This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org Beyond Good and Evil by Frederick Nietzsche Preface read by Hugh McGuire Supposing that truth is a woman, what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers insofar as they have been dogmatist have failed to understand women that the terrible seriousness and clumsy an opportunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to truth have been unskilled and Unseemly methods for winning a woman Certainly she has never allowed herself to be one and at present every kind of dogma stands with a sad and discouraged mean If indeed it stands at all For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen that all dogma lies on the ground nay more that it is at its last gasp But to speak seriously There are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy whatever solemn whatever conclusive and Decided heirs it has assumed may have been only a noble purism and tyrannism and Probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood What has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared Perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time such as the soul superstition which in the form of subject and ego superstition has not yet ceased doing mischief Perhaps some play upon words a deception on the part of grammar or an audacious generalization of very restricted very personal Very human all too human fats The philosophy of the dogmatists it is to be hoped Was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards as was astrology in still earlier times In the service of which probably more labor gold Acuteness and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto We owe to it and to its superterrestrial potensions in Asia and Egypt the grand style of architecture It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures Dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind For instance the Vedanta doctrine in Asia and plagued inism in Europe Let us not be ungrateful to it. Although it must certainly be confessed the worst the most tiresome and the most dangerous of Errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error Namely Plato's invention of pure spirit and the good in itself But now when it has been surmounted when Europe rid of this nightmare can again draw breath freely and At least enjoy a healthier sleep We whose duty is wakefulness itself are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered It amounted to the very inversion of truth and the denial of the perspective the fundamental condition of Life to speak of spirit and the good as Plato spoke of them Indeed one might ask as a physician How did such a melody attack the finest product of antiquity Plato Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him was Socrates after all a corrupter of youths and deserved his hemlock But the struggle against Plato or to speak planar and for the people the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity For Christianity is Platonism for the people produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul such as had not existed anywhere previously With such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals As a matter of fact the European feels this tension as a state of distress and twice attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow Once by means of jesuitism and the second time by means of democratic enlightenment Which with the aid of liberty of the press and newspaper reading might in fact bring it about the spirit would not so easily find itself in distress The Germans invented gunpowder all credit to them, but they again made things square. They invented printing But we who are neither Jesuits nor Democrats nor even sufficiently Germans we good Europeans and free very free spirits We have it still all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow and perhaps also the arrow the duty And who knows the goal to aim at written in sills Maria upper Engadine June 1885 end of preface This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer Please visit LibriVox.org Beyond Good and Evil by Frederick Nietzsche chapter 1 prejudices of philosophers read by humaguire one The will to truth which is to tempt us to many a hazardous Enterprise the famous truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect What questions has this will to truth not laid before us? What strange perplexing questionable questions? It is already a long story Yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful lose patience and turn impatiently away? That this sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves Who is it really that puts questions to us here? What really is this will to truth in us? In fact, we made a long halt at the questions as to the origin of this will Until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question We inquired about the value of this will Granted that we want the truth Why not rather untruth and Uncertainty even ignorance The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us Or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the edifice here which the sphinx It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before As if we were the first to discern it get a sight of it and risk raising it for there is risk in raising it Perhaps there is no greater risk to How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example truth out of error or the will to truth out of the will to deception Or the generous deed out of selfishness or the pure Sun bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness Such genesis is impossible Whoever dreams of it is a fool may worse than a fool Things of the highest value must have a different origin an origin of their own in this transitory seductive illusory Poultry world in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity. They cannot have their source But rather in the lap of being in the intransitory in the concealed God in the thing in itself There must be their source and nowhere else This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized This mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure Through this belief of theirs they exert themselves for their knowledge for something that is in the end solemnly christened the truth The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antithesis of values It never occurred even to the warriest of them to doubt here on the very threshold where doubt however was most necessary Though they had made a solemn vow the omnibus do be tandem For it may be doubted firstly whether antithesis exists at all and secondly whether the popular valuations and Antithesis of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal are not perhaps merely superficial estimates merely provisional perspectives Besides being probably made from some corner perhaps from below Frog perspectives as it were to borrow an expression current among painters in spite of all the value Which may belong to the true the positive and the unselfish it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life Generally should be assigned to pretense to the will to delusion to selfishness and Cupidity it might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and respected things Consist precisely in their being insidiously related knotted and crotcheted to these evil and apparently opposed things Perhaps even in being essentially identical with them perhaps But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous perhaps's for that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of Philosophers such as will have other tastes and inclinations the reverse of those hitherto prevalent Philosophers of the dangerous perhaps in every sense of the term and to speak in all seriousness. I see such new philosophers beginning to appear Three having kept a sharp eye on philosophers and having read between their lines long enough I now say to myself that the greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions and It is so even in the case of philosophical thinking one has here to learn a new As one learned new about heredity and innate this as little as the act of birth comes into consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity Just as little is being being conscious Opposed to the instinctive in any decisive sense the greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts and forced into definite channels and Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement. There are valuations or to speak more plainly Physiological demands for the maintenance of a definite mode of life For example that the certain is worth more than the uncertain that the illusion is less valuable than the truth Such valuations in spite of their regulative importance for us might not withstanding the only superficial valuations special kinds of Mazery such as may be necessary for the maintenance of beings such as ourselves Supposing in effect that man is not just the measure of things For the falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it It is here perhaps that our new language sounds most strangely The question is how far an opinion is life furthering life Persevering species persevering perhaps species rearing and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions Do which the synthetic judgments a priori belong are the most indispensable to us that without a recognition of logical fictions Without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable Without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers man could not live That the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life a negation of life to recognize Untruth as a condition of life that is certainly to impunge the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner and a philosophy Which ventures to do so has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil five That which causes philosophers to be regarded half distrustfully and half mockingly is not the oft-repeated discovery How innocent they are how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way in short how childish and childlike they are But that there is not enough honest dealing with them Whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner They all pose as though their real opinions have been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold pure Divinely indifferent dialectic in contrast to all sorts of mystics who fairer and foolisher talk of inspiration Whereas in fact a prejudice proposition idea or suggestion which is generally their heart's desire abstract than refined is Defended by them with arguments sought out after the event They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such generally astute defenders also of their prejudices Which they dubbed truths and very far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself Very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood Perhaps to warm friend or foe or in cheerful and cheerful confidence and self-reheal The spectacle of the tartufory of old Kant Equally stiff and decent with which he entices us into the dialectic byways that lead more correctly needy mislead To his categorical imperative makes us facidious one's smile We who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers Or still more so the hocus-pocus in mathematical form by means of which Spinoza has as it were clad his philosophy in male and mask In fact the love of his wisdom to translate the term fairly and squarely In order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on the invincible maiden That palace Athenae how much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray? six It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of Namely the confession of its originator and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography and moreover that the moral or immoral purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ Out of which the entire plant has always grown Indeed to understand how the obstrucist metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at it is always well and wise to first ask oneself What morality do they or does he aim at? Accordingly, I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy But that another impulse here is elsewhere Has only made use of knowledge and mistaken knowledge as an instrument But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as inspiring Jenny or As demons and kobolds We'll find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look Upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate lord over all other impulses for every impulse is imperious and As such attempts to philosophize To be sure in the case of scholars in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise better if you will There there may really be such a thing as an impulse to knowledge some kind of small independent clockwork Which when well wound up works away industriously to that end without the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part They're in the actual interests of the scholar. Therefore are generally in quite another direction in The family perhaps or in money-making or in politics It is in fact almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed And whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist a mushroom specialist or a chemist He's not characterized by becoming this or that in the philosopher on the contrary. There is absolutely nothing impersonal and Above all his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who he is That is to say in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other seven How malicious philosophers can be I know of nothing more stinging than the joke Epicureus took the liberty of making on Plato and Platonists He called them Dionysio Colakes in its original sense and on the face of it the word signifies Flatterers of Dionysius consequently tyrants accessories and licks bills Besides this however it is as much to say. They're all actors. There's nothing genuine about them For Dionysio Colax was a popular name for an actor And the latter is really the malignant reproach that Epicureus cast upon Plato He was annoyed by the grandiose manner the mise-en-scène style of which Plato and his scholars were masters of which Epicureus was not a master He the old school teacher of Samus who sat concealed in his little garden at Athens and wrote 300 books Perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato who knows Greece took a hundred years to find out who the garden God Epicureus really was did she ever find out eight There is a point in every philosophy at which the conviction of the philosopher appears on the scene or to put it in The words of the ancient mystery Nine you desire to live according to nature.  How could you live in accordance with such indifference to live? Is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this nature is not living valuing preferring being unjust being limited endeavoring to be different and Granted that you're imperative living according to nature Means actually the same as living according to life. How could you do differently? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be in? Reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you while you pretend to read with rapture the cannon of your law in nature You want something quite contrary you extraordinary stage players and self deluders in your pride You wish to dictate your morals and ideals to nature to nature herself and to incorporate them therein You insist that it shall be nature according to the stoa and Would like everything to be made after your own image as a vast eternal glorification and generalism of stoicism With all your love for truth you have forced yourselves so long so persistently and with such hypnotic rigidity to see nature falsely That is to say stoically that you are no longer able to see it Otherwise and to crown all some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the bellomite hope that because you are able to tyrannize over yourselves Stoicism is self tyranny nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over is not the stoic a part of nature But this is an old and everlasting story What happened in old times with the stoic still happens today as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself It always creates the world in its own image it cannot do otherwise Philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself the most spiritual will to power the will to creation of the world the will to cause a prima 10 The eerness and subtlety I should even say craftiness with which the problem of the real and the apparent world is dealt with a present throughout Europe furnishes food for thought and attention and he who hears only a will to truth in the background and nothing else Cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears in rare and isolated cases It may really have happened that such a will to truth a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck a metaphysicians Ambition of the forlorn hope has participated therein that which in the end always prefers a handful of certainty to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities There may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer to put their last trust in a sure-nothing Rather than in an uncertain something but that is nihilism and the sign of a despairing morally worried soul Not withstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display It seems however to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life In that they side against appearance and speak superciliously of perspective in that they rank the credibility of their own bodies About as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence that the earth stands still and thus apparently Allowing with complacency their securities possession to escape for what does one at present believe in more firmly than in one's body Who knows if they are not really trying to win back something which was formally and even secure possession Something of the old domain of the faith of former times Perhaps the immortal soul perhaps the old God in short ideas by which they could live better That is to say more vigorously and more joyously than by modern ideas There is distrust of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things A disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today There is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn which can no longer injure the Brita Brack of ideas of the most varied origin Such as so-called positivism at present throws on the market a discussed at the more refined taste at the village fair Mottliness and patchiness of all these reality philosophy So fasters in whom there is nothing either new or true except this mottliness Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those skeptical anti-realists And knowledge microscopists of the present day their instinct which repels them from modern reality is Unrefuted what do their retrograde? By paths concern us the main thing about them is not that they wish to go back But that they wish to get away there from a little more strength swing courage and artistic power And they would be off and not back 11 It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to divert attention from the actual influence Which can't exercised on German philosophy and especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon himself Count was first and foremost proud of his table of categories With it in his hand. He said this is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics Let us only understand this could be he was proud of having discovered a new faculty in man the faculty of synthetic judgment a Priority granting that he deceived himself in this matter the development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover if possible something it all events New faculties of which to be still prouder, but let us reflect for a moment. It is high time to do so How our synthetic judgments a priority possible can't ask himself and what is really his answer by means of a means faculty But unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially and posing Lee and with such display of German profundity and verbal Flourishes that one all together loses sight of the comical neasery almond Involved in such an answer People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty and the jubilation reached its climax when cunt further discovered a moral faculty in man For at that time Germans were still moral not yet dabbling in the politics of hard fact Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy all the young theologians of the to begin Institution went immediately into the groves all seeking for faculties And what did they not find in that innocent rich and still youthful period of the German spirit to which romanticism the malicious Fairy piped and sang when one could not yet distinguish between finding and inventing above all a Faculty for the transcendental shelling christened it intellectual intuition and thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally pious inclined Germans One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and ecstatic movement Which was really youthfulness not withstanding that it disguised itself so boldly in Horry and senile conceptions that to take it seriously or even treat it with moral indignation Enough however the world grew older and the dream vanished a time came when people rubbed their foreheads And they still rubbed today people had been dreaming and first and foremost old cunt By means of a means faculty he had said or at least meant to say But is that an answer an explanation or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep by means of a faculty namely the virtuous Dormitiva replies the doctor in Moliere Yeah, it's in yo vitros Dormitiva could just as natura senses as appear But such replies belong to the realm of comedy and it is high time to replace the Kantian question How are synthetic judgments a priori possible by another question? Why is belief in such judgments necessary in affected as high time that we should understand that such judgments must be believed to be true? For the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves though They still might naturally be false judgments or more plainly spoken and roughly and readily Synthetic judgments a priority should not be possible at all. We have no right to them in our mouths. They are nothing but false judgments Only of course the belief in their truth is necessary as plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to the prospective view of life And finally to call to mind the enormous influence which German philosophy I hope you understand its right to inverted commas goose feet has exercised throughout the whole of Europe There is no doubt that a certain Virtuous Dormitiva had a share in it thanks to German philosophy It was a delight to the noble idlers the virtuous the mystics the artiste the three fourths Christians and the political Obscurantists of all nations to find an antidote to the still overwhelming Centralism which overflowed from the last century into into this in short census a superior 12 as regards materialistic atomism it is one of the best refuted theories that have been advanced and in Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learning world So unscholarly as to attach serious Signification to it except for convenient everyday use as an abbreviation of the means of expression Thanks chiefly to the pole Boskovich He and the pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of ocular evidence For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe contrary to all the senses that the earth does not stand fast Boskovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that stood fast of the earth the belief in substance in matter in the earth residem and Particle atom it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth One must however go still further and also declare war relentless war to the knife Against the atomistic requirements which still lead a dangerous afterlife in places where no one suspects them like the more celebrated metaphysical requirements one must also above all Give the finishing stroke to that other more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest the soul atomism Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul is something indestructible eternal Indivisible as a monad as an atom on this belief ought to be expelled from science between ourselves It is not at all necessary to get rid of the soul thereby and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated Hypothesis has happened frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul hypothesis and such conceptions as mortal soul and soul of subjective multiplicity and soul as social structure of the instincts and passions want henceforth to have legitimate rights and science in that new psychologist is About to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul He is really as it were thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust It is possible that the older psychologist had a merrier and more comfortable time of it Eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby He is also condemned to invent and who knows perhaps to discover the new 13 psychologists should be think themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being a Living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength Life itself is will to power Self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof in short here as everywhere else Let us be aware of superfluous teleological principles one of which is the instinct of self-preservation We owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency It is thus in effect that method ordains which must be essentially economy of principles 14 it is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural philosophy is only a world exposition and world arrangement According to us if I may say so and not a world explanation But in so far as it is based on belief in the senses It is regarded as more and for a long time to come must be regarded as more namely as an explanation It has eyes and fingers of its own it has ocular evidence and palpableness of its own This operates fascinatingly persuasively and convincingly upon an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes In fact, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternal popular sensualism What is clear what is explained Only that which can be seen and felt one must peruse every problem thus far Aversely however the charm of the platonic mode of thought which was an aristocratic mode consisted precisely in resistance to obvious sense evidence Perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries But who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of them and this By means of pale cold gray conceptual networks, which they threw over the motley world of the senses The mob of the senses as Plato said in this overcoming of the world and Interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato There was an enjoyment different from that which the physicists of today offer us and likewise the Darwinists and Anti-teleologists among the physiological workers with their principle of the smallest possible effort and the greatest possible blunder Where there is nothing more to see or grasp there is also nothing more for men to do that is certainly an imperative Different from the platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy laborious race of machinists and bridge builders of the future Who have nothing but rough work to perform? 15 to study Physiology with a clear conscience one must insist on the fact that the sense organs are not phenomena in the sense of the idealistic philosophy as such they certainly could not be causes Sensualism therefore at least as regulative hypothesis if not as heuristic principle what and Others say even that the external world is the work of our organs But then our body as a part of this external world would be the work of our organs But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs It seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum If the conception cause a sui is something fundamentally observed Consequently the external world is not the work of our organs 16 there are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are immediate certainties for instance I think or as a superstition of Schopenhauer puts it I will as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as the thing in itself Without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object I would repeat it however a hundred times that immediate certainty as Well as absolute knowledge and the thing in itself involve a contradictio in ejecto We really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things But the philosopher must say to himself when I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence I think I find a whole series of daring assertions the argumentative proof of which would be difficult perhaps impossible for instance That it is I Who think that there must necessarily be something that thinks That thinking is an activity and an operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause That there is an ego and finally that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking that I know what thinking is For if I had not already decided within myself what it is by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not Perhaps willing or feeling in short the assertion I think assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself Which I know in order to determine what it is on account of this retrospective connection with further knowledge It has at any rate no immediate certainty for me In place of the immediate certainty in which the people may believe in the special case The philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him Veritable conscience questions of the intellect to which whence did I get this notion of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect?  He who ventures to answers these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception Like the person who says I think and I know that this at least is true actual and certain We'll encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays Sir the philosopher will perhaps given to understand it is improbable that you are not mistaken But why should it be the truth? 17 with regard to the superstitions of logicians I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds Namely that a thought comes when it wishes and not when I wish So that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject I is the condition of the predicate think one thinks But that this one is precisely the famous old ego is to put it mildly only a supposition an assertion and Assuredly not an immediate certainty after all one has even gone too far with this one thinks even the one contains an Interpretation of the process and does not belong to the process itself One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula to think is an activity every activity requires an agency that is active consequently It was pretty much the same Lines that the older atomists sought besides the operating power the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates the atom More rigorous minds however learned at last to get along without this earth's idium And perhaps someday we shall accustomed ourselves even from the logicians point of view to get along without the little one To which the worthy old ego has refined itself 18 It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable It is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds It seems that the hundred times refuted theory of the free will owes its persistence to this charm alone Someone is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it 19 Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it were the best known thing in the world Indeed Schopenhauer has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to us absolutely and completely known Without deduction or addition but it again and again seems to me that in this case Schopenhauer also only did what? Philosophers are in the habit of doing he seems to have adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated it Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated something that is a unity only in name and It is precisely in a name that popular prejudice lurks Which has got the mastery over the inadequate precautions of philosophers in all ages So let us for once be more cautious. Let us be unphilosophical Let us say that in all willing there is firstly a plurality of sensations namely the sensation of the condition Away from which we go the sensation of the condition towards which we go the sensation of this from and towards itself and then besides an accompanying muscular sensation which even without our putting in motion arms and legs Commences its action by force of habit directly. We will anything therefore just as sensations and indeed many kinds of sensations are to be recognized as Ingredients of the will so in the second place thinking is also to be recognized in Every act of the will there is a ruling thought and let us not imagine it possible To sever this thought from the willing as if the will would then remain over In the third place the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking but it is above all an emotion and in fact The emotion of the command that which is termed freedom of the will is essentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him Who must obey I am free he must obey this consciousness is inherent in every will and equally So the straining of the attention the straight look which fits it fixes itself exclusively on one thing the Unconditional judgment that this and nothing else is necessary now the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered and whatever else Pertains to the position of the commander a man who wills commands something within himself Which renders obedience or which he believes renders obedience, but now let us notice What is the strangest thing about the will this affair so extremely complex for which the people have only one name in as much as in the given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding and The obeying parties and as the obeying party We know the sensations of constraint Impulsion pressure resistance and motion which usually commenced immediately after the act of will in as much as on the other hand We are accustomed to disregard this duality and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic term I a Whole series of erroneous conclusions and consequently of false judgments about the will itself has become attached to the act of willing To such a degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing suffices for action Since in the majority of cases there has only been exercise of will when the effect of the command Consequently obedience and therefore action was to be expected the appearance has translated itself into sentiment as If there were a necessity of effect In a word he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one He ascribes the success the carrying out of the willing to the will itself and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power Which accompanies all success Freedom of will that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition Who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order who as such enjoys also the triumph over obstacles But thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them in this way The person exercising volition adds feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments the useful under wills or under souls indeed Our body is but a social structure composed of many souls to his feelings of delight as commander Le fait c'est moi What happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth Namely that the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth in all willing It is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying on the basis as already said of a social structure composed of many souls On which account a philosopher should claim the right to include willing as such within the sphere of morals Regarded as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of life manifests itself 20 that the separate Philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving but grow up in connection and relationship with each other that However suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought They never look the less belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a continent Is betrayed in the end by the circumstance how unfailingly the most diverse Philosophers always feel in again a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies Under an invisible spell they always revolve once more in the same orbit However independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic will Something within them leads them something impels them in definite order The one after the other to wit the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas Their thinking is in fact far less a discovery than a re Recognizing a remembering a return and a homecoming to far off ancient common household of the soul Out of which those ideas formally grew Philosophizing is so far a kind of activism of the highest order the wonderful family resemblance of all Indian Greek and German Philosophizing is easily enough explained in fact where there is affinity of language owing to the common philosophy of grammar I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions It cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems Just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world interpretation It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural Altaic languages where the conception of the subject is least developed look otherwise into the world and Will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germans and Muslims the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions So much by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas 21 the cause a sui is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived It is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly The desire for freedom of will in the superlative Metaphysical sense such as still holds sway Unfortunately in the minds of the half-educated the desire to bear the entire and ultimate Responsibility for one's actions oneself and to absolve God the world ancestors chance and society therefrom involves nothing less than to be precisely this cause a sui and With more than Manchausen daring to pull oneself up into existence by the hair out of the slough of nothingness If anyone should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of free will And put it out of his head all together I beg of him to carry his enlightenment a step further and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of free will I mean non free will which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and effect One should not wrongly materialize cause and effect as the natural philosophers do and whoever like them naturalize in thinking At present according to the prevailing mechanical Which makes the cause press and push until it affects its end one should use cause and effect only as pure conceptions That is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding Not for explanation in being in itself. There is nothing of causal connection of necessity or of psychological non-freedom There the effect does not follow the cause their law does not obtain it is we alone who have devised cause sequence reciprocity Relativity constraint number law freedom motive and purpose and when we interpret and Intermix this simple world as being in itself with things we act once more as we have always acted mythologically The non-free will is mythology in real life. It is only a question of strong and weak wills It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker in every causal connection and psychological Necessity manifests something of compulsion indigence Obsequiousness oppression and non-freedom. It is suspicious to have such feelings The person betrays himself and in general if I have observed correctly the non-freedom of the will is regarded as a problem from two Entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner Some will not give up their responsibility their belief in themselves the personal right to their merits At any price the vain races belong to this class Others on the contrary do not wish to be answerable for anything or blamed for anything and Owing to an inward self-contempt seek to get out of the business no matter how The latter when they write books are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals a sort of Socialistic sympathy is their favorite disguise and as a matter of fact the fatalism the weak willed embellishes itself Surprisingly when it can pose as la religion de la souffrance humaine that is its good taste 22 let me be pardoned as an old philologist who cannot Desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation But nature's conformity to law of which you physicists talk so proudly as though why it exists only owing to your Interpretation and bad philology It is no matter of fact no text but rather just naively human humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meeting with which you make Abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul Everywhere equality before the law nature is not different in that respect nor better than we a fine instance of secret motive In which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic Likewise a second and more refined atheism in which a vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic Likewise a second and more refined atheism is once more disguised need you name it That also is what you want and therefore cheers for natural law. Is it not so? But as has been said that is interpretation not text and somebody might come along who with Opposite intentions and modes of interpretation could read out of the same nature and with regard to the same phenomena Just the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power An interpreter who should so place the Unexceptionalness and unconditionalness of all will to power before your eyes that almost every word and the word tyranny itself Would eventually seem unsuitable or like a weakening and softening metaphor as being too human And who should nevertheless end by asserting the same about this world as you do namely that it has a necessary and calculable course Not however because laws obtain in it But because they are absolutely lacking and every power affects its ultimate consequences every moment granted that this also Is only interpretation and you will be eager enough to make this objection Well, so much the better 23 All psychology hitherto has run aground on moral prejudices and timidities It has not dared to launch out into the depths in so far as it is allowable to recognize in that which has hitherto Been written evidence of that which has hitherto been kept silent It seems as if nobody had yet harbored the notion of psychology as the morphology and development doctrine of the will to power As I conceive of it The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most intellectual world The world apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced and has obviously Operated in an injurious obstructive blinding And distorting manner a proper Physiopsychology has to contend with unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator It has the heart against it even a doctrine of the reciprocal Conditionalness of the good and the bad impulses causes as refined Immorality distress and aversion in a still strong and manly conscience Still more so a doctrine of the derivation of all good impulses from bad ones If however a person should regard even the emotions of hatred envy covetousness and imperiousness as life conditioning emotions As factors which must be present fundamentally and essentially in the general economy of life Which must therefore be further developed if life is to be further developed He will suffer from such a view of things as from seasickness And yet this hypothesis is far from being the strangest and most painful in this immense and almost new domain Of dangerous knowledge and there are in fact A hundred good reasons why everyone should keep away from it who can do so On the other hand if one has once drifted hither With one's bark well Very good Now let us set our teeth firmly Let us open our eyes and keep our hand fast on the helm We sail away right over morality. We crush out. We destroy perhaps The remains of our own mortality by daring to make our voyage thither But what do we matter never yet did a profound world of insight reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers And the psychologist who thus makes a sacrifice. It is not the sacrificial del intelecto on the contrary Will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall once more be recognized as the queen of the sciences For whose service and equipment the other sciences exist For psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems End of chapter one This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer Please visit LibriVox.org Beyond good and evil by Frederick Wilhelm Nietzsche Chapter two the free spirit 24 Osankta Simplicitatis in one strange simplification and falsification man lives One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marble How we have made everything around us so clear and free and easy and simple How we have been able to give our senses of passport to everything superficial our thoughts of godlike desire for wanting pranks of wrong inferences How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom Thoughtlessness imprudence hardiness and gaiety in order to enjoy life And only on the solidified granite-like foundation of ignorance for knowledge rear itself hitherto the will to knowledge And the foundation of a far more powerful will the will to ignorance to the uncertain to the untrue Not as its opposite, but as its refinement It is to be hoped indeed that language here is elsewhere will not get over its awkwardness And that it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradiation It is equally be hoped that the incarnated tartufory of morals which now belongs to our unconquerable flesh and blood Will turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which Precisely the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in the simplified thoroughly artificial Suitably imagined and suitably falsified world at the way in which whether it will or not it loves error because it's living itself It loves life 25 after such a cheerful commencement a serious word would fame be heard it appeals to the most serious minds Take care of your philosophers and friends of knowledge and beware of martyrdom of suffering for the truth's sake Even in your own defense it spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience It makes you headstrong against objections and red rags It stupefies analizes and brutalizes when in the struggle with danger slander suspicion expulsion and even worse consequence of enmity You have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth as though the truth were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors And you of all people the knights of the sorrowful countenance Miser's loafer and cobweb spinners of the spirit Finally he knows efficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if you just carry your point You know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little Interrogative mark which you place after your special words and favorite doctrines and occasionally after yourselves Then in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before accusers and law courts Rather go out of the way flee into concealment and have your masks and your ruses that you may be mistaken for what you are Or somewhat feared and pray don't forget the garden the garden with golden trellis work and have people around you Who are as a garden or his music on the waters at apentide when the day becomes a memory Choose the good solitude the free wanton the lightsome solitude Which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever How poisonous how crafty how bad does every long war make one from which Cannot be waged openly by means of force how personal does a long fear make one a long watching of enemies of possible enemies These pariahs of society these long-perceived badly persecuted ones Also the compulsory recklessness the spinoses and goryanna brunos always become in the end even under the most intellectual masquerade And perhaps without being themselves aware of it refined vengeance sickers and poison brewers just may bear the foundations of spinoses ethics and theology Not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation Which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humor has left him the martyrdom of the philosopher His sacrifice for the sake of truth forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks within him And if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity with regard to many a philosopher It is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration deteriorated into a martyr into a stage and tribune brawler Only that it is necessary with such desire to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case merely a satiric play merely an epilogue Fars and merely continued proof that the long real tragedy is at an end Supposing that every philosophy has long been a tragedy in its origin 26 every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy where he is free from the crowd The many the majority where he may forget men who are the rule as their exception Exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by still stronger instinct as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense Whoever in intercourse with men does not occasionally glisten in all the green and gray colors of distress Only to discuss satiety sympathy gluminess and solitaryness is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes Supposing however that he does not voluntarily take all this burden and discussed upon himself that he persistently avoids it and remains As I said quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel one thing is then certain He was not made he was not predestined for knowledge for as such he would one day have to say to himself The devil take my good taste but the rule is more interesting than the exception than myself the exception And he would go down and above all he would go inside the long and serious study of the average man And consequently much disguise self overcoming familiarity and bad intercourse all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's equals That constitutes a necessary part of the life history of every philosopher Perhaps the most disagreeable odious and disappointing part If he is fortunate however as a favored child of knowledge should be he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and lighten his task I mean so called cynics those who simply recognize the animal the commonplace and the rule in themselves And at the same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and their like before witnesses Sometimes they wallow even in books as on their own dung hill Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty And a higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism And congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him or the scientific satyr speaks out There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust namely whereby a freak of nature Genius is bound to some indiscreet billy goat in ape as in the case of the abbey giliani The profoundest acutus and perhaps also the filthiest man of his century He was far more profound than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal more silent It happens more frequently as has been hinted that a scientific head is placed on a named body A fine exceptional understanding in a base soul an occurrence by no means rare Especially among doctors and moral physiologists And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness or rather quite innocently of man as a belly with two requirements and a head with one Whenever anyone sees seeks and wants to see only hunger sexual instinct and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions In short when anyone speaks badly and not even ill of man Then ought the lover of knowledge to harken attentively and diligently He ought in general to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation For the indignant man and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth Or in place of himself the world god or society may indeed morally speaking stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr But in every other sense he is more ordinary more indifferent and less instructive case And no one is such a liar as the indignant man 27 it is difficult to be understood especially when one thinks and lends Ganga street gati footnote like the river kanji's presto Among those who think and live otherwise namely korma gati footnote like the tortoise lento Or at best frog like mondia khagati footnote like the frogs to kato I do everything to be difficultly understood myself And one should be heartily grateful for the goodwill and some refinement of interpretation as regards the good friends However, who are always too easygoing and think that as friends they have a right to ease One does well at the very first to grant them a playground and romping place for misunderstanding One can thus laugh still or get rid of them all together these good friends and laugh then also 28 what is most difficult to render from one language into another is the tempo of its style Which has its basis in the character of the race or to speak more physiologically in the average tempo of the assimilation of its Nutriment there are honestly meant translations which as involuntary vulgarizations are almost falsifications of the original Merely because it's lively and merry tempo which overlaps and obviates all the dangers in word and expression could not also be rendered A german is almost incapacitated for presto in his language Consequently also he may be reasonably inferred for many of the most delightful and daring nuances of free free-spirited thought And just as the buffoon and seder are foreign to him in body and conscience So aristophanies and petronias are untranslatable for him Everything ponderous viscous and pompously clumsy all long winded and weary species of style are developed in profuse variety among germans Part of me for stating the fact that even gothers prose in its mixture of stiffness and elegance is now exception As reflection of the good old time to which it belongs and an expression of german taste at a time when there was still a german taste Which was a rococo taste in moribus at archibus Lessing is an exception owing to his histrionic nature which understood much and was versed in many things He who was not the translator of bail to no purpose who took refuge willingly in the shadow of dittorach and voltair And still more willingly among the roman comedy writers Lessing left also free spiritism in the tempo and flight out of germany But how could the german language even in the prose of lessing imitate the tempo of machiavelli Who in his principa makes us breathe the dry fine air of florence and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous Allegresimo perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he ventures to present Long heavy difficult dangerous spots and a tempo of the gallop and of the best wantonous humor Finally who could venture on a german translation of petronius who more than any great musician hitherto Was a master of presto in invention ideas and words What mattered in the end about the swamps of the sick evil world or the ancient world when like him One has the feet of the wind the rush the breath the emancipating scorn of a wind which makes everything healthy by making everything run And with regard to aristothonies that transfiguring complementary genius for whose sake one pardons all hellenism for having existed Provided one has understood in its whole profoundity all that there requires pardon and transfiguration There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and spince like nature Then the happily preserved petty fate that under the pillow of his deathbed There was found no bible nor anything egyptian pathagorean or platonic But a book of aristophanies how could even play to have endured life a greek life which he repudiated without an aristophanies 29 it is the business of the very few to be independent It is a privilege of the strong and whoever attempts it even with the best right But without being obliged to do so proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring beyond measure He enters into a labyrinth He multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it Not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way Become isolated and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience Suppose such a one comes to grief it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize with it And he can no longer go back. He cannot even go back to the sympathy of men 30 our deepest insights must and should appear as follies and under certain circumstances as crimes when they come Unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them The exoteric and the esoteric as they were formally distinguished by philosophers among the indians as among the greeks persians and muslims In short wherever people believed in gradations of rank not inequality and equal rights Are not so much in contrary distinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class Standing without and viewing estimating measuring and judging from the outside and not from the inside The more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards While the esoteric class view things from above downwards There are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically And if all the woe in the world were taken together Who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would necessarily seduce and constrain to sympathy and thus to a doubling of the Woe That which serves the higher class of men for nourishment or refreshment must also be poisoned to an entirely different and lower Order of human beings the virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in the philosopher It might be possible for a highly developed man supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin To acquire qualities thereby alone for the sake of which he would have been honored as a saint in the lower world In which he had sunk There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality Or the higher and more powerful make use of them in the former case They are dangerous disturbing and unsettling books in the latter case There are herald calls which sum the bravest to their bravery Books with a general reader are always ill smelling books the odor of paltry people clings to them Where the populous eat and drink and even where they reverence it is accustomed to stink One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air 31 in our youthful years We still venerate and despise without the art of nuance which is the best game of life And we have rightly to do hard penance for having fallen upon men and things with yay and nay Everything is so arranged that the worst of all tastes the taste for the unconditional Is cruelly befooled and abused until a man learns to introduce a little art into his sentiments And prefers to try conclusions with the artificial as do the real artists of life The angry and reverent spirit peculiar to youth appears to allow itself no peace until it has suitably falsified men and things To be able to vent its passion upon them youth in itself even is something falsifying and deceptive Later on when the young soul tortured by continual disillusions Finally turns suspiciously against itself still ardent and savage even in its suspicion and remorse of conscience How it upraises itself how impatiently it tears itself how it revenges itself with long self-blinding as though it had been a voluntary blindness In this transition one punishes oneself by distrust of one's sentiments when tortures one's enthusiasm with doubt One feels even the good conscience to be danger and if it were the self-concealment and lassitude of a more refined uprightness And above all one espouses upon the principle the cause against youth a decade later And one comprehends that this was also still youth 32 Throughout the longest period of human history one calls it the prehistoric period The value or non-value of an action was inferred from its consequence The action in itself was not taken into consideration any more than its origin But pretty much as in china at present where the distinction or disgrace of a child redounds to its parents The retro-operating power Of success or failure was what induced men to think well or ill of an action Let us call this period the premoral period of mankind the imperative know thyself was then still unknown In the last 10,000 years on the other hand on certain large portions of the earth One has gradually got so far that one no longer lets the consequences of an action But its origin decide with regards to its worth a great achievement as a whole an important refinement of vision and criterion The unconscious effort of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in origin the mark Of a period which may be designated in the narrower sense as the moral one the first attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made Instead of the consequence the origin what an inversion of perspective And assuredly an inversion affected only after long struggle and wavering to be sure an ominous new superstition Of peculiar narrowness of interpretation attained supremacy precisely thereby The origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible as origin out of intention People were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention The intention is the sole origin and antecedent history of an action under the influence of this prejudice moral praise And blame have been bestowed and men have judged and even philosophize almost up to the present day Is it not possible however that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our minds with regards to the reversing And fundamental shifting of values owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man Is it not possible that we may be standing on the threshold of a period which to begin with would be distinguished negatively as ultra moral Nowadays when at least among us immoralists the suspicion arises that the decisive value of an action lies precisely In that which is not intentional and that all its intentionalness all that is seen sensible or sensed in it Belongs to its surface or skin which like every skin betrays something but can seal still more In short we believe that the intention is only a sign or symptom Which first requires an explanation a sign moreover which has too many interpretations And consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone that morality in the sense in which it has been understood hitherto As intention morality has been a prejudice perhaps a prematureness or preliminaryness Probably something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy But in a case something which must be surmounted there's a mounting of morality in a certain sense even the self mounting of morality Let that be the name for the long secret labor which has been reserved for the most refined the most upright And also the most wicked consciences of today as the living touchstones of the soul 33 it cannot be helped the sentiment of surrender of sacrifice for one's neighbor and all self renunciation Morality must be mercilessly called to account and brought to judgment Just as the aesthetics of disinterested contemplation under which the emasculation of art nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create itself Good conscience There is far too much witchery and sugar in the sentiments for others and not for myself For one not needing to be doubly distrustful here and and for one ask you completely Are they now perhaps deceptions they that please him who has them and him who enjoys their fruit And also the mere spectator that is all no argument in their favor but just calls for caution But it's therefore be cautious 34 at whatever standpoint of philosophy one may place oneself nowadays Seen from every position the erroneousness of the world in which we think we live is the surest and most certain thing our eyes can light upon We find proof after proof thereof which would feign allura since surmises concerning a deceptive principle in the nature of things He however who makes thinking itself and consequently the spirit responsible for the falseness of the world an honorable exit Which every conscious or unconscious a vacatious day avails himself of he who regards this world including space time form and movement As falsely deduced would have at least good reason in the end to become distrustful also of all thinking Has it not hitherto been playing upon us the worst of scurvy tricks? And what guarantee would it give that it would not continue to do what it has always been doing? In all seriousness the innocence of thinkers has something touching and respect inspiring about it Which even nowadays permits them to wait upon consciousness with the request that it will give them honest answers For example, whether it be real or not and why it keeps the outer world so resolutely at a distance and other questions of the same description The belief in immediate certainties is a moral naivete which does honor to its philosophers But we have now ceased being merely moral men apart from morality such belief is a folly which does little honor to us If in middle-class life and everybody distrust is regarded as the sign of a bad character and consequently as imprudence Here among us beyond the middle-class world and its yeas and nays What should prevent our being imprudent and saying the philosopher has at length a right to bad character As the being who has hitherto been most befooled on earth He is now under obligation to distrustfulness through the wibbidest squinting out of every abyss of suspicion Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and turn of expression for I myself have long ago learned to think and estimate differently With regard to deceiving and being deceived and I keep at least a couple of pokes on the ribs ready for the blind rage With which philosophers struggle against being deceived. Why not? It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance It is in fact the worst proof supposition in the world so much must be conceded There could have been no life at all except on the basis of perspective estimations and semblances And if with the virtuous enthusiasm and stupidity of many philosophers one wish to do away altogether with the seeming world Well granted you could do that at least nothing of your truth would thereby remain Indeed what is it that forces us in general to the supposition that there is an essential opposition of true and false Is it not enough to suppose degrees of seemingness and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of semblances different values as the painters say Why might not the world which concerns us be a fiction and to anyone who suggested But to a fiction belongs an originator might it not be bluntly replied. Why may this belong also belong to the fiction Why is it not at length permitted to be a little ironical towards the subject just as towards the predicate and object Might not the philosopher elevate himself about faith and grammar all respect to governesses But is it not time that philosophy should renounce governess faith? 35 oh Voltaire. Oh humanity. Oh idiocy. There's something ticklish in the truth and the search for the truth And if man goes about it too humanely I wager he finds nothing 36 supposing that nothing else is given as real but our world of desires and passions that we cannot Sink or rise to any other reality But just that of our impulses for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another Are we not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is given does not suffice By means of our counterparts for the understanding of the so-called mechanical or material world I do not mean as an illusion Assemblance a representation in the berkeleyan and schopenhauer sense But as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves as a more primitive form of the world of emotions In which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity which afterwards branches off and develops itself in organic processes Naturally, also Refines and debilitates as a kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions including self regulation a simulation nutrition secretion and change of matter are still synthetically united with one another as A primary form of life in the end is it not only permitted to make this attempt It is commanded by the conscience of logical method not to assume several kinds of causality So long as the attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest extent to absurdity If I may be allowed to say so that is morality of method Which one may not repudiate nowadays it follows from its definition as mathematician say the question is ultimately Whether we recognize the will as operating whether we believe in the causality of this will if we do so and fundamentally Our belief in this is just our belief in causality itself We must make an attempt to posit hypothetically The causality of the will as the only causality will can naturally only operate on will And not on matter not on nerves for instance in short the hypothesis must be hazarded Whether will does not operate on will wherever effects are recognized and whether all mechanical action in as much as power operates Therein is not the power of will the effect of will Granted finally that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development of ramification Of one fundamental form of will namely the will to power as my thesis puts it Granted that all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power And that the solution of this problem of generation and nutrition It is one problem could also be found therein one would thus have acquired the right to define all active force unequivocally as will to power The world seen from within the world defined and designated according to its intelligible character It would simply be will to power and nothing else 37 what does not that mean in popular language? God is disproved but not the devil on the contrary on the contrary my friends and who the devil also compels you to speak popularly 38 as happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times with the french revolution that terrible farce quite superfluous When judged close to hand into which however the noble and visionary spectators of all europe have interpreted from a distance Their own indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately until the text has disappeared under the interpretation So a noble posterity might once more Misunderstand the whole of the part and perhaps only thereby make its aspect adorable or rather has not this already happened Have we not ourselves been that noble posterity and in so far as we now comprehend this is it not thereby already passed? 39 nobody will very readily regard a doctrine is true merely because it makes the people happy or virtuous Accepting perhaps the amiable idealists who are enthusiastic about the good true and beautiful and let all kinds of motley course and good nature Desirabilities swim about Miscuously in their pond happiness and virtue are no arguments It is willingly forgotten However, even on the part of thoughtful minds that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter arguments A thing could be true although it were the highest degree injurious and dangerous Indeed the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one's is succumbed by a full knowledge of it So that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of truth that could endure or speak more plainly By the extent to which it required truth attenuated veiled sweetened dampened and falsified But there is no doubt for the discovery of certain portions of the truth The wicked and unfortunate are more favorably situated and have greater likelihood of success Not to speak of the wicked who are happy a species about who moralists are silent Perhaps severity and craft are more favorable conditions for the development of strong independent spirits And philosophers than the gentle refined yielding good nature and habit of taking things easily which are prized and rightly prized An alerted man Presupposing always to begin with that the term philosopher be not confined to the philosopher who writes books or even Introduces his philosophy into books Stendhal furnaces a last feature of the portrait of the free-spirited philosopher for which the sake of German taste I will not omit underline for it is opposed to German taste For a very good philosophy says this last great psychologist He thought it very sick clear some solution 40 everything that is profound loves the mass the profoundest things have a hatred even a figure in likeness Should not the contrary only be the right disguise for the shame of a god to go about it A question worth asking it would be strange if some mystic has not already ventured on the same kind of thing There are proceedings of such a delicate nature That is as well to overwhelm them with a coarseness and make them unrecognizable There are actions of love and an extravagant Magnonomy after which nothing to be wiser than to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly when thereby obscures his recollection Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory in order to at least have vengeance on the soul party in the secret Shame is inventive. They are not the worst things of which one is most ashamed There is not only deceit behind a mask. There is so much goodness and craft I could imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to conceal would roll through life clumsily and rotundly Like an old green heavily hooped wine cask the refinement of his shame requiring it to be so A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon pass Which few ever reach and with regard to the existence of which his nearest to most intimate friends may be ignorant His mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes and equally so he's regained security such a hidden nature Which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment and is inexhaustible in an evasion of communication Desires and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his friends And supposing he does not desire it his eyes will someday be open to the fact that there's nevertheless a mask of him There and that it is well to be so every profound spirit needs a mask name more around every profound spirit There's continually grows a mask owing to the constantly false That is to say superficial interpretation of every word he utters every step he takes every sign of life. He manifests 41 one must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is destined for independence and command And do so at the right time one must not avoid one's tests Although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play and are in the end tests made only before ourselves And before no other judge not to cleave any person But it even the dearest every person is a prison and also a recess Not to cleave to a fatherland be it even the most suffering and necessitous It is even less difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious fatherland Not to cleave to sympathy be it even for higher men in whose particular torture and helplessness chances given us an insight Not to cleave to a science though attempt one with the most valuable discoveries Apparently specially reserved for us not to cleave to one's own liberation to the voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird Which always flies further aloft in order to seem more under it the danger of the flyer Not to cleave to our own virtues nor become as a whole victim to any of our specialties To our hospitality for instance, which is the danger of dangers for highly developed and wealthy souls Who deal prodigly almost indifferently with themselves and push the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes a vice One must know how to conserve oneself the best test of independence 42 a new order of philosophers is appearing I shall venture to baptize them by name not without danger as far as I understand them as far as they Allow themselves to be understood for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle These philosophers of the future might rightly perhaps also wrongly claim to be designated as tempters This name itself is after all only an attempt or if it be preferred a temptation 43 will they be new friends of truth these coming philosophers very probably for all philosophers hitherto have loved their truths But assuredly they will not be dogmatists It must be contrary to their pride and also contrary to their taste that their truth should still be truth For everyone that which is hitherto when the secret wish and ultimate purpose of all dogmatic efforts My opinion is my opinion another person has not easily a right to it such a philosopher of the future will say perhaps One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people Good is no longer good when one's neighbor takes it into his mouth And how could there be a common good the expression contradicts itself that which can be common is always a small value In the end things must be as they are and always have been the great things remain for the great The business for the profound the delicacies and thrills for the refined and to sum up shortly everything rare for the rare 44 need I say expressly after all this that they will be free very free spirits these philosophers of the future as certainly also they will not merely Free spirits but something more higher greater and fundamentally different Which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken But while I say this I feel at our obligation almost as much to them as to ourselves We free spirits who are their heralds and forerunners to sweep away from ourselves altogether a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding Which like a fog has too long made the conception of a free spirit obscure in every country of europe and the same in america There is a present something which makes an abuse of this name a very narrow Pre-possessed and chained class of spirits who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt not to mention that in respect to The new philosophers who are appearing they must still more be closed windows and bolted doors Briefly and regrettably They belong to levelers these wrongly named free spirits as glib tongued and scribe fingered slaves of the democratic taste In its modern ideals all of them men without solitude without personal Solitude blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honorable contact ought to be denied Only they are not free and are ludicrously superficial Especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost all human misery and failure in the old forms in which society is hitherto existed A notion which happily inverts the truth entirely What they would faint attain with all their strength is the universal green meadowed happiness of the herd Together with security safety comfort and alleviation of life for everyone Their two most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called equality of rights and sympathy with all sufferers And suffering itself is looked upon by them as something which much to be done away with The opposite ones however who have opened our eye and conscience to the question how and where the plant Man has hitherto grown most vigorously believe that this has always taken place under the opposite conditions That for this end the dangerousness of his situation has to be increased enormously His inventive faculty and dissembling power his spirit had to develop into subtlety and daring under long oppression and compulsion And his will to life had to be increased to the unconditioned will to power We believe that severity violence slavery danger in the street and in the heart secrecy Stoicism tempters art and devilry of every kind that everything wicked terrible tyrannical predatory and serpentine and man Serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite We do not even say enough when we only say this much and in any case we find ourselves here both with our Speech and our silence at the other extreme of all modern ideology and gregarious desirability as their antipodes perhaps What wonder that we free spirits are not The exactly the most communicative spirits that we do not wish to betray in every respect What a spirit can free itself from and where perhaps it will then be driven And as to the import of the dangerous formula beyond good and evil with which we at least avoid confusion We are something else than libre pensions They've been pensatory free thinkers and whatever else these honest advocates of modern ideas like to call themselves Having been at home or at least guests in many realms of the spirit having escaped again and again from the gloomy agreeable nooks In which preferences and prejudices youth origin and accident of men in books or even the weariness of travel seem to confine us Full of malice against the seductions of dependence which he concealed in honors money positions or exaltations of the senses Grateful even for the distress and vicitudes of illness because they always free us from from some rule And it's prejudice grateful to the god devil sheep and worm in us inquisitive to a fault investigators to the point of cruelty With unhesitating fingers for the intangible with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible ready for any business that requires sagy Acity and acute senses ready for every adventure. I went to an excess of free will With anterior and posterior souls into the ultimate intentions of which it is difficult to pry With foregrounds and backgrounds to the end of which no foot may run hidden ones under the mantles of light Appropriators although we resemble errors and sprinting thrifts arrangers and collectors from morning till night Mises of our wealth and full crammed doors economical and learning and forgetting Inventive in scheming sometimes proud of tables of categories sometimes pendants Sometimes night owls of work even in full day. Yay if necessary even scarecrows and it is necessary nowadays That is to say in as much as we are the born sworn jealous friends of solitude of our own profoundest midnight midday solitude Such kind of men are we we free spirits and perhaps you are also something of the same kind g coming ones Be new philosophers And chapter two beyond good and evil by frederick vilhelm nicci 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.org Beyond good and evil by frederick nicci translation by helen zimmerman Chapter three the religious mood 45 The human soul and its limits the range of a man's inner experiences Hitherto attained the heights depths and distances of these experiences The entire history of the soul up to the present time and it's still un-exhausted possibilities This is the preordained hunting domain for born psychologist and lover of a big hunt But how often must he say despairingly to himself? A single individual alas only a single individual and this great forest this virgin forest So he would like to have some hundreds of hunting assistants And fine trained hounds that he could send into the history of the human soul to drive his game together In vain again and again. He experiences profoundly and bitterly How difficult it is to find assistance and dogs for all the things that directly excite his curiosity The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting domains Where courage sagacity and subtlety in every sense are required Is that there are no longer serviceable just when the big hunt and also the great danger commences It is precisely then that they lose their keen eye and nose In order for instance to divine and determine what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience Has hitherto had in the souls of hominés relojussi A person would perhaps himself have to possess a profound as bruised as immense an experience As the intellectual conscience of pascal and then he would still require that widespread heaven of clear wicked spirituality Which from above would be able to oversee a range and effectively Formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences But who would do me this service and who would have time to wait for such servants? They evidently appear too rarely. They are so improbable at all times Eventually one must do everything one's self in order to know something Which means that one has much to do But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices Pardon me. I mean to say that the love of truth has its reward in heaven and already upon earth 46 Faith such as early christianity desired and not infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free spirited world Which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it Counting besides the education intolerance, which the imperium romanum gave This faith is not that sincere austere slave faith by which perhaps a luther or a cromwell Or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his god and christianity It is much rather the faith of pascal which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason A tough long-lived worm-like reason, which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow The christian faith from the beginning is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom all pride all self confidence of spirit It is the same time subjection self derision and self mutilation There's cruelty and religious finitionism in this faith Which is adapted to a tender many-sided and very fastidious conscience It takes for granted that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably painful That all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdism in the form of which faith comes to it Modern men with their obtuseness as regards all christian nomenclature Have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception Which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula god on the cross Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion Nor anything at once so dreadful questioning and questionable as this formula It promised a transvaluation of all ancient values It was the orient the profound orient It was the oriental slave who thus took revenge on rome and its noble light-minded toleration On the roman catholicism of non-faith and it was always not the faith But the freedom from the faith the half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of the faith Which made the slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them Enlightenment causes revolt for the slave desires the unconditioned He understands nothing but to tyrannous even in morals He loves as he hates without nuance to the very depths to the point of pain to the point of sickness His many hidden sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems to deny suffering The skepticism with regard to suffering fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic morality Was not the least of the causes also the last great slave insurrection which began with the french revolution 47 Whenever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far We find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen solitude fasting and sexual abstinence But without it's being possible to determine with certainty which is cause and which is effect Or if any relation at all of cause and effect exists there This latter doubt is justified by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms among savage as well as among civilized peoples Is the most sudden and excessive sensuality Which then with equal suddenness transforms into Penitential paroxysms world renunciation and will renunciation Both symptoms perhaps explainable as disguised epilepsy But nowhere is it more obligatory to put aside explanations around no other type has there grown such a massive absurdity and superstition No other type seems to have been more interesting to men and even to philosophers Perhaps it is time to become just a little indifferent here to learn caution or better still to look away to go away Yet in the background of the most recent philosophy that of schopenhauer We find most as the problem in itself this terrible note of interrogation of the religious crisis and awakening How is the negation of will possible? How is the saint possible? That seems to have been the very question with which schopenhauer made a start and became a philosopher And thus it was genuine schopenhauerium consequence that his most convinced adherent Perhaps also his last as far as germany is concerned Namely, richard wagner should bring his own life work to an end just here And should finally put that terrible and eternal type upon the stages country type veku And it is loved and lived at the very time that the mad doctors in almost all european countries Had an opportunity to study the type close at hand Wherever the religious neurosis or as I call it the religious mood made its latest Epidemic outbreak and display as the salvation army If it be in question however as to what has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts In all ages and even to philosophers in the whole phenomenon of the saint It is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein Namely the immediate succession of opposites of states of the soul regarded as morally antithetical It was believed here to be self-evident that the bad man was all at once turned into a saint a good man The hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point Is it not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals Because it believed in oppositions of moral values and saw red and interpreted these oppositions into the text and facts of the case What miracle only an error of interpretation? A lack of philology 48 It seems that the latin races are far more deeply attached to their catholicism than we northerners are to christianity generally And that consequently unbelief in catholic countries means something quite different from what it does among protestants Namely a sort of revolt against the spirit of the race While with us it is rather a return to the spirit or non-spirit of the race We northerners undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous races Even as regards our talents for religion. We have poor talents for it One may make an exception in a case of the Celts who have thereto for furnished also the best soil for christian infection in the north The christian ideal blossomed forth in france as much as ever the pale sun of the north would allow it How strangely pious for our taste are still these later french skeptics Wherever there is any Celtic blood in their origin How catholic how un-german does august day comps Sociology seemed to us with the roman logic of its instincts How jesuitical that amiable and shrewd ciceroan of port royal St. Bove in spite of all his hostility to jesuits And even urnus renon how inaccessible to us northerners does the language of such a renon appear In whom every instant the merest touch of religious thrill throws his refined Voluptuous and comfortable couching soul off its balance. Let us repeat after him these fine sentences And what wickedness and haughtiness is immediately aroused by way of answer in our probably less beautiful but harder souls That is to say in our more german souls The souls don't carry me Que la religion est un purdut de l'homme normal Quelle homme est le plus dans le bras quant il est Le plus religiux est le plus assue d'un testi ifini C'est quand il est bon que il vivute Que la vertu corresponde à un ordet eternal C'est quand il contemple les choses d'une manière Testi resti Que l'amour rêve l'autre est absurde These sentences are so extremely antipodal to my ears and habits of thought That in my first impulse of rage on finding them I wrote on the margin Until in my later rage I even took a fancy to them these sentences with their truth absolutely inverted It is so nice and such a distinction to have one's own antipodes 49 That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient greeks Is the irrestrainable stream of gratitude which it pours forth It is a very superior kind of man who takes such an attitude towards nature and life Later on when the populace got the upper hand in greece Fear became so rampant also in religion and christianity was preparing itself 50 The passion for god there are churlish honest hearted and importune kinds of it Like that of luther the whole of protestantism lacks the southern delicatesa There is an oriental exaltation of the mind in it like that of an undeservedly favored or elevated slave As in the case of st augustine for incidents Who lacks in an offensive manner all nobility in bearing and desires There is a feminine tenderness and sensuality in it Which modestly and unconsciously longs for an unio mystica et fisica as in the case of madame deguin In many cases it appears curiously enough as the disguise of a girl's or a youth's puberty Here and there even in the hysteria of an old maid Also as her last ambition the church has frequently canonized the woman in such a case 51 The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently before the saint As the ignigma of self-subjugation and utter voluntary privation Why did they thus bow They divined in him and as it were behind the questionableness of his frail and wretched appearance The superior force which wished to test itself by such a subjugation The strength of will in which they recognized their own strength and love of power and knew how to honor it They honored something in themselves when they honored the saint In addition to this the contemplation of the saint suggested to them a suspicion Such an enormity of self-negation and antinaturalness will not have been coveted for nothing They have said inquireingly There is perhaps a reason for it Some very great danger about which the ecstatic might wish to be more accurately informed through his secret into locutors and visitors In a word the mighty ones of the world learned to have a new fear before him They divined a new power a strange still unconquered enemy It was the will to power which obliged them to hope before the saint They had to question him 52 In the jewish old testament the book of divine justice There are men Things and sayings on such an immense scale that greek and indian literature has nothing to compare with it One stands with fear and reverence Before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly And one has sad thoughts about old asia and its little outpushed peninsula europe Which would like by all means to figure before asia as the progress of mankind To be sure he who himself only a slender tame house animal and knows only the wants of a house animal Like our cultured people of today including the christians of cultured christianity Need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins The taste for the old testament is a touchstone With respect to great and small Perhaps he will find that the new testament the book of grace still appeals more to his heart There's much of the odor of the genuine tender stupid beadsman and petty soul in it To have bound up this new testament a kind of rococo of taste and ever respect Along with the old testament into one book as the bible As the book in itself is perhaps the greatest audacity and sin against the spirit Which literary europe has upon its conscience 53 Why atheism nowadays The father and god is thoroughly refuted equally so the judge the rewarder Also his free will he does not hear and even if he did he would not know how to help The worst is that he seems incapable of communicating himself clearly Is he uncertain? This is what I have made out by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations To be the cause of the decline of european theism It appears to me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth It rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust 54 What does all modern philosophy do? Since Descartes and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure An attentat has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old conception of the soul Under the guise of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception that it is to say An attentat on the fundamental presupposition of christian doctrine Modern philosophy as an epistemological skepticism is secretly or openly anti-christian Although for keener years be it said by no means anti-religious Formerly in effect one believed in the soul as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject One said I is the condition Think is the predicate and is conditioned to think is an activity for which one must suppose a subject as cause The attempt was then made with marvelous tenacity and subtlety To see if one could not get out of this net To see if the opposite was not perhaps true Think the condition and I the conditioned I therefore only a synthesis which has been made by thinking itself Can't really wish to prove that starting from the subject The subject could not be proved nor the object either The possibility of an apparent existence of the subject and therefore of the soul May not always have been strange to him The thought that once an immense power on earth as the vendetta philosophy 55 There is a great ladder of religious cruelty with many rounds, but three of these are the most important Once on a time men sacrificed human beings to their god and perhaps just those they love the best To this category belong the first link sacrifices of all primitive religions And also the sacrifice of the emperor tiberius in the mythra grotto on the island of capri That most terrible of all roman anachronisms Then during the immoral epoch of mankind they sacrificed their god the strongest instincts they possessed Their nature this festival joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and anti-natural fanatics Finally what still remained to be sacrificed Was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything? comforting holy healing all hope all faith in hidden harmonies in future blessedness and justice Was it not necessary to sacrifice god himself? And out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone stupidity gravity fate nothingness To sacrifice god for nothingness This paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation We all know something therefore ready 56 Whoever like myself prompted by some enigmatic desire has long endeavored to go to the bottom of the question of pessimism And free it from the half christian half german narrowness and stupidity in which it has finally presented itself to this century Namely in the form of schopenhauer's philosophy Whoever with an asiatic and super asiatic eye has actually looked inside and into the most world renouncing of all possible modes of thought Beyond good and evil and no longer like buddha and schopenhauer under the dominion and delusion of morality Whoever has done this has perhaps just thereby without really desiring it Opened his eyes to behold the opposite ideal The ideal of the most world-approving Exuberant and vivacious man who has not only learned to compromise and arrange with that which was and is But wishes to have it again as it was and is for all eternally Insatiably calling out de capo not only to himself But to the whole peace and play and not only the play but actually to him who requires the play and makes it necessary Because he always requires himself anew and makes himself necessary. What? And this would not be circulus vicius deus 57 The distance and as it were the space around man grows with the strength of his intellectual vision and insight His world become profounder new stars new igno thomas and notions are ever coming into view Perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised his acuteness and profundity Has just been an occasion for its exercise Something of a game something for children and childish minds Perhaps the most solemn conceptions have caused the most fighting and suffering The conceptions god and sin will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child's plaything Or a child's pain seems to an old man And perhaps another plaything and another pain will be then necessary once more for the old man Always childish enough an eternal child d8 Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness or semi idleness is necessary to a religious life A like for its favorite microscopic labor of self examination and for its soft placidity called prayer The state of perpetual readiness for the coming of god I mean the idleness with a good conscience the idleness of olden times and of blood to which the aristocratic sentiment that work is Dishonoring that it vulgarizes the body and soul. Is it not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently the modern noisy time and grossing conceded foolishly proud laboriousness Educates and prepares for unbelief more than anything else Among these for instance who are at present living apart from a religion in germany I find free thinkers of diversified species in origin But above all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to generation was dissolved the religious instincts So that they no longer know what purpose religions serve and only note their existence in the world with a kind of dull astonishment They feel themselves already fully occupied These good people be it by their business or by their pleasures not to mention the fatherland And the newspapers and their family duties It seems that they have no time whatever left for religion And above all it is not obvious to them whether it is a question of a new business or a new pleasure For it is impossible They say to themselves that people should go to church merely to spoil their tempers They are by no means enemies of religious customs should certain circumstances state affairs perhaps require their participation in such customs They do what is required as so many things are done With a patient an unassuming seriousness and without much curiosity or discomfort They live too much apart and outside to feel even the necessity for a for or against in such matters Among those in different persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority of german Protestants of the middle classes Especially in the great laborious centers of trade and commerce Also the majority of laborious scholars and the entire university personnel With the exception of the theologians whose existence and possibility there always gives psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to solve On the part of pious or merely churchgoing people There seldom any idea of how much goodwill one might say arbitrary will is now necessary for a german scholar to take the problem of religion seriously His whole profession and as I have said his whole workman-like laboriousness to which he is compelled by his modern conscience Inclines him to a lofty and almost charitable serenity as regards to religion With which is occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the uncleanliness of spirit Which he takes for granted wherever anyone still professes to belong to the church It is only with the help of history not through his own personal experience Therefore that the scholar succeeds in bringing himself to a respectful seriousness and to a certain timid difference in presence of religions But even when his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards them He has not personally advanced one step nearer to that which still maintains itself as church or as piety Perhaps even the contrary the practical indifference to religious matters in the midst of which he has been born and brought up Usually supplements itself in his case into circumspension and cleanliness Which shuns contact with religious men and things And it may just be the depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings with it Every age has its own divine type of naivete For the discovery of which other ages may envy it And how much naivete, adorable, childlike and boundlessly foolish naivete is involved in this belief of the scholar in his superiority In the good conscience of his tolerance in the unsuspecting simple certainty With which his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and less valuable type Beyond before and above which he himself has developed He the little arrogant dwarf and mob man the sedulously alert head and hand drudge of ideas of modern ideas 59 Whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless Divined what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial It is their preservative instinct that teaches them to be flighty lightsome and false Here and there one finds a passionate and exaggerated adoration of pure forms in philosophers as well as in artists It is not to be doubted that whoever has need of the cult of the superficial To that extent has at one time or another made an unlucky dive beneath it Perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those birth children The born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to falsify its image As if taking wear some revenge on it One might guess to what degree life has disgusted them by the extent to which they wish to see its image falsified attenuated ultrafied and deified One might reckon that hominus relogicy among the artists as their highest rank It is the profound suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism which compels whole centuries to fasten their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence The fear of the instinct Which divines a truth might be attained too soon Before man has become strong enough hard enough artists enough Piety the life in god regarded in this light would appear as the most elaborate and ultimate product of the fear of truth As artists adoration and artist intoxication in presence of the most logical of all falsifications As the will to the inversion of truth to untruth at any price Perhaps there has hitherto been no more effective means of beautifying man than piety By means of it man can become so artful So superficial so iridescent and so good that his appearance no longer offends paragraph 60 To love mankind for god's sake This has so far been the noblest and remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained That love to mankind without any redeeming intention to the background is only an additional folly and brutishness That the inclination to this love has first to get its proportion Its delicacy its gram of salt and sprinkling of averages from an higher inclination Whoever first perceived and experienced this However, his tongue may have stammered as it attempted to express such a delicate matter Let him for all time be wholly and respected as the man who has so far flown highest and gone astray in the finest fashion paragraph 61 The philosopher as we free spirits understand him as the man of the greatest responsibility Who has the conscience for the general development of mankind Will use religion for his disciplining and educating work Just as he will use the contemporary political and economic conditions The selecting and disciplining influence Destructive as well as creative and fashioning which can be exercised by means of religion is manifold and varied According to the sort of people placed under its spell and protection For those who are strong and independent Destined and trained to command in whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is incorporated Religion is an additional means for overcoming resistance in the exercise of authority As a bond which binds rulers and subjects in common Betraying and surrendering to the former the conscience of the latter Their innermost heart which would feign escape obedience And in the case of the unique natures of noble origin if by virtue of superior spirituality They should incline to a more retired and contemplative life Reserving to themselves only the more refined forms of government overtosen disciples or members of an order Religion itself may be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and trouble of managing grosser affairs And for securing immunity from the unavoidable filth of all political agitation The brahmins for instance understood this fact with the help of a religious organization They secured to themselves the power of nominating kings for the people While their sentiments prompted them to keep apart and outside as men with a higher and super regal mission At the same time religion gives inducement and opportunity to some of the subjects to qualify themselves for future ruling And commanding the slowly ascending ranks and classes In which through fortunate marriage customs Volitional power and delight in self-control are on the increase To them religion offers sufficient incentives and temptations to aspire to higher intellectuality And to experience the sentiments of authoritative self-control Of silence and of solitude Asceticism and puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race Which seeks to rise above its heredity baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy And finally to ordinary men to the majority of the people who exist for service and general utility And are only so far entitled to exist Religion gives invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition piece of heart ennoblement of obedience Additional social happiness and sympathy with something of transfiguration and embellishment Something of justification of all common-placeness All the meanness all the semi-annual poverty of their souls Religion together with the religious significance of life Sheds sunshine over such perpetually harassed men and makes even their own aspect and durable to them It operates upon them as the epicurean philosophy usually operates upon sufferers of a higher order In a refreshing and refining manner almost turning suffering to account and in the end even hollowing and vindicating it There is perhaps nothing so admirable in christianity and buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by piety to seemingly higher order of things And thereby to retain their satisfaction with the actual world in which they find it difficult enough to live This very difficult being necessary paragraph 62 To be sure to make also the bad counter reckoning against such religions and to bring to light their secret dangers The cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do not operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher But rule voluntarily and paramountly when they wish to be the final end And not a means along with other means Among men as among all other animals there is a surplus of defective diseased Generating infirm and necessarily suffering individuals The successful cases among men also are always the exception And in view of the fact that man is the animal not yet properly adapted to his environment the rare exception But worse still the higher the type of man represents the greater is the improbability that he will succeed The accidental the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind Manifest itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men The conditions of whose lives are delicate diverse and difficult to determine What then is the attitude of the two greatest religions above mentioned to the surplus of failures in life? They endeavor to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved In fact as the religions for sufferers they take the part of these upon principle They're always in favor of those who suffer from life as from a disease And they would feign treat every other experience of life as false and impossible However highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care In as much as in applying to others it has supplied and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man The hitherto paramount religions to give a general appreciation of them are among the principal causes Which have kept the type of man upon a lower level. They have preserved too much that which should have perished One has to thank them for invaluable services and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that The spiritual men of Christianity have done for Europe hither, too But when they had given comfort to the sufferers courage to be oppressed and despairing a staff and support to the helpless And when they had allured from society into covenants and spiritual penitentiaries that broken hearted and distracted What else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion and with a good conscience for the preservation of all the sick and suffering Which means indeed in truth to work for the deterioration of the european race To reverse all estimates of value That is what they had to do And to shatter the strong to spoil great hopes to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty To break down everything autonomous manly conquering and imperious All instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of man Into uncertainty distressive conscience and self destruction Forsooth to invert all love of the earth and of supremacy over the earth into hatred of the earth and earthly things That is the task the church imposed on itself and was obliged to impose until according to its standard of value On worldliness unsensuousness and higher man fused into one sentiment If one could observe the strangely painful equally coarse and refined comedy of european christianity With the derisive and impartial eye of an epicurean god I should think one would never cease marveling and laughing Does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over europe for 18 centuries in order to make a sublime abortion of man He however who with opposite requirements no longer epicurean and with some divine hammer in his hand Could approach this almost voluntary degeneration And stunting of mankind as exemplified in the european christian pascal for instance Would he not have to cry aloud with rage pity and horror Oh you bunglers presumptuous pitiful bunglers. What have you done? Was that a work for your hands? How you have hacked and botched my finest stone What have you presumed to do? I should say that christianity has here thereto been the most portentious of presumptions Men not great enough nor hard enough to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning man Men not sufficiently strong and farsighted to allow With sublime self-constraint the obvious law of the thousand fold failures and parachings to prevail Men not sufficiently knowable to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man Such men with their quality before god have hitherto swayed the destiny of europe Until at last a dwarfed almost ludicrous species has been produced a gregarious animal Something obligantly sickly mediocre that european of the present day end of chapter three This is a liver vox recording all liver vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer Please visit liver vox.org Beyond good and evil by fridrich micha translated by helen zimmern chapter four apathems and interludes 63 he who was a thorough teacher takes things seriously and even himself only in relation to his pupils 64 knowledge for its own sake that is the last snare laid by morality. We are thereby completely entangled in morals once more 65 the charm of knowledge would be small where it not so much shame has to be overcome on the way to it 65 a we are most dishonorable towards our god. He is not permitted to sin 66 the tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded robbed deceived and exploited might be the diffidence of a god among men 67 love to one only is a barbarity for it is exercised at the expense of all others love to god also 68 I did that says my memory. I could not have done that says my pride and remains inexorable Eventually the memory yields 69 one has regarded life carelessly if one has failed to see the hand that kills with leniency 70 if a man has character he has also his typical experience which always recurs 71 the sage as astronomer so long as thou feelest the stars as an above thee thou lackest the eye of the discerning one 72 it is not the strength but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men 73 he who attains his ideal precisely thereby surpasses it 73 a Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye and calls it his pride 74 a man of genius is unbearable unless he possesses at least two things besides gratitude and purity 75 the degree in nature of a man's sensuality extends to the highest altitudes of his spirit 76 under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself 77 with his principles a man seeks either to dominate or justify or honor or reproach or conceal his habits Two men with the same principles probably seek fundamentally different ends therewith 78 he who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself thereby as a despiser 79 a soul which knows that it is loved but does not itself love Betrays its sediment its drapes come up 80 a thing that is explained ceases to concern us What did the god mean who gave the advice know thyself? Did it perhaps imply cease to be concerned about thyself become objective and socrates and the scientific man? 81 it is terrible to die of thirst at sea Is it necessary that you should so salt your truth that it will no longer quench thirst? 82 sympathy for all would be harshness and tyranny for thee my good neighbor 83 instinct when the house is on fire one forgets even the dinner yes but one recovers it from among the ashes 84 woman learns how to hate in proportion as she forgets how to charm 85 the same emotions are in man and woman but in different tempo on that account man and woman never cease to misunderstand each other 86 in the background of all their personal vanity women themselves have still their impersonal scorn for woman 87 fettered heart free spirit when one firmly fetters one's heart and keeps it prisoner One can allow one's spirit many liberties I said this once before but people do not believe it when I say so unless they know it already 88 one begins to distrust very clever persons when they become embarrassed 89 dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them is not something dreadful also 90 heavy melancholy men turn lighter and come temporarily to their surface precisely by that which makes others heavy by hatred and love 91 so cold so icy that one burns one's finger at the touch of him every hand that lays hold of him shrinks back and for that very reason many think him red hot 92 who has not at one time or another sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name 93 in affability there is no hatred of men but precisely on that account a great deal too much contempt of men 94 the maturity of man that means to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play 95 to be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also of one's morality 96 one should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausica blessing it rather than in love with it 97 what a great man I always see merely the play actor of his own ideal 98 when one trains one's conscience it kisses one while it bites 99 the disappointed one speaks I listened for the echo and I heard only praise 100 we all feign to ourselves that we are simpler than we are we thus relax ourselves away from our fellows 101 a discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the animalization of God 102 discovering reciprocal love should really disenchant the lover with regard to the beloved what she is modest enough to love even you or stupid enough or or 103 the danger and happiness everything now turns out best for me I now love every fate who would like to be my fate 104 not their love of humanity but the impotence of their love prevents the Christians of today burning us 105 the piafraus is still more repugnant to the taste the piety of the free spirit the pious man of knowledge than the impiafraus hence the profound lack of judgment in comparison with the church characteristic of the type free spirit as it's non-freedom 106 by means of music the very passions enjoy themselves 107 a sign of strong character when once the resolution has been taken to shut the ear even to the best counter arguments occasionally therefore a will to stupidity 108 there is no such thing as moral phenomena but only a moral interpretation of phenomena 109 the criminal is often enough not equal to his deed he extenuates and maligns it 110 the advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer 111 our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been wounded 112 to him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to believe all believers are too noisy and obtrusive he guards against them 113 you want to pre-possess him in your favor then you must be embarrassed before him 114 the immense expectation with regard to sexual love and the coiness in this expectation spoils all the perspectives of women at the outset 115 where there is neither love nor hatred in the game woman's play is mediocre 116 the great apokes of our life are at the points when we gain courage to re-baptize our badness as the best in us 117 the will to overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another or of several other emotions 118 there is an innocence of admiration it is possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired someday 119 our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning ourselves justifying ourselves 120 sensuality often forces the growth of love too much so that its root remains weak and is easily torn up 121 it is a curious thing that god learned greek when he wished to turn author and that he did not learn it better 122 to rejoice on account of praise is in many cases merely politeness of heart and the very opposite of vanity of spirit 123 even concubine edge has been corrupted by marriage 124 he who exalts at the stake does not triumph over pain but because of the fact that he does not feel pain where he expected it a parable 125 when we have to change an opinion about anyone we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us 126 a nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men yes and then to get around them 127 in the eyes of all true women science is hostile to the sense of shame they feel as if one wished to peep under their skin with it or worse still under their dress and finery 128 the more abstract the truth you wish to teach the more must you allure the senses to it 129 the devil has the most extensive perspectives for god on that account he keeps so far away from him the devil in effect as the oldest friend of knowledge 130 what a person is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases when he ceases to show what he can do talent is also an adornment and adornment is also a concealment 131 the sexes deceive