July 28, 2025 • 39 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter two, The Free Spirit twenty four Osancta simplicatatus. In
what strange simplification and falsification man lives? One can never
cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding
this marble. How we have made everything around us so
clear and free and easy and simple. How we have
been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial,
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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, granite like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear
itself hitherto the will to knowledge in the foundation of
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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 is elsewhere will not get over its awkwardness,
and that it will continue to talk of opposites where
there are only degrees. In many refinements of gradiation, it
is equally to be hooped, that the incarnated tartuffery of morals,
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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,
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it loves life. Twenty five After such a cheerful commencement,
a serious word would fain be heard. It appeals to
the most serious minds. Take care of you, 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
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makes you headstrong against objections in red rags. It stupefies, animalizes,
and brutalizes. When in the struggle with dangersander's suspicion, expulsion,
and even worse consequence 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,
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ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Monsieur Loufer and cobweb
spinners of the spirit. Finally, ye know sufficiently well that
it cannot be of any consequence if ye just carry
your point. Ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried
his point, and that there might be a more laudable
truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after
your special words and favorite doctrines, and occasionally after yourselves,
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than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before
accusers in 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 musical the waters at eventide,
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when 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
for which cannot be waged openly by means of force?
How personal does a long fear make one? A long
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watching of enemies, of possible enemies, these pariahs of society,
these long pursued, badly persecuted ones. Also the compulsory recklesses
the Spinozas and Gordiano Bruno's, always become in the end,
even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being
themselves aware of it, refined vengeance sickers and poison brewers
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just lay bare the foundations 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 humor has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher,
his sacrifice for the sake of truth, forces into the
light whatever of the agitator. An actor lurks with within him,
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and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity.
With regard to many a philosopher, it is easy to
understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration,
deteriorated into a martyr, into a stage and tribune brawler,
Only that it is necessary with such desire to be
clear what spectacle one will see, in any case, merely
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a satiric play, merely an epilogue farce, and merely continued
proof that the long real tragedy is at an end.
Supposing that every philosophy has long been a tragedy in
its origin twenty six, 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
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men who are the rule as their exception, exclusive only
of the case in which he is pushed straight to
such men by 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 gray
colors of distress, owing to discuss satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and solitariness,
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is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes. Supposing however,
that he does not voluntarily take all this burden and
discussed upon himself, that he persistently avoids it and remains,
as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel.
One thing is then certain. He was not made, He
was not predestined for knowledge. For as such he would
one day have to say to himself, the devil take
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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
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the life history of every philosopher, perhaps the most disagreeable, odious,
and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a
favorite child of knowledge should be, he will meet with
suitable auxiliaries who will shorten enlighten 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
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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. Dunghill 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
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the scientific sator speaks out. There are even cases where
enchantment mixes with the disgust, namely whereby freak of nature,
genius is bound to some indiscreet billygoat and ape, as
in the case of the Abbe Guiliani, the profoundest, acutest,
and perhaps also the filthiest man of his century. He
was far profounder than Voltaire, and consequently also a good
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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 in 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 anyone sees seeks and wants to
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see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real
and only motives of human actions. In short, when anyone
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
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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
more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case, and no
one is such a liar as the indignant man. Twenty seven.
It is different cult to be understood, especially when one
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thinks and lives ganghestragati footnote like the river Ganges presto.
Among those who think and live otherwise, namely kromagati footnote
like the tortoise lento, or at best frog like mandya
Kegati footnote like the frogs taccato. I do everything to
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be difficultly understood myself, and one should be heartily grateful
for the good will, and 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 playground in brompin place for misunderstanding. One
can thus laugh still or get rid of them altogether
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these good friends and laugh then also twenty eight. 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 assimi of its nutriment.
There are honestly meant translations which, as in voluntary vogarizations,
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are almost falsifications of the original, merely because its lively
and merry tempo, which overleaps and obviates all the dangers
in word and expression, could not also be rendered. A
German is almost incapacitated for presto in his language. Consequently,
also he may be reasonably inferred for many of the
most delightful and daring nuances of free, free spirited thought,
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and just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to
him in body and conscience. So Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable.
For him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, All long
winded and weary species of style are developed in profuse
variety among Germans. Part of me for stating the fact
that even Gotha's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance,
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is no exception, as a reflection of the good old
time to which it belongs, and an expression of German
taste at a time when there was still a German taste,
which was a rocucotate in moribus at Archibas. Blessing is
an exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much
and was versed in many things. He who was not
the translator of bail to no purpose, who took refuge
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willingly in the shadow of Diterat 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
principa makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence,
and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a
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boisterous alagressimo, 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 wantonous humor. Finally, who could venture on a German
translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician hitherto
was a master of presto, in invention, ideas and words.
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What matter in the end about the swamps of the
sick evie or of the ancient world, when like him
one has the feet of the 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 complimentary genius, for whose sake one pardons all Hellenism
for having existed, provided one has understood in its whole profoundity,
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all that there requires pardon and transfiguration. There is nothing
that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy
and spinslike nature than the happily preserved pettit fate 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,
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a Greek life which he repudiated, without an Aristophanes twenty nine.
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
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already brings with it, not the least of which is
that no one can see how and where he loses
his way, become isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some
minotaur of conscience. Suppose 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
can no longer go back. He cannot even go back
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to the sympathy of men. Thirty Our deepest insights must
and should appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as
crimes when they are come unauthorizedly to the ears of
those who are not disposed and predestined for them. The
exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formally distinguished by
philosophers among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans.
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In short, wherever people believed in gradiations of rank, 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,
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while the esoteric class few things from above downwards. There
are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no
longer appears to operate tragically. And if all the woe
in the world were taken together, who would dare to
decide whether the sight of it would necessarily seduce and
constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe.
That which serves the higher class of men for nourishment
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or refreshment must also be poisoned to an entirely different
and lower order. Of human beings. The virtues of the
common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in the 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
been honored as a saint in the lower world in
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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, and unsettling books. In the latter
case there are herald calls which summon the bravest to
their bravery. Books for the general reader are always ill
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smelling books. The odor 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. Thirty one,
in our youthful years, we still venerate and despise without
the art of nuance, which is the best gain of life,
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and we have rightly to do hard penance for having
fallen upon men and things. With the A and A,
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
a sentiments and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial,
as do the real artists of life. The angry and
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reverence 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
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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 one's self by distrust of
one's sentiments. When tortures one's enthusiasm with doubt, one feels
even the good conscience to be danger and if it were,
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the self concealment and lassitude of a more refined uprightness.
And above all one espouses upon the principle the cause
against youth. A decade later, and one comprehends that this
was also still youth thirty two. Throughout the longest period
of human history, one calls it the prehistoric period. The
value or non value of an action was inferred from
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its consequence. The action in itself was not taken into
consideration any more than its origin. But pretty much as
in China at present, where the distinction or disgrace of
a child redounds to its parents, the retro operating power
of success or failure was what induced men to think
well or ill of an action. Let us call this
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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 regards to its worth. A great achievement as a
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whole and important refinement of vision and criterion, the unconscious
effort of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the
belief in origin the mark of a period which which
may be designated in the narrower sense as the moral one.
The first attempt at self knowledge is thereby made instead
of the consequence. The origin what an inversion of perspective,
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and assuredly an inversion affected only after long struggle in
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 intention. People were agreed in the
belief that the value of an action lay in the
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value of its intention. The intention is 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
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with regards 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
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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,
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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 in alchemy. But in a case something which
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must be surmounted. There's surmounting of morality in certain sense,
even the self mounting morality. Let that be the name
for the long secret labor which has been reserved for
the most refined the most upright and also the most
wicked consciences of today, as the living touchstones of the soul.
Thirty three, It cannot be helped the sentiment of surrender
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of sacrifice for one's neighbor, 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 it
self good conscience. There is far too much witchery and
sugar in the sentiments for others and not for myself.
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For one not needing to be doubly distrustful here, and
for one asking promptly, are they not perhaps deceptions? They
that please him who has them, and him who enjoys
their fruit, and also the mere spectator that is all
no argument in their favor, but just calls for caution.
Let us therefore be cautious at whatever standpoint of philosophy
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one may place one's self. 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
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the world, an honorable exit which every conscious or unconscious
evacutus day 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
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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 about it,
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
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questions of the same description. The belief in immediate certainties
is a moral ne avite, which does honor to his philosophers.
But we have now ceased being merely moral men apart
from morality. Such belief is a folly which does little
honor to us. If in middle class life an ever
ready distrusted is regarded as the sign of a bad character,
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and consequently as imprudence. Here among us beyond the middle
class world, in its ads 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 through the wickedest squinting out of every
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abyss of suspicion. Forgive me the joke of this gloomy
grimace and turn of expression, For I myself have long
ago learned to think can estimate differently with regard to
deceiving and being deceived. And I keep at least a
couple of pokes in the ReBs ready for the blind
rage with which philosophers struggle against being deceived. Why not
it is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth
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is worth more than semblance. It is, in fact the
worst proof supposition in the world. So much must be conceded.
There could have been no life at all except on
the basis of prospective estimations 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
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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 semblances, different values. As the
painters say, why might not the world which concerns us
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be a fiction? And to any one who suggested, but
to who if fiction belongs an originator, might it not
be bluntly replied, why may this belong also belong to
the fiction? Why is it not at length permitted to
be a little ironical towards the subject, just as towards
the predicate an object? Might not the philosopher elevate himself
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above faith and grammar? All respect to governesses? But is
it not time that philosophy should renounce governess faith? Thirty
five O Voltaire, Oh humanity, Oh idiocy? There is something
ticklish in the truth and the search for the truth.
And if man goes about it too humanely, ernich cherie
nevre qui pour Philippienne, I wager he finds nothing. Thirty six.
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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
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understanding of the so called mechanical or material world. I
do not mean as an illusion, a semblance, a representation
in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhaueren 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
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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, as simulation, nutrition, secretion,
and change of matter are still synthetically united with one
another as a primary form of life. In the end,
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is it not only permitted to make this attempt, It
is commanded by the conscience of logical method not to
assume several kinds of cause, 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 morality of method,
which one may not repudiate. Nowadays, it follows from its definition,
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as mathematicians say, the question is ultimately whether we recognize
the will as operating, whether we believe in the causality
of this will. If we do so, and fundamentally our
belief in this is just our belief in causality itself,
we must make an attempt to posit hypothetically the causality
of the will as the only causality. Will can naturally
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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 power operates therein
is not the power of will, the effect of will.
Granted finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive
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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 this problem of generation and nutrition, it is one problem,
could also be found therein. One would thus have acquired
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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. Thirty seven. What
does not that mean? In popular language? God has disproved,
but not the devil. On the contrary, On the contrary,
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my friends, and who the devil also compels you to
speak popularly? Thirty eight? As happened finally, in all the
enlightenment of modern times with the French Revolution, that terrible farce,
quite superfluous when judged close to hand, into which, however,
the noble and visionary spectators of all Europe have interpreted
from a distance their own indignation and enthusiasm so long
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and passionately until the text has disappeared under the interpretation,
so a noble posterity might once more misunderstand the whole
of the part, and perhaps only thereby make its aspect endurable.
Or rather, has not this already happened? Have we not
ourselves been that noble posterity? And in so far as
we now comprehend this, is it not thereby already past
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thirty nine? Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as
true merely because it makes the people happy or virtuous,
excepting perhaps the amiable idealists, who are enthusiastic about the good, true,
and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley course and
good natured desirabilities swim about promiscuously in their pond. Happiness
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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 the highest
degree injury and dangerous. Indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence
might be such that once is succumbed by a full
knowledge of it, so that the strength of a mind
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might be measured by the amount of truth that could
endure or speak, more plainly, by the extent to which
it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, dampened, and falsified. But
there is no doubt for the discovery of certain portions
of truth. The wicked and unfortunate are more favorably situated
and have greater likelihood of success, not to speak of
the wicked who are happy, a species about whom moralists
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are silent. Perhaps severity and craft are more favorable 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
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or even introduces his philosophy into books, Stenthall furnishes a
last feature of the portrait of the free spirited philosopher,
for which the sake of German taste I will not
omit to underline, for it is opposed to German taste
pour tre bround philosophy says this last great psychologist. If
foltetrisec Claire soon de lejon umbonquisque fiochun e un parti
(29:16):
de queratiriqui peufeverre des couvertis In philosophy ciestidia pouvot claire
Tons seques forty. Everything that is profound loves the mass.
The profoundest things have a hatred, even of figure and likeness.
Should not the contrary only be the right disguise for
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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 a coarseness and make
them unrecognizable their actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimy,
after which nothing can be wiser than to take a
(29:58):
stick and thrash the witness soundly, when thereby oscures his recollection.
Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his
own memory in order to at least 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 and craft. I could imagine that a
(30:20):
man with something costly and fragile to conceal would roll
through life clumsily and rotoundly like an old green heavily
hooped wine cask, the refinement of his shame requiring it
to be so. A man who has depths in his
shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths
which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence
of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant,
(30:43):
his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes, and equally
so has regained security. Such a hidden nature, which instinctively
employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustible an
evasion of communication, desires and insists that a mask of
himself shall ought to by his place in the hearts
and heads of his friends. And supposing he does not
(31:04):
desire it, his eyes will some day be open 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,
(31:25):
every step he takes, every sign of life he manifests
Forty one. One must subject one's self 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
(31:47):
only before ourselves and before no other judge. Not to
cleave any person, but 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 sympathy, be it
(32:08):
even for higher men, in whose peculiar torture and helplessness
chance has given us an insight. Not to cleave to
a science, though attempt 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 to theme. More
(32:30):
under it the danger of the flier not to cleave
to our own virtues, nor become as a whole 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 one's self
(32:54):
the best test of independence. Forty two. A new order
of philosophers as appear, 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,
(33:14):
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. Forty three Will they be
new friends of truth? These coming philosophers, very probably, for
all philosophers hitherto have loved their truths. But assuredly they
(33:35):
will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary to their
pride and also contrary to their taste, that their truths
should still be truth for everyone, 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
(33:56):
will say, perhaps one must renounce the bad taste of
wishing to agree with many people. Good is no longer
good when one's neighbor 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
always have been. The great things remain for the great,
(34:18):
the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for
the refined, And to sum up shortly, everything rare for
the rare. Forty four 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 merely
free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different,
(34:39):
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 a free spirit
obscure in every country of Europe, and the same in America.
(35:03):
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
(35:24):
to levelers. These wrongly named free spirits as glib, tongued
and scribe fingered slaves of the democratic taste in its
modern ideals, all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude,
blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honorable contact
ought to be denied. Only they are not free, and
are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality. Foreseeing the
(35:47):
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 meadowed
happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and
alleviation of life for everyone. Their two most frequently chanted
(36:09):
songs and doctrines are called equality of rights and sympathy
with all sufferers. And suffering itself is looked upon by
them as something which much 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 believed that this has always taken
(36:29):
place under the opposite conditions, that for this end, the
dangerousness of his situation has 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, violent slavery,
(36:51):
danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempters, art,
and devilry of every kind that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory,
and so 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
(37:13):
all modern ideology and gregarious desirability as their antipodes. Perhaps
what wonder that we free spirits are not the 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
(37:34):
and evil, with which we at least avoid confusion, we
are something else than librepensur, libin pensitory freethinkers, and whatever
else 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
(37:57):
origin and accident of men in books, or even the
weariness of travels seem to confine us full of malice
against the seductions of dependence, which he concealed in honors, money, positions,
or exaltations of the senses. Grateful even for the distress
and vicissitudes of illness, because they always free us from
some rule and its prejudice. Grateful to the God, Devil's
(38:20):
sheep and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault. Investigators
to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible,
with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, Ready for
any business that requires sageiacity 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
(38:42):
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 errors
and spread thrifts, arrangers and collectors from morning till night,
mises of our wealth and full cramp drawers, economical in
learning and forgetting, invented and scheming, sometimes proud of tables
(39:03):
of categories, sometimes pendants, 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 mid day solitude. Such kind of
men are we, we free spirits, And perhaps ye are
(39:24):
also something of the same kind, Ye coming ones, ye
New Philosophers, end Chapter two,
Chapter two, The Free Spirit twenty four Osancta simplicatatus. In
what strange simplification and falsification man lives? One can never
cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding
this marble. How we have made everything around us so
clear and free and easy and simple. How we have
been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial,
(00:22):
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, granite like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear
itself hitherto the will to knowledge in the foundation of
(00:46):
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 is elsewhere will not get over its awkwardness,
and that it will continue to talk of opposites where
there are only degrees. In many refinements of gradiation, it
is equally to be hooped, that the incarnated tartuffery of morals,
(01:09):
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,
(01:32):
it loves life. Twenty five After such a cheerful commencement,
a serious word would fain be heard. It appeals to
the most serious minds. Take care of you, 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
(01:52):
makes you headstrong against objections in red rags. It stupefies, animalizes,
and brutalizes. When in the struggle with dangersander's suspicion, expulsion,
and even worse consequence 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,
(02:17):
ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Monsieur Loufer and cobweb
spinners of the spirit. Finally, ye know sufficiently well that
it cannot be of any consequence if ye just carry
your point. Ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried
his point, and that there might be a more laudable
truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after
your special words and favorite doctrines, and occasionally after yourselves,
(02:40):
than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before
accusers in 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 musical the waters at eventide,
(03:01):
when 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
for which cannot be waged openly by means of force?
How personal does a long fear make one? A long
(03:22):
watching of enemies, of possible enemies, these pariahs of society,
these long pursued, badly persecuted ones. Also the compulsory recklesses
the Spinozas and Gordiano Bruno's, always become in the end,
even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being
themselves aware of it, refined vengeance sickers and poison brewers
(03:43):
just lay bare the foundations 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 humor has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher,
his sacrifice for the sake of truth, forces into the
light whatever of the agitator. An actor lurks with within him,
(04:04):
and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity.
With regard to many a philosopher, it is easy to
understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration,
deteriorated into a martyr, into a stage and tribune brawler,
Only that it is necessary with such desire to be
clear what spectacle one will see, in any case, merely
(04:26):
a satiric play, merely an epilogue farce, and merely continued
proof that the long real tragedy is at an end.
Supposing that every philosophy has long been a tragedy in
its origin twenty six, 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
(04:46):
men who are the rule as their exception, exclusive only
of the case in which he is pushed straight to
such men by 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 gray
colors of distress, owing to discuss satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and solitariness,
(05:07):
is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes. Supposing however,
that he does not voluntarily take all this burden and
discussed upon himself, that he persistently avoids it and remains,
as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel.
One thing is then certain. He was not made, He
was not predestined for knowledge. For as such he would
one day have to say to himself, the devil take
(05:29):
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
(05:51):
the life history of every philosopher, perhaps the most disagreeable, odious,
and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a
favorite child of knowledge should be, he will meet with
suitable auxiliaries who will shorten enlighten 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
(06:11):
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. Dunghill 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
(06:34):
the scientific sator speaks out. There are even cases where
enchantment mixes with the disgust, namely whereby freak of nature,
genius is bound to some indiscreet billygoat and ape, as
in the case of the Abbe Guiliani, the profoundest, acutest,
and perhaps also the filthiest man of his century. He
was far profounder than Voltaire, and consequently also a good
(06:55):
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 in 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 anyone sees seeks and wants to
(07:19):
see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real
and only motives of human actions. In short, when anyone
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
(07:41):
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
more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case, and no
one is such a liar as the indignant man. Twenty seven.
It is different cult to be understood, especially when one
(08:02):
thinks and lives ganghestragati footnote like the river Ganges presto.
Among those who think and live otherwise, namely kromagati footnote
like the tortoise lento, or at best frog like mandya
Kegati footnote like the frogs taccato. I do everything to
(08:23):
be difficultly understood myself, and one should be heartily grateful
for the good will, and 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 playground in brompin place for misunderstanding. One
can thus laugh still or get rid of them altogether
(08:44):
these good friends and laugh then also twenty eight. 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 assimi of its nutriment.
There are honestly meant translations which, as in voluntary vogarizations,
(09:06):
are almost falsifications of the original, merely because its lively
and merry tempo, which overleaps and obviates all the dangers
in word and expression, could not also be rendered. A
German is almost incapacitated for presto in his language. Consequently,
also he may be reasonably inferred for many of the
most delightful and daring nuances of free, free spirited thought,
(09:28):
and just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to
him in body and conscience. So Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable.
For him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, All long
winded and weary species of style are developed in profuse
variety among Germans. Part of me for stating the fact
that even Gotha's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance,
(09:50):
is no exception, as a reflection of the good old
time to which it belongs, and an expression of German
taste at a time when there was still a German taste,
which was a rocucotate in moribus at Archibas. Blessing is
an exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much
and was versed in many things. He who was not
the translator of bail to no purpose, who took refuge
(10:12):
willingly in the shadow of Diterat 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
principa makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence,
and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a
(10:34):
boisterous alagressimo, 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 wantonous humor. Finally, who could venture on a German
translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician hitherto
was a master of presto, in invention, ideas and words.
(10:57):
What matter in the end about the swamps of the
sick evie or of the ancient world, when like him
one has the feet of the 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 complimentary genius, for whose sake one pardons all Hellenism
for having existed, provided one has understood in its whole profoundity,
(11:20):
all that there requires pardon and transfiguration. There is nothing
that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy
and spinslike nature than the happily preserved pettit fate 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,
(11:41):
a Greek life which he repudiated, without an Aristophanes twenty nine.
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
(12:04):
already brings with it, not the least of which is
that no one can see how and where he loses
his way, become isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some
minotaur of conscience. Suppose 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
can no longer go back. He cannot even go back
(12:25):
to the sympathy of men. Thirty Our deepest insights must
and should appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as
crimes when they are come unauthorizedly to the ears of
those who are not disposed and predestined for them. The
exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formally distinguished by
philosophers among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans.
(12:49):
In short, wherever people believed in gradiations of rank, 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,
(13:11):
while the esoteric class few things from above downwards. There
are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no
longer appears to operate tragically. And if all the woe
in the world were taken together, who would dare to
decide whether the sight of it would necessarily seduce and
constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe.
That which serves the higher class of men for nourishment
(13:34):
or refreshment must also be poisoned to an entirely different
and lower order. Of human beings. The virtues of the
common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in the 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
been honored as a saint in the lower world in
(13:56):
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, and unsettling books. In the latter
case there are herald calls which summon the bravest to
their bravery. Books for the general reader are always ill
(14:18):
smelling books. The odor 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. Thirty one,
in our youthful years, we still venerate and despise without
the art of nuance, which is the best gain of life,
(14:38):
and we have rightly to do hard penance for having
fallen upon men and things. With the A and A,
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
a sentiments and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial,
as do the real artists of life. The angry and
(14:59):
reverence 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
(15:22):
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 one's self by distrust of
one's sentiments. When tortures one's enthusiasm with doubt, one feels
even the good conscience to be danger and if it were,
(15:42):
the self concealment and lassitude of a more refined uprightness.
And above all one espouses upon the principle the cause
against youth. A decade later, and one comprehends that this
was also still youth thirty two. Throughout the longest period
of human history, one calls it the prehistoric period. The
value or non value of an action was inferred from
(16:04):
its consequence. The action in itself was not taken into
consideration any more than its origin. But pretty much as
in China at present, where the distinction or disgrace of
a child redounds to its parents, the retro operating power
of success or failure was what induced men to think
well or ill of an action. Let us call this
(16:26):
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 regards to its worth. A great achievement as a
(16:46):
whole and important refinement of vision and criterion, the unconscious
effort of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the
belief in origin the mark of a period which which
may be designated in the narrower sense as the moral one.
The first attempt at self knowledge is thereby made instead
of the consequence. The origin what an inversion of perspective,
(17:07):
and assuredly an inversion affected only after long struggle in
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 intention. People were agreed in the
belief that the value of an action lay in the
(17:29):
value of its intention. The intention is 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
(17:50):
with regards 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
(18:11):
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,
(18:31):
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 in alchemy. But in a case something which
(18:55):
must be surmounted. There's surmounting of morality in certain sense,
even the self mounting morality. Let that be the name
for the long secret labor which has been reserved for
the most refined the most upright and also the most
wicked consciences of today, as the living touchstones of the soul.
Thirty three, It cannot be helped the sentiment of surrender
(19:17):
of sacrifice for one's neighbor, 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 it
self good conscience. There is far too much witchery and
sugar in the sentiments for others and not for myself.
(19:39):
For one not needing to be doubly distrustful here, and
for one asking promptly, are they not perhaps deceptions? They
that please him who has them, and him who enjoys
their fruit, and also the mere spectator that is all
no argument in their favor, but just calls for caution.
Let us therefore be cautious at whatever standpoint of philosophy
(20:02):
one may place one's self. 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
(20:25):
the world, an honorable exit which every conscious or unconscious
evacutus day 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
(20:48):
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 about it,
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
(21:11):
questions of the same description. The belief in immediate certainties
is a moral ne avite, which does honor to his philosophers.
But we have now ceased being merely moral men apart
from morality. Such belief is a folly which does little
honor to us. If in middle class life an ever
ready distrusted is regarded as the sign of a bad character,
(21:32):
and consequently as imprudence. Here among us beyond the middle
class world, in its ads 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 through the wickedest squinting out of every
(21:52):
abyss of suspicion. Forgive me the joke of this gloomy
grimace and turn of expression, For I myself have long
ago learned to think can estimate differently with regard to
deceiving and being deceived. And I keep at least a
couple of pokes in the ReBs ready for the blind
rage with which philosophers struggle against being deceived. Why not
it is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth
(22:14):
is worth more than semblance. It is, in fact the
worst proof supposition in the world. So much must be conceded.
There could have been no life at all except on
the basis of prospective estimations 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
(22:36):
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 semblances, different values. As the
painters say, why might not the world which concerns us
(22:59):
be a fiction? And to any one who suggested, but
to who if fiction belongs an originator, might it not
be bluntly replied, why may this belong also belong to
the fiction? Why is it not at length permitted to
be a little ironical towards the subject, just as towards
the predicate an object? Might not the philosopher elevate himself
(23:21):
above faith and grammar? All respect to governesses? But is
it not time that philosophy should renounce governess faith? Thirty
five O Voltaire, Oh humanity, Oh idiocy? There is something
ticklish in the truth and the search for the truth.
And if man goes about it too humanely, ernich cherie
nevre qui pour Philippienne, I wager he finds nothing. Thirty six.
(23:47):
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
(24:09):
understanding of the so called mechanical or material world. I
do not mean as an illusion, a semblance, a representation
in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhaueren 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
(24:31):
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, as simulation, nutrition, secretion,
and change of matter are still synthetically united with one
another as a primary form of life. In the end,
(24:52):
is it not only permitted to make this attempt, It
is commanded by the conscience of logical method not to
assume several kinds of cause, 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 morality of method,
which one may not repudiate. Nowadays, it follows from its definition,
(25:14):
as mathematicians say, the question is ultimately whether we recognize
the will as operating, whether we believe in the causality
of this will. If we do so, and fundamentally our
belief in this is just our belief in causality itself,
we must make an attempt to posit hypothetically the causality
of the will as the only causality. Will can naturally
(25:36):
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 power operates therein
is not the power of will, the effect of will.
Granted finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive
(25:57):
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 this problem of generation and nutrition, it is one problem,
could also be found therein. One would thus have acquired
(26:18):
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. Thirty seven. What
does not that mean? In popular language? God has disproved,
but not the devil. On the contrary, On the contrary,
(26:40):
my friends, and who the devil also compels you to
speak popularly? Thirty eight? As happened finally, in all the
enlightenment of modern times with the French Revolution, that terrible farce,
quite superfluous when judged close to hand, into which, however,
the noble and visionary spectators of all Europe have interpreted
from a distance their own indignation and enthusiasm so long
(27:02):
and passionately until the text has disappeared under the interpretation,
so a noble posterity might once more misunderstand the whole
of the part, and perhaps only thereby make its aspect endurable.
Or rather, has not this already happened? Have we not
ourselves been that noble posterity? And in so far as
we now comprehend this, is it not thereby already past
(27:27):
thirty nine? Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as
true merely because it makes the people happy or virtuous,
excepting perhaps the amiable idealists, who are enthusiastic about the good, true,
and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley course and
good natured desirabilities swim about promiscuously in their pond. Happiness
(27:47):
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 the highest
degree injury and dangerous. Indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence
might be such that once is succumbed by a full
knowledge of it, so that the strength of a mind
(28:08):
might be measured by the amount of truth that could
endure or speak, more plainly, by the extent to which
it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, dampened, and falsified. But
there is no doubt for the discovery of certain portions
of truth. The wicked and unfortunate are more favorably situated
and have greater likelihood of success, not to speak of
the wicked who are happy, a species about whom moralists
(28:30):
are silent. Perhaps severity and craft are more favorable 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
(28:51):
or even introduces his philosophy into books, Stenthall furnishes a
last feature of the portrait of the free spirited philosopher,
for which the sake of German taste I will not
omit to underline, for it is opposed to German taste
pour tre bround philosophy says this last great psychologist. If
foltetrisec Claire soon de lejon umbonquisque fiochun e un parti
(29:16):
de queratiriqui peufeverre des couvertis In philosophy ciestidia pouvot claire
Tons seques forty. Everything that is profound loves the mass.
The profoundest things have a hatred, even of figure and likeness.
Should not the contrary only be the right disguise for
(29:36):
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 a coarseness and make
them unrecognizable their actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimy,
after which nothing can be wiser than to take a
(29:58):
stick and thrash the witness soundly, when thereby oscures his recollection.
Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his
own memory in order to at least 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 and craft. I could imagine that a
(30:20):
man with something costly and fragile to conceal would roll
through life clumsily and rotoundly like an old green heavily
hooped wine cask, the refinement of his shame requiring it
to be so. A man who has depths in his
shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths
which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence
of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant,
(30:43):
his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes, and equally
so has regained security. Such a hidden nature, which instinctively
employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustible an
evasion of communication, desires and insists that a mask of
himself shall ought to by his place in the hearts
and heads of his friends. And supposing he does not
(31:04):
desire it, his eyes will some day be open 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,
(31:25):
every step he takes, every sign of life he manifests
Forty one. One must subject one's self 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
(31:47):
only before ourselves and before no other judge. Not to
cleave any person, but 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 sympathy, be it
(32:08):
even for higher men, in whose peculiar torture and helplessness
chance has given us an insight. Not to cleave to
a science, though attempt 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 to theme. More
(32:30):
under it the danger of the flier not to cleave
to our own virtues, nor become as a whole 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 one's self
(32:54):
the best test of independence. Forty two. A new order
of philosophers as appear, 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,
(33:14):
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. Forty three Will they be
new friends of truth? These coming philosophers, very probably, for
all philosophers hitherto have loved their truths. But assuredly they
(33:35):
will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary to their
pride and also contrary to their taste, that their truths
should still be truth for everyone, 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
(33:56):
will say, perhaps one must renounce the bad taste of
wishing to agree with many people. Good is no longer
good when one's neighbor 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
always have been. The great things remain for the great,
(34:18):
the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for
the refined, And to sum up shortly, everything rare for
the rare. Forty four 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 merely
free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different,
(34:39):
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 a free spirit
obscure in every country of Europe, and the same in America.
(35:03):
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
(35:24):
to levelers. These wrongly named free spirits as glib, tongued
and scribe fingered slaves of the democratic taste in its
modern ideals, all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude,
blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honorable contact
ought to be denied. Only they are not free, and
are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality. Foreseeing the
(35:47):
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 meadowed
happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and
alleviation of life for everyone. Their two most frequently chanted
(36:09):
songs and doctrines are called equality of rights and sympathy
with all sufferers. And suffering itself is looked upon by
them as something which much 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 believed that this has always taken
(36:29):
place under the opposite conditions, that for this end, the
dangerousness of his situation has 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, violent slavery,
(36:51):
danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempters, art,
and devilry of every kind that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory,
and so 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
(37:13):
all modern ideology and gregarious desirability as their antipodes. Perhaps
what wonder that we free spirits are not the 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
(37:34):
and evil, with which we at least avoid confusion, we
are something else than librepensur, libin pensitory freethinkers, and whatever
else 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
(37:57):
origin and accident of men in books, or even the
weariness of travels seem to confine us full of malice
against the seductions of dependence, which he concealed in honors, money, positions,
or exaltations of the senses. Grateful even for the distress
and vicissitudes of illness, because they always free us from
some rule and its prejudice. Grateful to the God, Devil's
(38:20):
sheep and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault. Investigators
to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible,
with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, Ready for
any business that requires sageiacity 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
(38:42):
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 errors
and spread thrifts, arrangers and collectors from morning till night,
mises of our wealth and full cramp drawers, economical in
learning and forgetting, invented and scheming, sometimes proud of tables
(39:03):
of categories, sometimes pendants, 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 mid day solitude. Such kind of
men are we, we free spirits, And perhaps ye are
(39:24):
also something of the same kind, Ye coming ones, ye
New Philosophers, end Chapter two,
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