Part IX — What Is Noble?

Ninth Part:

What Is Noble?

257 Every elevation of the type “human being” has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and so it will be again and again: a society that believes in a long ladder of rank and differences in value between human beings, and needs slavery in some sense. Without the pathos of distance that grows out of the ingrained difference between estates, out of the ruling caste’s constant looking out and down upon subjects and instruments, and out of its equally constant practice in obeying and commanding, keeping down and keeping at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not grow at all: that longing for an ever-new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, more far-reaching, more comprehensive states—in short, precisely the elevation of the type “human being,” the continued “self-overcoming of humanity,” to take a moral formula in a supramoral sense. Admittedly, one must entertain no humanitarian delusions about the origins of an aristocratic society (and thus of the precondition for that elevation of the type “human being”): the truth is hard. Let us tell ourselves unsparingly how every higher culture on earth has begun until now! People whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, predatory human beings still possessed of unbroken powers of will and lusts for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps engaged in trade or cattle breeding, or upon old, crumbling cultures in which the last vitality was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of intellect and corruption. The noble caste was always, in the beginning, the barbarian caste: its superiority lay primarily not in physical strength but in strength of soul—they were the more whole human beings (which at every level also means “the more whole beasts”).

258 Corruption, as the expression of anarchy threatening within the instincts and of a shaken foundation of affects called “life”: corruption is something fundamentally different according to the living formation in which it appears. When, for instance, an aristocracy such as France’s at the beginning of the Revolution throws away its privileges with a sublime disgust and sacrifices itself to an excess of its moral feeling, this is corruption—it was really only the final act of that centuries-long corruption through which it had surrendered its ruling prerogatives step by step and reduced itself to a function of royalty (finally even to its ornament and showpiece). What is essential to a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it feels itself not to be a function (whether of royalty or of the commonwealth), but its meaning and highest justification—that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of countless people who must for its sake be pressed down and diminished into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into instruments. Its fundamental belief must be that society may not exist for society’s sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding on which a select kind of being can raise itself to its higher task and, in general, to a higher existence: comparable to those sun-seeking climbing plants on Java—they are called Sipo Matador—that clasp an oak tree with their arms so long and so often that at last, high above it but supported by it, they can unfold their crown in the open light and display their happiness.—

259 Mutually refraining from injury, violence, and exploitation, setting one’s own will on a level with another’s: in a certain coarse sense, this can become good practice between individuals, if the conditions for it are given (namely, their actual similarity in quantities of strength and standards of value, and their belonging together within one body). But as soon as one wanted to take this principle further, perhaps even as society’s fundamental principle, it would immediately reveal itself for what it is: a will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think thoroughly down to the ground and ward off all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is foreign and weaker, oppression, hardness, imposing one’s own forms, incorporation, and at the very least, at the mildest, exploitation—but why should one always use precisely those words that have been stamped with a slanderous intention from time immemorial? Even that body within which, as was assumed above, individuals treat each other as equals—this happens in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it is a living and not a dying body, do to other bodies everything that its individuals refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be will to power incarnate; it will want to grow, reach out, draw things to itself, gain ascendancy—not out of any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely will to power. Yet there is no point on which the common consciousness of Europeans is more reluctant to be instructed than this; everywhere now people enthuse, even in scientific disguises, about coming social conditions from which “the exploitative character” will be absent—to my ears that sounds as though they were promising to invent a life that would refrain from every organic function. “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the actual will to power, which is precisely the will of life.—Granted that as a theory this is an innovation—as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us at least be that honest with ourselves!—

260 Wandering through the many subtler and coarser moralities that have ruled on earth or still rule, I found certain traits regularly recurring together and linked to one another: until finally two basic types revealed themselves to me, and a fundamental distinction sprang into view. There is master morality and slave morality—I add at once that in all higher and more mixed cultures, attempts to mediate between the two moralities also appear, still more often their confusion and mutual misunderstanding, indeed sometimes their harsh juxtaposition—even in the same person, within a single soul. Moral distinctions of value have arisen either among a ruling kind, which became pleasantly conscious of its difference from the ruled—or among the ruled, the slaves and dependents of every degree. In the first case, when it is the rulers who determine the concept “good,” it is the elevated, proud states of the soul that are felt to distinguish people and determine rank. The noble human being separates from himself those beings in whom the opposite of such elevated, proud states finds expression: he despises them. Notice at once that in this first kind of morality the opposition “good” and “bad” means as much as “noble” and “contemptible”—the opposition “good” and “evil” has another origin. The cowardly, the timid, the petty, those who think in terms of narrow utility are despised; likewise the suspicious with their unfree gaze, the self-abasing, the doglike kind of person who lets himself be mistreated, the begging flatterer, above all the liar—it is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people are liars. “We truthful ones”—that is what the nobles of ancient Greece called themselves. It is plain that moral designations of value were everywhere first applied to human beings, and only derivatively and late to actions: hence it is a serious blunder when historians of morality begin with questions such as “Why has the compassionate action been praised?” The noble kind of human being feels itself to determine values; it has no need to be approved of; it judges, “What is harmful to me is harmful in itself”; it knows itself as that which first confers honor on things; it creates values. Everything it knows in itself it honors: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of fullness, of power that wants to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth that wants to give and bestow—the noble human being too helps the unfortunate, but not, or hardly, out of pity, rather from an urge produced by an excess of power. The noble human being honors the powerful person in himself, also the one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who takes pleasure in practicing severity and hardness toward himself and reveres everything severe and hard. “Wotan laid a hard heart in my breast,” says an old Scandinavian saga: rightly composed from the soul of a proud Viking. This kind of human being is proud precisely of not being made for fellow suffering: which is why the saga’s hero adds the warning, “Whoever does not have a hard heart when young will never have a hard one.” Noble and brave people who think this way are furthest removed from that morality which sees the mark of the moral precisely in compassion or in acting for others or in disinterestedness; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony toward “selflessness” belong as decidedly to noble morality as a slight disdain and caution toward sympathetic feelings and the “warm heart.”—It is the powerful who know how to honor; this is their art, their realm of invention. Deep reverence for age and for tradition—all law rests on this double reverence—belief and prejudice in favor of ancestors and against those to come are typical of the morality of the powerful; and when, conversely, the people of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future,” and increasingly lack respect for age, this alone sufficiently betrays the ignoble origin of these “ideas.” But a morality of rulers is most foreign and painful to present taste in the rigor of its principle that one has duties only toward one’s equals; that toward beings of lower rank, toward everything foreign, one may act as one thinks fit or “as the heart wishes,” and in any case “beyond good and evil”—compassion and the like may belong here. The capacity and duty for long gratitude and long revenge—both only among one’s equals—subtlety in requital, refinement of concepts in friendship, a certain necessity of having enemies (as drainage channels, so to speak, for the affects of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance—fundamentally, so as to be able to be a good friend): all these are typical marks of noble morality, which, as indicated, is not the morality of “modern ideas,” and is therefore hard today to feel one’s way into, hard also to excavate and uncover.—It is different with the second type of morality, slave morality. Suppose the violated, the oppressed, the suffering, the unfree, those uncertain of themselves and the weary moralize: what will their moral valuations have in common? Probably a pessimistic suspicion of the whole human condition will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of humanity together with its condition. The slave’s gaze is ill-disposed toward the virtues of the powerful: he is skeptical and mistrustful, he has a subtle mistrust of everything “good” honored there—he would like to persuade himself that even the happiness there is not genuine. Conversely, those qualities that serve to ease existence for sufferers are brought forward and flooded with light: here compassion, the obliging, helpful hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, friendliness attain honor—for these are the most useful qualities here, and almost the only means of enduring the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility. Here is the hearth where that famous opposition “good” and “evil” originates—into evil are felt power and dangerousness, a certain fearsomeness, subtlety, and strength that do not allow contempt to arise. According to slave morality, then, the “evil” person arouses fear; according to master morality, it is precisely the “good” person who arouses fear and wants to arouse it, while the “bad” person is felt to be contemptible. The opposition comes to a head when, in accordance with the logic of slave morality, a breath of disdain finally attaches even to the “good” person of this morality—it may be slight and benevolent—because in the slave’s way of thinking the good person must in any case be the harmless one: he is good-natured, easy to deceive, a little stupid perhaps, a good fellow. Everywhere that slave morality gains the upper hand, language shows a tendency to bring the words “good” and “stupid” closer together.—One final fundamental distinction: the longing for freedom, the instinct for the happiness and subtleties of the feeling of freedom, belongs as necessarily to slave morality and moral conduct as artfulness and enthusiasm in reverence, in devotion, are the regular symptom of an aristocratic way of thinking and valuing.—From this one can readily understand why love as passion—it is our European specialty—must simply be of noble origin: as is well known, its invention belongs to the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent, inventive human beings of the “gai saber,” to whom Europe owes so much, almost its very self.—

261 Among the things that are perhaps hardest for a noble human being to understand is vanity: he will be tempted to deny it even where another kind of person thinks he can grasp it with both hands. His problem is to imagine beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves that they do not themselves hold—and thus do not “deserve”—and who nevertheless afterward believe in this good opinion themselves. This seems to him partly so tasteless and disrespectful toward oneself, partly so grotesquely unreasonable, that he would like to understand vanity as an exception, and doubts it in most cases where people speak of it. He will say, for instance: “I can be mistaken about my worth, and on the other hand still demand that others acknowledge my worth precisely as I assess it—but that is not vanity (rather conceit or, in the more frequent cases, what is called ‘humility,’ also ‘modesty’).” Or again: “I can take pleasure in others’ good opinion for many reasons, perhaps because I honor and love them and rejoice in every one of their pleasures, perhaps also because their good opinion endorses and strengthens my belief in my own good opinion, perhaps because others’ good opinion, even where I do not share it, still benefits me or promises a benefit—but none of that is vanity.” The noble human being must force himself, especially with history’s help, to imagine that from time immemorial, in all strata of the people that were dependent in any way, the common person was only what he was taken to be—not at all accustomed to setting values himself, he assigned himself no value other than what his masters assigned him (it is the masters’ true prerogative to create values). One may understand it as the consequence of a tremendous atavism that even now the ordinary person still waits first for an opinion about himself and then instinctively submits to it: but by no means only to a “good” opinion, also to a bad and unfair one (think, for example, of most of the self-assessments and self-underestimations that devout women learn from their confessors, and the devout Christian in general learns from his church). In fact, in accordance with the slow emergence of the democratic order of things (and its cause, the intermixing of the blood of masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare urge to assign oneself a value on one’s own authority and to “think well” of oneself will be increasingly encouraged and spread: but at every moment it faces an older, broader, and more thoroughly incorporated inclination—and in the phenomenon of “vanity,” this older inclination becomes master over the younger. The vain person takes pleasure in every good opinion he hears about himself (quite apart from any consideration of its usefulness, and equally regardless of true and false), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he submits to both, feels himself subject to them, out of that most ancient instinct of submission that erupts in him.—It is “the slave” in the vain person’s blood, a remnant of the slave’s cunning—and how much “slave” remains in woman even now!—that seeks to seduce people into good opinions of him; it is likewise the slave who immediately afterward falls down before these opinions himself, as though he had not called them forth.—And to say it once more: vanity is an atavism.

262 A species arises, a type becomes firm and strong, in a long struggle with essentially the same unfavorable conditions. Conversely, we know from breeders’ experience that species receiving overabundant nourishment and, in general, more protection and care immediately tend most strongly toward variation of type and abound in marvels and monstrosities (also in monstrous vices). Now consider an aristocratic commonwealth, say an ancient Greek polis or Venice, as an arrangement, voluntary or involuntary, for the purpose of breeding: here are people living together and thrown back on themselves, who want to assert their kind, usually because they must assert themselves or face the terrible danger of extermination. Here the favor, the excess, the protection under which variation is encouraged are absent; the species needs itself as a species, as something that can assert and perpetuate itself at all precisely through its hardness, uniformity, simplicity of form, in constant struggle with its neighbors or with the oppressed who are in revolt or threatening revolt. The most varied experience teaches it which qualities above all it owes its continued existence to, in defiance of all gods and human beings, its having always emerged victorious: these qualities it calls virtues, and these virtues alone it breeds to maturity. It does so with hardness, indeed it wants hardness; every aristocratic morality is intolerant—in educating the young, in disposing of women, in marriage customs, in the relationship of old and young, in penal laws (which have eyes only for those who deviate)—it counts intolerance itself among the virtues, under the name “justice.” A type with few but very strong traits, a kind of severe, warlike, shrewdly silent, self-contained and reserved human beings (and, as such, with the subtlest feeling for the charms and nuances of society), is in this way established beyond the succession of generations; the constant struggle with the same unfavorable conditions is, as I said, the reason a type becomes firm and hard. Eventually, however, a fortunate situation arises, the tremendous tension relaxes; perhaps there are no more enemies among the neighbors, and the means of life, even of enjoying life, are overabundant. At a stroke the bond and compulsion of the old discipline snap: it no longer feels itself necessary, a condition of existence—if it wanted to persist, it could do so only as a form of luxury, an archaizing taste. Variation, whether as deviation (into the higher, subtler, rarer) or as degeneration and monstrosity, is suddenly on the scene in the greatest fullness and splendor; the individual dares to be individual and stand apart. At these turning points of history there appear side by side, and often entangled and interwoven, a magnificent, manifold, jungle-like upgrowth and upstriving, a kind of tropical tempo in the rivalry of growth, and a tremendous perishing and self-destruction, thanks to the wildly antagonistic, as it were exploding egoisms that wrestle with each other “for sun and light,” and no longer know how to derive any limit, any restraint, any consideration from the morality they have had until now. It was this morality itself that piled up strength to a monstrous degree, that bent the bow so threateningly—now it is, now it is becoming, “outlived.” The dangerous and uncanny point has been reached where the greater, more manifold, more comprehensive life lives beyond the old morality; the “individual” stands there, compelled to a legislation of his own, to arts and ruses of his own for self-preservation, self-elevation, self-redemption. Nothing but new purposes, nothing but new means, no shared formulas anymore, misunderstanding allied with disregard, decline, corruption, and the highest desires horribly knotted together, the genius of the race overflowing from every cornucopia of good and bad, a fateful simultaneity of spring and autumn, full of new charms and veils belonging to a young corruption, still unexhausted, still unwearied. Once again danger is there, the mother of morality, the great danger, this time displaced into the individual, into the neighbor and friend, into the street, into one’s own child, into one’s own heart, into everything most personal and secret in wish and will: what will the moral philosophers who arise at this time have to preach now? They discover, these sharp observers and street-corner loiterers, that things are rapidly coming to an end, that everything around them is corrupt and corrupting, that nothing will last until the day after tomorrow, with one kind of human being excepted, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have a prospect of continuing, of propagating—they are the people of the future, the only survivors; “Be like them! Become mediocre!” is now the only morality that still makes sense, that still finds ears.—But it is hard to preach, this morality of mediocrity!—For it must never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak of moderation and dignity and duty and love of one’s neighbor—it will have trouble hiding its irony!—

263 There is an instinct for rank that is, more than anything else, already a sign of high rank; there is a pleasure in the nuances of reverence that suggests noble descent and habits. The subtlety, goodness, and height of a soul are put to a dangerous test when something of the first rank passes it, not yet guarded against intrusive grasping and clumsiness by the awe of authority: something that goes its way like a living touchstone, unmarked, undiscovered, testing, perhaps deliberately veiled and disguised. Anyone whose task and practice is to explore souls will employ precisely this art in many forms to establish a soul’s ultimate value, the immovable, inborn order of rank to which it belongs: he will test its instinct for reverence. Difference breeds hatred: the vulgarity of many a nature suddenly spurts out like dirty water when some holy vessel, some precious object from locked shrines, some book bearing the marks of a great destiny is carried past; and on the other hand there is an involuntary falling silent, a hesitation of the eye, a stilling of every gesture, expressing that a soul feels the nearness of what is most worthy of veneration. The way reverence for the Bible has on the whole been maintained in Europe until now is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of manners that Europe owes to Christianity: such books of depth and ultimate significance need, for their protection, a tyranny of authority coming from outside, in order to gain those millennia of endurance necessary to exhaust and fathom them. Much has been achieved when the great mass of people (the shallow and the quick-digesting of every kind) has finally been bred to feel that it may not touch everything; that there are holy experiences before which it must take off its shoes and keep its unclean hand away—it is almost its highest elevation toward humanity. Conversely, perhaps nothing about the so-called educated, the believers in “modern ideas,” is so nauseating as their lack of shame, the comfortable insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, lick, finger everything; and it is possible that today among the people, the lower people, especially among peasants, one still finds relatively more nobility of taste and tact in reverence than among the newspaper-reading intellectual demi-monde, the educated.

264 What a person’s ancestors did most gladly and consistently cannot be wiped from his soul: whether they were industrious savers and appendages of a desk and cashbox, modest and bourgeois in their desires, modest also in their virtues; or whether they lived accustomed to commanding from morning to night, devoted to rough pleasures and perhaps still rougher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, at some point they sacrificed old privileges of birth and property to live entirely for their faith—their “God”—as people of an inexorable and tender conscience that blushes at every compromise. It is quite impossible for a person not to have the qualities and preferences of his parents and forebears in his body, whatever appearances may say against it. This is the problem of race. Suppose one knows something about the parents: an inference about the child is permitted; some repellent lack of restraint, some furtive envy, some coarse self-righteousness—as these three together have at all times constituted the true rabble type—such things must pass to the child as surely as corrupted blood; and with the help of the best upbringing and education one will achieve only a deception about such an inheritance.—And what else do upbringing and education want today! In our very popular age, by which I mean our rabble age, “upbringing” and “education” must essentially be the art of deception—of deceiving about ancestry, the inherited rabble in body and soul. An educator who today preached truthfulness above all, and constantly called to his pupils, “Be true! Be natural! Give yourselves as you are!”—even such a virtuous and simplehearted ass would after a time learn to reach for Horace’s pitchfork to drive nature out: with what result? The “rabble” will always return.—

265 At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I put this forward: egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul, by which I mean that immovable belief that other beings must by nature be subject to a being such as “we are,” and must sacrifice themselves to it. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without a question mark, without even a feeling of hardness, compulsion, or arbitrariness in it, but rather as something that may be grounded in the primordial law of things—if it sought a name for it, it would say, “It is justice itself.” Under circumstances that at first make it hesitate, it admits to itself that there are others with rights equal to its own; as soon as it has settled this question of rank, it moves among these equals and equally entitled beings with the same assurance in modesty and delicate reverence that it has in its intercourse with itself—according to an inborn celestial mechanics understood by all the stars. This subtlety and self-restraint in dealing with its equals is one more part of its egoism—every star is such an egoist—it honors itself in them and in the rights it grants them; it does not doubt that the exchange of honors and rights, as the essence of all intercourse, likewise belongs to the natural state of things. The noble soul gives as it takes, out of the passionate and sensitive instinct for requital that lies at its foundation. The concept “grace” has no meaning or sweet scent inter pares; there may be a sublime way of letting gifts from above, as it were, rain upon one and thirstily drinking them in like drops: but the noble soul has no aptitude for this art and gesture. Its egoism hinders it here: it is reluctant to look “up” at all—but looks either ahead, horizontally and slowly, or down—it knows itself to be on the heights.—

266 “One can truly esteem only someone who does not seek himself.”—Goethe to Councilor Schlosser.

267 There is a proverb among the Chinese that mothers already teach their children: siao-sin, “make your heart small!” This is the true fundamental inclination in late civilizations: I do not doubt that an ancient Greek would recognize self-diminishment first of all in us Europeans of today as well—in that alone we would already “go against his taste.”—

268 What, ultimately, is commonness?—Words are sound-signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image-signs for frequently recurring sensations that occur together, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not yet enough to use the same words: one must also use the same words for the same kind of inner experiences; ultimately, one must have one’s experience in common. That is why people of one nation understand each other better than members of different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have long lived together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, needs, work), something arises from this whose members “understand one another”: a people. In all souls, the same number of frequently recurring experiences has gained the upper hand over those that come more rarely: on their basis people understand each other, quickly and ever more quickly—the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation—on the basis of this quick understanding people unite, closely and ever more closely. The greater the danger, the greater the need to agree quickly and easily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand each other in danger is what people simply cannot do without in their dealings. Even in every friendship or love affair, this test is made: nothing of the kind endures once it emerges that, with the same words, one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, fears something different from the other. (Fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the benevolent genius that so often keeps people of different sexes from hasty unions recommended by the senses and the heart—and not some Schopenhauerian “genius of the species”!) Which groups of sensations awaken most quickly within a soul, take the floor, give orders: that decides the entire order of rank among its values, that ultimately determines its table of goods. A person’s valuations betray something of the structure of his soul, and of where it sees its conditions of life, its actual need. Now, supposing that need has always drawn together only those people who could indicate similar needs, similar experiences, by similar signs, it follows on the whole that the easy communicability of need—that is, fundamentally, the experiencing of only average and common experiences—must have been the mightiest of all the powers that have held sway over humanity until now. The more alike, more ordinary human beings always were and are at an advantage; the choicer, subtler, stranger, harder-to-understand people easily remain alone, succumb in their isolation to accidents, and seldom propagate. One must call upon tremendous counterforces to thwart this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile, humanity’s development into the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike—into the common!—

269 The more a psychologist—a born, an inescapable psychologist and diviner of souls—turns toward the choicer cases and human beings, the greater his danger of suffocating from compassion: he needs hardness and cheerfulness more than another person does. For the corruption, the perishing of higher human beings, of souls of a stranger kind, is the rule: it is terrible to have such a rule always before one’s eyes. The manifold torture of the psychologist who has discovered this perishing, who first discovers and then almost invariably rediscovers, throughout all history, this whole inner “hopelessness” of the higher human being, this eternal “Too late!” in every sense—may perhaps one day cause him to turn bitterly against his own lot and attempt self-destruction—to “go to ruin” himself. In almost every psychologist one will notice a telltale inclination and pleasure in the company of everyday and well-ordered people: this betrays that he is always in need of healing, that he needs a kind of flight and forgetting, away from what his insights and incisions, what his “craft,” have laid upon his conscience. Fear of his memory is peculiar to him. He readily falls silent before others’ judgments: with an unmoved face he listens as people revere, admire, love, transfigure where he has seen—or he even conceals his silence by expressly agreeing with some foreground opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his situation becomes so dreadful that the crowd, the educated, the enthusiasts learn their great veneration precisely where he has learned great compassion alongside great contempt—veneration for “great men” and prodigious creatures for whose sake people bless and honor their fatherland, the earth, the dignity of humanity, themselves, and toward whom they direct and educate the young… And who knows whether the same thing has not happened in all great cases until now: that the crowd worshiped a god—and the “god” was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar, and the “work” itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised beyond recognition in his creations; the “work,” the artist’s or philosopher’s, first invents the one who created it, who is supposed to have created it; “great men,” as they are revered, are little, bad fictions composed afterward; in the world of historical values, counterfeiting rules. These great poets, for example, these Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol—as they happen to be, perhaps have to be: people of moments, inspired, sensual, childish, rash and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which some fracture usually has to be concealed; often taking revenge with their works for an inward defilement, often seeking in their soaring flights to forget an all-too-faithful memory, often straying into the mud and almost falling in love with it, until they become like the will-o’-the-wisps around the swamps and pretend to be stars—the people then call them idealists—often struggling with a long disgust, with a recurring ghost of unbelief that chills them and compels them to languish for glory and eat “faith in themselves” out of the hands of intoxicated flatterers—what torture these great artists, and higher human beings in general, are for anyone who has once divined them! It is so understandable that precisely from woman—who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering and unfortunately also craves to help and save far beyond her powers—they so readily receive those outbursts of boundless, utterly devoted compassion that the crowd, above all the revering crowd, does not understand and heaps with curious and self-satisfied interpretations. This compassion regularly deludes itself about its strength; woman would like to believe that love can do everything—that is her true faith. Ah, the knower of the heart divines how poor, stupid, helpless, presumptuous, mistaken, more readily destroying than saving, even the best and deepest love is!—It is possible that beneath the holy fable and disguise of Jesus’ life lies one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowing about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most desirous heart, which never had enough of any human love, which demanded love, being loved, and nothing besides, with hardness, with madness, with terrible outbursts against those who denied it love; the story of a poor, unsatisfied and insatiable being in love, who had to invent hell to send there those who would not love him—and who finally, having become knowledgeable about human love, had to invent a God who was all love, all capacity for love—who takes pity on human love because it is so very pitiful, so ignorant! Whoever feels this way, whoever knows about love in this way—seeks death.—But why dwell on such painful things? Supposing one does not have to.—

270 The intellectual arrogance and disgust of every person who has suffered deeply—how deeply people can suffer almost determines their order of rank—his shuddering certainty, which thoroughly saturates and colors him, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest can know, that he has been acquainted with and once “at home” in many distant, terrible worlds “you know nothing about!”… this intellectual, silent arrogance of the sufferer, this pride of the one chosen for knowledge, of the “initiate,” of the all-but-sacrificed, finds every form of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with intrusive and compassionate hands, and altogether from everything not its equal in pain. Deep suffering makes noble; it separates. One of the subtlest forms of disguise is Epicureanism and a certain boldness of taste henceforth displayed, which takes suffering lightly and puts itself on guard against everything sad and deep. There are “cheerful people” who make use of cheerfulness because it causes them to be misunderstood—they want to be misunderstood. There are “scientific people” who make use of science because it gives a cheerful appearance, and because scientific-mindedness permits the inference that a person is superficial—they want to lead people to a false conclusion. There are free, insolent spirits who would like to conceal and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts; and sometimes folly itself is the mask for an unhappy, all-too-certain knowledge.—From which it follows that it belongs to a subtler humanity to have reverence “for the mask,” and not to practice psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.

271 What separates two human beings most deeply is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What use is all uprightness and mutual usefulness, what use all goodwill toward each other: in the end the fact remains—they “cannot stand each other’s smell!” The highest instinct for cleanliness places the person afflicted with it in the strangest and most dangerous isolation, as a saint: for that is precisely what holiness is—the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question. Some shared awareness of an indescribable fullness in the happiness of bathing, some ardor and thirst that constantly drives the soul out of night into morning and out of murk, out of “tribulation,” into the bright, gleaming, deep, subtle—just as such an inclination distinguishes—it is a noble inclination—it also separates.—The saint’s compassion is compassion for the filth of the human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights where he feels even compassion itself as contamination, as filth…

272 Signs of nobility: never to think of lowering our duties into duties for everyone; not to want to surrender one’s own responsibility, not to want to share it; to count one’s privileges and their exercise among one’s duties.

273 A person striving for great things regards everyone he encounters on his path either as a means or as a delay and obstacle—or as a temporary resting couch. His own distinctive, high-natured goodness toward his fellow human beings becomes possible only when he has reached his height and rules. Impatience, and his consciousness of being condemned until then always to play a comedy—for even war is a comedy and conceals, as every means conceals the end—spoil all his dealings with others: this kind of person knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.

274 The problem of those who wait.—Good fortune and much that cannot be calculated are necessary if a higher human being, in whom the solution to a problem sleeps, is to come to action at the right time—to an “eruption,” as one might say. As a rule it does not happen, and in every corner of the earth sit people waiting who scarcely know to what extent they are waiting, still less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes, too, the awakening call comes too late, that chance occurrence that gives “permission” to act—when the best youth and strength for action have already been used up in sitting still; and how many, at the very moment they “leaped up,” discovered with horror that their limbs had fallen asleep and their minds had already grown too heavy! “It is too late,” they told themselves, having lost faith in themselves and now forever useless.—In the realm of genius, might the “Raphael without hands,” the phrase taken in the widest sense, perhaps be not the exception but the rule?—Perhaps genius is not so rare at all: but the five hundred hands it needs to tyrannize over the καιρός, “the right time”—to seize chance by the forelock!

275 Anyone who does not want to see what is high in a person looks all the more sharply for what is low and foreground in him—and thereby betrays himself.

276 In every kind of injury and loss, the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler: the latter’s dangers must be greater; indeed, given the manifold conditions of its life, the likelihood that it will meet disaster and perish is enormous.—A lizard grows back a finger it has lost: not so a human being.—

277 Bad enough! The old story again! Once one has finished building one’s house, one realizes one has inadvertently learned something in the process that one absolutely had to know before one—began building. The eternal, tiresome “Too late!”—The melancholy of everything finished!…

278 “Wanderer, who are you? I see you go your way, without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes; wet and sad as a plummet that has come back unsatisfied from every depth into the light—what did it seek down there?—with a breast that does not sigh, with a lip that hides its disgust, with a hand that now grasps only slowly: who are you? What did you do? Rest here: this place is hospitable to everyone—recover! And whoever you may be: what would please you now? What would help you recover? Just name it: whatever I have, I offer you!”—“To recover? To recover? Oh, you curious one, what are you saying! But give me, I beg you—”—“What? What? Say it!”—“One mask more! A second mask!”…

279 People of deep sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a way of grasping happiness as though they wanted to crush and suffocate it out of jealousy—ah, they know too well that it will run away from them!

280 “Bad! Bad! What? Isn’t he going—backward?”—Yes! But you understand him badly if you complain about it. He is going backward like anyone who wants to make a great leap.—

281 “Will anyone believe me? But I demand to be believed: I have always been poor at thinking about myself, reflecting on myself, only in quite rare cases, only under compulsion, always without pleasure ‘in the subject,’ ready to wander away from ‘Me,’ always without faith in the result, thanks to an invincible mistrust of the possibility of self-knowledge, which has led me so far that I feel even the concept ‘immediate knowledge,’ which the theorists permit themselves, to be a contradictio in adjecto—this whole fact is almost the surest thing I know about myself. There must be a kind of reluctance in me to believe anything definite about myself.—Is there perhaps a riddle hidden here? Probably; but fortunately not one for my own teeth.—Perhaps it betrays the species to which I belong?—But not to me: just as I myself am quite content to have it.”

282 “But what happened to you?”—“I don’t know,” he said hesitantly; “perhaps the Harpies flew over my table.”—It sometimes happens today that a gentle, moderate, reserved person suddenly flies into a frenzy, smashes plates, overturns the table, shouts, rages, insults everyone—and finally goes aside, ashamed, furious with himself—where? To what end? To starve to death apart from the rest? To choke on his memory?—Anyone who has the desires of a high, discriminating soul and only rarely finds his table set, his food ready, will be in great danger at all times: today, however, his danger is extraordinary. Thrown into a noisy and vulgar age with which he has no wish to eat from the same bowl, he can easily perish from hunger and thirst, or, if he finally does “help himself”—from sudden disgust.—Probably all of us have sat at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the most intellectual among us, who are hardest to nourish, know that dangerous dyspepsia arising from a sudden insight and disillusionment about our food and our table companions—after-dinner disgust.

283 It is a subtle and at the same time noble self-control, supposing one wants to praise at all, always to praise only where one does not agree—in the other case one would be praising oneself, which goes against good taste—admittedly a self-control that offers a pleasant occasion and inducement for being constantly misunderstood. To be entitled to indulge in this genuine luxury of taste and morality, one must live not among intellectual blockheads, but among people whose misunderstandings and mistakes still amuse by their subtlety—or one will have to pay dearly for it!—“He praises me: therefore he agrees with me”—this asinine inference spoils half the lives of us hermits, for it brings the asses into our neighborhood and friendship.

284 To live with an immense and proud composure; always beyond.—To have and not have one’s affects, one’s For and Against, at will; to condescend to them, for hours; to mount them like horses, often like asses—for one must know how to put their stupidity to use as well as their fire. To preserve one’s three hundred foregrounds; also one’s dark glasses: for there are cases where no one may look into our eyes, still less into our “grounds.” And to choose that roguish and cheerful vice for one’s companion, politeness. And to remain master of one’s four virtues: courage, insight, fellow feeling, solitude. For with us solitude is a virtue, as a sublime inclination and urge toward cleanliness that divines how, in contact between human beings—“in society”—things must inevitably go uncleanly. Every community makes one, somehow, somewhere, sometime—“common.”

285 The greatest events and thoughts—but the greatest thoughts are the greatest events—are understood last: the generations contemporaneous with them do not experience such events—they live past them. Something happens here as in the realm of the stars. The light of the most distant stars comes last to human beings; and until it has arrived, human beings deny that there are—stars there. “How many centuries does a spirit need to be understood?”—That too is a measure; with it too one creates an order of rank and an etiquette, such as are needed: for spirit and star.—

286 “Here the view is open, the spirit lifted.”—But there is an opposite kind of person who is also on the heights and also has an open view—but looks down.

287 What is noble? What does the word “noble” still mean to us today? By what does the noble human being betray himself, by what can he be recognized, beneath this heavy, overcast sky of the dawning rule of the rabble, through which everything becomes opaque and leaden?—It is not actions that prove him—actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable—nor is it “works.” Among artists and scholars today one finds enough who betray through their works how a deep desire for the noble drives them: but precisely this need for the noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and is the very eloquent and dangerous sign of its absence. It is not works, it is faith that decides here, that establishes the order of rank here, to take up an old religious formula in a new and deeper sense: some fundamental certainty a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, cannot be found, and perhaps cannot be lost either.—The noble soul has reverence for itself.—

288 There are people whose intelligence is inescapable; they may twist and turn as they please and hold their hands before their telltale eyes (as though the hand were not a traitor!)—in the end it always comes out that they have something to hide, namely intelligence. One of the subtlest means of deceiving at least as long as possible, and successfully pretending to be stupider than one is—which in ordinary life is often as desirable as an umbrella—is called enthusiasm: including what belongs with it, virtue for instance. For, as Galiani says, who must have known: virtue is enthusiasm.

289 In a hermit’s writings one always hears something of the echo of the wasteland too, something of solitude’s whispering tone and shy glances around; from his strongest words, even from his cry, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of keeping silent. Whoever has sat alone with his soul year in, year out, by day and night, in intimate dispute and dialogue; whoever in his cave—it may be a labyrinth, but also a gold mine—has become a cave bear or treasure digger or guardian of treasure and dragon: his concepts themselves finally acquire a twilight color of their own, an odor as much of depth as of mold, something uncommunicative and reluctant that breathes coldly on everyone passing by. The hermit does not believe that any philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has always first been a hermit—has ever expressed his true and ultimate opinions in books: does one not write books precisely to conceal what one harbors within?—Indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher can have “ultimate and true” opinions at all, whether behind every cave there does not lie, must not lie, a still deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world above a surface, an abyss behind every ground, beneath every “grounding.” Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—that is a hermit’s judgment: “There is something arbitrary in the fact that he stopped here, looked back, looked around, that he dug no deeper here and laid his spade aside—there is something distrustful in it too.” Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask.

290 Every deep thinker fears being understood more than being misunderstood. The latter perhaps wounds his vanity; the former, however, his heart, his fellow feeling, which always says: “Ah, why do you want to have it as hard as I do?”

291 The human being, a manifold, mendacious, artificial, opaque animal, uncanny to the other animals less through strength than through cunning and cleverness, invented the good conscience in order to enjoy his soul for once as something simple; and the whole of morality is a long, audacious falsification through which any pleasure in the sight of the soul becomes possible at all. From this point of view, perhaps far more belongs within the concept “art” than people commonly believe.

292 A philosopher: that is a person who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as though from outside, from above and below, as by his own kind of events and lightning bolts; who is perhaps himself a thunderstorm pregnant with new lightning; a fateful human being around whom there is always rumbling and growling and gaping and something uncanny going on. A philosopher: ah, a being who often runs away from himself, often fears himself—but is too curious not to keep “coming back to himself”…

293 A man who says, “I like this; I take it as my own and will protect and defend it against everyone”; a man who can conduct a cause, carry out a decision, remain faithful to a thought, hold on to a woman, punish and overthrow a reckless man; a man who has his anger and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, even the animals, gladly turn and naturally belong, in short a man who is by nature a master—when such a man has compassion, well! That compassion has value! But what does the compassion of those who suffer matter! Or of those who actually preach compassion! Today, almost everywhere in Europe, there is a pathological sensitivity and susceptibility to pain, likewise a repellent lack of restraint in lamentation, an overindulgent softness that would like to dress itself up as something higher with religion and philosophical odds and ends—there is a veritable cult of suffering. The unmanliness of what is christened “compassion” in such circles of enthusiasts is, I think, always the first thing to strike the eye.—One must vigorously and thoroughly banish this newest kind of bad taste; and finally I wish that people would place the good amulet “gai saber” around their hearts and necks against it—“joyful science,” to make it clear to the Germans.

294 The Olympian vice.—In defiance of that philosopher who, as a true Englishman, tried to give laughter a bad name among all thinking minds—“Laughter is a grave defect of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome” (Hobbes)—I would even permit myself an order of rank among philosophers according to the rank of their laughter—up to those capable of golden laughter. And supposing that gods too philosophize, as many an inference has already driven me to suppose, I do not doubt that they also know how to laugh while doing so in a superhuman and new way—and at the expense of all serious things! Gods delight in mockery: it seems they cannot refrain from laughter even during holy rites.

295 The genius of the heart, such as that great hidden one possesses, the tempter-god and born pied piper of consciences, whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul, who speaks not a word, casts not a glance in which there does not lie a consideration and a fold of enticement, whose mastery includes knowing how to appear—and not as what he is, but as what supplies his followers with one more compulsion to press ever closer to him, to follow him ever more inwardly and thoroughly—the genius of the heart that silences everything loud and self-satisfied and teaches it to listen, that smooths rough souls and gives them a taste of a new longing—to lie still like a mirror, so that the deep sky may mirror itself in them; the genius of the heart that teaches the clumsy and overhasty hand to hesitate and grasp more delicately; that divines the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet intellectuality beneath thick, murky ice, and is a divining rod for every grain of gold long buried in a prison of much mud and sand; the genius of the heart from whose touch everyone goes away richer, not favored by grace and taken by surprise, not gladdened and burdened as by another’s goods, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, breathed upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps more uncertain, more tender, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new willing and streaming, full of new unwillingness and streaming back… But what am I doing, my friends? Of whom am I speaking to you? Have I forgotten myself so far that I have not even told you his name? Unless you have already divined for yourselves who this questionable spirit and god is, who wants to be praised in such a way. For as happens to everyone who from childhood has always been on the road and in foreign lands, many strange and not undangerous spirits have crossed my path too, but above all the one of whom I have just spoken, and this one again and again: none other, namely, than the god Dionysus, that great ambiguous one and tempter-god to whom, as you know, I once offered my first fruits in all secrecy and reverence—as the last, it seems to me, to have offered him a sacrifice: for I found no one who understood what I did then. Since then I have learned much, all too much more about this god’s philosophy, and, as I said, from mouth to mouth—I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus: and surely I might at last begin to give you, my friends, a little taste of this philosophy, as far as I am permitted? In a half voice, as is fitting: for it involves many things secret, new, strange, wondrous, uncanny. The very fact that Dionysus is a philosopher, and therefore that gods too philosophize, seems to me a piece of news that is not without its risks and might arouse mistrust precisely among philosophers—among you, my friends, it already has less against it, unless it comes too late and at the wrong hour: for today, as I have been told in confidence, you are reluctant to believe in God and gods. Perhaps, too, I must go further in the frankness of my account than the strict habits of your ears will always find agreeable? Certainly the god in question went further in such dialogues, very much further, and was always many steps ahead of me… Indeed, if it were permissible to give him, after human custom, beautiful, solemn names of splendor and virtue, I would have much praise to bestow on his courage in inquiry and discovery, his daring honesty, truthfulness, and love of wisdom. But a god like this has no use for all that venerable junk and pomp. “Keep it,” he would say, “for yourself and your kind and whoever else needs it! I—have no reason to cover my nakedness!”—One divines: perhaps this kind of divinity and philosopher lacks shame?—Thus he once said: “Under certain circumstances I love human beings”—and here he was alluding to Ariadne, who was present—“the human being is to me a pleasant, brave, inventive animal, without equal on earth; it can still find its way in every labyrinth. I am fond of it: I often think about how to advance it further and make it stronger, more evil, and deeper than it is.”—“Stronger, more evil, and deeper?” I asked in alarm. “Yes,” he said once more, “stronger, more evil, and deeper; also more beautiful”—and with that the tempter-god smiled his halcyon smile, as though he had just said something enchantingly courteous. Here one sees at the same time: it is not only shame that this divinity lacks—and there are, in general, good reasons to conjecture that in some respects the gods, one and all, could be schooled by us human beings. We human beings are—more human…

296 Ah, what have you become, you thoughts of mine, written and painted! Not long ago you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? Already you have taken off your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths: so immortal do they already look, so heartbreakingly upright, so boring! And was it ever otherwise? What things do we copy down and paint, we mandarins with a Chinese brush, we immortalizers of things that let themselves be written—what alone are we capable of painting? Ah, always only what is just about to wither and is beginning to lose its scent! Ah, always only departing and exhausted thunderstorms and yellow, late feelings! Ah, always only birds that have flown themselves weary and flown astray, and now let themselves be caught by hand—by our hand! We immortalize what can no longer live and fly for long, only weary and brittle things! And it is only for your afternoon, you thoughts of mine, written and painted, that I have colors, many colors perhaps, many colorful tendernesses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds—but no one can divine from them how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you old, beloved—wicked thoughts of mine!

Ninth Part:

What Is Noble?

257 Every raising of the human type so far has been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again. A society, that is, which believes in a long ladder of rank and differences in value between one person and another, and needs slavery in some sense. The feeling of distance grows out of ingrained differences between social classes, out of the ruling caste’s constant looking out and down on subjects and tools, and its equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, keeping others down and at a distance. Without this feeling, that other, more mysterious feeling could never arise: the desire to keep extending distance within the soul itself, to develop ever higher, rarer, more distant, more widely stretched, more comprehensive states. In short, the raising of the human type, the continuing “self-overcoming of the human being,” to use a moral formula in a sense beyond morality. Of course, we must not indulge in humanitarian illusions about how an aristocratic society came into being—and therefore about the precondition for that raising of the human type. The truth is hard. Let us tell ourselves without mercy how every higher culture on earth has begun! People whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, predatory people still possessing unbroken strength of will and lust for power, threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle breeders, or on old, worn-out cultures whose last vitality was flickering away in brilliant fireworks of intelligence and corruption. In the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste. Its superiority lay primarily not in physical strength but in strength of soul. They were the more complete human beings—which, at every level, also means “the more complete beasts.”

258 Corruption expresses a threat of anarchy within the instincts, a shaking of the basic structure of feelings and passions called “life.” Corruption is something fundamentally different depending on the living structure in which it appears. When, for example, an aristocracy like France’s at the start of the Revolution throws away its privileges in sublime disgust and sacrifices itself to an excess of its own moral feeling, that is corruption. It was really only the closing act of a corruption lasting centuries, through which it had given up its ruling powers step by step and lowered itself to a function of the monarchy—finally even to its ornament and showpiece. But what is essential in a good, healthy aristocracy is that it feels itself not to be a function of the monarchy or the community, but to be their meaning and highest justification. It therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of countless people who, for its sake, must be pressed down and reduced to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to tools. Its basic belief must be that society has no right to exist for society’s sake, but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a select kind of being can rise to its higher task and, in general, to a higher existence. Like those sun-hungry climbing plants on Java—they are called Sipo Matador—which wrap their arms around an oak so long and so many times that at last, high above it but supported by it, they can spread their crown in the open light and display their happiness.—

259 Refraining from hurting, using violence against, and exploiting one another, setting one’s will on an equal footing with another’s: in a certain rough sense, this can become good manners between individuals, if the conditions are present. Namely, that they are actually alike in amounts of strength and standards of value, and belong together within a single body. But as soon as one tried to take this principle further, perhaps even make it the fundamental principle of society, it would immediately prove to be what it is: a will to deny life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here we must think thoroughly down to the roots and resist all sentimental weakness. Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is foreign and weaker, oppression, harshness, forcing one’s own forms on others, incorporation, and, at the very least and mildest, exploitation. But why must we always use precisely these words, stamped since ancient times with a slanderous intention? Even that body within which, as we assumed before, individuals treat one another as equals—as happens in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it is a living rather than a dying body, do to other bodies everything its members refrain from doing to one another. It will have to be the will to power in the flesh. It will want to grow, spread, draw things to itself, gain the upper hand—not out of any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely will to power. Yet on no point is ordinary European awareness more unwilling to be taught than on this one. Everywhere now, even in scientific disguises, people enthuse about future states of society that will lack an “exploitative character.” To my ears that sounds like a promise to invent a life that refrains from every organic function. “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society. It belongs to the essence of living things as a basic organic function. It follows from the actual will to power, which is precisely the will of life. Even if this is new as a theory, as a reality it is the original fact of all history. Let us at least be that honest with ourselves!—

260 In traveling through the many subtler and coarser moralities that have ruled on earth, or still rule, I found certain features regularly recurring together and linked to one another. At last two basic types revealed themselves to me, and a fundamental difference stood out. There is master morality and slave morality. I immediately add that all higher, more mixed cultures also show attempts to mediate between the two moralities; still more often, they show confusion between them and mutual misunderstanding, sometimes even their harsh coexistence—even in the same person, within a single soul. Moral distinctions in value have arisen either among a ruling kind of people, pleasantly aware of their difference from those they rule, or among the ruled: slaves and dependents of every degree. In the first case, when the rulers determine the concept “good,” it is the elevated, proud states of soul that are felt to distinguish a person and determine rank. The noble person separates from himself those beings who express the opposite of such elevated, proud states: he despises them. Notice at once that in this first kind of morality the opposition “good” and “bad” means the same as “noble” and “contemptible.” The opposition “good” and “evil” has a different origin. The coward, the fearful, the petty person thinking only of narrow advantage is despised. So is the suspicious person with his constrained gaze, the self-abasing person, the doglike human being who lets himself be mistreated, the begging flatterer, and above all the liar. It is a basic belief of all aristocrats that the common people lie. “We truthful ones”—that is what the nobles called themselves in ancient Greece. It is obvious that terms of moral value were everywhere first applied to people, and only later, by derivation, to actions. So it is a serious mistake when historians of morality start from questions such as “Why was the compassionate action praised?” The noble kind of person feels himself to be the determiner of values. He does not need approval. He judges, “What harms me is harmful in itself.” He knows himself to be what first gives honor to things. He creates values. Everything he recognizes in himself, he honors: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of fullness, of power wanting to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the awareness of wealth wanting to give and share. The noble person too helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from compassion; rather from an urge produced by an excess of power. The noble person honors the powerful person in himself, including the one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and remain silent, who gladly practices severity and hardness toward himself and respects everything severe and hard. “Wotan put a hard heart in my breast,” says an old Scandinavian saga. It is rightly composed in these words out of a proud Viking’s soul. Such a person is proud of not being made for pity. That is why the saga’s hero adds the warning: “Anyone whose heart is not hard when young will never have a hard heart.” Noble and brave people who think this way are furthest removed from that morality which sees the mark of morality precisely in compassion, in acting for others, or in disinterestedness. Faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony toward “selflessness,” belong to noble morality just as surely as a slight disdain and wariness toward sympathetic feelings and the “warm heart.” The powerful are the ones who know how to honor. It is their art, their realm of invention. Deep respect for age and tradition—all law rests on this double respect—belief and prejudice in favor of ancestors and against those to come, are typical of the morality of the powerful. Conversely, when people of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future,” and show less and less respect for age, this alone sufficiently reveals the ignoble origin of those “ideas.” But a morality of rulers is most foreign and painful to present-day taste in the severity of its principle that one has duties only toward one’s equals; that toward beings of lower rank, toward everything foreign, one may act as one sees fit, or “as the heart wishes,” and in any case “beyond good and evil.” Compassion and the like may belong here. The capacity and duty for long gratitude and long revenge—both only among equals—subtlety in repayment, refinement in the concept of friendship, a certain need to have enemies (as drainage channels, so to speak, for the feelings of envy, quarrelsomeness, high spirits—basically, so as to be a good friend): all these are typical features of noble morality. As indicated, it is not the morality of “modern ideas,” and so today it is hard to enter into its feelings, hard to dig it up and uncover it. It is different with the second type of morality, slave morality. Suppose the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, self-doubting, and weary begin to moralize: what will their moral judgments have in common? Probably a pessimistic suspicion about the whole human situation will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of humanity along with its situation. The slave looks with envy at the powerful person’s virtues. He is skeptical and distrustful, subtly distrustful of everything “good” that is honored there. He would like to persuade himself that even their happiness is not genuine. Conversely, qualities that make existence easier for sufferers are brought forward and flooded with light. Here compassion, the accommodating, helpful hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, friendliness come to honor. For here these are the most useful qualities, and almost the only means of enduring the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of usefulness. Here is the breeding ground of that famous opposition “good” and “evil.” Power and dangerousness are felt to be present in evil, a certain capacity to inspire fear, a subtlety and strength that prevent contempt from arising. So according to slave morality, the “evil” person inspires fear. According to master morality, it is precisely the “good” person who inspires fear and wants to inspire it, while the “bad” person is felt to be contemptible. The opposition reaches its sharpest point when, as a consequence of slave morality, even the “good” person of this morality finally carries a touch of disdain—it may be slight and well-intentioned—because in the slave’s way of thinking the good person must in any case be the harmless one. He is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, a good fellow. Wherever slave morality gains the upper hand, language tends to bring the words “good” and “stupid” closer together. One last basic difference: the desire for freedom, the instinct for the happiness and subtleties of the feeling of freedom, belong as necessarily to slave morality and its moral practice as the art and enthusiasm of reverence and devotion are the regular signs of an aristocratic way of thinking and valuing. From this we can readily understand why love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must be of noble origin. As everyone knows, its invention belongs to the knight-poets of Provence, those magnificent, inventive people of the “joyful art,” to whom Europe owes so much and almost its very self.—

261 Vanity is among the things a noble person may find hardest to understand. He will be tempted to deny it even where another kind of person thinks he can grasp it with both hands. The problem for him is to imagine beings who try to awaken a good opinion of themselves that they themselves do not hold—and therefore do not “deserve”—and who afterward believe in that good opinion themselves. This seems to him partly so tasteless and disrespectful toward oneself, partly so bizarrely unreasonable, that he would like to treat vanity as an exception, and doubts its presence in most cases where people speak of it. He will say, for example: “I can be mistaken about my value and still demand that others recognize my value exactly as I assess it. But that is not vanity. It is conceit, or, in the more common cases, what is called ‘humility,’ also ‘modesty.’” Or: “I can be pleased by other people’s good opinion for many reasons. Perhaps because I honor and love them, and enjoy every pleasure of theirs. Perhaps because their good opinion endorses and strengthens my belief in my own good opinion. Perhaps because the good opinion of others, even where I do not share it, still benefits me or promises benefit. But none of that is vanity.” The noble person first has to force himself, especially with history’s help, to imagine that, from time immemorial, in every dependent social layer, the common person was only what he was taken to be. Entirely unused to setting values himself, he gave himself no value other than the one his masters gave him. (Creating values is the true right of masters.) We may understand it as the result of an enormous return to ancestral habits that even now the ordinary person still first waits for an opinion about himself, then instinctively submits to it. And by no means only a “good” opinion, but also a bad and unfair one. Think, for example, of most of the self-assessments and self-underestimations that devout women learn from their confessors, and the devout Christian in general learns from his church. In fact, as the democratic order slowly rises—and because of its cause, the mixing of masters’ and slaves’ blood—the originally noble and rare drive to assign oneself a value on one’s own authority and “think well” of oneself will be increasingly encouraged and spread. But it always has against it an older, broader, more thoroughly incorporated inclination. And in the phenomenon of “vanity,” this older inclination becomes master over the younger. The vain person delights in every good opinion he hears about himself, quite apart from all questions of its usefulness, and equally apart from truth or falsehood. Just as he suffers from every bad opinion. For he submits to both; he feels subject to them through that most ancient instinct of submission breaking out in him. It is “the slave” in the vain person’s blood, a remnant of the slave’s slyness—and how much “slave” still lingers in woman, for example!—that tries to seduce people into good opinions of him. It is also the slave who immediately falls down before these opinions afterward, as though he had not brought them about himself. And to say it once more: vanity is a return to an ancestral trait.

262 A kind comes into being, a type becomes firm and strong, through a long struggle against essentially the same unfavorable conditions. Conversely, breeders’ experience teaches us that kinds given overabundant nourishment and generally more protection and care soon show the strongest tendency to vary their type, producing a wealth of marvels and monstrosities, including monstrous vices. Now consider an aristocratic community, say an ancient Greek city-state or Venice, as an arrangement, voluntary or involuntary, for the purpose of breeding. People live together there, dependent on themselves, who want their kind to prevail—usually because they must prevail or face the terrible danger of extermination. Here there is none of the favorable treatment, excess, and protection that encourage variation. The kind needs itself as a kind: as something that can prevail and endure precisely through its hardness, uniformity, and simplicity of form, in constant struggle with its neighbors or with the oppressed who rebel or threaten rebellion. Experience of the most varied sorts teaches it which qualities above all it owes its continued existence to, its continued victories despite all gods and men. It calls these qualities virtues, and breeds only these virtues to greatness. It does so harshly; indeed, it wants harshness. Every aristocratic morality is intolerant: in educating the young, in controlling women, in marriage customs, in the relations of old and young, in criminal laws—which have their eyes only on those who deviate from the type. It counts intolerance itself among the virtues, under the name “justice.” In this way, a type with few but very strong features is established across the changing generations: a kind of stern, warlike, shrewdly silent people, united and closed off—and as such, with the finest feeling for society’s charms and nuances. As I said, constant struggle against the same unfavorable conditions makes a type firm and hard. But finally a fortunate situation arises, and the enormous tension relaxes. Perhaps there are no enemies left among the neighbors, and the means of living, even of enjoying life, are present in overabundance. At one stroke, the bond and compulsion of the old discipline snap. It no longer feels necessary, a condition of existence. If it wanted to continue, it could do so only as a form of luxury, as a taste for the archaic. Variation suddenly appears on the scene in the greatest abundance and splendor, whether as departure from the type toward something higher, finer, rarer, or as degeneration and monstrosity. The individual dares to be an individual and stand apart. At these turning points in history, side by side and often tangled and entwined, there appear a magnificent, varied, jungle-like growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow, and an enormous perishing and self-destruction. This comes from the wildly opposed, seemingly exploding egoisms that struggle with one another “for sun and light” and can no longer draw any limit, restraint, or consideration from the previous morality. It was this morality itself that piled strength up to monstrous heights, that drew the bow so threateningly tight. Now it is, now it is becoming, “outlived.” The dangerous, disturbing point has been reached where the greater, more varied, more comprehensive life lives beyond the old morality. The “individual” stands there, forced to make his own laws and devise his own arts and tricks of self-preservation, self-elevation, self-redemption. All new purposes, all new means, no shared formulas anymore; misunderstanding allied with disrespect; decay, corruption, and the highest desires horribly knotted together; the genius of the race overflowing from every horn of plenty, in good and bad; a fateful simultaneity of spring and fall, full of new attractions and veils belonging to young corruption, not yet exhausted, not yet tired. Danger is here again, the mother of morality: the great danger, this time placed inside the individual, the neighbor and friend, in the street, in one’s own child, one’s own heart, in everything most personal and secret in desire and will. What will the moral philosophers who appear at this time have to preach? These sharp observers and street-corner watchers discover that the end is coming fast, that everything around them is becoming corrupt and spreading corruption, that nothing will last till the day after tomorrow except one kind of person: the incurably mediocre. Only the mediocre have any prospect of continuing, of reproducing. They are the people of the future, the only survivors. “Be like them! Become mediocre!” That is now the only morality that still makes sense, that still finds listeners. But this morality of mediocrity is hard to preach! It can never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak of moderation, dignity, duty, and love of one’s neighbor. It will have trouble hiding its irony!—

263 There is an instinct for rank that, more than anything, is itself a sign of high rank. There is a pleasure in the nuances of reverence that suggests noble ancestry and habits. A soul’s subtlety, goodness, and height are put to a dangerous test when something of the first rank passes it, not yet guarded against intrusive grabbing and clumsiness by the awe of authority. Something unmarked, undiscovered, testing, perhaps deliberately veiled and disguised, going its way like a living touchstone. Anyone whose task and practice is to explore souls will use precisely this art in many forms to determine a soul’s ultimate value, the unalterable, inborn order of rank to which it belongs. He will test its instinct for reverence. “Difference breeds hatred”: the vulgarity of some natures suddenly squirts out like dirty water when some sacred vessel, some treasure from locked shrines, some book bearing the signs of a great destiny is carried past. On the other hand, there is an involuntary falling silent, a hesitation of the eye, a stilling of every gesture, which express that a soul feels the nearness of what is most worthy of reverence. The way respect for the Bible has, on the whole, been maintained in Europe up to now is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of manners Europe owes to Christianity. Books of such depth and ultimate significance need the protection of an externally imposed tyranny of authority, to gain the thousands of years of endurance needed to exhaust and decipher them. Much has been achieved when the great crowd—the shallow and the quick-digesting of every kind—has finally been bred to feel that it may not touch everything. That there are sacred experiences before which it must take off its shoes and keep its unclean hands away. This is almost the highest point to which it can be raised in humanity. Conversely, perhaps nothing about the so-called educated, the believers in “modern ideas,” is so disgusting as their lack of shame: the easy insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, lick, and feel everything. And it is possible that today among the people, the lower people, especially peasants, there is still relatively more nobility of taste and tact in reverence than among the newspaper-reading half-world of the intellect, the educated.

264 What a person’s ancestors most liked to do, and did most constantly, cannot be wiped from his soul. Perhaps they were diligent savers, appendages of a desk and cashbox, modest and middle-class in their desires, modest also in their virtues. Or they lived accustomed to commanding from morning till night, fond of rough pleasures and perhaps still rougher duties and responsibilities. Or finally, at some point, they sacrificed ancient privileges of birth and property to live entirely for their faith—their “God”—as people of a conscience at once unrelenting and delicate, blushing at every compromise. It is simply impossible for a person not to have the qualities and preferences of his parents and forebears in his body, whatever appearances may say against it. This is the problem of race. Suppose we know something about the parents: then we may draw a conclusion about the child. Some repulsive lack of self-restraint, some secret envy, a clumsy insistence on being right—these three together have always constituted the true rabble type—must pass to the child as surely as tainted blood. Even with the best education and cultivation, one will achieve only a deception about such an inheritance. And what else do education and cultivation want today! In our very popular—that is to say, rabble-like—age, “education” and “cultivation” must essentially be the art of deception: of deceiving about origins, about the inherited rabble in body and soul. An educator who today preached truthfulness above all, and kept calling to his pupils, “Be true! Be natural! Show yourselves as you are!”—even such a virtuous, trusting ass would after a while learn to reach for Horace’s pitchfork, to drive nature out. With what success? “Rabble” will always come running back.—

265 At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I state this: egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul. I mean that unshakable belief that other beings must naturally be subject to a being such as “we are,” and must sacrifice themselves to it. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without any question mark, and without feeling any harshness, compulsion, or arbitrariness in it. Rather, it accepts it as something that may be grounded in the original law of things. If it looked for a name, it would say, “It is justice itself.” Under circumstances that at first make it hesitate, it admits to itself that others exist with equal rights. As soon as it is clear about this question of rank, it moves among these equals, these equally entitled beings, with the same assurance in modesty and delicate reverence that it has in its dealings with itself—following an inborn celestial mechanics understood by all the stars. This subtlety and self-restraint in dealing with its equals is another piece of its egoism—every star is such an egoist. It honors itself in them and in the rights it grants them. It does not doubt that the exchange of honors and rights, as the essence of all social relations, likewise belongs to the natural order of things. The noble soul gives as it takes, out of the passionate, sensitive instinct of repayment that lies at its foundation. Among equals, the concept of “grace” has neither meaning nor a pleasant scent. There may be a sublime art of letting gifts from above descend upon oneself, as it were, and thirstily drinking them up like drops of water. But the noble soul has no talent for this art and gesture. Its egoism prevents it. It dislikes looking “up” at all, but looks either ahead, horizontally and slowly, or down: it knows itself to be on the heights.—

266 “One can truly esteem only someone who does not seek himself.”—Goethe to Councilor Schlosser.

267 The Chinese have a proverb that mothers already teach their children: siao-sin, “make your heart small!” This is the true basic tendency of late civilizations. I do not doubt that an ancient Greek would first notice self-diminishment in us Europeans of today as well. That alone would make us “offend his taste.”—

268 What, in the end, is vulgarity? Words are sound-signs for concepts. But concepts are more or less definite image-signs for sensations that often recur and occur together, for groups of sensations. Using the same words is not enough for people to understand one another. They must also use the same words for the same kind of inner experiences; ultimately, they must have their experience in common. That is why people of one nation understand one another better than members of different nations, even when they use the same language. Or rather, when people have lived together for a long time under similar conditions—of climate, soil, danger, needs, work—something arises whose members “understand one another”: a people. In every soul, an equal stock of often-recurring experiences has gained the upper hand over rarer ones. On the basis of these, people understand one another quickly, and ever more quickly—the history of language is the history of a process of shortening. On the basis of this quick understanding, they join together closely, and ever more closely. The greater the danger, the greater the need to agree quickly and easily about what must be done. Not misunderstanding one another in danger: that is what people absolutely cannot do without in their dealings. Every friendship or love affair still undergoes this test. Nothing of the kind lasts once it becomes clear that, with the same words, one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, fears something different from the other. (Fear of “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the benevolent guardian spirit that so often keeps people of different sexes from the hasty unions their senses and hearts advise—not some Schopenhauerian “spirit of the species”!) Which groups of sensations awaken fastest within a soul, take the floor, give the command: this decides the entire order of rank among its values, and ultimately determines its table of goods. A person’s valuations reveal something about the structure of his soul, and where it sees the conditions of its life, its real need. Now suppose that need has always brought together only people who could indicate similar needs and similar experiences with similar signs. It follows, on the whole, that the ease with which need can be communicated—that is, ultimately, experiencing only average and common experiences—must have been the mightiest of all powers that have governed humanity so far. The more alike, more ordinary people have always had the advantage, and still do. The more select, sensitive, unusual, harder-to-understand people easily remain alone, fall victim to accidents in their isolation, and rarely reproduce. Enormous counterforces must be called on to thwart this natural, all-too-natural advance toward similarity: humanity’s continued development toward the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike—toward the vulgar!

269 The more a psychologist—a born, an inevitable psychologist and reader of souls—turns toward the more select cases and people, the greater his danger of suffocating from compassion. He needs hardness and cheerfulness more than another person does. For the corruption and ruin of higher people, of souls of a stranger kind, is the rule. It is terrible to have such a rule constantly before one’s eyes. The psychologist’s many torments may one day cause him to turn bitterly against his own fate and attempt self-destruction—to “go to ruin” himself. He has discovered this ruin, first once and then almost always again, throughout history: all this inner “hopelessness” of the higher person, this eternal “Too late!” in every sense. In almost every psychologist one will notice a revealing preference and pleasure in the company of everyday, orderly people. This reveals his constant need for healing, for a kind of escape and forgetting, away from what his insights and incisions, his “craft,” have laid upon his conscience. Fear of his own memory is characteristic of him. Faced with other people’s judgments, he easily falls silent. With an unmoving face, he listens to reverence, admiration, love, glorification precisely where he has seen. Or he even hides his silence by expressly agreeing with some surface opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his position becomes so dreadful that the crowd, the educated, the enthusiasts learn great reverence precisely where he has learned great compassion alongside great contempt. Reverence for “great men” and miraculous creatures, for whose sake people bless and honor their fatherland, the earth, humanity’s dignity, themselves; toward whom they point the young, toward whom they educate them… And who knows whether the same thing has happened in every great case so far: that the crowd worshiped a god—and the “god” was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar, and the “work” itself is a success. The great statesman, conqueror, discoverer is disguised in his creations until he is unrecognizable. The “work,” the artist’s or philosopher’s, first invents the person who created it, who supposedly created it. The “great men,” as they are revered, are little, bad fictions made up afterward. Counterfeiting rules in the world of historical values. Those great poets, for example, those Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol, being as they are, perhaps must be: people of moments, inspired, sensual, childish, careless and sudden in distrust and trust; with souls in which some break usually has to be concealed. Often taking revenge in their works for some inner stain, often seeking, in their flights upward, to forget an all-too-faithful memory. Often lost in the mud and almost in love with it, until they become like the wandering lights around swamps and pretend to be stars—the people then call them idealists. Often struggling with a long disgust, with a recurring ghost of unbelief that chills them and forces them to languish for glory and feed on “faith in themselves” from the hands of intoxicated flatterers. What a torment these great artists, and higher people in general, are to anyone who has once seen through them! It is so understandable that from woman in particular—who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering and, unfortunately, craves to help and save far beyond her powers—they so easily receive those outbursts of boundless, utterly devoted pity. The crowd, especially the worshiping crowd, does not understand these outbursts and heaps curious, self-satisfied interpretations on them. This compassion regularly deceives itself about its power. Woman wants to believe that love can do anything: that is her real faith. Ah, someone who knows the heart sees how poor, stupid, helpless, presumptuous, mistaken even the best and deepest love is—more likely to destroy than to save! It is possible that beneath the holy fable and disguise of Jesus’s life lies hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowing about love. The martyrdom of the most innocent and demanding heart, never satisfied with any human love, demanding love, being loved, and nothing else—with harshness, with madness, with terrible outbursts against those who refused it love. The story of a poor person unsatisfied and insatiable in love, who had to invent hell to send there those who did not want to love him. Who finally, having learned about human love, had to invent a God who is entirely love, entirely the ability to love—who takes pity on human love because it is so very poor, so ignorant! Anyone who feels this way, who knows about love in this way, seeks death. But why dwell on such painful things? Assuming one does not have to.—

270 The intellectual arrogance and disgust of anyone who has suffered deeply—how deeply people can suffer almost determines their rank. His shuddering certainty, which soaks and colors him through and through, that because of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest can know; that he has been acquainted with, and once “at home” in, many distant, terrible worlds “you know nothing about!”… This silent intellectual arrogance of the sufferer, this pride of the one chosen for knowledge, the “initiate,” the one all but sacrificed, finds every form of disguise necessary to protect itself from the touch of intrusive, pitying hands, and in general from everything that is not its equal in pain. Deep suffering makes noble; it separates. One of the subtlest forms of disguise is Epicureanism, and a certain boldness of taste displayed from then on, which treats suffering lightly and defends itself against everything sad and deep. There are “cheerful people” who use cheerfulness because it makes them misunderstood: they want to be misunderstood. There are “scientific people” who use science because it gives a cheerful appearance, and because being scientific suggests that the person is superficial: they want to lure people to a false conclusion. There are free, insolent spirits who want to hide and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts. And sometimes foolishness itself is the mask of an unhappy, all-too-certain knowledge. It follows that a more sensitive humanity includes reverence “for the mask,” and refrains from practicing psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.

271 What separates two people most deeply is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What use are all their decency and mutual usefulness, all their goodwill toward each other? In the end the fact remains: they “cannot stand each other’s smell!” The highest instinct for cleanliness puts the person who has it into the strangest and most dangerous isolation, as a saint. For that is precisely what holiness is: the highest spiritualization of this instinct. Some shared awareness of an indescribable fullness in the happiness of bathing, some heat and thirst constantly driving the soul from night into morning, and from murk, from “tribulation,” into what is bright, shining, deep, fine: as much as such an inclination distinguishes—it is a noble inclination—it also separates. The saint’s compassion is compassion for the dirt of the human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights at which he feels compassion itself as contamination, as dirt…

272 Signs of nobility: never thinking of lowering our duties into duties for everyone; not wanting to give away or share our own responsibility; counting our privileges and their exercise among our duties.

273 A person who strives for great things sees everyone he meets on his path either as a means, a delay and obstacle—or as a temporary couch to rest on. His own distinctive, high-minded kindness toward his fellow human beings becomes possible only when he has reached his height and rules. Impatience, and his awareness that until then he is always condemned to play in a comedy—for even war is a comedy, and conceals, as every means conceals its end—spoil every social relation for him. This kind of person knows solitude, and the most poisonous thing in it.

274 The problem of those who wait. Good luck and many unpredictable things are needed for a higher person, in whom the solution of a problem sleeps, to act while there is still time—to “break out,” as one might say. Usually it does not happen, and in every corner of the earth sit people waiting, scarcely knowing in what sense they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the wake-up call comes too late: that chance event that gives “permission” to act, when the best youth and strength for action have already been used up by sitting still. And how many a person has discovered with horror, just as he “sprang up,” that his limbs had fallen asleep and his mind had already grown too heavy! “It is too late,” he told himself, having lost faith in himself and now useless forever. In the realm of genius, might the “Raphael without hands,” taking the words in their broadest sense, be not the exception but the rule? Perhaps genius is not so rare at all. But the five hundred hands it needs to master the καιρός, “the right time,” to seize chance by the forelock!

275 Anyone who does not want to see what is high in a person looks all the more sharply for what is low and superficial in him—and thereby reveals himself.

276 With every kind of injury and loss, the lower, coarser soul is better off than the nobler one. The latter’s dangers must be greater. Indeed, because of the many conditions its life depends on, the likelihood of its meeting disaster and perishing is enormous. A lizard grows back a finger it has lost. Not so a human being.—

277 Bad enough! The old story again! Once you have finished building your house, you realize you have unexpectedly learned something in the process that you absolutely needed to know before you—began building. The eternal, wretched “Too late!” The melancholy of everything finished!…

278 “Wanderer, who are you? I see you going your way, without mockery, without love, with unreadable eyes. Wet and sad like a sounding weight brought unsatisfied back into the light from every depth—what was it looking for down there? With a breast that does not sigh, with a lip that hides its disgust, with a hand that now grasps only slowly: who are you? What have you done? Rest here: this place welcomes everyone. Recover! And whoever you may be: what pleases you now? What helps you recover? Just name it: whatever I have, I offer you!” “To recover? To recover? Oh, you curious person, what are you saying! But give me, please—” “What? What? Say it!” “One more mask! A second mask!”…

279 People of deep sadness reveal themselves when they are happy. They have a way of grasping happiness as though, out of jealousy, they wanted to crush and suffocate it. Ah, they know all too well that it runs away from them!

280 “Bad! Bad! What? Isn’t he going—backward?” Yes! But you misunderstand him if you complain about that. He is stepping back like anyone who wants to make a great leap.—

281 “Will anyone believe me? But I demand to be believed: I have always been poor at thinking about myself, reflecting on myself. I have done it only very rarely, only under compulsion, always without pleasure ‘in the subject,’ ready to wander away from ‘me,’ always without faith in the result. This is thanks to an unconquerable distrust of the possibility of self-knowledge, which has led me so far as to feel that even the concept ‘immediate knowledge,’ which theorists allow themselves, is a contradiction in terms. This whole fact is almost the most certain thing I know about myself. There must be a kind of reluctance in me to believe anything definite about myself. Is there perhaps a riddle in this? Probably; but fortunately not one for my own teeth. Perhaps it reveals the species to which I belong? But not to me—which is just as I would wish.”

282 “But what happened to you?” “I don’t know,” he said hesitantly. “Perhaps the Harpies flew over my table.” Nowadays it sometimes happens that a gentle, moderate, reserved person suddenly goes wild, smashes plates, overturns the table, screams, rages, insults everyone—and finally goes off alone, ashamed, furious with himself. Where to? What for? To starve to death apart from others? To suffocate on his memory? Anyone with the desires of a high, choosy soul, who only rarely finds his table laid, his food ready, will face great danger at all times. But today it is extraordinary. Thrown into a noisy, rabble-like age, with which he does not want to eat from the same dish, he can easily perish from hunger and thirst—or, if he finally does “dig in,” from sudden disgust. Probably all of us have sat at tables where we did not belong. And precisely the most intellectual among us, the hardest to feed, know that dangerous indigestion arising from a sudden insight and disappointment about our fare and our table companions: disgust after dinner.

283 It is a subtle and at the same time noble form of self-control, assuming one wants to praise at all, always to praise only where one does not agree. Otherwise one would be praising oneself, which goes against good taste. Admittedly, this self-control provides a pretty occasion and incentive for being constantly misunderstood. To allow oneself this real luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual blockheads, but among people whose misunderstandings and mistakes are still amusing in their subtlety—or one will pay dearly for it! “He praises me: so he agrees with me.” This asinine conclusion spoils half the lives of us hermits, because it brings asses into our neighborhood and friendship.

284 To live with an enormous, proud composure; always beyond. To have or not have one’s passions, one’s yes and no, at will; to descend to them for hours; to sit on them as on horses, often as on asses—for one must know how to use their stupidity as well as their fire. To preserve one’s three hundred surfaces; also one’s dark glasses, because there are cases where no one may look into our eyes, still less into our “grounds.” And to choose that roguish, cheerful vice, courtesy, for one’s company. And to remain master of one’s four virtues: courage, insight, sympathy, solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, a sublime inclination and urge toward cleanliness, which senses how contact between people—“in society”—must inevitably be unclean. Every community makes one, somehow, somewhere, sometime—“common.”

285 The greatest events and thoughts—but the greatest thoughts are the greatest events—are understood latest. The generations living at the same time as them do not experience such events: they live right past them. Something happens here like what happens among the stars. The light of the most distant stars reaches people last; and until it has arrived, people deny that there are—stars there. “How many centuries does a mind need to be understood?” That too is a measure. With it one also creates an order of rank and an etiquette, such as is needed: for mind and star.—

286 “Here the view is clear, the spirit raised.” But there is an opposite kind of person, also on the heights, also with a clear view—but looking down.

287 What is noble? What does the word “noble” still mean to us today? Under this heavy, veiled sky of the beginnings of mob rule, which makes everything opaque and leaden, what reveals the noble person, what lets us recognize him? It is not actions that prove him—actions are always open to many meanings, always unfathomable. Nor is it his “works.” Among artists and scholars today, one finds enough people whose works reveal a deep desire driving them toward the noble. But precisely this need for the noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and is the eloquent and dangerous sign of its absence. It is not works but faith that decides here, that establishes rank—to take up an old religious formula in a new and deeper sense. Some basic certainty a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, cannot be found, and perhaps cannot be lost either. The noble soul has reverence for itself.—

288 There are people who are inescapably intelligent. They may twist and turn as they like, hold their hands over their revealing eyes—as though the hand were not a betrayer! In the end it always comes out that they have something to hide: intelligence. One of the subtlest means of deceiving people, at least as long as possible, and successfully making oneself look stupider than one is—which in everyday life is often as desirable as an umbrella—is called enthusiasm. Add what belongs with it, for example virtue. For as Galiani says, and he must have known: virtue is enthusiasm.

289 In a hermit’s writings one always hears something of the echo of the wasteland, something of solitude’s whispering and shy glancing around. From his strongest words, even from his cry, there still sounds a new, more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. Anyone who has sat alone with his soul year after year, day and night, in intimate argument and dialogue; anyone who, in his cave—which may be a labyrinth, but also a gold mine—has become a cave bear or a treasure digger, or a treasure guardian and dragon: in the end his very concepts take on their own twilight color. They acquire a smell of depth as much as of mold, something uncommunicative and reluctant that blows cold on every passerby. The hermit does not believe that any philosopher—assuming a philosopher was always first a hermit—ever expressed his real and final opinions in books. Doesn’t one write books precisely to hide what one harbors within? Indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher can have “final and real” opinions at all; whether behind every cave there does not lie, must not lie, a deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world above a surface, an abyss behind every ground, beneath every “grounding.” Every philosophy is a surface philosophy: that is a hermit’s judgment. “There is something arbitrary about the fact that he stopped here, looked back, looked around, did not dig deeper here, and put the spade aside. There is also something suspicious about it.” Every philosophy also hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask.

290 Every deep thinker fears being understood more than being misunderstood. The latter may hurt his vanity; the former hurts his heart, his sympathy, which always says, “Ah, why do you want to have it as hard as I do?”

291 The human being, a many-sided, lying, artificial, opaque animal, frightening to the other animals less through strength than through cunning and cleverness, invented the good conscience so that for once he could enjoy his soul as simple. And all morality is a bold, long falsification through which any pleasure at all in the sight of the soul becomes possible. From this point of view, perhaps much more belongs within the concept “art” than people usually believe.

292 A philosopher: a person who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things. Who is struck by his own thoughts as though from outside, from above and below, as by his own kind of events and lightning bolts. Who is perhaps himself a thunderstorm pregnant with new lightning. A fateful person, around whom there is always rumbling and growling and gaping and something uncanny going on. A philosopher: ah, a being who often runs away from himself, often fears himself—but is too curious not to keep “coming back to himself”…

293 A man who says, “I like this; I take it for my own and will protect and defend it against everyone.” A man who can lead a cause, carry through a decision, remain faithful to a thought, hold on to a woman, punish and strike down a reckless person. A man who has his anger and his sword, and to whom the weak, suffering, and hard-pressed, even animals, gladly turn and naturally belong. In short, a man who is a master by nature: when such a man feels compassion, well, this compassion has value! But what does the compassion of those who suffer matter! Or of those who actually preach compassion! Almost everywhere in Europe today there is a sickly sensitivity and irritability toward pain, and an equally repulsive lack of restraint in complaining. An overdelicacy that wants to dress itself up as something higher with religion and philosophical bric-a-brac. There is a downright cult of suffering. What strikes the eye first, I think, is always the unmanliness of what these circles of enthusiasts christen “compassion.” This latest form of bad taste must be firmly and thoroughly banned. And finally I wish people would hang the good amulet “gai saber” around their hearts and necks to ward it off—“joyful knowledge,” to make it clear to the Germans.

294 The Olympian vice. In defiance of that philosopher who, like a true Englishman, tried to give laughter a bad reputation among all thinking minds—“Laughter is a serious infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome” (Hobbes)—I would even venture to rank philosophers according to the rank of their laughter, up to those capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods too philosophize—a conclusion I have already been driven toward more than once—I do not doubt that, in doing so, they also know how to laugh in a new, superhuman way—and at the expense of everything serious! Gods enjoy mockery. It seems they cannot stop laughing even during sacred rites.

295 The genius of the heart, such as that great hidden one possesses, the tempter-god and born pied piper of consciences. His voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul. He does not say a word, does not cast a glance, without some consideration and twist of enticement in it. Part of his mastery is knowing how to appear—not as what he is, but as what gives those who follow him one more compulsion to press ever closer to him, to follow him ever more inwardly and thoroughly. The genius of the heart that silences everything loud and self-satisfied and teaches it to listen; that smooths rough souls and lets them taste a new desire: to lie still like a mirror, so that the deep sky may be reflected in them. The genius of the heart that teaches the clumsy, overhasty hand to hesitate and grasp more delicately; that detects the hidden, forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet intellectual life beneath thick, murky ice, and is a divining rod for every grain of gold long buried in a prison of mud and sand. The genius of the heart, whose touch sends everyone away richer—not favored and astonished, not made happy and burdened as though by someone else’s possessions, but richer in themselves, newer to themselves than before, broken open, breathed on and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps less certain, more tender, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that still have no name, full of new willing and flowing, full of new unwillingness and flowing back… But what am I doing, my friends? Who am I talking to you about? Have I forgotten myself so far that I have not even told you his name? Unless you have already guessed for yourselves who this questionable spirit and god is, who wants to be praised in such a way. As happens to everyone who has always been traveling and abroad since childhood, I too have had strange and not harmless spirits cross my path. Above all the one I have just spoken of, and him again and again: no less than the god Dionysus, that great ambiguous one and tempter-god, to whom, as you know, I once offered my first fruits in all secrecy and reverence—as, it seems to me, the last person to have offered him a sacrifice. For I found no one who understood what I was doing then. Since then I have learned much, all too much more about this god’s philosophy, and, as I said, in direct conversation—I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus. And might I not finally begin to let you, my friends, taste a little of this philosophy, as far as I am permitted? In a low voice, as is fitting: for it concerns many things secret, new, strange, wondrous, uncanny. That Dionysus is a philosopher at all, and therefore that gods too philosophize, already seems to me a piece of news that is not without danger, and might arouse distrust precisely among philosophers. Among you, my friends, it has less against it, unless it comes too late and at the wrong hour. For I have been told that nowadays you are reluctant to believe in God and gods. Perhaps, too, I must go further in the frankness of my account than the strict habits of your ears will always enjoy? Certainly the god in question went further, very much further, in such conversations, and was always many steps ahead of me… Yes, if I were permitted to give him beautiful, solemn titles of splendor and virtue in the human manner, I would have much praise for his courage as an explorer and discoverer, for his daring honesty, truthfulness, and love of wisdom. But such a god has no use for all this venerable clutter and finery. “Keep it,” he would say, “for yourself and your kind, and whoever else needs it! I—have no reason to cover my nakedness!” One guesses: perhaps this kind of deity and philosopher lacks shame? Thus he once said, “Under certain circumstances I love human beings”—and here he was alluding to Ariadne, who was present—“the human being is to me a pleasant, brave, inventive animal, without an equal on earth; it still finds its way in every labyrinth. I am fond of it. I often think about how to bring it further forward and make it stronger, more evil, and deeper than it is.” “Stronger, more evil, and deeper?” I asked in alarm. “Yes,” he said once more, “stronger, more evil, and deeper; also more beautiful”—and with that the tempter-god smiled his serene smile, as though he had just said something charmingly courteous. One sees at the same time that this deity lacks more than shame. And there are good reasons in general for supposing that in some respects all the gods could take lessons from us human beings. We human beings are—more human…

296 Ah, what have you become, my written and painted thoughts! Not long ago you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths: they already look so immortal, so heartbreakingly upright, so boring! And was it ever any different? What things do we copy down and paint, we mandarins with a Chinese brush, we immortalizers of things that can be written? What alone are we able to paint? Ah, always only what is just about to wilt and begin losing its scent! Ah, always only departing, exhausted thunderstorms and yellow, late feelings! Ah, always only birds that have flown themselves tired and astray, and now let themselves be caught by hand—by our hand! We immortalize what can no longer live and fly for long, only tired, worn-out things! And it is only for your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, that I have colors—many colors, perhaps, many colorful caresses, and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds. But from these no one can guess how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old, beloved—wicked thoughts!