07 - Our Virtues - Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter seven, Our Virtues two hundred and fourteen Our virtues.
It is probable that we too have still our virtues,
although naturally they are not those sincere and massive virtues

(00:20):
on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem.
And also at a little distance from us, we Europeans
of the day after tomorrow, we firstlings of the twentieth century,
with all our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness, and art of
disguising our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and spirit,

(00:43):
we shall, presumably, if we must have virtues, have those
only which have come to agreement with our most secret
and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements, Well, then
let us look for them in our lifeths. Where As
we know, so many things lose themselves, so many things

(01:06):
get quite lost. And is there anything finer than to
search for one's own virtues? Is it not almost to
believe in one's own virtues? But this believing in one's
own virtues, is it not practically the same as what
was formerly called one's good conscience? That long respectable pigtail

(01:30):
of an idea which our grandfathers used to hang behind
their heads. And often enough also behind their understandings. It
seems therefore, that, however little we may imagine ourselves to
be old fashioned and grandfatherly, respectable in other respects, in
one thing, we are nevertheless the worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers.

(01:53):
We last Europeans with good consciences. We also still wear
the pigtail. Ah, if you only knew how soon, so
very soon, it will be different two hundred and fifteen.

(02:14):
As in the stellar firmament, there are sometimes two suns
which determine the path of one planet, and in certain
cases suns of different colors shine around a single planet,
now with red light, now with green, and then simultaneously
illumine and flood it with motley colors. So we modern men,

(02:35):
owing to the complicated mechanism of our firmament, are determined
by different moralities. Our actions shine alternately in different colors,
and are seldom unequivocal. And there are often cases also
in which our actions are motley colored. Two hundred and sixteen.

(02:59):
To love ones enemies, I think that has been well learnt.
It takes place thousands of times at present, on a
large and small scale. Indeed, at times the higher and
sublimer thing takes place. We learn to despise when we love,
and precisely when we love best. All of it, however, unconsciously,

(03:24):
without noise, without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness,
which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the
formula of virtue. Morality as attitude is opposed to our taste. Nowadays.
This is also an advance, as it was an advance

(03:47):
in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became
opposed to their taste, including the enmity and voltairean bitterness
against religion and all that formerly belonged to a freethinker antemime.
It is the music in our conscience, the dance in
our spirit to which puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody

(04:11):
goodness won't chime two hundred and seventeen. Let us be
careful in dealing with those who attach great importance to
being credited with moral tact and subtlety in moral discernment.
They never forgive us if they have once made a

(04:32):
mistake before us, or even with regard to us. They
inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and detractors, even when they
still remain our friends. Blessed are the forgetful, for they
get the better even of their blunders two hundred and eighteen.

(05:00):
The psychologists of France, and where else are there still
psychologists nowadays, have never yet exhausted their bitter and manifold
enjoyment of the petit bourgeois, just as though in short
they betray something thereby. Flaubert, for instance, the honest citizen

(05:23):
of Rouen neither saw, heard, nor tasted anything else. In
the end, it was his mode of self torment and
refined cruelty. As this is growing wearisome, I would now
recommend for a change something else for a pleasure, namely
the unconscious astuteness with which good, fat, honest mediocrity always

(05:48):
behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to perform.
The subtle, barbed jesuitical astuteness, which is a thousand I'm
subtler than the taste and understanding of the middle class,
and its best moments, subtler even than the understanding of
its victims. A repeated proof that instinct is the most

(06:13):
intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been
discovered In short, you psychologists study the philosophy of the
rule in its struggle with the exception. There you have
a spectacle fit for gods and godlike malignity, or, in

(06:37):
plain words, practice vivisection on good people on the homo
bonne voluntatis on yourselves. Two hundred and nineteen. The practice
of judging and condemning morally is the favorite revenge of

(06:59):
the intellectually shallow on those who are less. So. It
is also a kind of indemnity for their being badly
endowed by nature. And finally, it is an opportunity for
acquiring spirit and becoming subtle melis spiritualize. They are glad

(07:23):
in their inmost heart that there is a standard according
to which those who are over endowed with intellectual goods
and privileges are equal to them. They contend for the
equality of all before God, and almost need the belief
in God for this purpose. It is among them that

(07:43):
the most powerful antagonists of atheism are found. If anyone
were to say to them, a lofty spirituality is beyond
all comparison with the honesty and respectability of a merely
moral man, it would make them furious. I shall take

(08:04):
care not to say so, I would rather flatter them
with my theory that lofty spirituality itself exists only as
the ultimate product of moral qualities, that it is a
synthesis of all qualities attributed to the merely moral man,
after they have been acquired singly through long training and practice,

(08:29):
perhaps during a whole series of generations. That lofty spirituality
is precisely the spiritualizing of justice and the beneficent severity,
which knows that it is authorized to maintain gradations of
rank in the world, even among things, and not only

(08:49):
among men two hundred and twenty. Now that the praise
of the disinterested person is so popular, one must, probably
not without some danger, get an idea of what people
actually take an interest in, and what are the things

(09:10):
generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern ordinary men, including the cultured,
even the learned, and perhaps philosophers also, if appearances do
not deceive the fact, thereby becomes obvious that the greater
part of what interests and charms higher natures and more

(09:33):
refined and fastidious tastes seems absolutely uninteresting to the average man. If,
notwithstanding he perceived devotion to these interests, he calls it desinteresse,
and wonders how it is possible to act disinterestedly. There

(09:54):
have been philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a
seductive and miss stickle other worldly expression, perhaps because they
did not know the higher nature by experience, instead of
stating the naked and candidly reasonable truth that disinterested action

(10:15):
is very interesting, and interested action provided that and love.
What even an action for love's sake, shall be unegoistic?
But you, fools, and the praise of the self sacrificer.

(10:38):
But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted
and obtained something for it, perhaps something from himself, for
something from himself that he relinquished here in order to
have more there, perhaps in general, to be more, or
even feel himself more. But this is a realm of

(11:01):
questions and answers in which a more fastidious spirit does
not like to stay. For here truth has to stifle
her yawn so much when she is obliged to answer.
And after all, truth is a woman. One must not
use force with her. Two hundred and twenty one. It

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sometimes happens, said a moralistic, pedant and trifle retailer, that
I honor and respect an unselfish man, not however, because
he is unselfish, but because I think he has a
right to be useful to another man at his own expense.
In short, the question is always who he is and

(11:51):
who the other is. For instance, in a person created
and destined for command self denial in mind, modest retirement,
instead of being virtues, would be the waste of virtues.
So it seems to me every system of unegoistic morality

(12:11):
which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to everyone not only
sins against good taste, but is also an incentive to
sins of omission, an additional seduction under the mask of philanthropy,
and precisely a seduction and injury to the higher, rarer

(12:31):
and more privileged types of men. Moral systems must be
compelled first of all to bow before the gradations of rank.
Their presumption must be driven home to their conscience until
they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral to
say that what is right for one is proper for another.

(12:58):
So said my moralistic pedant, And bunum did he perhaps
deserve to be laughed at when he thus exhorted systems
of morals to practice morality, But one should not be
too much in the right if one wishes to have
the laughers on one's own side. A grain of wrong

(13:19):
pertains even to good taste two hundred and twenty two.
Wherever sympathy fellow suffering is preached nowadays, and if I
gather rightly, no other religion is any longer preached. Let
the psychologist have his ears open through all the vanity,

(13:43):
through all the noise which is natural to these preachers,
as to all preachers, he will hear a hoarse, groaning,
genuine note of self contempt. It belongs to the overshadowing
and uglifying of Europe, which is been on the increase
for a century, the first symptoms of which are already

(14:04):
specified documentarily in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to Madame d'Epinay.
If it is not really the cause thereof the man
of modern ideas, the conceited ape is excessively dissatisfied with himself.
This is perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity wants

(14:27):
him only to suffer with his fellows two hundred and
twenty three. The hybrid European a tolerably ugly Plebeian taken
all in all, absolutely requires a costume. He needs history
as a store room of costumes. To be sure. He

(14:50):
notices that none of the costumes fit him properly, he
changes and changes. Let us look at the nineteenth century
with respect to these hasty preferences and changes in its
masquerades of style, and also with respect to its moments
of desperation. On account of nothing suiting us, it is

(15:11):
in vain to get ourselves up as Romantic or classical,
or Christian, or Florentine or Barocco or national. In moribus
et artibus. It does not clothe us. But the spirit,

(15:32):
especially the historical spirit, profits even by this desperation. Once
and again a new sample of the past or of
the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up,
and above all studied. We are the first studious age
in puncto of costumes, I mean as concerns, morals, articles

(15:56):
of belief, artistic tastes, and religion. We are prepared as
no other age has ever been, for a carnival in
the grand style, for the most spiritual festival, laughter and arrogance,
for the transcendental height of supreme folly and aristophanic ridicule,

(16:17):
of the world. Perhaps we are still discovering the domain
of our invention, just here, the domain where even we
can still be original, probably as parodists of the world's history,
and as God's merry andrews. Perhaps, though nothing else of

(16:37):
the present have a future, our laughter itself may have
a future two hundred and twenty four. The historical sense,
or the capacity for divining quickly the order of rank
of the valuations according to which a people, a community,

(16:59):
or an indie vidual has lived, the divining instinct for
the relationships of these valuations, for the relation of the
authority of the valuations to the authority of the operating forces.
This historical sense, which we Europeans claim as our own specialty,
has come to us in the train of the enchanting

(17:19):
and mad semi barbarity into which Europe has been plunged
by the democratic mingling of classes and races. It is
only the nineteenth century that has recognized this faculty as
its sixth sense. Owing to this mingling, the past of
every form and mode of life, and of cultures which

(17:41):
were formerly closely contiguous and superimposed on one another, flows
forth into us modern souls. Our instincts now run back
in all directions, we ourselves are a kind of chaos
in the end, as we have said, the spirit perceives
its advantage therein by means of our semi barbarity in

(18:06):
body and in desire. We have secret access everywhere, such
as a noble age never had. We have access above
all to the labyrinth of imperfect civilizations, and to every
form of semi barbarity that has at any time existed
on earth, and in so far as the most considerable

(18:26):
part of human civilization hitherto has just been semi barbarity.
The historical sense implies almost the sense and instinct for everything,
the taste and tongue for everything, whereby it immediately proves
itself to be an ignoble sense. For instance, we enjoy

(18:48):
Homer once more. It is perhaps our happiest acquisition that
we know how to appreciate Homer, whom men of distinguished culture,
as the French seventeenth century, like Saint Evment, who reproached
him for his esprit vast, and even Voltaire, the last

(19:08):
echo of the century, cannot and could not so easily appropriate,
whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy. The very decided
yea and nay of their palate, their promptly ready disgust,
their hesitating reluctance with regard to everything strange, their horror

(19:30):
of the bad taste, even of lively curiosity, and in general,
the averseness of every distinguished and self sufficing culture to
avow a new desire, a dissatisfaction with its own condition,
or an admiration of what is strange. All this determines
and disposes them unfavorably, even towards the best things of

(19:53):
the world, which are not their property or could not
become their prey. And no fac faculties more unintelligible to
such men than just this historical sense, with its truckling
plebeian curiosity. The case is not different with Shakespeare, that

(20:15):
marvelous Spanish Moorish Saxon synthesis of taste, over whom an
ancient Athenian of the circle of Eschylus would have half
killed himself with laughter or irritation. But we accept precisely
this wild motleiness, this medley of the most delicate, the

(20:35):
most coarse, and the most artificial, with a secret confidence
and cordiality. We enjoy it as a refinement of art
reserved expressly for us, and allow ourselves to be as
little disturbed by the repulsive fumes and the proximity of
the English populace in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives,

(20:57):
as perhaps on the chiaja of Naples, where with all
our senses awake, we go our way enchanted and voluntarily
in spite of the drain odor of the lower quarters
of the town. That as men of the historical sense
we have our virtues is not to be disputed. We

(21:19):
are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self control and
self renunciation, very grateful, very patient, very complaisant. But with
all this we are perhaps not very tasteful. Let us
finally confess it that what is most difficult for us,

(21:42):
men of the historical sense, to grasp, feel, taste, and love,
what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely
the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art,
the essentially no in works and men, their moment of

(22:03):
smooth sea and halcyon self sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness
which all things show that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our
great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast
to good taste, at least to the very bad taste.

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And we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly and
with compulsion the small, short and happy God sends and
glorifications of human life as they shine here and there,
those moments and marvelous experiences when a great power has
voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and infinite,

(22:49):
when a superabundance of refined delight has been enjoyed by
a sudden checking and petrifying by standing firmly and planting
oneself fixedly on still trembling ground. Proportionateness is strange to us.
Let us confess it to ourselves. Our itching is really

(23:10):
the itching for the infinite, the immeasurable. Like the rider
on his forward panting horse, we let the reins fall
before the infinite. We modern men, we semi barbarians, and
are only in our highest bliss when we are in
the most danger two hundred and twenty five. Whether it

(23:36):
be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of
thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure
and pain, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary
considerations are plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which everyone

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conscious of creative powers and an artist's conscience will look
down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy sympathy. For you,
to be sure, that is not sympathy as you understand it.
It is not sympathy for social distress, for society with

(24:21):
its sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective
who lie on the ground around us. Still less is
its sympathy for the grumbling, vexed revolutionary slave classes who
strive after power they call it freedom. Our sympathy is

(24:42):
a loftier and further sighted sympathy. We see how man
dwarfs himself, how you dwarf him. And there are moments
when we view your sympathy with an indescribable anguish, when
we resist it, when we regard your serious busness as
more dangerous than any kind of levity you want, if possible,

(25:07):
And there is not a more foolish, if possible, to
do away with suffering, and we it really seems that
we would rather have it increased and made worse than
it has ever been. Well being as you understand, it
is certainly not a goal. It seems to us an end,

(25:30):
a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible,
and makes his destruction desirable, the discipline of suffering, of
great suffering. Know ye not that it is only this
discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity. Hitherto

(25:51):
the tension of soul in misfortune, which communicates to it
its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin,
its inventiveness and bravery, and undergoing, enduring, interpreting and exploiting misfortune.
And whatever depth mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has

(26:14):
been bestowed upon the soul, has it not been bestowed
through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering. In man,
creature and creator are united. In man, there is not
only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos, but there

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is also the Creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer,
the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh Day. Do
ye understand this contrast, and that your sympathy for the
creature in man applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined,

(27:05):
to that which must necessarily suffer and is meant to suffer,
and our sympathy. Do you not understand what our reverse
sympathy applies to when it resists your sympathy as the
worst of all pampering and enervation. So it is sympathy
against sympathy. But to repeat it once more, there are

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higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and sympathy,
And all systems of philosophy which deal only with these
are naivetes two hundred and twenty six. We immoralists. This

(27:51):
world with which we are concerned, in which we have
to fear and love, this almost invisible, inaudible world, world
of delicate command and delicate obedience, a world of almost
in every respect captious, insidious, sharp, and tender. Yes, it

(28:12):
is well protected from clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity. We
are woven into a strong net and garment of duties,
and cannot disengage ourselves. Precisely Here we are men of duty,
even we occasionally, it is true we dance in our

(28:35):
chains and betwixt our swords. It is nonetheless true that
more often we gnash our teeth under the circumstances, and
are impatient at the secret hardship of our lot. But
do what we will. Fools and appearances say of us,
these are men without duty. We have always fools and

(28:58):
appearances against us two hundred and twenty seven Honesty, granting
that it is the virtue of which we cannot rid ourselves,
we free spirits, while we will labor at it with
all our perversity and love, and not tire of perfecting

(29:21):
ourselves in our virtue, which alone remains, may its glance
someday overspread like a gilded blue mocking twilight, this aging civilization,
with its dull, gloomy seriousness. And if nevertheless our honesty
should one day grow weary and sigh and stretch its

(29:45):
limbs and find us too hard, and would fain have
it pleasanter, easier and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let
us remain hard, we latest stoics, and let us send
to its help whatever devilry we have in us, our

(30:05):
discussed at the clumsy and undefined, our nitimur in vetitum,
our love of adventure, our sharpened and fastidious curiosity, our
most subtle, disguised intellectual will to power and universal conquest,
which rambles and roves avidiously around all the realms of

(30:27):
the future. Let us go with all our devils to
the help of our God. It is probable that people
will misunderstand and mistake us on that account. What does
it matter? They will say, their honesty, that is their devilry,

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and nothing else. What does it matter? And even if
they were right, have not all gods hitherto been such sanctified,
re baptized devils? And after all, what do we know
of ourselves? And what the spirit that leads us wants

(31:08):
to be called? It is a question of names and
how many spirits we harbor? Our honesty, we free spirits.
Let us be careful lest it become our vanity, our
ornament and ostentation, our limitation, our stupidity, every virtue inclines

(31:31):
to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue, stupid to the point
of sanctity. They say in Russia, let us be careful
lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us

(31:52):
to bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal
life in order to two hundred and twenty eight I
hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy
hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances,

(32:17):
and that virtue, in my opinion, has been more injured
by the tediousness of its advocates than by anything else.
At the same time, however, I would not wish to
overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few
people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently, it

(32:41):
is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting.
But let us not be afraid. Things still remain to
day as they have always been. I see no one
in Europe who has or discloses an idea of the
fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, captious,

(33:05):
and ensnaring manner, that calamity might be involved therein observe,
for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians, how ponderously and
respectably they stalk on stalk along. A Homeric metaphor expresses

(33:28):
it better in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he
had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius.
No he was not a dangerous man. Helvetius c senatur
pococurante to use an expression of Galiani. No new thought,

(33:48):
nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better
expression of an old thought, not even a proper history
of what has been previously thought on the subject, an
impossible literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows
how to leavin it with some mischief. In effect, the
old English vice called cant which is moral Tartufism, has

(34:13):
insinuated itself also into these moralists, whom one must certainly
read with an eye to their motives, if one must
read them concealed this time under the new form of
the scientific spirit. Moreover, there is not absent from them
a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience from which

(34:34):
a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer in all
their scientific tinkering with morals. Is not a moralist, the
opposite of a Puritan, that is to say, as a
thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of interrogation.
In short, as a problem, is moralizing, not immoral. In

(35:01):
the end, they all want English morality to be recognized
as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind or the general utility or
the happiness of the greatest number. No, the happiness of
England will be best served thereby. They would like, by
all means to convince themselves that the striving after English happiness,

(35:24):
I mean after comfort and fashion, and in the highest
instance a seat in Parliament, is at the same time
the true path of virtue. In fact, that in so
far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto,
it has just consisted in such striving. Not one of
those ponderous, conscience stricken, hurting animals who undertake to advocate

(35:50):
the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare,
wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts.
That the general welfare is known, ideal, no goal, no
notion that can be at all grasped, but is only
a nostrum that what is fair to one may not
at all be fair to another. That the requirement of

(36:12):
one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men.
In short, that there is a distinction of rank between
man and man, and consequently between morality and morality. They
are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men, these

(36:33):
utilitarian Englishmen, and as already remarked. In so far as
they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility.
One ought even to encourage them, as has been partially
attempted in the following rhymes Hail ye worthies barrow, wheeling

(36:55):
longer better Aye, revealing stiffer eyes in head and knee, unenraptured,
never jesting, mediocre, ever lasting, Saint Jennie as Saintes two

(37:17):
hundred and twenty nine. In these later ages, which may
be proud of their humanity, there still remains so much fear,
so much superstition, of the fear of the cruel wild beast,
the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these
humaner ages, that even obvious truths, as if by the

(37:41):
agreement of centuries, have long remained unuttered, because they have
the appearance of helping the finally slain wild beast back
to life again. I perhaps risk something when I allow
such a truth to escape. Let others capture it again
and give it so much milk of pious sentiment footnote

(38:05):
an expression from Schiller's William Tell Act for scene three.
Let others capture it again and give it so much
milk of pious sentiment to drink, that it will lie
down quiet and forgotten in its old corner. One ought
to learn anew about cruelty and open one's eyes. One

(38:29):
ought at last to learn impatience, in order that such immodest,
gross errors, as for instance, have been fostered by ancient
and modern philosophers with regard to tragedy, may no longer
wander about virtuously and boldly. Almost everything that we call

(38:49):
higher culture is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty.
This is my thesis. The wild beast has not been slain.
All it lives, it flourishes, It has only been transfigured.
That which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty.

(39:12):
That which operates agreeably in so called tragic sympathy, and
at the basis even of everything sublime up to the
highest and most delicate thrills of metaphysics, obtains its sweetness
solely from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty. What the Roman
enjoys in the arena the Christian and the ecstasies of

(39:34):
the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the fagot
and stake, or of the bull fight the present day
Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy, the workman
of the Parisian suburbs who has a homesickness for bloody revolutions,
the Wagnerian, who, with unhinged will undergoes the performance of

(39:58):
Tristan and a souled. What all these enjoy and strive
with mysterious ardor to drink in is the filter of
the great circe cruelty. Here, to be sure, we must
put aside entirely the blundering psychology of former times, which

(40:18):
could only teach with regard to cruelty that originated at
the sight of the suffering of others. There is an abundant,
superabundant enjoyment, even in one's own suffering, in causing one's
own suffering, and wherever man has allowed himself to be
persuaded to self denial in the religious sense, or to

(40:40):
self mutilation, as among the Phoenicians and Ascetics, or in general,
to desensualization, decarnalization and contrition, to puritanical repentance, spasms, to
vivisection of conscience, and to pascal like sacris effiesiad del intilletto.

(41:03):
He is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his cruelty,
by the dangerous thrill of cruelty towards himself. Finally, let
us consider that even the seeker of knowledge operates as
an artist and glorifier of cruelty, and that he compels
his spirit to perceive against its own inclination, and often

(41:26):
enough against the wishes of his heart. He forces it
to say nay where he would like to affirm love
and adore. Indeed, every instance of taking a thing profoundly
and fundamentally is a violation and intentional injuring of the
fundamental will of the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance

(41:49):
and superficiality. Even in every desire for knowledge, there is
a drop of cruelty to one hundred and thirty. Perhaps
what I have said here about a fundamental will of
the spirit may not be understood without further details. I

(42:11):
may be allowed a word of explanation that imperious, something
which is popularly called the spirit, wishes to be master
internally and externally, and to feel itself master. It has
the will of a multiplicity, for a simplicity, a binding, taming,

(42:34):
imperious and essentially ruling will Its requirements and capacities here
are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything
that lives, grows and multiplies. The power of the spirit
to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency

(42:55):
to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold,
to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory, just as it
arbitrarily re underlines, makes prominent and falsifies for itself certain
traits and lines in the foreign elements in every portion

(43:16):
of the outside world. Its object thereby is the incorporation
of new experiences, the assortment of new things in the
old arrangements in short growth, or more properly, the feeling
of growth, the feeling of increased power, is its object.

(43:39):
This same will has at its service an apparently opposed
impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance,
of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner
denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a
sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a

(44:02):
contentment with obscurity, with the shutting in horizon, an acceptance
and approval of ignorance, as that which is all necessary
according to the degree of its appropriating power, its digestive
power to speak figuratively, and in fact the spirit resembles
a stomach more than anything else. Here also belonged an

(44:27):
occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived,
perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is not so
and so, but is only allowed to pass as such,
a delight in uncertainty, an ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of
arbitrary out of the way, narrowness and mystery of the

(44:48):
too near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished,
the misshapen, the beautified, an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of
all these manifestations of power. Finally, in this connection there
is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive

(45:11):
other spirits and dissemble before them the constant pressing and
straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power. The spirit enjoys
therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises. It enjoys
also its feeling of security. Therein it is precisely by

(45:32):
its protean arts that it is best protected and concealed
counter to this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise,
for a cloak, in short, for an outside, for every
outside is a cloak, there operates the sublime tendency of

(45:53):
the man of knowledge, which takes and insists on taking
things profoundly, various, and thoroughly, as a kind of cruelty
of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker
will acknowledge in himself, provided as it ought to be,

(46:13):
that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long
for introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even
severe words, he will say, there is something cruel in
the tendency of my spirit. Let the virtuous and amiable
try to convince him that it is not so. In fact,

(46:37):
it would sound nicer if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps
our extravagant honesty were talked about, whispered about, and glorified.
We free, very free spirits, And some day perhaps such
will actually be our posthumous glory. Meanwhile, for there is

(47:00):
plenty of time until then, we should be least inclined
to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage.
Our whole former work has just made us sick of
this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are beautiful, glistening, jingling,
festive words. Honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom sacrificed

(47:26):
for knowledge, heroism of the truthful. There is something in
them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we
anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves, in all
the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade
of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery

(47:50):
and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even
under such flattering color and repainting, the terrible original text
Homo natura must again be recognized, in effect to translate
man back again into nature, to master the many vain

(48:11):
and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been
scratched and daubed over the eternal original text Homo natura,
to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand before
man as he, now hardened by the discipline of science,
stands afore the other forms of nature, with fearless oedipus eyes,

(48:35):
and stopped ulysses ears deaf to the enticements of old
metaphysical bird catchers who have piped to him far too long.
Thou art more, thou art higher, thou hast a different origin.
This may be a strange and foolish task, but that

(48:56):
it is a task. Who can deny why did we
choose it? This foolish task? Or to put the question differently,
why knowledge at all? Every one will ask us about this,
and thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the question

(49:17):
a hundred times, have not found and cannot find any
better answer two hundred thirty one. Learning alters us. It
does what all nourishment does. That does not merely conserve,

(49:39):
as the physiologist knows. But at the bottom of our souls,
quite down below, there is certainly something unteachable, a granite
of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined
chosen questions. In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable

(50:01):
I am this. A thinker cannot learn anew about man
and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully. He
can only follow to the end what is fixed about
them in himself. Occasionally we find certain solutions of problems
which make strong beliefs for us. Perhaps they are henceforth

(50:23):
called convictions later on when seizing them only footsteps to
self knowledge, guide posts to the problem which we ourselves are,
or more correctly, to the great stupidity which we embody
our spiritual fate. The unteachable in us quite down below.

(50:45):
In view of this liberal compliment which I have just
paid myself permission, will perhaps be more readily allowed me
to utter some truths about woman as she is, provided
that it is known at the outset how literally they
are merely my truths two hundred and thirty two. Woman

(51:11):
wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to enlighten
men about woman as she is. This is one of
the worst developments of the general uglifying of Europe. For
what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and self
exposure bring to light? Woman has so much cause for

(51:36):
shame in woman. There is so much pedantry, superficiality, school masterliness,
petty presumption, unbridledness and indiscretion concealed studying only women's behavior
towards children, which has really been best restrained and dominated

(51:56):
hitherto by the fear of man alas if ever the
eternally tedious in woman, she has plenty of it is
allowed to venture forth if she begins radically and on principle,
to unlearn her wisdom and art of charming, of playing,

(52:18):
of frightening away sorrow, of alleviating and taking easily. If
she forgets her delicate aptitude for agreeable desires. Female voices
are already raised, which, by Saint Aristophanes make one afraid
with medical explicitness. It is stated in a threatening manner,

(52:41):
what woman first and last requires from man? Is it
not in the very worst taste that woman sets herself
up to be? Scientific? Enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men's affair,
men's gift, remained therewith among ourselves. And in the end,

(53:04):
in view of all that women write about woman, we
may well of considerable doubt as to whether woman really
desires enlightenment about herself, and can desire it. If woman
does not thereby seek a new ornament for herself, I
believe ornamentation belongs to the eternally feminine, Why then she

(53:27):
wishes to make herself feared? Perhaps she thereby wishes to
get the mastery, but she does not want truth? What
does woman care for truth. From the very first. Nothing
is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman
than truth. Her great art is falsehood, Her chief concern

(53:49):
is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it. We men,
we honor and love this very art and this very
instinct in woman. We who have the hard task and
for our recreation, gladly seek the company of beings under
whose hands glances and delicate follies. Our seriousness, our gravity,

(54:12):
and profundity appear almost like follies to us. Finally, I
asked the question, did a woman herself ever acknowledge profundity
in a woman's mind or justice in a woman's heart?
And is it not true that on the whole woman
has hitherto been most despised by woman herself, and not

(54:34):
at all by us. We men desire that woman should
not continue to compromise herself by enlightening us. Just as
it was man's care and the consideration for woman when
the Church decreed Moliere tessay it in Ecclesia, it was
to the benefit of woman when Napoleon gave the too

(54:55):
eloquent Madame de Stale to understand Moliere taseaus. In politicists
and in my opinion, he is a true friend of
women who calls out to woman today moliere tassea it
de millierro two hundred and thirty three. It betrays corruption

(55:18):
of the instincts, apart from the fact that it betrays
bad taste when a woman refers to Madame Rolande or
Madame de Stael or Monsieur George Sande, as though something
was proved thereby in favor of woman as she is
among men. These are the three comical women, as they

(55:40):
are nothing more and just the best involuntary counter arguments
against feminine emancipation and autonomy two hundred and thirty four.
Stupidity in the kitchen woman as cook the terrible thoughtlessness

(56:00):
with which the feeding of the family and the master
of the house is managed. Woman does not understand what
food means, and she insists on being cook. If woman
had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook,
for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts,

(56:21):
and should likewise have got possession of the healing art.
Through bad female cooks, through the entire lack of reason
in the kitchen, the development of mankind has been longest
retarded and most interfered with. Even today, matters are very
little better a word to high school girls two hundred

(56:47):
and thirty five. There are turns and casts of fancy.
There are sentences, little handfuls of words in which a
whole culture, a whole societyuddenly crystallizes itself. Among these is
the incidental remark of Madame de Lambert to her son

(57:09):
monemi nevu perit jeme cou de foilis cavu feren grand pleisier,
the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way that was
ever addressed to a son two hundred thirty six. I

(57:29):
have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what
Dante and Gerda believed about woman, the former when he
sang a la guardavasuso adio inlay, and the latter when
he interpreted it. The eternally feminine, draws us Aloft, for

(57:50):
this is just what she believes of the eternally masculine
two hundred thirty seven. Seven Apathemes for women, how the
longest awe flees when a man comes to our knees.

(58:13):
Age alas and science stay'd furnish even weak virtue, aid
somber Garb and silence, meet dress for every dame discreet,
whom I think when in my bliss God and my
good tailoress young, a flower decked cavern, home old a dragon,

(58:38):
thence doth rome, noble title leg that's fine man as well,
oh were he mine? Speech in brief and sense in
mass slippery for the Jenny Ass two hundred thirty seven.

(59:00):
A woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds, which,
losing their way, have come down among them from an elevation,
as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet and animating, but
as something also which must be cooped up to prevent

(59:22):
it flying away two hundred and thirty eight. To be
mistaken in the fundamental problem of man and woman, To
deny here the profoundest antagonism, and the necessity for an
eternally hostile tension. To dream here perhaps of equal rights,

(59:43):
equal training, equal claims and obligations. That is a typical
sign of shallow mindedness, And a thinker who has proved
himself shallow at this dangerous spot shallow in instinct, may
generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed. As discovered,

(01:00:06):
he will probably prove too short for all fundamental questions
of life, future as well as present, and will be
unable to descend into any of the depths. On the
other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as
well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence,
which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded

(01:00:29):
with them, can only think of woman as orientals do.
He must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property,
as being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission. Therein,
He must take his stand in this matter upon the
immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instinct

(01:00:53):
of Asia, as the Greeks did formerly, those best heirs
and scholars of Asia, who, as is well known, with
their increasing culture and amplitude of power from Homer to
the time of Pericles, became gradually stricter towards woman. In short,

(01:01:13):
more oriental. How necessary, how logical, even how humanely desirable
this was. Let us consider for ourselves two hundred thirty nine.
The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated
with so much respect by men as at present. This

(01:01:35):
belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy. In
the same way as disrespectfulness to old age. What wonder
is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect?
They want more, they learned to make claims. The tributive
respect is at last felt to be well nigh galling

(01:01:57):
rivalry for rights, indeed need actual strife itself would be preferred.
In a word, woman is losing modesty, and let us
immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is
unlearning to fear man. But the woman who unlearns to

(01:02:18):
fear sacrifices her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture
forward when the fear inspiring quality in man, or more definitely,
the man in man is no longer either desired or
fully developed. Is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough. What

(01:02:40):
is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby woman deteriorates.
This is what is happening nowadays. Let us not deceive
ourselves about it. Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over
the military and aristocratic spirit strives for the economic and

(01:03:01):
legal independence of a clerk woman, as clerk esse is
inscribed on the portal of the modern society, which is
in the course of formation. While she thus appropriates new rights,
aspires to be master, and inscribes progress of woman on

(01:03:21):
her flags and banners. The very opposite realizes itself with
terrible obviousness. Woman retrogrades. Since the French Revolution, the influence
of woman in Europe has declined in proportion as she
has increased her rights and claims, and the emancipation of

(01:03:43):
woman in so far as it is desired and demanded
by women themselves, and not only by masculine shallow pates.
This proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increasing
weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is
stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which

(01:04:06):
a well reared woman, who is always a sensible woman,
might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition as to
the ground upon which she can most surely achieve victory,
to neglect exercise in the use of her proper weapons,
to let herself go before man, perhaps even to the

(01:04:28):
book where formerly she kept herself in control, and in
refined artful humility, to neutralize with her virtuous audacity man's
faith in a veiled, fundamentally different ideal in woman, something
eternally necessarily feminine, to emphatically and loquaciously dissuade man from

(01:04:53):
the idea that woman must be preserved, cared for, protected,
and indulged like some delicate, strangely wild and often pleasant
domestic animal, the clumsy and indignant collection of everything of
the nature of servitude and bondage which the position of

(01:05:14):
woman in the hitherto existing order of society has entailed
and still entails, as though slavery were a counter argument,
and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of
every elevation of culture. What does all this be token,
if not a disintegration of womanly instincts, a defeminizing Certainly,

(01:05:38):
there are enough of idiotic friends and corrupters of woman,
among the learned asses of the masculine sex, who advise
woman to defeminize herself in this manner, and to imitate
all the stupidities from which man in Europe European manliness suffers,
who would like to lower woman to general culture, indeed

(01:06:02):
even to newspaper reading and meddling with politics here and there.
They wish even to make women into free spirits and
literary workers, as though a woman without piety would not
be something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a profound and
godless man. Almost everywhere her nerves are being ruined by

(01:06:24):
the most morbid and dangerous kind of music, our latest
German music, and she is daily being made more hysterical
and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function,
that of bearing robust children. They wish to cultivate her
in general still more, and intend, as they say, to

(01:06:47):
make the weaker sex strong by culture, as if history
did not teach in the most emphatic manner, that the
cultivating of mankind and his weakening, that is to say,
the weakening, dissipating, and languishing of his force of will,
have always kept pace with one another, and that the

(01:07:08):
most powerful and influential women in the world, and lastly
the mother of Napoleon, had just to thank their force
of will and not their schoolmasters, for their power and
ascendancy over men. That which inspires respect in woman, and

(01:07:29):
often enough fear also is her nature, which is more
natural than that of man. Her genuine carnivora like cunning flexibility,
her tiger claws beneath the glove, her naivete and egoism,
her untrainableness, and innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation

(01:07:53):
of her desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear,
excites one's sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat woman
is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous
of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature.

(01:08:17):
Fear and sympathy. It is with these feelings that man
has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with
one foot already in tragedy which rends while it delights,
what and all that is now to be at an end,
and the disenchantment of woman is in progress. The tediousness

(01:08:41):
of woman is slowly evolving. Oh, Europe. Europe, we know
the horned animal, which is always most attractive to thee,
from which danger is ever again threatening. Thee. Thy old
fable might once more become history. An immense stupidity might
once again overmaster thee and carry thee away. And no

(01:09:05):
God concealed beneath it, no only an idea, a modern idea.
End of Chapter seven