themselves about each other the reason is that in reality they honor and love only themselves or their own ideal to express it more agreeably thus man wishes woman to be peaceable but in fact woman is essentially unpeaceable like the cat however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanor 132 one is punished best for one's virtues 133 he who cannot find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without an ideal 134 from the senses originate all trustworthiness all good conscience all evidence of truth 135 Phariseeism is not a deterioration of the good man a considerable part of it is rather an essential condition of being good 136 the one seeks an accouture for his thoughts the other seeks someone whom he can assist a good conversation thus originates 137 in intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man and often even in a mediocre artist one finds a very remarkable man 138 we do the same when awake as when dreaming we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse and forget it immediately 139 in revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man 140 advice as a riddle if the band is not to break fight it first secure to me 141 the belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself for a god 142 the chastest utterance I have ever heard 143 our vanity would like what we do best to pass precisely for what is most difficult to us concerning the origin of many systems of morals 144 when a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste man indeed if I may say so is the barren animal 145 comparing man and woman generally one may say that woman would not have the genius for adornment if she had not the instinct for the secondary role 146 he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster and if thou gays long into an abyss the abyss will also gaze into thee 147 from old florentine novels moreover from life 148 to seduce their neighbor to a favorable opinion and afterwards to believe implicitly in this opinion of their neighbor who can do this conjuring trick so well as women 149 that which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good the adivism of an old ideal 150 around the hero everything becomes a tragedy around the demigod everything becomes a satire play and around god everything becomes what perhaps a world 151 it is not enough to possess a talent one must also have your permission to possess it hey my friends 152 where there is the tree of knowledge there is always paradise so say the most ancient and most modern serpents 153 what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil 154 objection evasion joyous distrust and love of irony or signs of health everything absolute belongs to pathology 155 the sense of the tragic increases and declines with sensuousness 156 insanity in individuals is something rare but in groups parties nations and apokes it is the rule 157 the thought of suicide is a great consolation by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night 158 not only our reason but also our conscience trickles to our strongest impulse the tyrant in us 159 one must repay good and ill but why just to the person who did us good or ill 160 one no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently after one has communicated it 161 poets act shamelessly towards their experiences they exploit them 162 our fellow creature is not our neighbor but our neighbor's neighbor so thanks every nation 163 love brings to light the noble and hidden qualities of a lover his rare and exceptional traits it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal character 164 Jesus said to his Jews the law was for servants love God as I loved him as his son what have we sons of God to do with morals 165 in sight of every party a shepherd has always need of a bell weather or he has himself to be a weather occasionally 166 one may indeed lie with the mouth but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth 167 to vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame and something precious 168 Christianity gave eros poison to drink he did not die of it certainly but degenerated to vice 169 to talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself 170 in praise there is more obtrusiveness than in flame 171 pity has an almost ludicrous effect on a man of knowledge like tender hands on a cyclops 172 one occasionally embraces someone or other out of love to mankind because one cannot embrace all but this is what one must never confess to the individual 173 one does not hate as long as one just esteems but only when one esteems equal or superior 174 utilitarians e2 love the util only as a vehicle for your inclinations e2 really find the noise of its wheels insupportable 175 one loves ultimately one's desires not the thing desired 176 the vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is counter to our vanity 177 with regard to what truthfulness is perhaps nobody has ever been sufficiently truthful 178 one does not believe in the follies of clever man what a forfeiture of the rites of man 179 the consequences of our actions sees us by the forelaw very indifferent to the fact that we have meanwhile reformed 180 there is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith and a cause 181 it is inhuman to bless when one is being cursed 182 the familiarity of superiors and bitters one because it may not be returned 183 I am affected not because you have deceived me but because I can no longer believe in you 184 there is a haughtiness of kindness which has the appearance of wickedness 185 I dislike him why I am not a match for him did anyone ever answer so end of chapter four this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information and to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Rainer Obgenheim beyond good and evil by Friedrich Nietzsche chapter five the natural history of morals 186 the moral sentiment in europe at present is perhaps as subtle belated diverse sensitive and refined as the science of morals belonging there too is recent initial awkward and coast fingered an interesting contrast which sometimes becomes incarnate and obvious in the very person of a moralist indeed the expression science of morals is in respect to what is designated thereby far from presumptuous encounter to good taste which is always a foretaste of more modest expressions one ought to evolve with the utmost fairness what is still necessary here for a long time what is alone proper for the present namely the collection of material the comprehensive survey and classification of an immense domain of delicate sentiments of verse and distinction of verse which live grow propagate and perish and perhaps attempt to give a clear idea of the recurring and more common forms of these living crystallizations as preparation for a theory of types of morality to be sure people have not had a row been so modest all the philosophers was a pedantic and ridiculous seriousness demanded of themselves something very much higher more pretentious and ceremonious when they're concerned to themselves morality as a science they wanted to give a basic to morality and every philosopher here the row has believed that he has given it a basis morality itself however has been regarded as something given how far from their awkward pride was a seemingly insignificant problem left in dust and decay of a description of forms of morality notwithstanding that the finest hands and senses could hardly be fine enough for it it was precisely owing to moral philosophers knowing the moral facts imperfectly in an arbitrary abit home or accidental abridgement perhaps as a morality of their environment their position their church their zeitgeist their climate and so on it was precisely because they were badly instructed with regard to nations eras and past ages and were by no means eager to know about these matters as they did not even come inside of the real problem of morals problems which only disclose themselves by a comparison of many kinds of morality and every science of morals has a row strange as it may sound the problem of morality itself has been omitted there has been no suspicion that there was anything problematic there that this philosopher's called giving a basis to morality an endeavor to realize has when seen in a right light proved merely a learned form of good faith and prevailing morality a new means of its expression consequently just a matter of fact within the sphere of a definite morality yeah it's ultimate motive a sort of denial that it is lawful for this morality to be called in question and in any case the reverse of the testing analyzing doubting and the rejecting of this very faith here for instance what was innocent almost worthy of honor Schopenhauer represents his own task and draw your conclusions concerning the scientificness of a science whose latest master still talks on the strain of children and old wives the principle he says page 136 of the Grundprobleme der Ethik the axiom about the purpose of which all moralists are practically agreed nemen im Läde im omnis quantum potis juva is really the proposition which all moral teachers strive to establish the real basis of ethics which has been thought like the philosopher stone for centuries the difficulty of establishing the proposition referred to may indeed be great it is well known that Schopenhauer also was unsuccessful in his efforts and whoever has thoroughly realized how absurdly false and sentimental this proposition is in a world whose essence is will to power may be reminded that Schopenhauer also a pessimist actually played the flute daily after dinner one may read about the matter in his biography a question by the way a pessimist a repudiator of god and of the world who makes a hall at morality who ascends to morality and plays the flute to Läde nemen im morals what is that really a pessimist 187 apart from the value of such a surgeon as there is a categorical imperative in us one can always ask what does such an assertion indicate about him who makes it there are system of morals which are meant to justify their also in the eyes of other people other system of morals are meant to tranquilize him and make himself satisfied with other systems he wants to crucify and humble himself with others he wishes to take revenge with others to conceal himself with others to glorify himself and gave superiority and distinction this system of morals helps its author to forget that system makes him or something of him forgotten many a moralist would like to exercise power and creative arbitrariness over mankind many and other perhaps can't especially gives us to understand by his morals that what is estimable in me is that i know how to obey and with you it shall not be otherwise than with me in short systems of morals are only a sign language of the emotions 188 in contrast to a lesser alley every system of morals is a sort of tyranny against nature and also against reason that is however no objection unless one should again decree by some system of morals that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonableness are unlawful what is essential and invaluable in every system of morals is that it is a long constraint in order to understand stoicism or portrayal or pluralism one should remember the constraint under which every language has attained to stretch and freedom symmetrical constraint the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm how much trouble have the poets and orators of every nation given themselves not accepting some of the prose rights of today and whose ear dwells in exorbitant consciousness not accepting some of the prose rights of today and whose ear dwells and exorbitant consciousness for the sake of a folly a utilitarian bungler say and thereby deems themselves wise from submission to arbitrary law as anarchists say and thereby fancy themselves free even free spirited the singular fact remains however that everything of the nature of freedom elegance boldness dance and masterly certainty which exists or has existed whether it be in thought itself or an admiration or in speaking and persuading in an art as in conduct has only developed by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law and in all seriousness it is not at all improbable that precisely this is nature and natural and not less early every artist knows how different from the state of letting himself go is his most natural condition the free arranging locating disposing and constructing in the moments of inspiration and how strictly and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws which by the very rigidness and precision defy all formulation by means of ideas even the most stable idea has in comparison there with something floating manifold and ambitious in it the essential thing in heaven and in earth is apparently to repeat it once more that there should belong obedience in the same direction there thereby results and has always resulted in the long run something which has made the life worth living for instance third year art music dancing reason spirituality anything whatever that is transfiguring refined foolish or divine the long bondage of the spirit the distrustful constraint in the communicability of ideas the discipline which the thinker imposed on himself to think in accordance with the rules of a church or a court or comfortable to earth totalian premises the persistent spiritual will to interpret everything that happened according to a christian scheme and then every occurrence to rediscover and justify the christian god all this violence arbitrariness severity dreadfulness and unreasonableness has proved itself as disciplinary means whereby the european spirit has attained its trench its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility granted also that much irrecoverable strange and spirit has to be stifled suffocated and spoiled in the process for here as everywhere nature shows herself as she is in all the extravagant and indifferent magnificent which is shocking but nevertheless noble that for centuries thinkers only thought in order to prove something nowadays on the contrary we are suspicious of every thinker who wishes to prove something that it was always said beforehand what was to be the result of the strictest thinking as it was perhaps in the asiatic astrology of former times or as it is still at the present day in the innocent christian moral explanation of the immediate personal events for the glory of god or for the good of the soul this tyranny this arbitrariness this severe and magnificent stupidity as educated the spirit slavery both in the course and the final sense is apparently an indispensable means even of spiritual education discipline one may look at every system of morals in this light it is nature therein which teaches to hate the less early the two great freedom and implants the need for limited horizons for immediate duties it teaches a narrowing of perspectives and thus in a certain sense the stupidity is a condition of life and development you must obey someone and for a long time otherwise you will come to grief and lose all respect for yourself this seems to me the moral imperative of nature which is certainly neither categorical as old can't wished consequently the otherwise nor does it address itself to the individual what does nature care for the individual but to nations races ages and ranks above all however to the animal man generally to mankind 189 industrious races find it a great hardship to be idle it was a master stroke of english instinct to hello and be gloom sunday to such an extent that the englishman unconsciously hankers for his week and work day again as a kind of cleverly devised cleverly intercalated fast such as is also frequently found in the ancient world although as is appropriate in southern nations not precisely with respect to work many kinds of fasts are necessary and wherever powerful influences and habits prevail legislators have to see that intercalary days are appointed on which such impulses are fettered and learn to hunger anew few from a higher standpoint hold generations in epochs when they show themselves infected with any moral fanatism seem like those intercalated periods of restraint and fasting during which an impulse learns to humble and submit itself at the same time also to purify and sharpen itself certain philosophical sects likewise admit of similar interpretation for instance the stowa in the midst of alienic culture with the atmosphere rank and overcharges effort the vehicle odors here also is a hint for the explanation of the paradox why it was precisely in the most christian period of european history and in general only under the pressure of christian sentiments that the sexual impulse supplemented into love amor passion 190 there's something in the morality of plato which does not really belong to plato but which only appears in his philosophy one might say in spite of him namely so criticism for which he himself was too noble no one desires to injure himself hence all evil is done unwittingly the evil man inflicts injury on himself he would not do so however if he knew that evil is evil the evil man therefore is only evil through error and when freeing from error one will necessarily make him good this mode of reasoning the savers of the populace who perceive only the unpleasant consequences of evil doing and practically judge said it is stupid to do wrong while they accept good as identical with useful and pleasant without further thought as regards every system of utilitarianism one might once assume that it has the same origin and follows a scent one will seldom hear plato it only could to interpret something refined and noble into the tenets of his teacher and above all to interpret himself into them he the most daring of all interpreters who lifted the entire socrates out of the street as a popular theme and song to exhibit him in endless and impossible modifications namely in all his own disguises and multiplicities in yes a numeric language as well what is the platonic socrates if not proste platon obitaine de platon tesse tegemeira 191 the old theological problem of faith and knowledge or more plainly of instinct and reason the question rather in respect to the valuation of things instinct deserves more authority than rationality which wants to appreciate and act according to motives according to a why that is to say in conformity to purpose and utility it is always the old moral problem that first appeared in the personal socrates and had divided man's minds long before christianity socrates himself following of course the taste of his talent that of the surpassing direction took at first the sight of reason and in fact what did he do all his life but love at the awkward incapacity of the noble atenians who were men of instinct like all noble men and could never give satisfactory answers concerning the motives of directions in the end however so silently and secretly he loved also at himself with his final conscience and introspection he found in himself the same difficulty and incapacity but why he said to himself should one on that account separate oneself from the instincts one must set them right and the reason also one must follow the instinct but the same time persuade the reason to support them with good arguments this was the real falseness of that great and mysterious ironist he brought his conscience up to the point that he was satisfied with the kind of self-outwitting in fact he perceived the irrationality in the moral judgment plaito more innocent in such matters and without the craftiness of the plebeian wished to prove to himself that the expenditure of all the strange the greatest change a philosopher had ever expanded the reason and instinct leads spontaneously to the one goal to the good to god and since plaito all theologians and philosophers have followed the same path which means that in matters of morality instinct or as christian call it face or as i call it she heard a scissors triumphed unless one should make an exception the case of the card the father of rationalism and consequently grandfather of the revolution recognized only the authority of reason but reasons only a tool and the card was superficial 192 whoever has followed the history of the single science finds in its development a clue to the understanding of the oldest and commonest processes of all knowledge and cognizance there as here the premature hypothesis the fiction the good stupid will to believe and the lack of distrust and patience are first developed our senses learn late and never learn completely to be subtle reliable and cautious organs of knowledge our eyes find it easier on a given occasion to produce a picture already often produced than to seize upon the divergence and novelty of an impression the letter requires more force more morality it is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new we hear strange music badly when we hear another language spoken we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds into words with which we are more familiar and conversant it was last for example that the germans modified the spoken word arcubalista into armbos that means crossbow our senses are also hostile and averse to the new and generally even in the simplest procession of sensation the emotions dominate such as fear love hatred and the passive emotion of indolence as little as a reader nowadays reads all the single words not to speak of syllabus of a page he rather takes about five out of every 20 words and random and guesses the probably appropriate sense to them just as little do we see a tree correctly and completely in respect to its leaves branches color and shape we find it so much easier to fancy the chance of a tree even the midst of the most remarkable experiences we still do just the same we fabricate the greater part of the experience and can hardly be made to contemplate any event except as inventors thereof all this goes to proof that from our fundamental nature and from remote ages we have been accustomed to lying or to express it more politely and hypocritically in short more pleasantly one is much more of an artist than one is aware of in an animated conversion i often see the face of the person with who i am speaking so clearly and sharply defined before me according to the thought he expresses or which i believe to be evoked in his mind that the degree of distinctness far exceeds the strength of my visual faculty the delicacy of the play of the muscles and of the expression of the eyes must therefore be imagined by me probably the person put on quite a different expression or none at all 193 quit could lose the food to neighbors argued but also contrary wise what we experience in dreams provided we experience it often pertains at last just as much of the general belongings of our soul as anything actually experienced by virtuoso we are richer or poorer we have a requirement more or less and finally in broad daylight and even the brightest moments of our waking life we are ruled to some extent by the nature of our dreams supposing that someone has often flown in his dreams and then at last as soon as he dreams he is conscious of the power and art of lying as his privilege and his peculiarly enviable happiness such a person who believes that on the slightest impulse he can actually all sorts of curves and angels who knows the sensation of a certain divine levity and upwards without effort or constraint and downwards without ascending or lowering without trouble how could the man with such dream experiences and dream habits fail to find happiness differently colored and defined even in his waking hours how could he fail to long differently for happiness flight such as his scribe approach must when compared to his own flying be far too earthly muscular violent far too troublesome for him 194 the difference among men does not manifest itself only in the difference of their list of desirable things in the regarding different good things as worth striving for and being disagreed as to the greater or less value the order of rank of the commonly recognized desirable things it manifests itself much more in what they regard as actually having and possessing a desirable thing as regards to a woman for instance the control of her body and her sexual gratification serves as an implies efficient sign of ownership and possession to the more modest man and other with the most auspicious and ambitious thirst for possession sees the questionableness the mere apparentness of such ownership and wishes to have finer tests in order to know especially whether the woman not only gives herself to him but also goes up for the sake but she has or would not like to have only then does he look upon her as possessed a third however has not even here got to the limit of his distrust and his desire for possession he asks himself whether the woman when she gives up everything for him does not perhaps do so far for a phantom of him he wishes first to be thoroughly indeed profoundly well known in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out only then as he feels the beloved one fully in his possession when she no longer deceives herself about him when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devoury and concealed insurability as for his goodness patience and spirituality one man would like to possess a nation and defines all the higher arts of cagliosto and catalina suitable for his purpose another with a more refined source of possession sighs to himself one may not deceive where one desires to possess he's irritated and impatient at the ideas that a mask of him should rule in the heart of the people i must therefore make myself known and first of all learn to know myself among helpful and charitable people one almost always finds the awkward craftiness which first gets absutable him who has to be helped as though for instance he should merit help seek just their help and would show himself deeply grateful attached and subservient to them for all help with these conceits they take control of the needy as a property just as in general they are charitable and helpful out of a desire for property one finds them jealous when they are crossed or for stalled in their charity parents invariably make something like themselves out of the children they call that education no mother doubts the bottom of her heart that the child she has born is thereby her property no father hesitates about his right to his own ideas and notions of birth indeed in former times fathers seem to try to use that description concerning the life or death of the newly born as among the ancient germans and like the father they also do the teacher the class the priest and the prince they'll see in every new individual an unobjectionable opportunity for new possession the consequence is 195 the jews a people born for slavery as tazitos in the whole ancient world say of them the chosen people among the nations and they themselves say in belief the jews performed miracle of the inversion of valuations by means of which the life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums their prophets fused into one the expressions rich godless wicked violent sensual and for the first time coined the word world as a term of reproach and this inversion of valuations in which is also included the use of the word pure as synonym the saint and friend the significance of the jews people is to be found it is with them that the slave insurrection and morals commences 196 it is to be inferred that there are countless dark bodies near the sun such as we shall never see among ourselves this is an allegory and the psychologists of morals read the whole star writing merely as an allegorical and symbolic language in which much may be unexpressed 197 the beast of prey and the man of prey for instance says a borgia are fundamentally misunderstood nature is misunderstood so long as one seeks a morbidness and the constitution of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and grills or even an innate hell in them as almost all moralists have done with a row does it seem that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of the tropics among moralists and that the tropical man must be discredited at all costs whether as a disease and deterioration of mankind or as his own hell and self-torture and why in favor of the temperate zones in favor of the temperate men the moral the mediocre this for the chapter morals as timidity 198 all the systems of morals which address themselves with a few of their happiness as it is called what else are they but suggestions for behavior adapted to the degree of danger from themselves in which the individuals live recipes for their passions their good and bad propensities and so far as such have the world to power and would like to play the master small and great expediencies and elaborations permeated with the mustier odor of old family medicines and old life wisdom all of them protect and absurd in their form because they address themselves to all because they generalize whether generalization is not authorized all of them speaking unconditionally and taking themselves unconditionally all of them flavored not merely with some grain of salt but rather and durable only and sometimes even seductive when they are overspiced and begin to smell dangerously especially of the other world that is all of little value when estimated intellectually and as far from being science much less wisdom but repeated once more and three times repeated it is expediency expediency expediency mixes stupidity stupidity stupidity whether it be indifference and stature as coldness towards the heated folly of the emotions which the stoics advised and fostered or the no more laughing and no more weeping of spinosa the destruction of the emotions by their analysis and vivisection which he recommended so naively or the lowering of the emotions to an innocent mean at which they all may be satisfied the aristotelianism of morals or even morality as the enjoyment of the emotions in a voluntary attenuation and spiritualization but in symbolism of art perps as music or as love of god and of mankind for god's sake for in religion the passions are once more enfranchised provided that or finally even the complacent and wanton surrender of the emotions as have been taught by hafiz and gütte the bold letting go of the range the spiritual and corporeal licensia morum in the exceptional cases of wise cold codges and drunkards with whom it no longer has much danger this also for the chapter moral estimility 199 in as much as in all ages as long as mankind has existed there have also been human hurts family alliances communities tribes peoples states churches and always a great number of who obey in proportion to the small number who command in view therefore of the fact that obedience has been most practiced and fostered among mankind to the row one may reasonably suppose that generally speaking the need thereof is now innate in everyone as a kind of formal conscience which gives the command you shall unconditionally do something unconditionally refrain from something in short you shall this need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with the content according to its trench impatience and eagerness it in one ceases as an omnivorous appetite with little diselection and accepts whatever is shouted to into its ear by all sorts of commanders parents teachers laws class prejudice or public opinion the extraordinary limitation of human development the hesitation protractedness frequent retrogression and turning thereof is attributable to the fact that the hurt instinct of obedience is transmitted best and at the cost of the art of command and one imagines this instinct increasing to its greatest extent commanders and independent individuals will finally be lacking altogether or they will suffer inwardly from a bad conscience and will have to impose a deception of themselves in the first place in order to be able to command just as if they also were only obeying this conditional things actually exists in Europe at present I called the moral hypocrisy of the commanding class they know no other way of protecting themselves from their bad conscience that by playing the role of executors of older and higher orders of predecessors of the constitution of justice of the law or of God himself or they even justify themselves by maxims from the current opinions of the herd as first servants of their people or instruments of the public will on the other hand the gregarious european man nowadays assumes an air as if he were the only kind of man that is allowable he glorifies his qualities such as public spirit kindness deference industry temperance modesty indulgence sympathy by virtue of which he's gentle and durable and useful to the herd as a peculiarly human virtues in cases however there is belief that the leader and bellwether cannot be dispensed with attempt after attempt is made nowadays to replace commanders by the summing together of clever gregarious men all representative constitutions for example are of this origin in spite of all what a blessing what a deliverance from a weight becoming unendurable is the appearance of an absolute ruler for these gregarious europeans of this fact the effect of the appearance of napoleon was the last great proof the history of the influence of napoleon is almost the three of the higher happiness to which the entire century has attained his individuals and periods 200 the man of an age of dissolution which mixes the races is one another who has an inheritance of a diversified descent in his body that is to say contrary and often not only contrary instincts and standards of value which struggle with one another and assault them at peace such a man of late culture and broken lives will on an average be a weak man his fundamental desire is that the war which is in him should come to an end happiness appears to him in the character of a suzing medicine and mode of thought for instant epicurean or christian it is above all things the happiness of repose of undisturbedness of repression of final unity it is the sabbat of sabbats to use the expression of the holy retorician saint augustin who was himself such a man should however the contrary and conflict in such natures operate as an additional incentive and stimulus to life and if on the other hand in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable instinct they have also inherited and indoctrinated into them a proper mastery and subtlety for caring on the conflict which themselves that is to say the faculty of self control and self deception there then arise those marvellously incomprehensible and inexplicable beings those enigmatic man predestined for conquering and circumventing others the finest examples of which are elizabethus and cesar which whom i should like to associate the first of europeans accounting to my taste the hon staufand redirect the second and among artists perhaps leonard davinci they appear precisely in the same periods when that weaker type which is longing for repose comes to the front the two types are complementary to each other and spring from the same causes 201 as long as the utility which determines moral estimates is only gregarious utility as long as the preservation of the community is only kept in view and their immoral assault precisely and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the maintenance of the community there can be no morality of love to one's neighbor granted even that there is already a little constant exercise of consideration sympathy fairness gentleness and mutual assistance granted that even in this condition of society all those instincts are already active which are laterally distinguished by honorable names as a virtue and eventually almost coincide with the conception morality in that period they do not as yet belong to the domain of moral valuations they are still ultra moral a sympathetic action for instance is neither called good nor bad moral or immoral in the best periods of the romance and truly praised a sort of resentful disdain is compatible with this praise even at the best directly the sympathetic action is compared with one which contributes to the welfare of the whole to the race publica after all love to our neighbor is always a secondary matter partly conventional and arbitrarily manifested in relation to our fear of our neighbor after the fabric of society seems on the whole established and secured against external dangers it is the fear of our neighbor which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation certain strong and dangerous instincts such as the love of enterprise full-heartedness revengefulness astuteness rapacity and love of power which up to then has not only be honored from the point of view of general utility under other names of course that those here given but had to be fostered and cultivated because they were perpetually required in the common danger against the common enemies are now felt in the dangerousness to be doubly strong when the outlets for them are lacking and are gradually branded as immoral and given over column name the contrary instincts and inclinations now attain a tomorrow honor the gregarious instinct gradually draws its conclusions how much or how little dangerousness to the community or to equality is contained in an opinion a condition an emotion and his position or an endowment that is now the moral perspective here again fear is the mother of morals it is by the loftiest and strongest instinct when they break out passionately and carry the individual far above and beyond the average and the low level of the gregarious conscience that the self-reliance of the community is destroyed its belief in itself its backbone as it were breaks consequently these very instincts will be most branded and defamed lofty independent spirituality they will stand alone and even the cogent reason are felt to be dangerous everything that elevates the individual above the herd and is a source of fear to the neighbor as hence were called evil the tolerant unassuming self-adapting self equalizing disposition the mediocrity of desires attains the moral distinction and honor finally under very peaceful circumstances there's always less opportunity and necessity for training the feelings to severity and rigor and now every form of severity even injustice begins to stir up the conscience a lofty and rigorous nobleness and self-responsibility almost offense and awakens distrust the lamp and still more the sheep wins respect there's a point of disease malonez and a feminacy in the history of society at which society itself takes a part of him who injures it the part of the criminal and does so in fact seriously and honestly to punish appears to be somehow unfair it is certain that the idea of punishment and the obligation to punish and then painful and alarming to people is it not sufficient and the criminal be rendered homeless why should we still punish punishment itself is terrible with these questions gregarious morality the morality of fear draws its ultimate conclusion if one could all do away with danger the cause of fear one would have done away with this morality at the same time it would no longer be necessary it would not consider itself any longer necessary whoever examines the conscience of the present day european will always elicit the same imperative from its thousand moral faults and hidden recesses the imperative of the timidity of the herd we wish that sometime or other there may be nothing more to fear sometime or other the will and the way there too is nowadays called progress all over europe 202 let us at once say again what we have already said a hundred times for people's ears nowadays are unwilling to hear such truth our truth we know well enough how offensive it sounds when anyone plainly and without metaphor counts men among the animals but it will be accounted to us almost a crime that it is precisely in respect to men of modern ideas that we have constantly applied the terms herd herd instincts and such like expressions what avail is it we cannot do otherwise for it is precisely here that our new insight is we have found that in all the principal moral judgments europe has become unanimous including likewise the countries where european influence prevails in europe people evidently know what socrates thought he did not know and what the famous serpent of old once promised to teach they know today what is good and evil it must then sound hard and be distasteful to the ear when we always insist that that which here thinks it knows that which here glorifies itself with praise and blame and calls itself good is the instinct of the herding human animal the instinct which has come and is ever coming more and more to the front to preponderance and supremacy over other instincts according to the increasing physiological approximation and resemblance of which is the symptom morality in europe at present is herding animal morality and therefore as we understand the matter only one kind of human morality besides which before which and after which many other moralities and above all higher moralities are or should be possible against such a possibility against such a should be however this morality defends itself it's all it's drench it says obstinately and inexorably i am morality itself and nothing else is morality indeed with the help of a religion which has humored and flattered the sublime's desires of the herding animal things have reached such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this morality even in political and social arrangements the democratic movement is the inheritance of the christian movement that its tempo however is much too slow and sleep before the more impatient ones for those who are sick and distracted by the herding instinct is indicated by the increasingly furious howling and always less disguised teased gnashing of the anarchist dogs who are now roving through the highways of european culture apparently in opposition to the peacefully industrious democrats and revolution ideologies and still more so to the awkward philipsofastas and fraternity visionaries who call themselves socialists and want a free society those are really at one with them and all their sorrow and instinctive hostility to every form of society other than the autonomous herd to the extent even of repudiating the notions master and servant nydionimetre says a socialist formula at one in the tenacious opposition to every special claim every special right and privilege this means ultimately opposition to every right for when we all equal no one needs the rights any longer at one in their distrust of punitive justice a third where a violation of the weak unfair to the necessary consequences of all former society but equally at one in the religion of sympathy in their compassion for all that feels lives and suffers down to the very animals up even to god the extravagance of the sympathy for god belongs to a democratic age altogether at one in the cry and impatience of the sympathy and the deadly hatred of suffering generality and they're almost feminine in capacity for witnessing it or allowing it at one in their involuntarily be glooming and heart softening under the spell of which europe seems to be threatened with a new buddhism at one in their belief in the morality of mutual sympathy as though it were morality in itself the climax the attained climax of mankind the sole hope of the future the consolation of the present the greatest charge from all the obligations of the past all together at one in their belief in the community as a deliverer in the herd and therefore themselves 203 we who hold a different belief we who regard the democratic movement not only as a degenerating form of political organization but as equivalent to a generating a waning type of man as involving his medial crying and deprecation where have we to fix our hopes in new philosophers there is no other alternative in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of values to transvalue and invert eternal valuations and foreigners in man of the futures who in the present shall fix the constraints and fast the knots which will compel millennia to take new path to teach man the future of humanity as his will as depending on human will and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has through the drug gone by the name of history the folly of the greatest number is only its last form for that purpose a new type of philosopher and commander will sometime or other be needed at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult terrible and benevolent beings might look pale and warped the image of such leaders hovers before our eyes is it lawful for me to say it aloud we free spirits the conditions which one would partly have to create and partly utilize for their genesis the presumptive methods and tests by virtue of which a soul should grow up to such an evaluation and power as to feel a constraint to these tasks a transvaluation of values under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass so as to be on the weight of such responsibility and on the other hand the necessity for our such leaders and on the other hand the necessity for such leaders the dreadful danger that they might be lacking or miscarry and degenerate these are our real anxieties and glooms we know it well we free spirits these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep across the heaven of our life there are few pains so grievous as to have seen divine or experienced how an exceptional man has missed display and deteriorated but he who has a rare eye for the universal danger of man himself deteriorating he who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortitudeness which has has played its game in respect of the future of mankind a game in which neither the hand nor even a finger of god has participated he who divides the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unvaryness and blind confidence of modern ideas and still more under the whole of crystal european morality suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared he sees at a glance all that could still be made out of man through a favorable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new path he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what red obstacles promising developments of the highest rank hathithero usually gone to pieces broken down sunk and become contentable the universal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the man of the future as idealized by the socialist fools and shallow pates this degeneracy and warfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal or as they call it to a man of free society this brutalizing of man to a pygmy with equal rights and claims is undoubtedly possible he who thought out this possibility to his ultimate conclusion knows and other lousy unknown to the rest of mankind and perhaps also a new mission end of chapter five this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox dot org this reading by carah schellenberg www dot k-ray dot org beyond good and evil by friedrich nichy chapter six we scholars 204 at the risk that moralizing may also reveal itself here as that which it has always been namely resolutely montreras says plays according to balzac i would venture to protest against an improper and injurious alteration of rank which quite unnoticed and as if with the best conscience threatens nowadays to establish itself in the relations of science and philosophy i mean to say that one must have the right out of one's own experience experience as it seems to me always implies unfortunate experience to treat of such an important question of rank so as not to speak of color like the blind or against science like women and artists ah this dreadful science sigh their instinct and their shame it always finds things out the declaration of independence of the scientific man his emancipation from philosophy is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization the self-glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom and in its best springtime which does not mean to imply that in this case self praise smells sweet here also the instinct of the populace cries freedom from all masters and after science has with the happiest results resisted theology whose handmade it had been too long it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy and in its turn to play the master what am i saying to play the philosopher on its own account my memory the memory of a scientific man if you please teams with the naivete of insolence which i have heard about philosophy and philosophers from young naturalists and old physicians not to mention the most cultured and most conceited of all learned men the philologists and school masters who are both the one and the other by profession on one occasion it was the specialist and the jack horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against all synthetic tasks and capabilities at another time it was the industrious worker who had got a scent of otium and refined luxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher and felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby on another occasion it was the colorblindness of the utilitarian who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted systems and an extravagant expenditure which does nobody any good at another time the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary adjustment of knowledge became conspicuous at another time the disregard of individual philosophers which had involuntarily extended to disregard of philosophy generally in fine i found most frequently behind the proud disdain of philosophy in young scholars the evil after effect of some particular philosopher to whom on the whole obedience had been foresworn without however the spell of his scornful estimates of other philosophers having been got rid of the result of being a general ill will to all philosophy such seems to me for instance the after effect of schopenhauer on the most modern germany by his unintelligent rage against hegel he has succeeded in severing the whole of the last generation of germans from its connection with german culture which culture all things considered has been an elevation and a divining refinement of the historical sense but precisely at this point schopenhauer himself was poor irreceptive and ungerman to the extent of ingeniousness on the whole speaking generally it may just have been the humanness all too humanness of the modern philosophers themselves in short their contemptableness which has injured most radically the reverence for philosophy and opened the doors to the instinct of the populace let it but be acknowledged to what an extent our modern world diverges from the whole style of the world of heraclitus platoe empedacles and whatever else all the royal and magnificent anchorites of the spirit were called and with what justice an honest man of science may feel himself of a better family and origin in view of such representatives of philosophy who owing to the fashion of the present day are just as much aloft as they are down below in germany for instance the two lions of berlin the anarchist eugen doring and the amalgamist edward von hartman it is especially the site of those hodgepodge philosophers who call themselves realists or positivists which is calculated to implant a dangerous distrust in the soul of a young and ambitious scholar those philosophers at the best are themselves but scholars and specialists that is very evident all of them are persons who have been vanquished and brought back again under the dominion of science who at one time or another claimed more from themselves without having a right to the more and its responsibility and who now creditably rancorously and vindictively represent in word and deed disbelief in the master task and supremacy of philosophy after all how could it be otherwise science flourishes nowadays and has the good conscience clearly visible on its countenance while that to which the entire modern philosophy has gradually sunk the remnant of philosophy of the present day excites distrust and displeasure if not scorn and pity philosophy reduced to a theory of knowledge no more in fact than a diffident science of epochs and doctrine of forbearance a philosophy that never even gets beyond the threshold and rigorously denies itself the right to enter that is philosophy in its last throes and end and agony something that awakens pity how could such a philosophy rule 205 the dangers that beset the evolution of the philosopher are in fact so manifold nowadays that one might doubt whether this fruit could still come to maturity the extent and towering structure of the sciences have increased enormously and therewith also the probability that the philosopher will grow tired even as a learner or will attach himself somewhere and specialize so that he will no longer attain to his elevation that is to say to his superspection his circumspection and his despection or he gets aloft too late when the best of his maturity and strength is passed or when he is impaired coarsened and deteriorated so that his view his general estimate of things is no longer of much importance it is perhaps just the refinement of his intellectual conscience that makes him hesitate and linger on the way he dreads the temptation to become a dilettante a millipede a milla antenna he knows too well that as a discerner one who has lost his self-respect no longer commands no longer leads unless he should aspire to become a great play actor a philosophical cogliostro and spiritual rat catcher in short a misleader this is in the last instance a question of taste if it has not really been a question of conscience to double once more the philosopher's difficulties there is also the fact that he demands from himself a verdict a yay or nay not concerning science but concerning life and the worth of life he learns unwillingly to believe that it is his right and even his duty to obtain this verdict and he has to seek his way to the right and the belief only through the most extensive perhaps disturbing and destroying experiences often hesitating doubting and dumbfounded in fact the philosopher has long been mistaken and confused by the multitude either with the scientific man and ideal scholar or with the religiously elevated decentralized desecularized visionary and god intoxicated man and even yet when one hears anybody praised because he lives wisely or as a philosopher it hardly means anything more than prudently and apart wisdom that seems to the populace to be a kind of flight a means and artifice for withdrawing successfully from a bad game but the genuine philosopher does it not seem so to us my friends lives un philosophically and unwisely above all imprudently and feels the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts and temptations of life he risks himself constantly he plays this bad game 206 in relation to the genius that is to say a being who either engenders or produces both words understood in their fullest sense the man of learning the scientific average man has always something of the old maid about him for like her he is not conversant with the two principal functions of man to both of course to the scholar and to the old maid one concedes respectability as if by way of indemnification in these cases one emphasizes the respectability and yet in the compulsion of this concession one has the same admixture of vexation let us examine more closely what is the scientific man firstly a commonplace type of man with commonplace virtues that is to say a non-ruling non-authoritative and non-self-sufficient type of man he possesses industry patient adaptableness to rank and file equability and moderation in capacity and requirement he has the instinct for people like himself and for that which they require for instance the portion of independence and green meadow without which there is no rest from labor the claim to honor and consideration which first and foremost presupposes recognition and recognizability the sunshine of a good name the perpetual ratification of his value and usefulness with which the inward distrust which lies at the bottom of the heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals has again and again to be overcome the learned man as is appropriate has also maladies and faults of an ignoble kind he is full of petty envy and has a link's eye for the weak points in those natures to whose elevations he cannot attain he is confiding yet only as one who lets himself go but does not flow and precisely before the man of the great current he stands all the colder and more reserved his eye is then like a smooth and irresponsible lake which is no longer moved by rapture or sympathy the worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type from the Jesuitism of mediocrity which labors instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man and endeavors to break or still better to relax every bent bow to relax of course with consideration and naturally with an indulgent hand to relax with confiding sympathy that is the real art of Jesuitism which has always understood how to introduce itself as the religion of sympathy 207 however gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded ipsis immocity in the end however one must learn caution even with regard to one's gratitude and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated as if it were the goal in itself as if it were salvation and glorification as is especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school which has also in its turn good reasons for paying the highest honors to disinterested knowledge the objective man who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist the ideal man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures is assuredly one of the most costly instruments that exist but his place is in the hand of one who is more powerful he is only an instrument we may say he is a mirror he is no purpose in himself the objective man is in truth a mirror accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known with such desires only as knowing or reflecting implies he waits until something comes and then expands himself sensitively so that even the light footsteps and gliding past of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface and film whatever personality he still possesses seems to him accidental arbitrary or still often are disturbing so much has he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms and events he calls up the recollection of himself with an effort and not infrequently wrongly he readily confounds himself with other persons he makes mistakes with regard to his own needs and here only is he unrefined and negligent perhaps he is troubled about the health or the pettiness and confined atmosphere of wife and friend or the lack of companions and society indeed he sets himself to reflect on his suffering but in vain his thoughts already drove away to the more general case and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help himself he does not now take himself seriously and devote time to himself he is serene not from lack of trouble but from lack of capacity for grasping and dealing with his trouble the habitual complacence with respect to all objects and experiences the radiant and impartial hospitality with which he receives everything that comes his way his habit of inconsiderate good nature of dangerous indifference as to yay and nay alas there are enough of cases in which he has to atone for these virtues of his and as man generally he becomes far too easily the cop it more to him of such virtues should one wish love or hatred from him i mean love and hatred as god woman and animal understand them he will do what he can and furnish what he can but one must not be surprised if it should not be much if he should show himself just at this point to be false fragile questionable and deteriorated his love is constrained his hatred is artificial and rather on to a divorce a slight ostentation and exaggeration he is only genuine so far as he can be objective only in his serene totality is he still nature and natural his mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows how to affirm no longer how to deny he does not command neither does he destroy jenet me prized press green he says with labnitz let us not overlook nor undervalue the press neither is he a model man he does not go in advance of anyone nor after either he places himself generally too far off to have any reason for espousing the cause of either good or evil if he has been so long confounded with the philosopher with the caesarean trainer and dictator of civilization he has had far too much honor and what is more essential in him has been overlooked he is an instrument something of a slave though certainly the sublimist sort of slave but nothing in himself press green the objective man is an instrument a costly easily injured easily tarnished measuring instrument and mirroring apparatus which is to be taken care of and respected but he is no goal not outgoing nor upgoing no complimentary man in whom the rest of existence justifies itself no termination and still less a commencement an engendering or primary cause nothing hardy powerful self-centered that wants to be master but rather only a soft inflated delicate movable potters form that must wait for some kind of content and frame to shape itself there too for the most part a man without frame and content a selfless man consequently also nothing for women in parentheses 208 when a philosopher nowadays makes it known that he is not a skeptic i hope that has been gathered from the foregoing description of the objective spirit people all hear it impatiently they regard him on that account with some apprehension they would like to ask so many many questions indeed among timid hearers of whom there are now so many he is henceforth said to be dangerous with his repudiation of skepticism it seems to them as if they heard some evil threatening sound in the distance as if a new kind of explosive were being tried somewhere a dynamite of the spirit perhaps a newly discovered russian nihiline a pessimism bonai voluntatus that not only denies means denial but dreadful thought practices denial against this kind of goodwill a will to the veritable actual negation of life there is as is generally acknowledged nowadays no better soporific and sedative than skepticism the mild pleasing lulling poppy of skepticism and hamlet himself is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an antidote to the spirit and its underground noises are not our ears already full of bad sounds say the skeptics as lovers of repose and almost as a kind of safety police this subterranean nay is terrible be still ye pessimistic moles the skeptic in effect that delicate creature is far too easily frightened his conscience is schooled so as to start at every nay and even at that sharp decided yay and feel something like a bite thereby yay and nay they seem to him opposed to morality he loves on the contrary to make a festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness while perhaps he says with montine what do i know or with socrates i know that i know nothing or here i do not trust myself no door is open to me or even if the door were open why should i enter immediately or what is the use of any hasty hypotheses it might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses at all are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is crooked to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum is there not time enough for that has not the time leisure oh ye demons can you not at all wait the uncertain also has its charms the swings too is a sir say and sir say too was a philosopher thus does a skeptic console himself and in truth he needs some consolation for skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many sided physiological temperament which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickness it arises whenever races or classes which have been long separated decisively and suddenly blend with one another in the new generation which has inherited as it were different standards and valuations in its blood everything is disquiet derangement doubt and tentativeness the best powers operate restrictively the very virtues prevent each other growing and becoming strong equilibrium ballast and perpendicular stability are lacking in body and soul that however which is most diseased and degenerated in such nondescripts is the will they are no longer familiar with independence of decision or the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing they are doubtful of the freedom of the will even in their dreams our present day europe the scene of a senseless precipitate attempt at a racial blending of classes and consequently of races is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths sometimes exhibiting the mobile skepticism which springs impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch sometimes with gloomy aspect like a cloud overcharged with interrogative signs and often sick unto death of its will paralysis of will where do we not find this cripple sitting nowadays and yet how bedecked oftentimes how seductively ornamented there are the finest gala dresses and disguises for this disease and that for instance most of what places itself nowadays in the showcases as objectiveness the scientific spirit l'art pour l'art and pure voluntary knowledge is only decked out skepticism and paralysis of will i am ready to answer for this diagnosis of the european disease the disease of the will is diffused unequally over europe it is worst and most varied where civilization has longest prevailed it decreases according as the barbarian still or again asserts his claims under the loose drapery of western culture it is therefore in the france of today as can be readily disclosed and comprehended that the will is most infirm and france which has always had a masterly aptitude for converting even the portentious crisis of its spirit into something charming and seductive now manifests emphatically its intellectual ascendancy over europe by being the school and exhibition of all the charms of skepticism the power to will and to persist moreover in a resolution is already somewhat stronger in germany and again in the north of germany it is stronger than in central germany it is considerably stronger in england spain and corsica associated with phlegm in the former and with hard skulls in the latter not to mention italy which is too young yet to know what it wants and must first show whether it can exercise will but it is strongest and most surprising of all in that immense middle empire where europe as it were flows back to asia namely in russia there the power to will has been long stored up and accumulated there the will uncertain whether to be negative or affirmative waits threateningly to be discharged to borrow their pet phrase from our physicists perhaps not only indian wars and complications in asia would be necessary to free europe from its greatest danger but also internal subversion the shattering of the empire into small states and above all the introduction of parliamentary imbecility together with the obligation of everyone to read his newspaper at breakfast i do not say this as one who desires it in my heart i should rather prefer the contrary i mean such an increase in the threatening attitude of russia that europe would have to make up its mind to become equally threatening namely to acquire one will by means of a new cast to rule over the continent a persistent dreadful will of its own that can set its aims thousands of years ahead so that the long spun out comedy of its petty statism and its dynastic as well as its democratic many wilderness might finally be brought to a close the time for petty politics is past the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion of the world the compulsion to great politics 209 as to how far the new warlike age on which we europeans have evidently entered may perhaps favor the growth of another and stronger kind of skepticism i should like to express myself preliminarily merely by a parable which the lovers of german history will already understand that unscrupulous enthusiast for big handsome grenadiers who as king of prussia brought into being a military and skeptical genius and therewith in reality the new and now triumphantly emerged type of german the problematic crazy father of frederick the great had on one point the very knack and lucky grasp of the genius he knew what was then lacking in germany the want of which was a hundred times more alarming and serious than any lack of culture and social form his ill will to the young frederick resulted from the anxiety of a profound instinct men were lacking and he suspected to his bitterest regret that his own son was not man enough there however he deceived himself but who would not have deceived himself in his place he saw his son lapsed to atheism to the esprit to the pleasant frivolity of clever frenchman he saw in the background the great bloodsucker the spider skepticism he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard enough either for evil or good and of a broken will that no longer commands is no longer able to command meanwhile however there grew up in his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism who knows to what extent it was encouraged just by his father's hatred and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude the skepticism of daring manliness which is closely related to the genius for war and conquest and made its first entrance into germany in the person of the great frederick this skepticism despises and nevertheless grasps it undermines and takes possession it does not believe but it does not thereby lose itself it gives the spirit a dangerous liberty but it keeps strict guard over the heart it is the german form of skepticism which as a continued frederickianism risen to the highest spirituality has kept europe for a considerable time under the dominion of the german spirit and its critical and historical distrust owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine character of the great german philologists and historical critics who rightly estimated were also all of them artists of destruction and dissolution a new conception of the german spirit gradually established itself in spite of all romanticism in music and philosophy in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was decidedly prominent whether for instance as fearlessness of gaze as courage and sternness of the dissecting hand or as resolute will to dangerous voyages of discovery to spiritualized north pole expeditions under barren and dangerous skies there may be good grounds for it when warm blooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit se espri fatalist ironic me fistophilic as michelé calls it not without a shutter but if one would realize how characteristic is the sphere of the man in the german spirit which awakened europe out of its dogmatic slumber let us call to mind the former conception which had to be overcome by this new one and that it is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman could dare with unbridled presumption to recommend the germans to the interest of europe as gentle good-hearted weak willed and poetical fools finally let us only understand profoundly enough napoleon's astonishment when he saw girtha it reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the german spirit voila oh no that was as much to say but this is a man and i only expected to see a german 210 supposing then that in the picture of the philosophers of the future some trait suggests the question whether they must not perhaps be skeptics in the last mentioned sense something in them would only be designated thereby and not they themselves with equal right they might call themselves critics and assuredly they will be men of experiments by the name with which i ventured to baptize them i have already expressly emphasized their attempting and their love of attempting is this because as critics in body and soul they will love to make use of experiments in a new and perhaps wider and more dangerous sense in their passion for knowledge will they have to go further in daring and painful attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste of a democratic century can approve of there is no doubt these coming ones will be least able to dispense with the serious and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic i mean the certainty as to standards of worth the conscious employment of a unity of method the wary courage the standing alone and the capacity for self-responsibility indeed they will avow among themselves a delight in denial and dissection and a certain considerate cruelty which knows how to handle the knife surely and deftly even when the heart bleeds they will be sterner and perhaps not always towards themselves only then humane people may desire they will not deal with the truth in order that it may please them or elevate and inspire them they will rather have little faith in truth bringing with it such revels for the feelings they will smile those rigorous spirits when anyone says in their presence that thought elevates me why should it not be true or that work enchants me why should it not be beautiful or that artist enlarges me why should he not be great perhaps they will not only have a smile but a genuine disgust for all that is thus rapturous idealistic feminine and her mafroditic and if anyone could look into their inmost hearts he would not easily find therein the intention to reconcile christian sentiments with antique taste or even with modern parliamentarism the kind of reconciliation necessarily found even among philosophers in our very uncertain and consequently very conciliatory century critical discipline and every habit that conduces to purity and rigor in intellectual matters will not only be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future they may even make a display thereof as their special adornment nevertheless they will not want to be called critics on that account it will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have it decreed as is so welcome nowadays that philosophy itself is criticism and critical science and nothing else whatever though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of all the positivists of france and germany and possibly it even flattered the heart and taste of cunt let us call to mind the titles of his principal works our new philosophers will say notwithstanding that critics are instruments of the philosopher and just on that account as instruments they are far from being philosophers themselves even the great chinamen of konigsberg was only a great critic 211 i insist upon it that people finally cease confounding philosophical workers and in general scientific men with philosophers that precisely here one should strictly give each his own and not give those far too much these far too little it may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher that he himself should have once stood upon all those steps upon which his servants the scientific workers of philosophy remain standing and must remain standing he himself must perhaps have been critic and dogmatist and historian and besides poet and collector and traveler and riddle reader and moralist and seer and free spirit and almost everything in order to traverse the whole range of human values and estimations and that he may be able with a variety of eyes and consciences to look from a height to any distance from a depth up to any height from a nook into any expanse but all these are only preliminary conditions for his task this task itself demands something else it requires him to create values the philosophical workers after the excellent pattern of Kant and Hegel have to fix and formalize some great existing body of valuations that is to say former determinations of value creations of value which have become prevalent and are for a time called truth whether in the domain of the logical the political moral or the artistic it is for these investigators to make whatever has happened and been esteemed hitherto conspicuous conceivable intelligible and manageable to shorten everything long even time itself and to subjugate the entire past an immense and wonderful task in the carrying out of which all refined pride all tenacious will can surely find satisfaction the real philosophers however are commanders and law givers they say thus shall it be they determine first the hither and the why of mankind and thereby set aside the previous labor of all philosophical workers and all subjugators of the past they grasp at the future with a creative hand and whatever is and was becomes for them thereby a means an instrument and a hammer their knowing is creating their creating is a law giving their will to truth is will to power are there at present such philosophers have there ever been such philosophers must there not be such philosophers someday 212 it is always more obvious to me that the philosopher as a man indispensable for the morrow and the day after the morrow has ever found himself and has been obliged to find himself in contradiction to the day in which he lives his enemy has always been the ideal of his day hither to all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators have found their mission their hard involuntary imperative mission in the end however the greatness of their mission in being the bad conscience of their age in putting the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very virtues of their age they have betrayed their own secret it has been for the sake of a new greatness of man a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement they have always disclosed how much hypocrisy indolence self-indulgence and self-neglect how much falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality how much virtue was outlived they have always said we must remove hence to where you are least at home in the face of a world of modern ideas which would like to confine everyone in a corner in a specialty a philosopher if there could be philosophers nowadays would be compelled to place the greatness of man the conception of greatness precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness in his all-roundness he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself according to the extent to which a man could stretch his responsibility nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will consequently in the ideal of the philosopher strength of will sternness and capacity for prolonged resolution must specially be included in the conception of greatness with as good a right as the opposite doctrine with its ideal of a silly renouncing humble selfless humanity was suited to an opposite age such as the 16th century which suffered from its accumulated energy of will and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness in the time of socrates among men only of worn out instincts old conservative athenians who let themselves go for the sake of happiness as they said for the sake of pleasure as their conduct indicated and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led irony was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul the wicked socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh as into the flesh and heart of the noble with a look that said plainly enough do not dissemble before me here we are equal at present on the contrary when throughout europe the herding animal alone attains to honors and dispenses honors when equality of right can too readily be transformed into equality and wrong i mean to say into general war against everything rare strange and privileged against the higher man the higher soul the higher duty the higher responsibility the creative plenipotence and lordliness at present it belongs to the conception of greatness to be noble to wish to be apart to be capable of being different to stand alone to have to live by personal initiative and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts he shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary the most concealed the most divergent the man beyond good and evil the master of his virtues and of super abundance of will precisely this shall be called greatness as diversified as can be entire as ample as can be full and to ask once more the question is greatness possible nowadays 213 it is difficult to learn what a philosopher is because it cannot be taught one must know it by experience or one should have the pride not to know it the fact that at present people all talk of things of which they cannot have any experience is true more especially and unfortunately as concerns the philosopher and philosophical matters the very few know them are permitted to know them and all popular ideas about them are false thus for instance the truly philosophical combination of a bold exuberant spirituality which runs at presto pace and a dialectic rigor and necessity which makes no false step is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience and therefore should anyone speak of it in their presence it is incredible to them they conceive of every necessity as troublesome as a painful compulsory obedience and state of constraint thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and hesitating almost as a trouble and often enough as worthy of the sweat of the noble but not at all as something easy and divine closely related to dancing and exuberance to think and to take a matter seriously arduously that is one of the same thing to them such only has been their experience artists have here perhaps a finer intuition they who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything arbitrarily and everything of necessity their feeling of freedom of subtlety of power of creatively fixing disposing and shaping reaches its climax in short that necessity and freedom of will are then the same thing with them there is in fine a graduation of rank in psychical states to which the graduation of rank in the problems corresponds and the highest problems repel ruthlessly everyone who ventures to near them without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality of what uses it for nimble everyday intellects or clumsy honest mechanics and empiricists to press in their plebeian ambition close to such problems and as it were into this holy of holies as so often happens nowadays but course feet must never tread upon such carpets this is provided for in the primary law of things the doors remain closed to those intruders though they may dash and break their heads there on people have always to be born to a high station or more definitely they have to be bred for it a person has only a right to philosophy taking the word in its higher significance in virtue of his descent the ancestors the blood decide here also many generations must have prepared the way for the coming of the philosopher each of his virtues must have been separately acquired nurtured transmitted and embodied not only the bold easy delicate course and current of his thoughts but above all the readiness for great responsibilities the majesty of ruling glance and contending look the feeling of separation from the multitude with their duties and virtues the kindly patronage and defense of whatever is misunderstood and callumniated be it god or devil the delight and practice of supreme justice the art of commanding the amplitude of will the lingering eye which rarely admires rarely looks up rarely loves end of chapter six read by kara schellenberg on january 8 2006 in oceanside california this is a liber fox recording all liber fox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libervox.org this reading by andrew miller toronto may 2006 beyond good and evil by friedrich nicha translated by helen zimmer chapter seven our virtues 214 our virtues it is probable that we too have still our virtues although naturally they are not those sincere and massive virtues on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem and also at a little distance from us we europeans of the day after tomorrow we firstlings of the 20th century with all our dangerous curiosity our multifariousness and art of disguising our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty and sense and spirit we shall presumably if we must have virtues have those only which have come to agreement with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations with our most ardent requirements well then let us look for them in our labyrinths where as we know so many things lose themselves so many things get quite lost and is there anything finer than to search for one's own virtues is it not almost to believe in one's own virtues but this believing in one's own virtues is it not practically the same as what was formerly called one's good conscience that long respectable pigtail of an idea which our grandfathers used to hang behind their heads and often enough also behind their understandings it seems therefore that however little we may imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned and grandfatherly respectable in other respects in one thing we are nevertheless the worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers we last europeans with good consciences we also still wear the pigtail ah if you only knew how soon so very soon it will be different 215 as in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two sons which determine the path of one planet and in certain cases sons 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 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 216 to love one's enemies i think that has been well learned it takes place thousands of times at present on a large and small scale indeed at times the higher and sublimer thing takes place we learn to despise when we love and precisely when we love best all of it however unconsciously without noise without ostentation with the shame and secrecy of goodness which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the formula of virtue morality as attitude is opposed to our taste nowadays this is also in advance as it was in advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste including the enmity and voltarian bitterness against religion and all that formerly belonged to free thinker pantomime it is the music in our conscience the dance in our spirit to which puritan litanese moral sermons and goody goodness won't chime 217 let us be careful in dealing with those who attach great importance to be credited with moral tat and subtlety and moral discernment they never forgive us if they have once made a mistake before us or even with regard to us they inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and detractors even when they still remain our friends blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders 218 the psychologists of france and where else are there still psychologists nowadays have never yet exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoyment of the petit bourgeois just as though in short they betray something thereby flair for instance the honest citizen of ruble neither saw heard nor tasted anything else in the end it was his mode of self-torment and refined cruelty as this is growing weary some i would now recommend for a change something else for a pleasure namely the unconscious astuteness with which good fat honest mediocrity always behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to perform the subtle barbed jesuitical astuteness which is a thousand times subtler than the taste and understanding of the middle class and its best moments subtler even than the understanding of its victims a repeated proof that instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered in short you psychologists study the philosophy of the rule in its struggle with the exception there you have a spectacle fit for gods and godlike malignity or in plater words practice vivisection on good people on the homo bonnet voluntatus on yourselves 219 the practice of judging and condemning morally is the favorite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so it is also a kind of indemnity for there being badly endowed by nature and finally it is an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming subtle malice spiritual ease they are glad in their inmost heart that there is a standard according to which those who are over endowed with intellectual goods and privileges are equal to them they contend for the equality of all before god and almost need the belief in god for this purpose it is among them that the most powerful antagonists of atheism are found if 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 care not to say so no i would rather flatter them with my theory that lofty spirituality itself exists only as the ultimate product of moral qualities that it is a synthesis of all qualities attributed to the merely moral man after they have been acquired singly through long training and practice perhaps during a whole series of generations that lofty spirituality is precisely the 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 among men 220 now that the praise of the disinterested person is so popular one must probably not without some danger get an idea of what people actually take an interest in and what are the things generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern ordinary men including the cultured even the learned and perhaps philosophers also if appearances do not deceive the fact thereby becomes obvious that the greater part of what interests and charms higher natures and more refined and fastidious tastes seems absolutely uninteresting to the average man if notwithstanding he perceived devotion to these interests he calls it disinterest and wonders how it is possible to act disinterestedly there have been philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a seductive and mystical otherworldly expression perhaps because they did not know the higher nature by experience instead of stating the naked and candidly reasonable truth that disinterested action is very interesting and interested action provided that and love what even an action for love's sake shall be unegoistic but you fools and the praise of the self-sacrificer but whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it perhaps something from himself for something from himself that he relinquished here in order to have more there perhaps in general to be more or even feel himself more but this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more fastidious spirit does not like to stay for here truth has to stifle her 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 sometimes happens set a moralistic patent and trifle retailer that i honor and respect an unselfish man not however because he is unselfish but because i think he is a right to be useful to another man at his own expense in short the question is always who he is and who the other is for instance in a person created and destined for command self-denial and modest retirement instead of being virtues would be the waste of virtues so it seems to me every system of unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to 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 and more privileged types of men moral systems must be compelled first of all to bow before the gradations of rank their presumption must be driven home to their conscience until they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral to say that what is right for one is proper for another so said my moralistic pent and but um 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 pertains even to good taste 222 wherever sympathy fellow suffering is preached nowadays and if i gather rightly no other religion is any longer preached let the psychologist have his ears open through all the vanity through all the noise which is natural to these preachers as to all preachers he will hear a horse groaning genuine note of self contempt it belongs to the overshadowing and uglifying of europe which has been on the increase for a century the first symptoms of which are already specified documentarily in a thoughtful letter of galliani to madame depenet if it is not really the cause thereof the man of modern ideas the conceited ape is excessively dissatisfied with himself this is perfectly certain he suffers and his vanity wants him only to suffer with his fellows 223 the hybrid european a tolerably ugly plebeian taken all in all absolutely requires a costume he needs history as a storeroom of costumes to be sure he notices that none of the costumes fit him properly he changes and changes let us look at the 19th century with respect to these hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades of style and also with respect to its moments of desperation on account of nothing suiting us it is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic or classical or christian or florentine or baroque or national in mortibus at artibus it does not clothe us but the spirit especially the historical spirit profits even by this desperation once and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested put on taken off packed up and above all studied we are the first studious age in puncto of costumes i mean as concerns morals articles of belief artistic tastes and religions we are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style for the most spiritual festival laughter and arrogance for the transcendental height of supreme folly and aristophantic ridicule of the world perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here the domain where even we can still be original probably as paradists of the world's history and as god's mary andrews perhaps though nothing else of the present have a future our laughter itself may have a future 224 the historical sense or the capacity for dividing quickly the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people a community or an individual has lived the defining 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 claims our own specialty has come to us in the train of the enchanting and mad semi-barbarity into which europe has been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races it is only the 19th century that has recognized this faculty as its sixth sense owing to this mingling the past of every form and mode of life and of cultures which were formerly closely contiguous and superimposed on one another flows forth into us modern souls our instincts now run back in all directions we ourselves are a kind of chaos in the end as we have said the spirit perceives its advantage therein by means of our semi-barbarity and body and in desire we have secret access everywhere such as a noble age never had we have access above all to the labyrinth of imperfect civilizations and to every form of semi-barbarity that has at any time existed on earth and in so far as the most considerable part of human civilization hitherto has just been semi-barbarity the historical sense implies almost the sense and instinct for everything the taste and tongue for everything whereby it immediately proves itself to be an ignoble sense for instance we enjoy Homer once more it is perhaps our happiest acquisition that we know how to appreciate Homer whom men have distinguished culture as the French of the 17th century like Saul Evamon who reproached him for his es reveste and even Voltaire the last echo of the century cannot and could not so easily appropriate whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy the very decided yay and nay of their palette they're promptly ready discussed they're hesitating reluctance with regard to everything strange their horror of the bad taste even of lively curiosity and in general the averseness of every distinguished and self-sufficing culture to avow a new desire a dissatisfaction with its own condition or an admiration of what is strange all this determines and disposes them unfavorably even towards the best things of the world which are not their property or could not become their prey and no faculty is more unintelligible to such men than just this historical sense with its chuckling plebeian curiosity the case is not different with Shakespeare that marvelous Spanish Moorish Saxon synthesis of taste over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of escalus would have half killed himself with laughter or irritation but we accept precisely this wild motleyness this medley of the most delicate the most coarse and the most artificial with a secret confidence and cordiality we enjoy it as a refinement of art reserved expressly for us and allow ourselves to be as little disturbed by the repulsive fumes and the proximity of the English populace in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives as perhaps on the Chiaja of Naples where with all our senses awake we go our way and chant it and voluntarily in spite of the drain odor of the lower quarters of the town that is man of the historical sense we have our virtues is not to be disputed we are unpretentious unselfish modest brave habituated to self control and self renunciation very grateful very patient very complacent but with all this we are perhaps not very tasteful let us finally confess it that what is most difficult for us men of the historical sense to grasp feel taste and love what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art the essentially noble in works and men their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast to good taste at least the very bad taste and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly hesitatingly and with compulsion the small short and happy god sins and glorifications of human life as they shine here and there those moments and marvelous experiences when a great power has voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and infinite when a superabundance of refined delight has been enjoyed by sudden checking and petrifying by standing firmly and planting oneself fixedly on still trembling ground proportionateness is strange to us let us confess it to ourselves our itching is really the itching for the infinite the immeasurable like the rider on his forward panting horse we let the reins fall before the infinite we modern men we semi-barbarians and are only in our highest bliss when we are in the most danger 225 whether it be hedonism pessimism utilitarianism or eudaimism 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 naive attes which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artist's conscience will look down upon with scorn though not without sympathy sympathy for you to be sure that is not sympathy as you understand it it is not sympathy for social distress for society with its sick and misfortune for the hereditary vicious and defective who lie in 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 a loftier and further cited sympathy we see how man dwarfs himself how you dwarf him and there are moments when we view your sympathy with an indescribable anguish when we resist it when we regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity you want if possible and there is not a more foolish if possible to do away with suffering and we it really seems that we would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been well being as you understand it is certainly not a goal it seems to us an end a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible and makes his destruction desirable the discipline of suffering of great suffering know you not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto the tension of soul and misfortune which communicates to it its energy its shuttering 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 been bestowed upon the soul has it not been bestowed through suffering through the discipline of great suffering in man creature and creator are united in man there is not only matter shred excess clay mire folly chaos but there is also the creator the sculptor the hardness of the hammer the divinity of the spectator and the seventh day do you understand this contrast and that your sympathy for the creature in man applies to that which has to be fashioned bruised forged stretched roasted annealed refined to that which must necessarily suffer and is meant to suffer and our sympathy do you not understand what our reverse sympathy applies to when it resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering and innervation so it is sympathy against sympathy but to repeat it once more there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and sympathy and all systems of philosophy which deal only with these are naivete's 226 we immoralists this world with which we are concerned in which we have to fear and love this almost invisible inaudible world of delicate command and delicate obedience a world of almost in every respect captures insidious sharp and tender yes it is well protected from clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity we are woven into a strong net and garment of duties and cannot disengage ourselves precisely here we are men of duty even we occasionally it is true we dance in our chains and betwixt our swords it is 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 appearances against us 227 honesty granting the it is the virtue of which we cannot rid ourselves we free spirits well we will labor at it with all our perversity and love and not tire of perfecting 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 limbs and find us too hard and would faint have it pleasanter easier and gentler like an agreeable vice let us remain hard we latest stoics and let us send to its help whatever devilry we have in us our disgust at the clumsy and undefined our nitimor invetitum our love of adventure our sharpened and festivities curiosity our most subtle disguised intellectual will to power and universal conquest which rambles and roves evidiously around all the realms of the future let us go with all our devils to the help of our god it is probable that people will misunderstand and mistake us on that account what does it matter they will say their honesty that is their devilry and nothing else what does it matter and even if they were right have not all gods hitherto been such sanctified revaptized devils and after all what do we know of ourselves and what the spirit that leads us wants to be called it is a question of names and how many spirits we harbor our honesty we free spirits let us be careful listed become our vanity our ornament and ostentation our limitation our stupidity every virtue inclines to stupidity every stupidity to virtue stupid to the point of sanctity they say in russia let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and boars is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves one would have to believe in eternal life in order to 228 i hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the so horrific appliances and the virtue in my opinion has been more injured by the tediousness of its advocates than by anything else at the same time however i would not wish to overlook their general usefulness it is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not someday become interesting but let us not be afraid things still remain today as they have always been i see no one in europe who has or discloses an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, capsious and ensnaring manner that calamity might be involved therein observe for example the indefatigable inevitable english utilitarians how ponderously and respectively they stalk on stalk along a Homeric metaphor expresses it better in the footsteps of bentham just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable helvetches no he was not a dangerous man helvetches says senator poco current to use an expression of galliani no new thought nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old thought not even a proper history of what has been previously thought on the subject and impossible literature taking it all in all unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief in effect the old english vice called can't which is moral tartufism has insinuated itself also into these moralists whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one must read them concealed this time under the new form of the scientific spirit moreover there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience from which a race of former puritans must naturally suffer in all their scientific tinkering with morals is not a moralist the opposite of a puritan that is to say as a thinker who regards morality as questionable as worthy of interrogation in short as a problem is moralizing not immoral in the end they all want english morality to be recognized as authoritative in as much as mankind or the general utility or the happiness of the greatest number no the happiness of england will be best served thereby they would like by all means to convince themselves that the striving after english happiness i mean after comfort and fashion and in the highest instance a seat in parliament is at the same time the true path of virtue in fact that insofar 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 the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the general welfare is no ideal no goal no notion that can be at all grasped but is only a nostrum that what is fair to one may not at all be fair to another that the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men in short that there is a distinction of rank between man and man and consequently between morality and morality they are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men these utilitarian englishmen and as already remarked insofar as they are tedious one cannot think highly enough of their utility one not even to encourage them as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes hail ye worthy's bear a wheeling longer better i revealing stiffer i in head and knee unenraptured never-gesting mediocre everlasting sans génie et sans esprit 229 in these later ages which may be proud of their humanity there still remains so much fear so much superstition of the fear of the cruel wild beast the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages that even obvious truths as if by the agreement of centuries have long remained unuttered because they have the appearance of helping the finally slain wild beast back to life again i perhaps risk something when i allow such a truth to escape let others capture it again and give it so much milk of pious sentiment footnote an expression from shillers 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 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 wonder about virtuously and boldly almost everything that we call higher culture is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty this is my thesis the wild beast has not been slain at all it lives it flourishes it has only been transfigured that which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty that which operates agreeably in so-called tragic sympathy and at the basis even of everything sublime up to the highest and most delicate thrills of metaphysics obtains its sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty what the roman enjoys in the arena the christian and the ecstasies of the cross the spaniard at the site of the faggot and steak or of the bullfight the present day japanese who presses his way to the tragedy the workman of the peresian suburbs who has a homesickness for bloody revolutions the vagnarion who with unhinged will undergoes the performance of tristan and a soul what all these enjoy and strive with mysterious ardor to drink in is the filter of the great surcy cruelty here to be sure we must put aside entirely the blundering psychology of former times which could only teach with regard to cruelty that originated at the site of the suffering of others there is an abundant super abundant enjoyment even in one's own suffering in causing one's own suffering and wherever man is allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense or to self-mutilation as among the finitions and aesthetics or in general to desensualization decarnalization and contrition to puritanical repentance spasms to vivisection of conscience and to Pascal like sacrifizia del intoletto 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 enough against the wishes of his heart he forces it to say nay where he would like to affirm love and adore indeed every instance of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally is a violation an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty 230 perhaps what i have said here about a fundamental will of the spirit may not be understood without further details i may be allowed a word of explanation that imperious something which is popularly called the spirit wishes to be master internally and externally and to feel itself master it has the will of a multiplicity for simplicity a binding taming imperious and essentially ruling will its requirements and capacities here are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything that lives grows and multiplies the power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old to simplify the manifold to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory just as it arbitrarily re underlined makes prominent and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines and the foreign elements in every portion of the outside world its object thereby is the incorporation of new experiences the assortment of new things in the old arrangements in short growth or more properly the feeling of growth the feeling of increased power is its object this same will has at its service and apparently opposed impulse of the spirit a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance of arbitrary shutting out a closing of windows an inner denial of this or that a prohibition to approach a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable a contentment with obscurity with the shutting in horizon and acceptance and approval of ignorance as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power its digestive power to speak figuratively and in fact the spirit resembles a stomach more than anything else here also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is not so-and-so but is only allowed to pass as such a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity and exalting enjoyment of arbitrary out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery of the two near of the foreground of the magnified the diminished the misshapen the beautified an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power finally in this connection there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them the constant pressing and straining of a creating shaping changeable power the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises it enjoys also its feeling of security therein it is precisely by its protein arts that it is best protected and concealed counter to this propensity for appearance for simplification for a disguise for a cloak in short for an outside for every outside is a cloak there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge which takes and insists on taking things profoundly variously and thoroughly as a kind of cruelty of intellectual conscience and taste which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself provided as it ought to be that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for introspection and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe words he will say there is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not so in fact it would sound nicer if instead of our cruelty perhaps our extravagant honesty we're talked about whispered about and glorified we free very free spirits and someday perhaps such will actually be our posthumous glory meanwhile for there's 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 a sick of this taste of its brightly exuberance they are beautiful glistening jingling festive words honesty love of truth love of wisdom sacrificed for knowledge heroism of the truthful there is something in them that makes one's hearts well with pride we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment frippery and gold dust of unconscious human vanity and that even under such flattering 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 and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and dogged over the eternal original text homo natura to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand before man as he now heartened by the discipline of science stands before the other forms of nature with fearless edipus eyes and stopped ulysses ears deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical birdcatchers who have piped to him far too long thou art more thou art higher thou hast a different origin this may be a strange and foolish task but that it is a task who can deny why did we choose it this foolish task or to put the question differently why knowledge at all everyone will ask us about this and thus pressed we who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times have not found and cannot find any better answer 231 learning alters us it does what all nourishment does that does not merely conserve as the physiologist knows but at the bottom of our souls quite down below there is certainly something unteachable a granite of spiritual fate of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined chosen questions in each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable I am this a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman for instance but can only learn fully he can only follow to the end what is fixed about them in himself occasionally we find certain solutions of problems which make strong beliefs for us perhaps they are henceforth called convictions later on one sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge guide posts to the problem which we ourselves are or more correctly to the great stupidity which we embody our spiritual fate the unteachable in us quite down below in view of this liberal compliment which I have just paid myself permission will perhaps be more readily allowed me to utter some truths about woman as she is provided that it is known to the outset how literally they are merely my truths 232 woman wishes to be independent and therefore she begins to enlighten men about woman as she is this is one of the worst developments of the general udlifying of Europe for what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientific ality and self-exposure bring to light woman has so much cause for shame in woman there is so much pettentury superficiality school masterliness petty presumption unbridledness and indiscretion concealed study only women's behavior towards children which is really being best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear of man alas if ever the eternally tedious in woman she has plenty of it is allowed to venture forth if she begins radically and on principle to unlearn her wisdom and art of charming of playing of frightening away sorrow of alleviating and taking easily if she forgets her delicate aptitude for agreeable desires female voices are already raised which by Saint Aristophanes make one afraid with medical explicitness that is stated in a threatening manner what woman first and last requires for a man is it not in the very worst case that woman sets herself up to be scientific enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men's affair men's gift we remain there with among ourselves and in the end in view of all that woman right about woman we may well have considerable doubt as to whether woman really desires enlightenment about herself and can desire it if woman does not thereby seek a new ornament for herself i believe ornamentation belongs to the eternally feminine why then she wishes to make herself feared perhaps she thereby wishes to get the mastery but she does not want truth what does woman care for truth from the very first nothing is more foreign more repugnant or more hostile to woman than truth her great art is falsehood her chief concern is appearance and beauty let us confess it we men we 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 and profundity appear almost like follies to us finally i ask the question did a woman herself ever acknowledge profundity in a woman's mind or justice in a woman's heart and is it not true that on the whole woman has hitherto been most despised by woman herself and not at all by us we men desire that woman should not continue to compromise herself by enlightening us just as it was man's care and the consideration for woman when the church decreed malier ta say it in ecclesia it was to the benefit of woman when de polian gave the two eloquent madame distale to understand malier ta say it in politicis and in my opinion he is a true friend of woman who calls it to woman today malier ta say it de malierro 233 it betrays corruption of the instincts apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste when a woman refers to madame rouland or madame distale or monsieur jor sand as though something was proved thereby in favor of woman as she is among men these are the three comical women as they are nothing more and just the best involuntary counter arguments against feminine emancipation and autonomy 234 stupidity in the kitchen woman as cook the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed woman does not understand what food means and she insists on being cook if woman had been a thinking creature she should certainly as cook for thousands of years have discovered the most important physiological facts and should likewise have got possession of the healing art through bad female cooks through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with even today matters are very little better a word to high school girls 235 there are turns and casts of fancy there are sentences little handfuls of words in which a whole culture a whole society suddenly crystallizes itself among these is the incidental remark of madame de lambert to her son mon ami ne vous permettez jamais que de folie que vous feront grand plaisir the motherliest and wisest remark by the way that was ever addressed to a son 236 I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose with Dante and Gerta believed about woman the former when he sang a la guarda vasuso and yo in line and the latter when he interpreted it the eternally feminine draws us aloft for this is just what she believes of the eternally masculine 237 seven apathems for women how the longest on we flees when a man comes to our knees age alas and science stayed furnish even weak virtue aid somber garb and silence meat dress for every game discreet whom I thank within my bliss god and my good tayloris young a flower decked cavern home old a dragon venced off the room noble title leg that's fine man as well oh were he mine speech and brief and sense and mass slippery for the Jenny ass 237 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 a something also which must be cooped up to prevent it flying away 238 to be mistaken in the fundamental problem of man and woman to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension to dream here perhaps of equal rights equal training equal claims and obligations that is a typical sign of shallow mindedness and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot shallow an instinct may generally be regarded as suspicious nay more as betrayed as discovered he will probably prove too short for all fundamental questions of life future as well as present and will be unable to descend into any of the depths on the other hand a man who is depth of spirit as well as of desires and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness and easily confounded with them can only think of woman as orientals do he must conceive of her as a possession as confinable property as 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 instinctive Asia as the Greeks did formerly those best heirs and scholars of Asia who as is well known with their increasing culture and amplitude of power from Homer to the time of Pericles became gradually stricter towards woman in short more oriental how necessary how logical even how humanely desirable this was let us consider for ourselves 239 the weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy in the same way as disrespectfulness to old age what wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect they want more they learn to make claims the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling rivalry for rights indeed actual strife itself would be preferred in a word woman is losing modesty and let us immediately add that she's also losing taste she's unlearning to fear man but the woman who unlearns to fear sacrifices her most womanly instincts that woman should venture forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man or more definitely the man in man is no longer either desired or fully developed is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough what is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby woman deteriorates this is what is happening nowadays let us not deceive ourselves about it wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military an