them in definite
- 18 -
order the one after the other--to wit, the innate methodology
and relationship of their ideas. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a
discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a
home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the
soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so
far a kind of atavism of the highest order. The wonderful family
resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is
easily enough explained. In fact, where there is affinity of language,
owing to the common philosophy of grammar--I mean
owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar
grammatical functions--it cannot but be that everything is prepared
at the outset for a similar development and succession of
philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against
certain other possibilities of world- interpretation. It is highly
probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic
languages (where the conception of the subject is least developed)
look otherwise "into the world," and will be found on paths
of thought different from those of the Indo-Germans and Mussulmans,
the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately
also the spell of PHYSIOLOGICAL valuations and racial conditions.--
So much by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality with
regard to the origin of ideas.

21. The CAUSA SUI is the best self-contradiction that has yet
been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness;
but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle
itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for
"freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as
still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated,
the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's
actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors,
chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be
precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen
daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the
slough of nothingness. If any one should find out in this manner
the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of "free will" and
put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his
"enlightenment" a step further, and also put out of his head the
contrary of this monstrous conception of "free will": I mean
"non-free will," which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and
effect. One should not wrongly MATERIALISE "cause" and "effect,"
as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them
naturalize in thinking at present), according to the prevailing
mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push
until it "effects" its end; one should use "cause" and "effect" only
as pure CONCEPTIONS, that is to say, as conventional fictions for
the purpose of designation and mutual understanding,--NOT for
- 19 -
explanation. In "being-in-itself" there is nothing of "casual- connection,"
of "necessity," or of "psychological non-freedom"; there
the effect does NOT follow the cause, there "law" does not obtain.
It is WE alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity,
relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and
purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world,
as "being-in-itself," with things, we act once more as we have
always acted--MYTHOLOGICALLY. The "non-free will" is mythology;
in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.-
-It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself,
when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological
necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness,
oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to
have such feelings--the person betrays himself. And in general, if
I have observed correctly, the "non-freedom of the will" is regarded
as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but
always in a profoundly PERSONAL manner: some will not give up
their "responsibility," their belief in THEMSELVES, the personal
right to THEIR merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this
class); others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for
anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward selfcontempt,
seek to GET OUT OF THE BUSINESS, no matter how.
The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of
taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their
favourite disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the
weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as
"la religion de la souffrance humaine"; that is ITS "good taste."
22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist
from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation,
but "Nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists
talk so proudly, as though--why, it exists only owing to your
interpretation and bad "philology." It is no matter of fact, no
"text," but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and
perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions
to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere
equality before the law--Nature is not different in that
respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in
which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic--
likewise a second and more refined atheism--is once
more disguised. "Ni dieu, ni maitre"--that, also, is what you
want; and therefore "Cheers for natural law!"-- is it not so? But,
as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody
might come along, who, with opposite intentions and modes of
interpretation, could read out of the same "Nature," and with
regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate
and relentless enforcement of the claims of power--an inter-
- 20 -
preter who should so place the unexceptionalness and unconditionalness
of all "Will to Power" before your eyes, that almost
every word, and the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually
seem unsuitable, or like a weakening and softening metaphor--
as being too human; and who should, nevertheless, end by
asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it
has a "necessary" and "calculable" course, NOT, however, because
laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely LACKING,
and every power effects its ultimate consequences every
moment. Granted that this also is only interpretation--and you
will be eager enough to make this objection?--well, so much the
better.
23. All psychology hitherto has run aground on moral prejudices
and timidities, it has not dared to launch out into the depths. In
so far as it is allowable to recognize in that which has hitherto
been written, evidence of that which has hitherto been kept
silent, it seems as if nobody had yet harboured the notion of
psychology as the Morphology and DEVELOPMENT-DOCTRINE OF
THE WILL TO POWER, as I conceive of it. The power of moral
prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most intellectual
world, the world apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced,
and has obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive, blinding,
and distorting manner. A proper physio-psychology has to contend
with unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator,
it has "the heart" against it even a doctrine of the reciprocal
conditionalness of the "good" and the "bad" impulses, causes (as
refined immorality) distress and aversion in a still strong and
manly conscience--still more so, a doctrine of the derivation of
all good impulses from bad ones. If, however, a person should
regard even the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and
imperiousness as life-conditioning emotions, as factors which
must be present, fundamentally and essentially, in the general
economy of life (which must, therefore, be further developed if
life is to be further developed), he will suffer from such a view of
things as from sea-sickness. And yet this hypothesis is far from
being the strangest and most painful in this immense and almost
new domain of dangerous knowledge, and there are in fact a
hundred good reasons why every one should keep away from it
who CAN do so! On the other hand, if one has once drifted hither
with one's bark, well! very good! now let us set our teeth firmly!
let us open our eyes and keep our hand fast on the helm! We sail
away right OVER morality, we crush out, we destroy perhaps the
remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage
thither--but what do WE matter. Never yet did a PROFOUNDER
world of insight reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers,
and the psychologist who thus "makes a sacrifice"--it is not the
- 21 -
sacrifizio dell' intelletto, on the contrary!--will at least be entitled
to demand in return that psychology shall once more be recognized
as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and
equipment the other sciences exist. For psychology is once more
the path to the fundamental problems.
- 22 -

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 truth-
- 23 -
fulness 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 trelliswork!
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- tribunebawler).
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,
- 24 -
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.
- 25 -
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 longwinded
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, wan-
- 26 -
tonest 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
- 27 -
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 selfconcealment
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
- 28 -
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 selfknowledge
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
- 29 -
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
- 30 -
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,
- 31 -
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"?
- 32 -

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 goodnatured
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,
- 33 -
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, heavilyhooped
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.
- 34 -
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 glibtongued
and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and
its "modern ideas" all of them men without solitude, without
- 35 -
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 antipodes 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" "freethinkers,"
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
- 36 -
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?
- 37 -

CHAPTER III - THE RELIGIOUS MOOD

45. The human soul and its limits, the range of man's inner
experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distances
of these experiences, the entire history of the soul UP TO THE
PRESENT TIME, and its still unexhausted possibilities: this is the
preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist and lover of
a "big hunt". But how often must he say despairingly to himself:
"A single individual! alas, only a single individual! and this great
forest, this virgin forest!" So he would like to have some hundreds
of hunting assistants, and fine trained hounds, that he
could send into the history of the human soul, to drive HIS game
together. In vain: again and again he experiences, profoundly
and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for all
the things that directly excite his curiosity. The evil of sending
scholars into new and dangerous hunting- domains, where courage,
sagacity, and subtlety in every sense are required, is that
they are no longer serviceable just when the "BIG hunt," and
also the great danger commences,--it is precisely then that they
lose their keen eye and nose. In order, for instance, to divine
and determine what sort of history the problem of KNOWLEDGE
AND CONSCIENCE has hitherto had in the souls of homines
religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to possess as
profound, as bruised, as immense an experience as the intellectual
conscience of Pascal; and then he would still require that
wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from
above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize
this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.--But who
could do me this service! And who would have time to wait for
such servants!--they evidently appear too rarely, they are so
improbable at all times! Eventually one must do everything
ONESELF in order to know something; which means that one has
MUCH to do!--But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most
agreeable of vices--pardon me! I mean to say that the love of
truth has its reward in heaven, and already upon earth.
46. Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not infrequently
achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited
world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical
schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in
tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave--this faith is NOT
that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a
Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained
attached to his God and Christianity, it is much rather
- 38 -
the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous
suicide of reason--a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason,
which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow. The
Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all
freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same
time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. There is cruelty
and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is adapted to
a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious conscience, it takes for
granted that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably PAINFUL,
that all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the
absurdissimum, in the form of which "faith" comes to it. Modern
men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature,
have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception
which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of
the formula, "God on the Cross". Hitherto there had never and
nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once
so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it
promised a transvaluation of all ancient values--It was the Orient,
the PROFOUND Orient, it was the Oriental slave who thus
took revenge on Rome and its noble, light-minded toleration, on
the Roman "Catholicism" of non-faith, and it was always not the
faith, but the freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling
indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which made the
slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them.
"Enlightenment" causes revolt, for the slave desires the unconditioned,
he understands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals,
he loves as he hates, without NUANCE, to the very depths,
to the point of pain, to the point of sickness--his many HIDDEN
sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems
to DENY suffering. The skepticism with regard to suffering, fundamentally
only an attitude of aristocratic morality, was not the
least of the causes, also, of the last great slave-insurrection
which began with the French Revolution.
47. Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth
so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as
to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence--but without
its being possible to determine with certainty which is cause and
which is effect, or IF any relation at all of cause and effect exists
there. This latter doubt is justified by the fact that one of the
most regular symptoms among savage as well as among civilized
peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality, which then
with equal suddenness transforms into penitential paroxysms,
world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both symptoms perhaps
explainable as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere is it MORE
obligatory to put aside explanations around no other type has
there grown such a mass of absurdity and superstition, no other
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type seems to have been more interesting to men and even to
philosophers--perhaps it is time to become just a little indifferent
here, to learn caution, or, better still, to look AWAY, TO GO
AWAY--Yet in the background of the most recent philosophy,
that of Schopenhauer, we find almost as the problem in itself,
this terrible note of interrogation of the religious crisis and awakening.
How is the negation of will POSSIBLE? how is the saint
possible?--that seems to have been the very question with which
Schopenhauer made a start and became a philosopher. And thus
it was a genuine Schopenhauerian consequence, that his most
convinced adherent (perhaps also his last, as far as Germany is
concerned), namely, Richard Wagner, should bring his own life-
work to an end just here, and should finally put that terrible and
eternal type upon the stage as Kundry, type vecu, and as it
loved and lived, at the very time that the mad-doctors in almost
all European countries had an opportunity to study the type close
at hand, wherever the religious neurosis--or as I call it, "the
religious mood"--made its latest epidemical outbreak and display
as the "Salvation Army"--If it be a question, however, as to what
has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages,
and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the saint,
it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein--
namely, the immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states of
the soul regarded as morally antithetical: it was believed here to
be self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once turned into a
"saint," a good man. The hitherto existing psychology was
wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened
principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion
of morals, because it BELIEVED in oppositions of moral
values, and saw, read, and INTERPRETED these oppositions into
the text and facts of the case? What? "Miracle" only an error of
interpretation? A lack of philology?
48. It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply attached to
their Catholicism than we Northerners are to Christianity generally,
and that consequently unbelief in Catholic countries means
something quite different from what it does among Protestants--
namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the race, while with
us it is rather a return to the spirit (or non- spirit) of the race.
We Northerners undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous
races, even as regards our talents for religion--we have POOR
talents for it. One may make an exception in the case of the
Celts, who have theretofore furnished also the best soil for Christian
infection in the North: the Christian ideal blossomed forth in
France as much as ever the pale sun of the north would allow it.
How strangely pious for our taste are still these later French
- 40 -
skeptics, whenever there is any Celtic blood in their origin! How
Catholic, how un-German does Auguste Comte's Sociology seem
to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts! How Jesuitical, that
amiable and shrewd cicerone of Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in
spite of all his hostility to Jesuits! And even Ernest Renan: how
inaccessible to us Northerners does the language of such a
Renan appear, in whom every instant the merest touch of religious
thrill throws his refined voluptuous and comfortably couching
soul off its balance! Let us repeat after him these fine
sentences--and what wickedness and haughtiness is immediately
aroused by way of answer in our probably less beautiful but
harder souls, that is to say, in our more German souls!--
"DISONS DONC HARDIMENT QUE LA RELIGION EST UN PRODUIT
DE L'HOMME NORMAL, QUE L'HOMME EST LE PLUS DANS LE
VRAI QUANT IL EST LE PLUS RELIGIEUX ET LE PLUS ASSURE
D'UNE DESTINEE INFINIE. . . . C'EST QUAND IL EST BON QU'IL
VEUT QUE LA VIRTU CORRESPONDE A UN ORDER ETERNAL,
C'EST QUAND IL CONTEMPLE LES CHOSES D'UNE MANIERE
DESINTERESSEE QU'IL TROUVE LA MORT REVOLTANTE ET ABSURDE.
COMMENT NE PAS SUPPOSER QUE C'EST DANS CES
MOMENTS-LA, QUE L'HOMME VOIT LE MIEUX?" . . . These sentences
are so extremely ANTIPODAL to my ears and habits of
thought, that in my first impulse of rage on finding them, I wrote
on the margin, "LA NIAISERIE RELIGIEUSE PAR EXCELLENCE!"--
until in my later rage I even took a fancy to them, these sentences
with their truth absolutely inverted! It is so nice and such
a distinction to have one's own antipodes!
49. That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient
Greeks is the irrestrainable stream of GRATITUDE which it
pours forth--it is a very superior kind of man who takes SUCH an
attitude towards nature and life.--Later on, when the populace
got the upper hand in Greece, FEAR became rampant also in
religion; and Christianity was preparing itself.
50. The passion for God: there are churlish, honest-hearted, and
importunate kinds of it, like that of Luther--the whole of Protestantism
lacks the southern DELICATEZZA. There is an Oriental
exaltation of the mind in it, like that of an undeservedly favoured
or elevated slave, as in the case of St. Augustine, for instance,
who lacks in an offensive manner, all nobility in bearing and
desires. There is a feminine tenderness and sensuality in it,
which modestly and unconsciously longs for a UNIO MYSTICA ET
PHYSICA, as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In many cases it
appears, curiously enough, as the disguise of a girl's or youth's
puberty; here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also
- 41 -
as her last ambition. The Church has frequently canonized the
woman in such a case.
51. The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently
before the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter
voluntary privation--why did they thus bow? They divined in
him-- and as it were behind the questionableness of his frail and
wretched appearance--the superior force which wished to test
itself by such a subjugation; the strength of will, in which they
recognized their own strength and love of power, and knew how
to honour it: they honoured something in themselves when they
honoured the saint. In addition to this, the contemplation of the
saint suggested to them a suspicion: such an enormity of self-
negation and anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for
nothing--they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a reason
for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might
wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors
and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the world
learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new
power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:--it was the "Will to
Power" which obliged them to halt before the saint. They had to
question him.
52. In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice,
there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale,
that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it.
One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous
remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts
about old Asia and its little out-pushed peninsula Europe, which
would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the "Progress of
Mankind." To be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame
house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like
our cultured people of today, including the Christians of "cultured"
Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid
those ruins--the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with
respect to "great" and "small": perhaps he will find that the New
Testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart
(there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid
beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound up this New
Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along
with the Old Testament into one book, as the "Bible," as "The
Book in Itself," is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against
the Spirit" which literary Europe has upon its conscience.
53. Why Atheism nowadays? "The father" in God is thoroughly
refuted; equally so "the judge," "the rewarder." Also his "free
will": he does not hear--and even if he did, he would not know
- 42 -
how to help. The worst is that he seems incapable of communicating
himself clearly; is he uncertain?--This is what I have made
out (by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations)
to be the cause of the decline of European theism; it appears to
me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth,--it
rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust.
54. What does all modern philosophy mainly do? Since Descartes--
and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of
his procedure--an ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all
philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise
of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception--that is to
say, an ATTENTAT on the fundamental presupposition of Christian
doctrine. Modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism,
is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN, although (for keener
ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious. Formerly, in effect,
one believed in "the soul" as one believed in grammar and the
grammatical subject: one said, "I" is the condition, "think" is the
predicate and is conditioned--to think is an activity for which one
MUST suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then made,
with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get
out of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps true:
"think" the condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I," therefore, only
a synthesis which has been MADE by thinking itself. KANT really
wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could
not be proved--nor the object either: the possibility of an APPARENT
EXISTENCE of the subject, and therefore of "the soul,"
may not always have been strange to him,--the thought which
once had an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philosophy.
55. There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many
rounds; but three of these are the most important. Once on a
time men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just
those they loved the best--to this category belong the firstling
sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the
Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri, that
most terrible of all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral
epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the strongest
instincts they possessed, their "nature"; THIS festal joy shines in
the cruel glances of ascetics and "anti-natural" fanatics. Finally,
what still remained to be sacrificed? Was it not necessary in the
end for men to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all
hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and
justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out of
cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate,
nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness--this paradoxical
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mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising
generation; we all know something thereof already.
56. Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatical desire,
has long endeavoured to go to the bottom of the question of
pessimism and free it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness
and stupidity in which it has finally presented itself to
this century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy;
whoever, with an Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye, has actually
looked inside, and into the most world-renouncing of all possible
modes of thought--beyond good and evil, and no longer like
Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the dominion and delusion of
morality,--whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby,
without really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold the opposite
ideal: the ideal of the most world-approving, exuberant, and
vivacious man, who has not only learnt to compromise and arrange
with that which was and is, but wishes to have it again AS
IT WAS AND IS, for all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo,
not only to himself, but to the whole piece and play; and not
only the play, but actually to him who requires the play--and
makes it necessary; because he always requires himself anew--
and makes himself necessary.--What? And this would not be--
circulus vitiosus deus?
57. The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows
with the strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world
becomes profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are
ever coming into view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual
eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been
an occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for
children and childish minds. Perhaps the most solemn conceptions
that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the
conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more
importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an
old man;-- and perhaps another plaything and another pain will
then be necessary once more for "the old man"--always childish
enough, an eternal child!
58. Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or
semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for its
favourite microscopic labour of self-examination, and for its soft
placidity called "prayer," the state of perpetual readiness for the
"coming of God"), I mean the idleness with a good conscience,
the idleness of olden times and of blood, to which the aristocratic
sentiment that work is DISHONOURING--that it vulgarizes body
and soul--is not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently the
modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited, foolishly proud la-
- 44 -
boriousness educates and prepares for "unbelief" more than
anything else? Among these, for instance, who are at present
living apart from religion in Germany, I find "free-thinkers" of
diversified species and origin, but above all a majority of those in
whom laboriousness from generation to generation has dissolved
the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose
religions serve, and only note their existence in the world with a
kind of dull astonishment. They feel themselves already fully
occupied, these good people, be it by their business or by their
pleasures, not to mention the "Fatherland," and the newspapers,
and their "family duties"; it seems that they have no time whatever
left for religion; and above all, it is not obvious to them
whether it is a question of a new business or a new pleasure--for
it is impossible, they say to themselves, that people should go to
church merely to spoil their tempers. They are by no means
enemies of religious customs; should certain circumstances,
State affairs perhaps, require their participation in such customs,
they do what is required, as so many things are done--with a
patient and unassuming seriousness, and without much curiosity
or discomfort;--they live too much apart and outside to feel even
the necessity for a FOR or AGAINST in such matters. Among
those indifferent persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority
of German Protestants of the middle classes, especially in the
great laborious centres of trade and commerce; also the majority
of laborious scholars, and the entire University personnel (with
the exception of the theologians, whose existence and possibility
there always gives psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to
solve). On the part of pious, or merely church-going people,
there is seldom any idea of HOW MUCH good-will, one might say
arbitrary will, is now necessary for a German scholar to take the
problem of religion seriously; his whole profession (and as I have
said, his whole workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled
by his modern conscience) inclines him to a lofty and
almost charitable serenity as regards religion, with which is
occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the "uncleanliness" of
spirit which he takes for granted wherever any one still professes
to belong to the Church. It is only with the help of history (NOT
through his own personal experience, therefore) that the scholar
succeeds in bringing himself to a respectful seriousness, and to a
certain timid deference in presence of religions; but even when
his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards
them, he has not personally advanced one step nearer to that
which still maintains itself as Church or as piety; perhaps even
the contrary. The practical indifference to religious matters in the
midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually sublimates
itself in his case into circumspection and cleanliness,
which shuns contact with religious men and things; and it may
- 45 -
be just the depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts
him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings
with it.--Every age has its own divine type of naivete, for the
discovery of which other ages may envy it: and how much naivete--
adorable, childlike, and boundlessly foolish naivete is involved
in this belief of the scholar in his superiority, in the good
conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting, simple certainty
with which his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and
less valuable type, beyond, before, and ABOVE which he himself
has developed--he, the little arrogant dwarf and mob-man, the
sedulously alert, head-and-hand drudge of "ideas," of "modern
ideas"!
59. Whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless divined
what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial.
It is their preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty,
lightsome, and false. Here and there one finds a passionate and
exaggerated adoration of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as
in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has NEED of the
cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or another
made an unlucky dive BENE