Part II — The Free Spirit
Original German
Zweites Hauptstück:
Der freie Geist.
24 O sancta simplicitas! In welcher seltsamen Vereinfachung und Fälschung lebt der Mensch! Man kann sich nicht zu Ende wundern, wenn man sich erst einmal die Augen für dies Wunder eingesetzt hat! Wie haben wir Alles um uns hell und frei und leicht und einfach gemacht! wie wussten wir unsern Sinnen einen Freipass für alles Oberflächliche, unserm Denken eine göttliche Begierde nach muthwilligen Sprüngen und Fehlschlüssen zu geben!—wie haben wir es von Anfang an verstanden, uns unsre Unwissenheit zu erhalten, um eine kaum begreifliche Freiheit, Unbedenklichkeit, Unvorsichtigkeit, Herzhaftigkeit, Heiterkeit des Lebens, um das Leben zu geniessen! Und erst auf diesem nunmehr festen und granitnen Grunde von Unwissenheit durfte sich bisher die Wissenschaft erheben, der Wille zum Wissen auf dem Grunde eines viel gewaltigeren Willens, des Willens zum Nicht-wissen, zum Ungewissen, zum Unwahren! Nicht als sein Gegensatz, sondern—als seine Verfeinerung! Mag nämlich auch die Sprache, hier wie anderwärts, nicht über ihre Plumpheit hinauskönnen und fortfahren, von Gegensätzen zu reden, wo es nur Grade und mancherlei Feinheit der Stufen giebt; mag ebenfalls die eingefleischte Tartüfferie der Moral, welche jetzt zu unserm unüberwindlichen "Fleisch und Blut" gehört, uns Wissenden selbst die Worte im Munde umdrehen: hier und da begreifen wir es und lachen darüber, wie gerade noch die beste Wissenschaft uns am besten in dieser vereinfachten, durch und durch künstlichen, zurecht gedichteten, zurecht gefälschten Welt festhalten will, wie sie unfreiwillig-willig den Irrthum liebt, weil sie, die Lebendige,—das Leben liebt!
25 Nach einem so fröhlichen Eingang möchte ein ernstes Wort nicht überhört werden: es wendet sich an die Ernstesten. Seht euch vor, ihr Philosophen und Freunde der Erkenntniss, und hütet euch vor dem Martyrium! Vor dem Leiden "um der Wahrheit willen"! Selbst vor der eigenen Vertheidigung! Es verdirbt eurem Gewissen alle Unschuld und feine Neutralität, es macht euch halsstarrig gegen Einwände und rothe Tücher, es verdummt, verthiert und verstiert, wenn ihr im Kampfe mit Gefahr, Verlästerung, Verdächtigung, Ausstossung und noch gröberen Folgen der Feindschaft, zuletzt euch gar als Vertheidiger der Wahrheit auf Erden ausspielen müsst:—als ob "die Wahrheit" eine so harmlose und täppische Person wäre, dass sie Vertheidiger nöthig hätte! und gerade euch, ihr Ritter von der traurigsten Gestalt, meine Herren Eckensteher und Spinneweber des Geistes! Zuletzt wisst ihr gut genug, dass nichts daran liegen darf, ob gerade ihr Recht behaltet, ebenfalls dass bisher noch kein Philosoph Recht behalten hat, und dass eine preiswürdigere Wahrhaftigkeit in jedem kleinen Fragezeichen liegen dürfte, welches ihr hinter eure Leibworte und Lieblingslehren (und gelegentlich hinter euch selbst) setzt, als in allen feierlichen Gebärden und Trümpfen vor Anklägern und Gerichtshöfen! Geht lieber bei Seite! Flieht in's Verborgene! Und habt eure Maske und Feinheit, dass man euch verwechsele! Oder ein Wenig fürchte! Und vergesst mir den Garten nicht, den Garten mit goldenem Gitterwerk! Und habt Menschen um euch, die wie ein Garten sind,—oder wie Musik über Wassern, zur Zeit des Abends, wo der Tag schon zur Erinnerung wird:—wählt die gute Einsamkeit, die freie muthwillige leichte Einsamkeit, welche euch auch ein Recht giebt, selbst in irgend einem Sinne noch gut zu bleiben! Wie giftig, wie listig, wie schlecht macht jeder lange Krieg, der sich nicht mit offener Gewalt führen lässt! Wie persönlich macht eine lange Furcht, ein langes Augenmerk auf Feinde, auf mögliche Feinde! Diese Ausgestossenen der Gesellschaft, diese Lang-Verfolgten, Schlimm-Gehetzten,—auch die Zwangs-Einsiedler, die Spinoza's oder Giordano Bruno's—werden zuletzt immer, und sei es unter der geistigsten Maskerade, und vielleicht ohne dass sie selbst es wissen, zu raffinirten Rachsüchtigen und Giftmischern (man grabe doch einmal den Grund der Ethik und Theologie Spinoza's auf!)—gar nicht zu reden von der Tölpelei der moralischen Entrüstung, welche an einem Philosophen das unfehlbare Zeichen dafür ist, dass ihm der philosophische Humor davon lief. Das Martyrium des Philosophen, seine "Aufopferung für die Wahrheit" zwingt an's Licht heraus, was vom Agitator und vom Schauspieler in ihm steckte; und gesetzt, dass man ihm nur mit einer artistischen Neugierde bisher zugeschaut hat, so kann in Bezug auf manchen Philosophen der gefährliche Wunsch freilich begreiflich sein, ihn auch einmal in seiner Entartung zu sehn (entartet zum "Märtyrer", zum Bühnen- und Tribünen-Schreihals). Nur dass man sich, mit einem solchen Wunsche, darüber klar sein muss, was man jedenfalls dabei zu sehen bekommen wird:—nur ein Satyrspiel, nur eine Nachspiel-Farce, nur den fortwährenden Beweis dafür, dass die lange eigentliche Tragödie zu Ende ist: vorausgesetzt, dass jede Philosophie im Entstehen eine lange Tragödie war.—
26 Jeder auserlesene Mensch trachtet instinktiv nach seiner Burg und Heimlichkeit, wo er von der Menge, den Vielen, den Allermeisten erlöst ist, wo er die Regel "Mensch" vergessen darf, als deren Ausnahme:—den Einen Fall ausgenommen, dass er von einem noch stärkeren Instinkte geradewegs auf diese Regel gestossen wird, als Erkennender im grossen und ausnahmsweisen Sinne. Wer nicht im Verkehr mit Menschen gelegentlich in allen Farben der Noth, grün und grau vor Ekel, Überdruss, Mitgefühl, Verdüsterung, Vereinsamung schillert, der ist gewiss kein Mensch höheren Geschmacks; gesetzt aber, er nimmt alle diese Last und Unlust nicht freiwillig auf sich, er weicht ihr immerdar aus und bleibt, wie gesagt, still und stolz auf seiner Burg versteckt, nun, so ist Eins gewiss: er ist zur Erkenntniss nicht gemacht, nicht vorherbestimmt. Denn als solcher würde er eines Tages sich sagen müssen "hole der Teufel meinen guten Geschmack! aber die Regel ist interessanter als die Ausnahme,—als ich, die Ausnahme!"—und würde sich hinab begeben, vor Allem "hinein". Das Studium des durchschnittlichen Menschen, lang, ernsthaft, und zu diesem Zwecke viel Verkleidung, Selbstüberwindung, Vertraulichkeit, schlechter Umgang—jeder Umgang ist schlechter Umgang ausser dem mit Seines-Gleichen -: das macht ein nothwendiges Stück der Lebensgeschichte jedes Philosophen aus, vielleicht das unangenehmste, übelriechendste, an Enttäuschungen reichste Stück. Hat er aber Glück, wie es einem Glückskinde der Erkenntniss geziemt, so begegnet er eigentlichen Abkürzern und Erleichterern seiner Aufgabe,—ich meine sogenannten Cynikern, also Solchen, welche das Thier, die Gemeinheit, die "Regel" an sich einfach anerkennen und dabei noch jenen Grad von Geistigkeit und Kitzel haben, um über sich und ihres Gleichen vor Zeugen reden zu müssen:—mitunter wälzen sie sich sogar in Büchern wie auf ihrem eignen Miste. Cynismus ist die einzige Form, in welcher gemeine Seelen an Das streifen, was Redlichkeit ist; und der höhere Mensch hat bei jedem gröberen und feineren Cynismus die Ohren aufzumachen und sich jedes Mal Glück zu wünschen, wenn gerade vor ihm der Possenreisser ohne Scham oder der wissenschaftliche Satyr laut werden. Es giebt sogar Fälle, wo zum Ekel sich die Bezauberung mischt: da nämlich, wo an einen solchen indiskreten Bock und Affen, durch eine Laune der Natur, das Genie gebunden ist, wie bei dem Abbé Galiani, dem tiefsten, scharfsichtigsten und vielleicht auch schmutzigsten Menschen seines Jahrhunderts—er war viel tiefer als Voltaire und folglich auch ein gut Theil schweigsamer. Häufiger schon geschieht es, dass, wie angedeutet, der wissenschaftliche Kopf auf einen Affenleib, ein feiner Ausnahme-Verstand auf eine gemeine Seele gesetzt ist,—unter Ärzten und Moral-Physiologen namentlich kein seltenes Vorkommniss. Und wo nur Einer ohne Erbitterung, vielmehr harmlos vom Menschen redet als von einem Bauche mit zweierlei Bedürfnissen und einem Kopfe mit Einem; überall wo Jemand immer nur Hunger, Geschlechts-Begierde und Eitelkeit sieht, sucht und sehn will, als seien es die eigentlichen und einzigen Triebfedern der menschlichen Handlungen; kurz, wo man "schlecht" vom Menschen redet—und nicht einmal schlimm -, da soll der Liebhaber der Erkenntniss fein und fleissig hinhorchen, er soll seine Ohren überhaupt dort haben, wo ohne Entrüstung geredet wird. Denn der entrüstete Mensch, und wer immer mit seinen eignen Zähnen sich selbst (oder, zum Ersatz dafür, die Welt, oder Gott, oder die Gesellschaft) zerreisst und zerfleischt, mag zwar moralisch gerechnet, höher stehn als der lachende und selbstzufriedene Satyr, in jedem anderen Sinne aber ist er der gewöhnlichere, gleichgültigere, unbelehrendere Fall. Und Niemand lügt soviel als der Entrüstete.—
27 Es ist schwer, verstanden zu werden: besonders wenn man gangasrotogati denkt und lebt, unter lauter Menschen, welche anders denken und leben, nämlich kurmagati oder besten Falles "nach der Gangart des Frosches" mandeikagati—ich thue eben Alles, um selbst schwer verstanden zu werden?—und man soll schon für den guten Willen zu einiger Feinheit der Interpretation von Herzen erkenntlich sein. Was aber "die guten Freunde" anbetrifft, welche immer zu bequem sind und gerade als Freunde ein Recht auf Bequemlichkeit zu haben glauben: so thut man gut, ihnen von vornherein einen Spielraum und Tummelplatz des Missverständnisses zuzugestehn:—so hat man noch zu lachen;—oder sie ganz abzuschaffen, diese guten Freunde,—und auch zu lachen!
28 Was sich am schlechtesten aus einer Sprache in die andere übersetzen lässt, ist das tempo ihres Stils: als welcher im Charakter der Rasse seinen Grund hat, physiologischer gesprochen, im Durchschnitts-tempo ihres "Stoffwechsels". Es giebt ehrlich gemeinte Übersetzungen, die beinahe Fälschungen sind, als unfreiwillige Vergemeinerungen des Originals, bloss weil sein tapferes und lustiges tempo nicht mit übersetzt werden konnte, welches über alles Gefährliche in Dingen und Worten wegspringt, weghilft. Der Deutsche ist beinahe des Presto in seiner Sprache unfähig: also, wie man billig schliessen darf, auch vieler der ergötzlichsten und verwegensten Nuances des freien, freigeisterischen Gedankens. So gut ihm der Buffo und der Satyr fremd ist, in Leib und Gewissen, so gut ist ihm Aristophanes und Petronius unübersetzbar. Alles Gravitätische, Schwerflüssige, Feierlich-Plumpe, alle langwierigen und langweiligen Gattungen des Stils sind bei den Deutschen in überreicher Mannichfaltigkeit entwickelt,—man vergebe mir die Thatsache, dass selbst Goethe's Prosa, in ihrer Mischung von Steifheit und Zierlichkeit, keine Ausnahme macht, als ein Spiegelbild der "alten guten Zeit", zu der sie gehört, und als Ausdruck des deutschen Geschmacks, zur Zeit, wo es noch einen "deutschen Geschmack" gab: der ein Rokoko-Geschmack war, in moribus et artibus. Lessing macht eine Ausnahme, Dank seiner Schauspieler-Natur, die Vieles verstand und sich auf Vieles verstand: er, der nicht umsonst der Übersetzer Bayle's war und sich gerne in die Nähe Diderot's und Voltaire's, noch lieber unter die römischen Lustspieldichter flüchtete:—Lessing liebte auch im tempo die Freigeisterei, die Flucht aus Deutschland. Aber wie vermöchte die deutsche Sprache, und sei es selbst in der Prosa eines Lessing, das tempo Macchiavell's nachzuahmen, der, in seinem principe, die trockne feine Luft von Florenz athmen lässt und nicht umhin kann, die ernsteste Angelegenheit in einem unbändigen Allegrissimo vorzutragen: vielleicht nicht ohne ein boshaftes Artisten-Gefühl davon, welchen Gegensatz er wagt,—Gedanken, lang, schwer, hart, gefährlich, und ein tempo des Galopps und der allerbesten muthwilligsten Laune. Wer endlich dürfte gar eine deutsche Übersetzung des Petronius wagen, der, mehr als irgend ein grosser Musiker bisher, der Meister des presto gewesen ist, in Erfindungen, Einfällen, Worten:—was liegt zuletzt an allen Sümpfen der kranken, schlimmen Welt, auch der "alten Welt", wenn man, wie er, die Füsse eines Windes hat, den Zug und Athem, den befreienden Hohn eines Windes, der Alles gesund macht, indem er Alles laufen macht! Und was Aristophanes angeht, jenen verklärenden, complementären Geist, um dessentwillen man dem ganzen Griechenthum verzeiht, dass es da war, gesetzt, dass man in aller Tiefe begriffen hat, was da Alles der Verzeihung, der Verklärung bedarf:—so wüsste ich nichts, was mich über Plato's Verborgenheit und Sphinx-Natur mehr hat träumen lassen als jenes glücklich erhaltene petit fait: dass man unter dem Kopfkissen seines Sterbelagers keine "Bibel" vorfand, nichts Ägyptisches, Pythagoreisches, Platonisches,—sondern den Aristophanes. Wie hätte auch ein Plato das Leben ausgehalten—ein griechisches Leben, zu dem er Nein sagte,—ohne einen Aristophanes!—
29 Es ist die Sache der Wenigsten, unabhängig zu sein:—es ist ein Vorrecht der Starken. Und wer es versucht, auch mit dem besten Rechte dazu, aber ohne es zu müssen, beweist damit, dass er wahrscheinlich nicht nur stark, sondern bis zur Ausgelassenheit verwegen ist. Er begiebt sich in ein Labyrinth, er vertausendfältigt die Gefahren, welche das Leben an sich schon mit sich bringt; von denen es nicht die kleinste ist, dass Keiner mit Augen sieht, wie und wo er sich verirrt, vereinsamt und stückweise von irgend einem Höhlen-Minotaurus des Gewissens zerrissen wird. Gesetzt, ein Solcher geht zu Grunde, so geschieht es so ferne vom Verständniss der Menschen, dass sie es nicht fühlen und mitfühlen:—und er kann nicht mehr zurück! er kann auch zum Mitleiden der Menschen nicht mehr zurück!—-
30 Unsre höchsten Einsichten müssen—und sollen!—wie Thorheiten, unter Umständen wie Verbrechen klingen, wenn sie unerlaubter Weise Denen zu Ohren kommen, welche nicht dafür geartet und vorbestimmt sind. Das Exoterische und das Esoterische, wie man ehedem unter Philosophen unterschied, bei Indern, wie bei Griechen, Persern und Muselmännern, kurz überall, wo man eine Rangordnung und nicht an Gleichheit und gleiche Rechte glaubte,—das hebt sich nicht sowohl dadurch von einander ab, dass der Exoteriker draussen steht und von aussen her, nicht von innen her, sieht, schätzt, misst, urtheilt: das Wesentlichere ist, dass er von Unten hinauf die Dinge sieht,—der Esoteriker aber von Oben herab! Es giebt Höhen der Seele, von wo aus gesehen selbst die Tragödie aufhört, tragisch zu wirken; und, alles Weh der Welt in Eins genommen, wer dürfte zu entscheiden wagen, ob sein Anblick nothwendig gerade zum Mitleiden und dergestalt zur Verdoppelung des Wehs verführen und zwingen werde?… Was der höheren Art von Menschen zur Nahrung oder zur Labsal dient, muss einer sehr unterschiedlichen und geringeren Art beinahe Gift sein. Die Tugenden des gemeinen Manns würden vielleicht an einem Philosophen Laster und Schwächen bedeuten; es wäre möglich, dass ein hochgearteter Mensch, gesetzt, dass er entartete und zu Grunde gienge, erst dadurch in den Besitz von Eigenschaften käme, derentwegen man nöthig hätte, ihn in der niederen Welt, in welche er hinab sank, nunmehr wie einen Heiligen zu verehren. Es giebt Bücher, welche für Seele und Gesundheit einen umgekehrten Werth haben, je nachdem die niedere Seele, die niedrigere Lebenskraft oder aber die höhere und gewaltigere sich ihrer bedienen: im ersten Falle sind es gefährliche, anbröckelnde, auflösende Bücher, im anderen Heroldsrufe, welche die Tapfersten zu ihrer Tapferkeit herausfordern. Allerwelts-Bücher sind immer übelriechende Bücher: der Kleine-Leute-Geruch klebt daran. Wo das Volk isst und trinkt, selbst wo es verehrt, da pflegt es zu stinken. Man soll nicht in Kirchen gehn, wenn man reine Luft athmen will.—-
31 Man verehrt und verachtet in jungen Jahren noch ohne jene Kunst der Nuance, welche den besten Gewinn des Lebens ausmacht, und muss es billigerweise hart büssen, solchergestalt Menschen und Dinge mit Ja und Nein überfallen zu haben. Es ist Alles darauf eingerichtet, dass der schlechteste aller Geschmäcker, der Geschmack für das Unbedingte grausam genarrt und gemissbraucht werde, bis der Mensch lernt, etwas Kunst in seine Gefühle zu legen und lieber noch mit dem Künstlichen den Versuch zu wagen: wie es die rechten Artisten des Lebens thun. Das Zornige und Ehrfürchtige, das der Jugend eignet, scheint sich keine Ruhe zu geben, bevor es nicht Menschen und Dinge so zurecht gefälscht hat, dass es sich an ihnen auslassen kann:—Jugend ist an sich schon etwas Fälschendes und Betrügerisches. Später, wenn die junge Seele, durch lauter Enttäuschungen gemartert, sich endlich argwöhnisch gegen sich selbst zurück wendet, immer noch heiss und wild, auch in ihrem Argwohne und Gewissensbisse: wie zürnt sie sich nunmehr, wie zerreisst sie sich ungeduldig, wie nimmt sie Rache für ihre lange Selbst-Verblendung, wie als ob sie eine willkürliche Blindheit gewesen sei! In diesem Übergange bestraft man sich selber, durch Misstrauen gegen sein Gefühl; man foltert seine Begeisterung durch den Zweifel, ja man fühlt schon das gute Gewissen als eine Gefahr, gleichsam als Selbst-Verschleierung und Ermüdung der feineren Redlichkeit; und vor Allem, man nimmt Partei, grundsätzlich Partei gegen "die Jugend".—Ein Jahrzehend später: und man begreift, dass auch dies Alles noch—Jugend war!
32 Die längste Zeit der menschlichen Geschichte hindurch—man nennt sie die prähistorische Zeit—wurde der Werth oder der Unwerth einer Handlung aus ihren Folgen abgeleitet: die Handlung an sich kam dabei ebensowenig als ihre Herkunft in Betracht, sondern ungefähr so, wie heute noch in China eine Auszeichnung oder Schande vom Kinde auf die Eltern zurückgreift, so war es die rückwirkende Kraft des Erfolgs oder Misserfolgs, welche den Menschen anleitete, gut oder schlecht von einer Handlung zu denken. Nennen wir diese Periode die vormoralische Periode der Menschheit: der Imperativ "erkenne dich selbst!" war damals noch unbekannt. In den letzten zehn Jahrtausenden ist man hingegen auf einigen grossen Flächen der Erde Schritt für Schritt so weit gekommen, nicht mehr die Folgen, sondern die Herkunft der Handlung über ihren Werth entscheiden zu lassen: ein grosses Ereigniss als Ganzes, eine erhebliche Verfeinerung des Blicks und Maassstabs, die unbewusste Nachwirkung von der Herrschaft aristokratischer Werthe und des Glaubens an "Herkunft", das Abzeichen einer Periode, welche man im engeren Sinne als die moralische bezeichnen darf: der erste Versuch zur Selbst-Erkenntniss ist damit gemacht. Statt der Folgen die Herkunft: welche Umkehrung der Perspektive! Und sicherlich eine erst nach langen Kämpfen und Schwankungen erreichte Umkehrung! Freilich: ein verhängnissvoller neuer Aberglaube, eine eigenthümliche Engigkeit der Interpretation kam eben damit zur Herrschaft: man interpretirte die Herkunft einer Handlung im allerbestimmtesten Sinne als Herkunft aus einer Absicht; man wurde Eins im Glauben daran, dass der Werth einer Handlung im Werthe ihrer Absicht belegen sei. Die Absicht als die ganze Herkunft und Vorgeschichte einer Handlung: unter diesem Vorurtheile ist fast bis auf die neueste Zeit auf Erden moralisch gelobt, getadelt, gerichtet, auch philosophirt worden.—Sollten wir aber heute nicht bei der Nothwendigkeit angelangt sein, uns nochmals über eine Umkehrung und Grundverschiebung der Werthe schlüssig zu machen, Dank einer nochmaligen Selbstbesinnung und Vertiefung des Menschen,—sollten wir nicht an der Schwelle einer Periode stehen, welche, negativ, zunächst als die aussermoralische zu bezeichnen wäre: heute, wo wenigstens unter uns Immoralisten der Verdacht sich regt, dass gerade in dem, was nicht-absichtlich an einer Handlung ist, ihr entscheidender Werth belegen sei, und dass alle ihre Absichtlichkeit, Alles, was von ihr gesehn, gewusst, "bewusst" werden kann, noch zu ihrer Oberfläche und Haut gehöre,—welche, wie jede Haut, Etwas verräth, aber noch mehr verbirgt? Kurz, wir glauben, dass die Absicht nur ein Zeichen und Symptom ist, das erst der Auslegung bedarf, dazu ein Zeichen, das zu Vielerlei und folglich für sich allein fast nichts bedeutet,—dass Moral, im bisherigen Sinne, also Absichten-Moral ein Vorurtheil gewesen ist, eine Voreiligkeit, eine Vorläufigkeit vielleicht, ein Ding etwa vom Range der Astrologie und Alchymie, aber jedenfalls Etwas, das überwunden werden muss. Die Überwindung der Moral, in einem gewissen Verstande sogar die Selbstüberwindung der Moral: mag das der Name für jene lange geheime Arbeit sein, welche den feinsten und redlichsten, auch den boshaftesten Gewissen von heute, als lebendigen Probirsteinen der Seele, vorbehalten blieb.—
33 Es hilft nichts: man muss die Gefühle der Hingebung, der Aufopferung für den Nächsten, die ganze Selbstentäusserungs-Moral erbarmungslos zur Rede stellen und vor Gericht führen: ebenso wie die Aesthetik der "interesselosen Anschauung", unter welcher sich die Entmännlichung der Kunst verführerisch genug heute ein gutes Gewissen zu schaffen sucht. Es ist viel zu viel Zauber und Zucker in jenen Gefühlen des "für Andere", des "nicht für mich", als dass man nicht nöthig hätte, hier doppelt misstrauisch zu werden und zu fragen: "sind es nicht vielleicht—Verführungen?"—Dass sie gefallen—Dem, der sie hat, und Dem, der ihre Früchte geniesst, auch dem blossen Zuschauer,—dies giebt noch kein Argument für sie ab, sondern fordert gerade zur Vorsicht auf. Seien wir also vorsichtig!
34 Auf welchen Standpunkt der Philosophie man sich heute auch stellen mag: von jeder Stelle aus gesehn ist die Irrthümlichkeit der Welt, in der wir zu leben glauben, das Sicherste und Festeste, dessen unser Auge noch habhaft werden kann:—wir finden Gründe über Gründe dafür, die uns zu Muthmaassungen über ein betrügerisches Princip im "Wesen der Dinge" verlocken möchten. Wer aber unser Denken selbst, also "den Geist" für die Falschheit der Welt verantwortlich macht—ein ehrenhafter Ausweg, den jeder bewusste oder unbewusste advocatus dei geht -: wer diese Welt, sammt Raum, Zeit, Gestalt, Bewegung, als falsch erschlossen nimmt: ein Solcher hätte mindestens guten Anlass, gegen alles Denken selbst endlich Misstrauen zu lernen: hätte es uns nicht bisher den allergrössten Schabernack gespielt? und welche Bürgschaft dafür gäbe es, dass es nicht fortführe, zu thun, was es immer gethan hat? In allem Ernste: die Unschuld der Denker hat etwas Rührendes und Ehrfurcht Einflössendes, welche ihnen erlaubt, sich auch heute noch vor das Bewusstsein hinzustellen, mit der Bitte, dass es ihnen ehrliche Antworten gebe: zum Beispiel ob es "real" sei, und warum es eigentlich die äussere Welt sich so entschlossen vom Halse halte, und was dergleichen Fragen mehr sind. Der Glaube an "unmittelbare Gewissheiten" ist eine moralische Naivetät, welche uns Philosophen Ehre macht: aber—wir sollen nun einmal nicht "nur moralische" Menschen sein! Von der Moral abgesehn, ist jener Glaube eine Dummheit, die uns wenig Ehre macht! Mag im bürgerlichen Leben das allzeit bereite Misstrauen als Zeichen des "schlechten Charakters" gelten und folglich unter die Unklugheiten gehören: hier unter uns, jenseits der bürgerlichen Welt und ihres Ja's und Nein's,—was sollte uns hindern, unklug zu sein und zu sagen: der Philosoph hat nachgerade ein Recht auf "schlechten Charakter", als das Wesen, welches bisher auf Erden immer am besten genarrt worden ist,—er hat heute die Pflicht zum Misstrauen, zum boshaftesten Schielen aus jedem Abgrunde des Verdachts heraus.—Man vergebe mir den Scherz dieser düsteren Fratze und Wendung: denn ich selbst gerade habe längst über Betrügen und Betrogenwerden anders denken, anders schätzen gelernt und halte mindestens ein paar Rippenstösse für die blinde Wuth bereit, mit der die Philosophen sich dagegen sträuben, betrogen zu werden. Warum nicht? Es ist nicht mehr als ein moralisches Vorurtheil, dass Wahrheit mehr werth ist als Schein; es ist sogar die schlechtest bewiesene Annahme, die es in der Welt giebt. Man gestehe sich doch so viel ein: es bestünde gar kein Leben, wenn nicht auf dem Grunde perspektivischer Schätzungen und Scheinbarkeiten; und wollte man, mit der tugendhaften Begeisterung und Tölpelei mancher Philosophen, die "scheinbare Welt" ganz abschaffen, nun, gesetzt, ihr könntet das,—so bliebe mindestens dabei auch von eurer "Wahrheit" nichts mehr übrig! Ja, was zwingt uns überhaupt zur Annahme, dass es einen wesenhaften Gegensatz von "wahr" und "falsch" giebt? Genügt es nicht, Stufen der Scheinbarkeit anzunehmen und gleichsam hellere und dunklere Schatten und Gesammttöne des Scheins,—verschiedene valeurs, um die Sprache der Maler zu reden? Warum dürfte die Welt, die uns etwas angeht -, nicht eine Fiktion sein? Und wer da fragt: "aber zur Fiktion gehört ein Urheber?"—dürfte dem nicht rund geantwortet werden: Warum? Gehört dieses "Gehört" nicht vielleicht mit zur Fiktion? Ist es denn nicht erlaubt, gegen Subjekt, wie gegen Prädikat und Objekt, nachgerade ein Wenig ironisch zu sein? Dürfte sich der Philosoph nicht über die Gläubigkeit an die Grammatik erheben? Alle Achtung vor den Gouvernanten: aber wäre es nicht an der Zeit, dass die Philosophie dem Gouvernanten-Glauben absagte?—
35 Oh Voltaire! Oh Humanität! Oh Blödsinn! Mit der "Wahrheit", mit dem Suchen der Wahrheit hat es etwas auf sich; und wenn der Mensch es dabei gar zu menschlich treibt—"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"—ich wette, er findet nichts!
36 Gesetzt, dass nichts Anderes als real "gegeben" ist als unsre Welt der Begierden und Leidenschaften, dass wir zu keiner anderen "Realität" hinab oder hinauf können als gerade zur Realität unsrer Triebe—denn Denken ist nur ein Verhalten dieser Triebe zu einander -: ist es nicht erlaubt, den Versuch zu machen und die Frage zu fragen, ob dies Gegeben nicht ausreicht, um aus Seines-Gleichen auch die sogenannte mechanistische (oder "materielle") Welt zu verstehen? Ich meine nicht als eine Täuschung, einen "Schein", eine "Vorstellung" (im Berkeley'schen und Schopenhauerischen Sinne), sondern als vom gleichen Realitäts-Range, welchen unser Affekt selbst hat,—als eine primitivere Form der Welt der Affekte, in der noch Alles in mächtiger Einheit beschlossen liegt, was sich dann im organischen Prozesse abzweigt und ausgestaltet (auch, wie billig, verzärtelt und abschwächt -), als eine Art von Triebleben, in dem noch sämmtliche organische Funktionen, mit Selbst-Regulirung, Assimilation, Ernährung, Ausscheidung, Stoffwechsel, synthetisch gebunden in einander sind,—als eine Vorform des Lebens?—Zuletzt ist es nicht nur erlaubt, diesen Versuch zu machen: es ist, vom Gewissen der Methode aus, geboten. Nicht mehrere Arten von Causalität annehmen, so lange nicht der Versuch, mit einer einzigen auszureichen, bis an seine äusserste Grenze getrieben ist (- bis zum Unsinn, mit Verlaub zu sagen): das ist eine Moral der Methode, der man sich heute nicht entziehen darf;—es folgt "aus ihrer Definition", wie ein Mathematiker sagen würde. Die Frage ist zuletzt, ob wir den Willen wirklich als wirkend anerkennen, ob wir an die Causalität des Willens glauben: thun wir das—und im Grunde ist der Glaube daran eben unser Glaube an Causalität selbst -, so müssen wir den Versuch machen, die Willens-Causalität hypothetisch als die einzige zu setzen. "Wille" kann natürlich nur auf "Wille" wirken—und nicht auf "Stoffe" (nicht auf "Nerven" zum Beispiel -): genug, man muss die Hypothese wagen, ob nicht überall, wo "Wirkungen" anerkannt werden, Wille auf Wille wirkt—und ob nicht alles mechanische Geschehen, insofern eine Kraft darin thätig wird, eben Willenskraft, Willens-Wirkung ist.—Gesetzt endlich, dass es gelänge, unser gesammtes Triebleben als die Ausgestaltung und Verzweigung Einer Grundform des Willens zu erklären—nämlich des Willens zur Macht, wie es mein Satz ist -; gesetzt, dass man alle organischen Funktionen auf diesen Willen zur Macht zurückführen könnte und in ihm auch die Lösung des Problems der Zeugung und Ernährung—es ist Ein Problem—fände, so hätte man damit sich das Recht verschafft, alle wirkende Kraft eindeutig zu bestimmen als: Wille zur Macht. Die Welt von innen gesehen, die Welt auf ihren "intelligiblen Charakter" hin bestimmt und bezeichnet—sie wäre eben "Wille zur Macht" und nichts ausserdem.—
37 "Wie? Heisst das nicht, populär geredet: Gott ist widerlegt, der Teufel aber nicht -?" Im Gegentheil! Im Gegentheil, meine Freunde! Und, zum Teufel auch, wer zwingt euch, populär zu reden!—
38 Wie es zuletzt noch, in aller Helligkeit der neueren Zeiten, mit der französischen Revolution gegangen ist, jener schauerlichen und, aus der Nähe beurtheilt, überflüssigen Posse, in welche aber die edlen und schwärmerischen Zuschauer von ganz Europa aus der Ferne her so lange und so leidenschaftlich ihre eignen Empörungen und Begeisterungen hinein interpretirt haben, bis der Text unter der Interpretation verschwand: so könnte eine edle Nachwelt noch einmal die ganze Vergangenheit missverstehen und dadurch vielleicht erst ihren Anblick erträglich machen.—Oder vielmehr: ist dies nicht bereits geschehen? waren wir nicht selbst—diese "edle Nachwelt"? Und ist es nicht gerade jetzt, insofern wir dies begreifen,—damit vorbei?
39 Niemand wird so leicht eine Lehre, bloss weil sie glücklich macht, oder tugendhaft macht, deshalb für wahr halten: die lieblichen "Idealisten" etwa ausgenommen, welche für das Gute, Wahre, Schöne schwärmen und in ihrem Teiche alle Arten von bunten plumpen und gutmüthigen Wünschbarkeiten durcheinander schwimmen lassen. Glück und Tugend sind keine Argumente. Man vergisst aber gerne, auch auf Seiten besonnener Geister, dass Unglücklich-machen und Böse-machen ebensowenig Gegenargumente sind. Etwas dürfte wahr sein: ob es gleich im höchsten Grade schädlich und gefährlich wäre; ja es könnte selbst zur Grundbeschaffenheit des Daseins gehören, dass man an seiner völligen Erkenntniss zu Grunde gienge,—so dass sich die Stärke eines Geistes darnach bemässe, wie viel er von der "Wahrheit" gerade noch aushielte, deutlicher, bis zu welchem Grade er sie verdünnt, verhüllt, versüsst, verdumpft, verfälscht nöthig hätte. Aber keinem Zweifel unterliegt es, dass für die Entdeckung gewisser Theile der Wahrheit die Bösen und Unglücklichen begünstigter sind und eine grössere Wahrscheinlichkeit des Gelingens haben; nicht zu reden von den Bösen, die glücklich sind,—eine Species, welche von den Moralisten verschwiegen wird. Vielleicht, dass Härte und List günstigere Bedingungen zur Entstehung des starken, unabhängigen Geistes und Philosophen abgeben, als jene sanfte feine nachgebende Gutartigkeit und Kunst des Leicht-nehmens, welche man an einem Gelehrten schätzt und mit Recht schätzt. Vorausgesetzt, was voran steht, dass man den Begriff "Philosoph" nicht auf den Philosophen einengt, der Bücher schreibt—oder gar seine Philosophie in Bücher bringt!—Einen letzten Zug zum Bilde des freigeisterischen Philosophen bringt Stendhal bei, den ich um des deutschen Geschmacks willen nicht unterlassen will zu unterstreichen:—denn er geht wider den deutschen Geschmack. "Pour être bon philosophe", sagt dieser letzte grosse Psycholog, "il faut être sec, clair, sans illusion. Un banquier, qui a fait fortune, a une partie du caractère requis pour faire des découvertes en philosophie, c'est-à-dire pour voir clair dans ce qui est."
40 Alles, was tief ist, liebt die Maske; die allertiefsten Dinge haben sogar einen Hass auf Bild und Gleichniss. Sollte nicht erst der Gegensatz die rechte Verkleidung sein, in der die Scham eines Gottes einhergienge? Eine fragwürdige Frage: es wäre wunderlich, wenn nicht irgend ein Mystiker schon dergleichen bei sich gewagt hätte. Es giebt Vorgänge so zarter Art, dass man gut thut, sie durch eine Grobheit zu verschütten und unkenntlich zu machen; es giebt Handlungen der Liebe und einer ausschweifenden Grossmuth, hinter denen nichts räthlicher ist, als einen Stock zu nehmen und den Augenzeugen durchzuprügeln: damit trübt man dessen Gedächtniss. Mancher versteht sich darauf, das eigne Gedächtniss zu trüben und zu misshandeln, um wenigstens an diesem einzigen Mitwisser seine Rache zu haben:—die Scham ist erfinderisch. Es sind nicht die schlimmsten Dinge, deren man sich am schlimmsten schämt: es ist nicht nur Arglist hinter einer Maske,—es giebt so viel Güte in der List. Ich könnte mir denken, dass ein Mensch, der etwas Kostbares und Verletzliches zu bergen hätte, grob und rund wie ein grünes altes schwerbeschlagenes Weinfass durch's Leben rollte: die Feinheit seiner Scham will es so. Einem Menschen, der Tiefe in der Scham hat, begegnen auch seine Schicksale und zarten Entscheidungen auf Wegen, zu denen Wenige je gelangen, und um deren Vorhandensein seine Nächsten und Vertrautesten nicht wissen dürfen: seine Lebensgefahr verbirgt sich ihren Augen und ebenso seine wieder eroberte Lebens-Sicherheit. Ein solcher Verborgener, der aus Instinkt das Reden zum Schweigen und Verschweigen braucht und unerschöpflich ist in der Ausflucht vor Mittheilung, will es und fördert es, dass eine Maske von ihm an seiner Statt in den Herzen und Köpfen seiner Freunde herum wandelt; und gesetzt, er will es nicht, so werden ihm eines Tages die Augen darüber aufgehn, dass es trotzdem dort eine Maske von ihm giebt,—und dass es gut so ist. Jeder tiefe Geist braucht eine Maske: mehr noch, um jeden tiefen Geist wächst fortwährend eine Maske, Dank der beständig falschen, nämlich flachen Auslegung jedes Wortes, jedes Schrittes, jedes Lebens-Zeichens, das er giebt.—
41 Man muss sich selbst seine Proben geben, dafür dass man zur Unabhängigkeit und zum Befehlen bestimmt ist; und dies zur rechten Zeit. Man soll seinen Proben nicht aus dem Wege gehn, obgleich sie vielleicht das gefährlichste Spiel sind, das man spielen kann, und zuletzt nur Proben, die vor uns selber als Zeugen und vor keinem anderen Richter abgelegt werden. Nicht an einer Person hängen bleiben: und sei sie die geliebteste,—jede Person ist ein Gefängniss, auch ein Winkel. Nicht an einem Vaterlande hängen bleiben: und sei es das leidendste und hülfbedürftigste,—es ist schon weniger schwer, sein Herz von einem siegreichen Vaterlande los zu binden. Nicht an einem Mitleiden hängen bleiben: und gälte es höheren Menschen, in deren seltne Marter und Hülflosigkeit uns ein Zufall hat blicken lassen. Nicht an einer Wissenschaft hängen bleiben: und locke sie Einen mit den kostbarsten, anscheinend gerade uns aufgesparten Funden. Nicht an seiner eignen Loslösung hängen bleiben, an jener wollüstigen Ferne und Fremde des Vogels, der immer weiter in die Höhe flieht, um immer mehr unter sich zu sehn:—die Gefahr des Fliegenden. Nicht an unsern eignen Tugenden hängen bleiben und als Ganzes das Opfer irgend einer Einzelheit an uns werden, zum Beispiel unsrer "Gastfreundschaft": wie es die Gefahr der Gefahren bei hochgearteten und reichen Seelen ist, welche verschwenderisch, fast gleichgültig mit sich selbst umgehn und die Tugend der Liberalität bis zum Laster treiben. Man muss wissen, sich zu bewahren: stärkste Probe der Unabhängigkeit.
42 Eine neue Gattung von Philosophen kommt herauf: ich wage es, sie auf einen nicht ungefährlichen Namen zu taufen. So wie ich sie errathe, so wie sie sich errathen lassen—denn es gehört zu ihrer Art, irgend worin Räthsel bleiben zu wollen -, möchten diese Philosophen der Zukunft ein Recht, vielleicht auch ein Unrecht darauf haben, als Versucher bezeichnet zu werden. Dieser Name selbst ist zuletzt nur ein Versuch, und, wenn man will, eine Versuchung.
43 Sind es neue Freunde der "Wahrheit", diese kommenden Philosophen? Wahrscheinlich genug: denn alle Philosophen liebten bisher ihre Wahrheiten. Sicherlich aber werden es keine Dogmatiker sein. Es muss ihnen wider den Stolz gehn, auch wider den Geschmack, wenn ihre Wahrheit gar noch eine Wahrheit für Jedermann sein soll: was bisher der geheime Wunsch und Hintersinn aller dogmatischen Bestrebungen war. "Mein Urtheil ist mein Urtheil: dazu hat nicht leicht auch ein Anderer das Recht"—sagt vielleicht solch ein Philosoph der Zukunft. Man muss den schlechten Geschmack von sich abthun, mit Vielen übereinstimmen zu wollen. "Gut" ist nicht mehr gut, wenn der Nachbar es in den Mund nimmt. Und wie könnte es gar ein "Gemeingut" geben! Das Wort widerspricht sich selbst: was gemein sein kann, hat immer nur wenig Werth. Zuletzt muss es so stehn, wie es steht und immer stand: die grossen Dinge bleiben für die Grossen übrig, die Abgründe für die Tiefen, die Zartheiten und Schauder für die Feinen, und, im Ganzen und Kurzen, alles Seltene für die Seltenen.—
44 Brauche ich nach alledem noch eigens zu sagen, dass auch sie freie, sehr freie Geister sein werden, diese Philosophen der Zukunft,—so gewiss sie auch nicht bloss freie Geister sein werden, sondern etwas Mehreres, Höheres, Grösseres und Gründlich-Anderes, das nicht verkannt und verwechselt werden will? Aber, indem ich dies sage, fühle ich fast ebenso sehr gegen sie selbst, als gegen uns, die wir ihre Herolde und Vorläufer sind, wir freien Geister!—die Schuldigkeit, ein altes dummes Vorurtheil und Missverständniss von uns gemeinsam fortzublasen, welches allzulange wie ein Nebel den Begriff "freier Geist" undurchsichtig gemacht hat. In allen Ländern Europa's und ebenso in Amerika giebt es jetzt Etwas, das Missbrauch mit diesem Namen treibt, eine sehr enge, eingefangne, an Ketten gelegte Art von Geistern, welche ungefähr das Gegentheil von dem wollen, was in unsern Absichten und Instinkten liegt,—nicht zu reden davon, dass sie in Hinsicht auf jene heraufkommenden neuen Philosophen erst recht zugemachte Fenster und verriegelte Thüren sein müssen. Sie gehören, kurz und schlimm, unter die Nivellirer, diese fälschlich genannten "freien Geister"—als beredte und schreibfingrige Sklaven des demokratischen Geschmacks und seiner "modernen Ideen": allesammt Menschen ohne Einsamkeit, ohne eigne Einsamkeit, plumpe brave Burschen, welchen weder Muth noch achtbare Sitte abgesprochen werden soll, nur dass sie eben unfrei und zum Lachen oberflächlich sind, vor Allem mit ihrem Grundhange, in den Formen der bisherigen alten Gesellschaft ungefähr die Ursache für alles menschliche Elend und Missrathen zu sehn: wobei die Wahrheit glücklich auf den Kopf zu stehn kommt! Was sie mit allen Kräften erstreben möchten, ist das allgemeine grüne Weide-Glück der Heerde, mit Sicherheit, Ungefährlichkeit, Behagen, Erleichterung des Lebens für Jedermann; ihre beiden am reichlichsten abgesungnen Lieder und Lehren heissen "Gleichheit der Rechte" und "Mitgefühl für alles Leidende",—und das Leiden selbst wird von ihnen als Etwas genommen, das man abschaffen muss. Wir Umgekehrten, die wir uns ein Auge und ein Gewissen für die Frage aufgemacht haben, wo und wie bisher die Pflanze "Mensch" am kräftigsten in die Höhe gewachsen ist, vermeinen, dass dies jedes Mal unter den umgekehrten Bedingungen geschehn ist, dass dazu die Gefährlichkeit seiner Lage erst in's Ungeheure wachsen, seine Erfindungs- und Verstellungskraft (sein "Geist" -) unter langem Druck und Zwang sich in's Feine und Verwegene entwickeln, sein Lebens-Wille bis zum unbedingten Macht-Willen gesteigert werden musste:—wir vermeinen, dass Härte, Gewaltsamkeit, Sklaverei, Gefahr auf der Gasse und im Herzen, Verborgenheit, Stoicismus, Versucherkunst und Teufelei jeder Art, dass alles Böse, Furchtbare, Tyrannische, Raubthier- und Schlangenhafte am Menschen so gut zur Erhöhung der Species "Mensch" dient, als sein Gegensatz:—wir sagen sogar nicht einmal genug, wenn wir nur so viel sagen, und befinden uns jedenfalls, mit unserm Reden und Schweigen an dieser Stelle, am andern Ende aller modernen Ideologie und Heerden-Wünschbarkeit: als deren Antipoden vielleicht? Was Wunder, dass wir "freien Geister" nicht gerade die mittheilsamsten Geister sind? dass wir nicht in jedem Betrachte zu verrathen wünschen, wovon ein Geist sich frei machen kann und wohin er dann vielleicht getrieben wird? Und was es mit der gefährlichen Formel "jenseits von Gut und Böse" auf sich hat, mit der wir uns zum Mindesten vor Verwechslung behüten: wir sind etwas Anderes als "libres-penseurs", "liberi pensatori", "Freidenker" und wie alle diese braven Fürsprecher der "modernen Ideen" sich zu benennen lieben. In vielen Ländern des Geistes zu Hause, mindestens zu Gaste gewesen; den dumpfen angenehmen Winkeln immer wieder entschlüpft, in die uns Vorliebe und Vorhass, Jugend, Abkunft, der Zufall von Menschen und Büchern, oder selbst die Ermüdungen der Wanderschaft zu bannen schienen; voller Bosheit gegen die Lockmittel der Abhängigkeit, welche in Ehren, oder Geld, oder Ämtern, oder Begeisterungen der Sinne versteckt liegen; dankbar sogar gegen Noth und wechselreiche Krankheit, weil sie uns immer von irgend einer Regel und ihrem "Vorurtheil" losmachte, dankbar gegen Gott, Teufel, Schaf und Wurm in uns, neugierig bis zum Laster, Forscher bis zur Grausamkeit, mit unbedenklichen Fingern für Unfassbares, mit Zähnen und Mägen für das Unverdaulichste, bereit zu jedem Handwerk, das Scharfsinn und scharfe Sinne verlangt, bereit zu jedem Wagniss, Dank einem Überschusse von "freiem Willen", mit Vorder- und Hinterseelen, denen Keiner leicht in die letzten Absichten sieht, mit Vorder- und Hintergründen, welche kein Fuss zu Ende laufen dürfte, Verborgene unter den Mänteln des Lichts, Erobernde, ob wir gleich Erben und Verschwendern gleich sehn, Ordner und Sammler von früh bis Abend, Geizhälse unsres Reichthums und unsrer vollgestopften Schubfächer, haushälterisch im Lernen und Vergessen, erfinderisch in Schematen, mitunter stolz auf Kategorien-Tafeln, mitunter Pedanten, mitunter Nachteulen der Arbeit auch am hellen Tage; ja, wenn es noth thut, selbst Vogelscheuchen—und heute thut es noth: nämlich insofern wir die geborenen geschworenen eifersüchtigen Freunde der Einsamkeit sind, unsrer eignen tiefsten mitternächtlichsten mittäglichsten Einsamkeit:—eine solche Art Menschen sind wir, wir freien Geister! und vielleicht seid auch ihr etwas davon, ihr Kommenden? ihr neuen Philosophen?—
Musean translation
Complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the German and reviewed against it.
Second Main Division:
The Free Spirit.
24 O holy simplicity! What a strange world of simplification and falsification human beings inhabit! Once you have fitted yourself with eyes for this wonder, there is no end to your astonishment! How we have made everything around us bright and free and light and simple! How we have managed to give our senses a free pass for everything superficial, our thinking a divine appetite for willful leaps and false inferences!—How, from the very beginning, we have known how to preserve our ignorance so as to enjoy a scarcely conceivable freedom, lack of scruple, carelessness, boldness, cheerfulness of life—to enjoy life itself! And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance has science so far been able to rise, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far mightier will: the will not to know, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement! For even if language, here as elsewhere, cannot get beyond its own clumsiness and persists in speaking of opposites where there are only degrees and many delicate gradations; even if morality's ingrained Tartuffery, which now belongs to our unconquerable “flesh and blood,” twists the words in the mouths of even us who know: here and there we grasp it and laugh at how precisely the best science still seeks best to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial world, this world composed and falsified to suit us; how, willingly against its will, it loves error because, being alive, it—loves life!
25 After so cheerful an opening, let a serious word not go unheard: it is addressed to the most serious. Take care, you philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering “for the sake of truth”! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you obstinate in the face of objections and red rags; it makes you stupid, beastly, bullish, when, struggling with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and still coarser consequences of enmity, you finally have to play the defenders of truth on earth—as though “truth” were so harmless and bumbling a person that she needed defenders! And you of all people, you knights of the most sorrowful countenance, you gentlemen lurking in corners and spinning cobwebs of the mind! After all, you know well enough that it must not matter whether you in particular are proved right; also that no philosopher has yet been proved right; and that a more praiseworthy truthfulness may lie in every little question mark you place after your watchwords and favorite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all your solemn gestures and trump cards before accusers and courts of law! Better step aside! Flee into hiding! And have your masks and your subtlety, so that people mistake you for someone else! Or fear you a little! And do not forget the garden, the garden with golden trellises! And have people around you who are like a garden—or like music over water at evening, when the day is already becoming a memory—choose the good solitude, the free, willful, light solitude that gives you, too, a right to remain good in some sense! How poisonous, how cunning, how bad every long war makes us when it cannot be fought with open force! How personal a long fear makes us, a long watch kept on enemies, on possible enemies! These outcasts from society, these long-persecuted, savagely hunted people—even the forced hermits, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos—always end by becoming, if under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without knowing it themselves, refined seekers of revenge and mixers of poison (just dig up the ground beneath Spinoza's ethics and theology sometime!)—not to mention the boorishness of moral indignation, which in a philosopher is the infallible sign that his philosophical sense of humor has deserted him. The philosopher's martyrdom, his “sacrifice for truth,” forces into the light whatever agitator and actor was hidden in him; and if one has so far watched him only with an artist's curiosity, then with certain philosophers the dangerous wish may indeed be understandable to see him, for once, in his degeneration too (degenerated into a “martyr,” into a shouter from stage and platform). Only, with such a wish, one must be clear about what one will in any event get to see—only a satyr play, only a farcical afterpiece, only the continuing proof that the long, real tragedy is over: assuming that every philosophy, in its genesis, was a long tragedy.—
26 Every select human being instinctively seeks his citadel and secrecy, where he is released from the crowd, the many, the vast majority, where he may forget the rule “human being,” as its exception—except in the one case where a still stronger instinct drives him straight toward this rule, as a seeker of knowledge in the great and exceptional sense. Anyone whose dealings with people do not sometimes make him shimmer in all the colors of distress, green and gray with disgust, weariness, fellow feeling, gloom, loneliness, is certainly not a person of higher taste; but suppose he does not take all this burden and displeasure on himself voluntarily, keeps evading it, and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel—well, then one thing is certain: he is not made for knowledge, not predestined for it. For as such he would one day have to say to himself, “To hell with my good taste! The rule is more interesting than the exception—than me, the exception!”—and would go down, above all “in.” The study of the average human being, long and earnest, and for this purpose much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, bad company—all company is bad company except that of one's equals—this forms a necessary part of every philosopher's life story, perhaps its most unpleasant, foul-smelling, disillusioning part. But if he is lucky, as befits a favorite child of knowledge, he encounters people who actually shorten and lighten his task—I mean so-called cynics, people who simply acknowledge the animal, the commonness, the “rule” in themselves and still have that degree of intellect and itch that makes them need to speak about themselves and their kind before witnesses—sometimes they even wallow in books as in their own dung. Cynicism is the only form in which common souls brush against what honesty is; and the higher human being must prick up his ears at every coarser or finer cynicism and congratulate himself each time the shameless buffoon or scientific satyr speaks up in his presence. There are even cases where enchantment mingles with disgust: namely, where a whim of nature has bound genius to such an indiscreet goat and ape, as with the Abbé Galiani, the deepest, most clear-sighted, and perhaps also the filthiest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal more silent. More often, as suggested, a scientific head is set on an ape's body, a fine, exceptional intellect on a common soul—among doctors and physiologists of morals in particular, no rare occurrence. And wherever anyone speaks of human beings without bitterness, indeed quite innocently, as a belly with two kinds of needs and a head with one; wherever someone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desire, and vanity, as though these were the real and only mainsprings of human actions; in short, wherever people speak “badly” of human beings—and not even maliciously—the lover of knowledge should listen attentively and diligently; he should keep his ears wherever people speak without indignation. For the indignant person, and anyone who tears and mangles himself with his own teeth (or, as a substitute, the world, or God, or society), may stand higher, morally reckoned, than the laughing, self-satisfied satyr; but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, less significant, less instructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant person.—
27 It is hard to be understood: especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati, among nothing but people who think and live otherwise, namely kurmagati, or at best “at the pace of the frog,” mandeikagati—am I doing everything I can to be hard to understand myself?—and one should be heartily grateful even for a good will toward some subtlety of interpretation. As for “good friends,” however, who are always too indolent and believe that being friends gives them a right to ease, one does well to allow them, from the outset, a margin and playground for misunderstanding—that way one still has something to laugh at—or to abolish them altogether, these good friends—and laugh at that too!
28 The hardest thing to translate from one language into another is the tempo of its style: this has its basis in the character of the race, or, physiologically speaking, in the average tempo of its “metabolism.” There are honestly intended translations that are almost falsifications, as involuntary vulgarizations of the original, simply because its brave and merry tempo could not be translated along with it, the tempo that leaps over, helps one over, everything dangerous in things and words. The German is almost incapable of presto in his language: thus, as we may reasonably conclude, also of many of the most delightful and daring nuances of free, free-spirited thought. Just as the buffo and the satyr are foreign to him, in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, slow-flowing, solemnly clumsy, all the protracted and tedious kinds of style, have developed among the Germans in superabundant variety—forgive me the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and daintiness, makes no exception: a reflection of the “good old days” to which it belongs, and an expression of German taste at a time when there was still a “German taste,” which was a rococo taste, in morals and the arts. Lessing is an exception, thanks to his actor's nature, which understood much and knew how to handle much: it was not for nothing that he translated Bayle, and he liked escaping into the company of Diderot and Voltaire, still more into that of the Roman comic playwrights—Lessing loved free-spiritedness, escape from Germany, in tempo too. But how could the German language, even in Lessing's prose, imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who lets us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence in his Prince and cannot help presenting the most serious business in an unbridled allegrissimo: perhaps not without an artist's malicious feeling for the contrast he dares—thoughts long, heavy, hard, dangerous, and a galloping tempo, the very best and most willful good humor. Who, finally, could even dare a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician so far, was the master of presto in inventions, inspirations, words—what, in the end, do all the swamps of the sick, wicked world, even of the “ancient world,” matter, if, like him, one has the feet of a wind, the rush and breath, the liberating mockery of a wind that makes everything healthy by making everything run! And as for Aristophanes, that transfiguring, complementary spirit for whose sake one forgives the whole Greek world for having existed—provided one has understood in all its depth how much there is in it that needs forgiveness, transfiguration—I know nothing that has made me dream more about Plato's hiddenness and sphinx-like nature than that happily preserved little fact: beneath the pillow of his deathbed they found no “Bible,” nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, Platonic—but Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek life, to which he said No—without an Aristophanes!—
29 Independence is the business of very few—it is a privilege of the strong. And anyone who attempts it, even with the best right to do so, but without having to, thereby proves that he is probably not merely strong, but daring to the point of recklessness. He enters a labyrinth; he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers life already brings with it—not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn to pieces by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience. Suppose such a person perishes: it happens so far beyond human understanding that people do not feel it or feel for him—and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to human pity!——
30 Our highest insights must—and should!—sound like follies, under certain circumstances like crimes, when they unlawfully reach the ears of those who are not constituted and predestined for them. The exoteric and the esoteric, as philosophers once distinguished them, among Indians as among Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short wherever people believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights—these differ not so much in that the exoteric stands outside and sees, assesses, measures, judges from without, not from within: what is more essential is that he sees things from below upward—but the esoteric from above downward! There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to have a tragic effect; and if all the world's suffering were gathered into one, who could dare decide whether the sight of it would necessarily seduce and compel one to pity, and thus to double the suffering?… What serves the higher kind of human being as nourishment or refreshment must be almost poison to a very different and lesser kind. The virtues of the common man might signify vices and weaknesses in a philosopher; it would be possible for a person of high nature, supposing he degenerated and perished, only then to acquire qualities for which people in the lower world into which he sank would have to revere him as a saint. There are books whose value for soul and health is reversed according to whether the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful makes use of them: in the first case they are dangerous, corrosive, dissolving books; in the other, heralds' calls challenging the bravest to their bravery. Books for everybody are always foul-smelling books: the smell of little people clings to them. Wherever the people eat and drink, even where they worship, there is usually a stink. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air.——
31 In youth we still revere and despise without that art of nuance which makes up life's best gain, and we must fairly pay dearly for having assaulted people and things in this way with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly duped and abused until a person learns to put some art into his feelings and would rather even venture an experiment with the artificial: as the true artists of life do. The anger and reverence peculiar to youth seem to give themselves no rest until they have falsified people and things to the point where they can vent themselves on them—youth is in itself already something falsifying and deceitful. Later, when the young soul, tortured by one disillusionment after another, finally turns back on itself in suspicion, still hot and wild even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience: how angry it now grows with itself, how impatiently it tears itself apart, how it takes revenge for its long self-blinding, as though that blindness had been voluntary! In this transition we punish ourselves by distrusting our feelings; we torture our enthusiasm with doubt; indeed, we already feel a good conscience as a danger, as though it were self-concealment and a tiring of our finer honesty; and above all we take sides, take sides on principle against “youth.”—A decade later: and we understand that all this, too, was still—youth!
32 Throughout the longest period of human history—what is called prehistoric time—the value or worthlessness of an action was derived from its consequences: the action in itself came into consideration no more than its origin did; rather, much as distinction or disgrace still reaches back in China from the child to the parents, it was the retroactive power of success or failure that guided people to think well or badly of an action. Let us call this period humanity's premoral period: the imperative “know yourself!” was still unknown then. Over the last ten thousand years, however, people in a few great regions of the earth have come, step by step, to let the origin of an action, rather than its consequences, decide its value: a great event taken as a whole, a considerable refinement of vision and standard, the unconscious aftereffect of the rule of aristocratic values and belief in “origin,” the distinguishing mark of a period that may be called moral in the narrower sense: with this the first attempt at self-knowledge has been made. Origin instead of consequences: what a reversal of perspective! And certainly a reversal achieved only after long struggles and vacillations! Admittedly, a fateful new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, came to power at the same time: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense as its origin in an intention; people became united in the belief that an action's value lay in the value of its intention. Intention as the entire origin and prehistory of an action: under this prejudice, almost down to the most recent times, people on earth have morally praised, blamed, judged, and philosophized.—But today, thanks to a renewed self-reflection and deepening of the human being, might we not have reached the necessity of resolving on yet another reversal and fundamental shift of values—might we not stand at the threshold of a period that, negatively, would at first have to be called extramoral: today, when at least among us immoralists the suspicion is stirring that precisely what is unintentional in an action holds its decisive value, and that all its intentionality, everything in it that can be seen, known, made “conscious,” still belongs to its surface and skin—which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals still more? In short, we believe intention to be only a sign and symptom that first needs interpreting, and moreover a sign that means too many things and consequently almost nothing on its own—that morality in the previous sense, the morality of intentions, has been a prejudice, a rash judgment, perhaps a provisional thing, something on roughly the level of astrology and alchemy, but in any event something that must be overcome. The overcoming of morality, in a certain sense even morality's self-overcoming: let that be the name for the long, secret labor reserved for the finest and most honest, also the most malicious, consciences of today, as living touchstones of the soul.—
33 There is no help for it: we must call the feelings of devotion, of sacrifice for one's neighbor, the whole morality of self-renunciation, mercilessly to account and bring them before a court: just as we must the aesthetics of “disinterested contemplation,” under which the emasculation of art today seeks, seductively enough, to provide itself with a good conscience. There is far too much magic and sugar in those feelings of “for others,” of “not for me,” for us not to need double suspicion here and to ask: “Might these not be—seductions?”—That they please—the person who has them, the person who enjoys their fruits, even the mere spectator—is still no argument for them, but precisely a call for caution. So let us be cautious!
34 Whatever standpoint of philosophy one may adopt today: seen from any position, the erroneousness of the world we believe we live in is the surest, firmest thing our eye can still grasp—we find reason upon reason for it, reasons that might tempt us into conjectures about a deceitful principle in the “essence of things.” But anyone who holds our thinking itself, and thus “the spirit,” responsible for the world's falseness—an honorable way out, taken by every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei—anyone who takes this world, together with space, time, form, motion, to have been inferred to be false, would at least have good cause finally to learn distrust of all thinking itself: has it not played the greatest possible prank on us so far? And what guarantee would there be that it would not go on doing what it has always done? In all seriousness: there is something touching and awe-inspiring about the innocence of thinkers that allows them, even today, to stand before consciousness with the request that it give them honest answers: for instance, whether it is “real,” and why it is actually so determined to keep the external world off its back, and other questions of that kind. Belief in “immediate certainties” is a moral naïveté that does us philosophers credit: but we are not, after all, supposed to be “merely moral” human beings! Apart from morality, that belief is a stupidity that does us little credit! In civil life, ever-ready distrust may count as a sign of “bad character” and consequently as something imprudent: here among ourselves, beyond the civil world and its Yes and No—what should prevent us from being imprudent and saying: the philosopher has gradually acquired a right to “bad character,” as the creature who has always been most thoroughly duped on earth—today he has a duty to distrust, to cast the most malicious sidelong glances out of every abyss of suspicion.—Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and turn of phrase: for I myself, of all people, long ago learned to think differently, to value differently, about deceiving and being deceived, and have at least a few pokes in the ribs ready for the blind fury with which philosophers resist being deceived. Why not? That truth is worth more than appearance is no more than a moral prejudice; it is even the worst-proved assumption in the world. Let us admit at least this much: no life would exist at all if not on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and boorishness of certain philosophers, one wanted to abolish the “apparent world” entirely—well, supposing you could do that—then at least nothing would be left of your “truth” either! Indeed, what compels us to assume that there is any essential opposition between “true” and “false”? Is it not enough to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and overall tones of appearance—different valeurs, to speak the language of painters? Why should the world that concerns us—not be a fiction? And if someone asks, “But doesn't a fiction require an author?”—might we not answer him bluntly: Why? Might this “requires” not belong to the fiction too? Is it not permissible, by now, to be a little ironic toward the subject as well as the predicate and object? Might the philosopher not rise above belief in grammar? All respect for governesses: but would it not be time for philosophy to renounce the governesses' faith?—
35 Oh Voltaire! Oh humanity! Oh idiocy! There is something to “truth,” to the search for truth; and if a person goes about it all too humanly—“he seeks the true only to do the good”—I wager he will find nothing!
36 Suppose nothing else is “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can descend or ascend to no other “reality” than precisely the reality of our drives—for thinking is only a relation of these drives to one another—may we not make the experiment and ask whether this given is not sufficient to understand, through things of its own kind, the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world as well? I do not mean as a deception, an “appearance,” a “representation” (in Berkeley's and Schopenhauer's sense), but as having the same rank of reality as our affect itself—as a more primitive form of the world of affects, in which everything still lies enclosed in a powerful unity that then branches off and takes shape in the organic process (also, as is to be expected, grows delicate and weakens—), as a kind of life of drives in which all the organic functions, including self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, metabolism, are still synthetically bound up with one another—as a preliminary form of life?—Ultimately, not only is it permissible to make this experiment: the conscience of method commands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the attempt to make do with a single one has been pushed to its outermost limit (—to the point of nonsense, if I may say so): that is a morality of method from which we may not excuse ourselves today—it follows “from its definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question, ultimately, is whether we really acknowledge the will as acting, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do—and at bottom our belief in this is precisely our belief in causality itself—then we must make the experiment of positing the causality of will hypothetically as the only causality. “Will” can naturally act only on “will”—and not on “matter” (not on “nerves,” for example—): in short, we must venture the hypothesis that wherever “effects” are acknowledged, will acts on will—and that all mechanical happening, insofar as a force is active in it, is precisely force of will, effect of will.—Suppose, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the development and ramification of one basic form of will—namely, the will to power, as my proposition has it—suppose we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem—then we would have acquired the right to define all effective force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its “intelligible character”—it would be “will to power” and nothing else.—
37 “What? Doesn't that mean, in popular language: God is refuted, but the devil is not—?” On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And who the devil forces you to speak in popular language!—
38 What happened, even amid all the brightness of modern times, with the French Revolution—that dreadful and, judged at close quarters, superfluous farce into which the noble and enthusiastic spectators of all Europe, looking on from afar, interpreted their own indignations and enthusiasms so long and so passionately until the text disappeared beneath the interpretation—could happen again: a noble posterity might misunderstand the whole past and perhaps only thereby make the sight of it bearable.—Or rather: has this not already happened? Were we not ourselves—this “noble posterity”? And precisely now, insofar as we understand this—is it not over?
39 No one will readily consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous: except perhaps those lovely “idealists” who gush over the good, the true, the beautiful, and let all kinds of colorful, clumsy, good-natured desirabilities swim about together in their pond. Happiness and virtue are no arguments. Yet people like to forget, even levelheaded minds, that making people unhappy and making them evil are no counterarguments either. Something might be true even though it were harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might belong to the fundamental constitution of existence that complete knowledge of it would destroy us—so that the strength of a spirit would be measured by how much “truth” it could just barely endure, more clearly, to what degree it would need that truth diluted, veiled, sweetened, dulled, falsified. But there can be no doubt that the evil and unhappy are more favored in discovering certain parts of truth and have a greater probability of success; not to mention the evil who are happy—a species the moralists pass over in silence. Perhaps hardness and cunning provide more favorable conditions for the emergence of the strong, independent spirit and philosopher than that gentle, fine, accommodating good nature and art of taking things lightly that we prize, and rightly prize, in a scholar. Assuming, as goes without saying, that we do not narrow the concept “philosopher” to the philosopher who writes books—or even puts his philosophy into books!—Stendhal supplies one final trait for the portrait of the free-spirited philosopher, which for the sake of German taste I will not fail to underline—for it runs counter to German taste. “To be a good philosopher,” says this last great psychologist, “one must be dry, clear, without illusions. A banker who has made his fortune has part of the character required to make discoveries in philosophy, that is, to see clearly into what is.”
40 Everything deep loves the mask; the very deepest things even hate image and likeness. Might not the opposite be the only proper disguise in which a god's shame could walk abroad? A questionable question: it would be strange if some mystic had not already ventured something of the kind within himself. There are events of so tender a kind that one does well to bury and disguise them with some coarseness; there are actions of love and extravagant magnanimity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and thrash the eyewitness: this clouds his memory. Some know how to cloud and mistreat their own memory, so as to take revenge at least on this one confidant—shame is inventive. It is not the worst things that make us feel the worst shame: there is not only malice behind a mask—there is so much goodness in cunning. I could imagine someone with something precious and vulnerable to shelter rolling through life coarse and round, like an old green wine cask bound with heavy hoops: the delicacy of his shame wills it so. A person with depth in his shame also meets his destinies and delicate decisions on paths few ever reach, and whose existence his nearest and most intimate must not know: his mortal danger hides from their eyes, and so does his reconquered security in life. Such a hidden person, who instinctively uses speech for silence and concealment and is inexhaustible in evading communication, wants and encourages a mask of himself to wander in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends; and supposing he does not want it, one day his eyes will open to the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of him there—and that this is good. Every deep spirit needs a mask: more, a mask is continually growing around every deep spirit, thanks to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.—
41 One must set oneself tests to show that one is destined for independence and command; and do this at the right time. One should not evade one's tests, although they may be the most dangerous game one can play, and in the end are tests taken with ourselves alone as witnesses and before no other judge. Not to remain attached to a person, however beloved—every person is a prison, and a corner too. Not to remain attached to a fatherland, even the most suffering and most in need of help—it is already less difficult to unbind one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to remain attached to pity, even if it is for higher human beings into whose rare torment and helplessness some chance has let us look. Not to remain attached to a science, however it may entice us with the most precious discoveries, seemingly reserved for us in particular. Not to remain attached to one's own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and estrangement of the bird that flees ever higher to see ever more beneath itself—the danger of the flyer. Not to remain attached to our own virtues and become, as a whole, the victim of some single feature in us, our “hospitality,” for example: as is the danger of dangers for high-natured and rich souls who treat themselves lavishly, almost indifferently, and carry the virtue of liberality to the point of vice. One must know how to preserve oneself: the strongest test of independence.
42 A new kind of philosopher is rising: I venture to baptize them with a name not without danger. As I divine them, as they allow themselves to be divined—for it belongs to their nature to wish to remain riddles in some respect—these philosophers of the future might have a right, perhaps also a wrong, to be called experimenters and tempters. This name itself, in the end, is only an experiment and, if you like, a temptation.
43 Are they new friends of “truth,” these coming philosophers? Quite probably: for all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But certainly they will not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, and their taste as well, if their truth is also supposed to be a truth for everybody: which has so far been the secret wish and ulterior meaning of all dogmatic endeavors. “My judgment is my judgment: someone else has no easy right to it too”—perhaps such a philosopher of the future will say. One must rid oneself of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one's neighbor takes it into his mouth. And how could there even be a “common good”! The phrase contradicts itself: what can be common always has little value. In the end things must be as they are and always have been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the deep, tendernesses and shudders for the subtle, and, in sum and in brief, everything rare for the rare.—
44 After all this, need I expressly say that they too will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future—as surely as they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, which does not want to be misjudged or confused with something else? But as I say this, I feel almost as much a duty toward them as toward us, their heralds and forerunners, us free spirits!—to blow away from us all an old, stupid prejudice and misunderstanding that has too long obscured the concept “free spirit” like a fog. In every country of Europe, and likewise in America, there is now something that abuses this name, a very narrow, captive, chained kind of spirit that wants roughly the opposite of what lies in our intentions and instincts—not to mention that, in relation to those rising new philosophers, they must be closed windows and bolted doors all the more. To put it briefly and harshly, these falsely named “free spirits” belong among the levelers—as eloquent, scribbling slaves of democratic taste and its “modern ideas”: all of them people without solitude, without a solitude of their own, clumsy, decent fellows who are not to be denied courage or respectable conduct, only that they are unfree and laughably superficial, above all in their basic inclination to see the forms of old society as it has existed until now as more or less the cause of all human misery and failure: which happily stands truth on its head! What they would strive for with all their strength is the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, absence of danger, comfort, an easier life for everyone; their two most abundantly sung songs and doctrines are called “equality of rights” and “sympathy for all that suffers”—and suffering itself is taken by them as something to abolish. We of the opposite persuasion, who have opened our eyes and conscience to the question of where and how the plant “human being” has so far grown most vigorously upward, believe that each time it has happened under the opposite conditions: that for this to occur the dangerousness of the human situation first had to grow to monstrous proportions; the power of invention and dissimulation (the “spirit” of the human being—) had to develop under long pressure and constraint into subtlety and daring; the will to life had to be intensified into an unconditional will to power—we believe that hardness, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the art of temptation, and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in human beings serves the elevation of the species “human being” as well as its opposite does—we do not even say enough when we say only this, and in any event, in our speaking and silence at this point, we stand at the other end of all modern ideology and herd desirability: perhaps as their antipodes? What wonder that we “free spirits” are not exactly the most communicative spirits? That we do not wish to betray in every respect from what a spirit can free itself and where it may then be driven? And as for that dangerous formula “beyond good and evil,” with which we at least protect ourselves from confusion: we are something other than “libres-penseurs,” “liberi pensatori,” “freethinkers,” and whatever else all these decent advocates of “modern ideas” like to call themselves. At home in many countries of the spirit, or at least having been their guests; escaping again and again from the stuffy, comfortable corners into which predilection and pre-aversion, youth, descent, the chance encounters with people and books, or even the weariness of wandering seemed to banish us; full of malice against the lures of dependence hidden in honors, or money, or offices, or excitements of the senses; grateful even to distress and changeful illness because they always freed us from some rule and its “prejudice,” grateful to the god, devil, sheep, and worm in us, curious to the point of vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for every craft demanding sharp wit and sharp senses, ready for every venture thanks to a surplus of “free will,” with foreground and background souls whose ultimate intentions no one easily sees through, with foregrounds and backgrounds no foot could walk to their end, hidden beneath cloaks of light, conquerors although we look like heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors from morning to evening, misers of our wealth and our crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemata, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls of work even in broad daylight; yes, if need be, even scarecrows—and today there is need: insofar as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude—such a kind of human being are we, we free spirits! And perhaps you too are something of this, you who are coming? You new philosophers?—
Plain English translation
Complete machine-assisted Plain English translation, made independently and directly from the German and reviewed against it.
Second Part:
The Free Spirit.
24 Oh, holy simplicity! What strange simplification and falsification human beings live in! Once we have fitted ourselves with eyes for this marvel, we can never stop marveling! How we have made everything around us bright, free, easy, and simple! How well we have known how to give our senses a free pass for everything on the surface, and our thinking a divine appetite for reckless leaps and false conclusions! From the very beginning, how well we have known how to preserve our ignorance so that we could enjoy a scarcely imaginable freedom, lack of hesitation, carelessness, boldness, cheerfulness in life—enjoy life itself! Only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance has science been able to rise so far: the will to know on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will not to know, to uncertainty, to untruth! Not as its opposite, but as its refinement! Here, as elsewhere, language may be unable to overcome its clumsiness and may go on talking about opposites where there are only degrees and many fine gradations. The ingrained hypocrisy of morality, which is now part of our unconquerable "flesh and blood," may even twist the words in the mouths of us who know. Still, here and there we understand it, and laugh at the way even the best science is best at trying to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial world, invented and falsified to suit us. We laugh at how, unwillingly and willingly, it loves error, because it, a living thing, loves—life!
25 After such a cheerful opening, let a serious word not go unheard. It is addressed to the most serious people. Watch out, you philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for truth's sake"! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and delicate neutrality of your conscience. It makes you stubborn against objections and red rags; it makes you stupid, brutish, and bullheaded when, in your struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and still cruder consequences of hostility, you finally have to play the part of truth's defenders on earth. As though "truth" were such a harmless, clumsy person that it needed defenders! Especially you, you knights of the most sorrowful figure, you gentlemen who lurk in corners and spin the spirit's cobwebs! In the end, you know well enough that it must not matter whether you in particular are proved right. You also know that no philosopher so far has been proved right, and that there may be more praiseworthy truthfulness in every little question mark you put after your favorite sayings and cherished teachings—and occasionally after yourselves—than in all your solemn gestures and trump cards before accusers and courts! Better to step aside! Escape into hiding! And have your mask and subtlety, so that people mistake you for someone else! Or fear you a little! And don't forget the garden, the garden with its golden trellises! Keep people around you who are like a garden—or like music over water in the evening, when the day is already turning into memory. Choose good solitude, free, playful, light solitude, which also gives you the right to remain good yourselves in some sense! How poisonous, how cunning, how bad every long war makes us when it cannot be fought with open force! How personal we become through long fear, through keeping a long watch on enemies, on possible enemies! These outcasts from society, these long-persecuted, viciously hunted people—even the forced recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos—always end by becoming sophisticated seekers of revenge and poison mixers. They may do it under the most spiritual masquerade, and perhaps without knowing it themselves. (Just dig up the foundations of Spinoza's ethics and theology sometime!) This is not even to mention the clumsiness of moral outrage, which in a philosopher is the unmistakable sign that his philosophical humor has deserted him. The philosopher's martyrdom, his "self-sacrifice for truth," forces into the open whatever agitator and actor lurked inside him. And if we have watched him so far only with an artist's curiosity, then, with some philosophers, we can certainly understand the dangerous wish to see him degenerate for once as well—degenerate into a "martyr," a ranter on the stage and public platform. But anyone with such a wish must be clear about what they will see in any case: only a satyr play, only a farcical afterpiece, only continued proof that the long, real tragedy is over—assuming that every philosophy was a long tragedy in the making.
26 Every exceptional person instinctively seeks his castle and privacy, where he is released from the crowd, the many, the great majority, where he can forget "human beings" as the rule to which he is the exception. There is just one exception: when an even stronger instinct drives him straight at this rule, as someone pursuing knowledge in the great and exceptional sense. Anyone who does not sometimes turn all the colors of distress in dealings with people—green and gray with disgust, weariness, sympathy, gloom, loneliness—is certainly not a person of higher taste. But suppose he does not take on all this burden and displeasure willingly, always avoids it, and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his castle. Then one thing is certain: he is not made, not destined, for knowledge. If he were, one day he would have to say to himself: "To hell with my good taste! The rule is more interesting than the exception—than me, the exception!" And he would go down, and above all, "in." The long, serious study of the average person—and for that purpose much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, bad company, since all company except that of one's equals is bad company—forms a necessary part of every philosopher's life story. Perhaps it is the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part, the richest in disappointments. But if he is lucky, as befits a favorite child of knowledge, he meets people who actually shorten and ease his task. I mean the so-called cynics: people who simply acknowledge the animal, the commonness, the "rule" in themselves, and who still have enough intelligence and itch to have to talk about themselves and their kind in front of witnesses. Sometimes they even roll around in books as though in their own dung. Cynicism is the only form in which common souls brush against honesty. The higher person must open his ears to every coarser and subtler kind of cynicism, and count himself lucky whenever the shameless clown or scientific satyr speaks up in his presence. There are even cases in which fascination mixes with disgust: when, through a whim of nature, genius is attached to such an indiscreet goat and ape. This was the case with the Abbé Galiani, the deepest, sharpest-sighted, and perhaps also the filthiest person of his century. He was much deeper than Voltaire, and therefore a good deal more silent too. More often, as I suggested, a scientific head is set on an ape's body, a subtle, exceptional intellect on a common soul. This is not rare, especially among doctors and physiologists of morality. Wherever someone speaks without bitterness, indeed quite innocently, of a human being as a belly with two kinds of needs and a head with one; wherever someone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desire, and vanity, as though these were the real and only mainsprings of human actions; in short, wherever people speak "poorly" of human beings, but not even maliciously, the lover of knowledge should listen closely and diligently. In general, his ears should be wherever people speak without outrage. For the outraged person, anyone who tears and mangles himself with his own teeth—or, as a substitute, the world, or God, or society—may rank higher in moral terms than the laughing, self-satisfied satyr. But in every other sense he is the more ordinary, less significant, less instructive case. And no one lies as much as the outraged person.
27 It is hard to be understood, especially when you think and live gangasrotogati, surrounded by people who think and live differently: kurmagati, or at best "at the gait of a frog," mandeikagati. Am I doing everything I can to make myself hard to understand? We should be sincerely grateful even for the goodwill to interpret with a little subtlety. But as for "good friends," who are always too lazy and think that precisely as friends they have a right to take things easy, we do well to grant them a space and playground for misunderstanding from the start. That way we still have something to laugh at. Or we can get rid of them altogether, these good friends—and laugh too!
28 What is hardest to translate from one language into another is the tempo of its style. This is rooted in the character of the race—or, in physiological terms, in the average tempo of its "metabolism." Some honestly intended translations are almost falsifications, because they unintentionally make the original more commonplace. This happens simply because its brave, cheerful tempo could not be translated too: the tempo that leaps over and helps us past everything dangerous in things and words. Germans are almost incapable of presto in their language. So, as we may fairly conclude, they are also incapable of many of the most delightful and daring shades of free, free-spirited thought. The comic clown and the satyr are foreign to them in body and conscience, and to the same extent Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for them. Everything ponderous, slow-moving, solemnly clumsy, every long-winded and boring kind of style, has developed among the Germans in overwhelming variety. Forgive me the fact that even Goethe's prose, with its mixture of stiffness and daintiness, is no exception. It reflects the "good old days" to which it belongs and expresses German taste at a time when there still was a "German taste": a Rococo taste, in morals and the arts. Lessing is an exception, thanks to his actor's nature, which understood many things and knew how to handle many things. It was no accident that he translated Bayle, and that he liked taking refuge near Diderot and Voltaire, and even more among the Roman writers of comedy. Lessing loved free-spiritedness, escape from Germany, in tempo too. But how could the German language, even in Lessing's prose, imitate Machiavelli's tempo? In his Prince, Machiavelli lets us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious business in an unrestrained, extremely lively rush. Perhaps he has a mischievous artist's sense of the contrast he dares: long, heavy, hard, dangerous thoughts, and the tempo of a gallop and of the very best, most playful mood. Finally, who could even dare a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician so far, has been the master of presto in inventions, sudden ideas, and words? After all, what do all the swamps of the sick, bad world—even the "ancient world"—matter, if, like him, you have the feet of a wind, the sweep and breath, the liberating mockery of a wind that makes everything healthy by setting everything running! And as for Aristophanes, that transfiguring, complementary spirit for whose sake we forgive the whole Greek world for having existed—assuming we have understood to the depths how much in it needs forgiveness and transfiguration—I know of nothing that has made me dream more about Plato's hiddenness and Sphinx-like nature than this happily preserved little fact. Under the pillow of his deathbed, people found no "Bible," nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek life, to which he said No—without an Aristophanes!
29 Independence is for very few people. It is a privilege of the strong. Anyone who attempts it, even with the best right to do so, but without being compelled to, thereby shows that he is probably not only strong but daring to the point of recklessness. He enters a labyrinth. He multiplies a thousandfold the dangers that life already brings with it. Not the smallest of these is that no one sees with their own eyes how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn apart piece by piece by some cave Minotaur of conscience. Suppose such a person is destroyed. It happens so far beyond people's understanding that they neither feel it nor feel for him. And he can no longer go back! He cannot even go back to human pity!
30 Our highest insights must—and should!—sound like foolishness, and in some circumstances like crimes, when they reach, without permission, the ears of people who are not made and destined for them. The exoteric and esoteric, as philosophers used to distinguish them among Indians as among Greeks, Persians, and Muslims—in short, wherever people believed in an order of rank, not in equality and equal rights—are not distinguished so much by the outsider standing outside and seeing, assessing, measuring, and judging from outside rather than inside. The more essential difference is that he sees things from below looking up, while the insider sees them from above looking down! There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy stops having a tragic effect. And if all the world's suffering were gathered into one, who would dare decide whether the sight of it would necessarily tempt and compel us to pity, and so to double the suffering?… What serves the higher kind of human being as nourishment or refreshment must be almost poison to a very different and lower kind. The common person's virtues might signify vices and weaknesses in a philosopher. It is possible that a person of high nature, if he degenerated and went to ruin, would only then acquire qualities for which people in the lower world he had sunk into would now need to honor him as a saint. There are books whose value for the soul and its health is reversed depending on whether a lower soul, a lower vital force, uses them, or a higher and more powerful one does. In the first case, they are dangerous books that wear the soul down and break it apart; in the other, they are heralds' calls challenging the bravest to show their courage. Books for everybody are always foul-smelling books: the smell of little people clings to them. Where the people eat and drink, even where they worship, there is usually a stink. We should not go into churches if we want to breathe clean air.
31 When we are young, we still honor and despise without that art of fine distinctions that is life's best gain. We must fairly pay a heavy price for having attacked people and things with Yes and No in this way. Everything is arranged so that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly fooled and abused until a person learns to put some art into his feelings, and prefers even to try the artificial, as true artists of life do. The anger and reverence typical of youth seem unable to rest until they have falsified people and things to suit themselves, so that they can let themselves loose on them. Youth is already, in itself, something that falsifies and deceives. Later, when the young soul, tormented by one disappointment after another, finally turns back on itself with suspicion—still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and guilty conscience—how angry it now becomes with itself! How impatiently it tears itself apart! How it takes revenge for its long self-blinding, as though that blindness had been deliberate! In this transition, we punish ourselves by distrusting our feelings. We torture our enthusiasm with doubt. We even begin to feel a good conscience as a danger, as though it were self-concealment and a tiring of our more delicate honesty. Above all, we take sides, as a matter of principle, against "youth." Ten years later, we understand that all this too was still—youth!
32 For the longest period of human history, what we call prehistoric times, the value or worthlessness of an action was derived from its consequences. The action itself counted as little as its origin. Instead, just as even today in China an honor or disgrace passes backward from a child to its parents, it was the backward-reaching force of success or failure that guided people to think well or poorly of an action. Let us call this the premoral period of humanity. The command "Know yourself!" was still unknown then. During the last ten thousand years, however, people in some large areas of the earth have gradually come to let the origin of an action, rather than its consequences, decide its value. Taken as a whole, this was a great event, a considerable refinement of vision and standards, the unconscious aftereffect of the rule of aristocratic values and belief in "origin." It marks a period we may call moral in the narrower sense. With it, the first attempt at self-knowledge was made. Origin instead of consequences: what a reversal of perspective! And certainly a reversal achieved only after long struggles and wavering! Of course, this also brought a disastrous new superstition to power, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation. People interpreted the origin of an action in the most definite sense as its origin in an intention. They agreed in believing that an action's value lay in the value of its intention. Intention as the whole origin and previous history of an action: under this prejudice, people have morally praised, blamed, judged, and also philosophized on earth almost down to the most recent times. But shouldn't we today have reached the point where we need to decide on another reversal and fundamental shift of values, thanks to a further turn toward self-reflection and depth in human beings? Shouldn't we be standing on the threshold of a period that, in negative terms, could first be called extramoral? Today, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion is stirring that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional in it. All its intentionality, everything about it that can be seen, known, or become "conscious," still belongs to its surface and skin—which, like every skin, reveals something but conceals still more. In short, we believe that intention is only a sign and symptom that first needs interpreting, and a sign, moreover, that means too many things and therefore almost nothing by itself. We believe that morality in its earlier sense, morality of intentions, has been a prejudice, a rashness, perhaps something provisional, something on roughly the level of astrology and alchemy, but in any case something that must be overcome. Overcoming morality—in a certain sense even morality's self-overcoming—may be the name for that long, secret work reserved for today's most sensitive and honest, and also most malicious, consciences, as living touchstones of the soul.
33 There is no help for it: we must ruthlessly question and bring to trial the feelings of devotion, of self-sacrifice for one's neighbor, the whole morality of giving oneself away. We must do the same with the aesthetics of "disinterested contemplation," under which the emasculation of art now seeks, seductively enough, to give itself a good conscience. There is far too much magic and sugar in those feelings of "for others," of "not for me," for us not to need double distrust here, and the question: "Might these not be—seductions?" That they please the person who has them, the person who enjoys their fruits, and even the mere spectator is not yet an argument for them. Rather, it is precisely a call for caution. So let us be cautious!
34 Whatever philosophical standpoint we take today, from every position the erroneousness of the world we believe we live in is the most certain and solid thing our eyes can still get hold of. We find reason after reason for this, tempting us to speculate about a deceitful principle in the "essence of things." But anyone who holds our thinking itself, and thus "the spirit," responsible for the world's falseness—an honorable way out taken by every conscious or unconscious advocate for God—anyone who regards this world, along with space, time, form, and movement, as something inferred to be false, would at least have good reason to learn, at last, to distrust all thinking itself. Hasn't it played the greatest tricks on us so far? And what guarantee would there be that it would not go on doing what it has always done? In all seriousness, there is something touching and awe-inspiring about the innocence of thinkers that lets them, even today, stand before consciousness and ask it for honest answers. For example, whether it is "real," and why it is actually so determined to keep the external world at arm's length, and other questions of that sort. Belief in "immediate certainties" is a moral naivety that does us philosophers credit. But we are not supposed to be "merely moral" people! Apart from morality, that belief is a stupidity that does us little credit! In ordinary social life, ever-ready distrust may count as a sign of "bad character," and therefore as an unwise thing. But here among ourselves, beyond the ordinary social world and its Yes and No, what should stop us from being unwise and saying: the philosopher, as the creature who has always been fooled best on earth, has now earned a right to "bad character"? Today he has a duty to distrust, to cast the most malicious sidelong glances from every abyss of suspicion. Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and turn of phrase. For I myself, of all people, long ago learned to think and judge differently about deceiving and being deceived. I have at least a few pokes in the ribs ready for the blind rage with which philosophers resist being deceived. Why not? It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance. It is even the worst-proven assumption in the world. Let us at least admit this much: no life would exist except on the basis of perspectival assessments and appearances. And if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some philosophers, you wanted to abolish the "apparent world" entirely—well, supposing you could, nothing would remain of your "truth" either! Indeed, what forces us to assume any essential opposition between "true" and "false"? Isn't it enough to assume degrees of appearance, as it were lighter and darker shades and overall tones of appearance—different color values, to use the language of painters? Why couldn't the world that concerns us be a fiction? And if someone asks, "But doesn't a fiction require an author?" couldn't we answer bluntly: Why? Doesn't this "require" perhaps belong to the fiction too? Aren't we finally allowed to be a little ironic about the subject, as well as the predicate and object? Couldn't the philosopher rise above belief in grammar? All respect to governesses—but isn't it time for philosophy to renounce the governesses' belief?
35 Oh, Voltaire! Oh, humanity! Oh, stupidity! "Truth," the search for truth, is no simple matter. And if a person goes about it all too humanly—"he seeks the true only to do the good"—I bet he finds nothing!
36 Suppose nothing is "given" as real except our world of desires and passions, and we cannot get down or up to any other "reality" than precisely the reality of our drives—for thinking is only a way these drives behave toward one another. Aren't we allowed to try asking whether what is given is enough to understand the so-called mechanistic (or "material") world too, in terms of something of the same kind? I do not mean understanding it as a deception, an "appearance," an "idea" in Berkeley's and Schopenhauer's sense. I mean as having the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves: as a more primitive form of the world of emotions, in which everything is still held together in a powerful unity that later branches out and takes shape in the organic process (and, of course, also grows delicate and weakens—). I mean a kind of life of drives in which all the organic functions—self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, metabolism—are still bound into one another in a synthesis, as a preliminary form of life. In the end, it is not only permissible to make this attempt: conscientious method demands it. We must not assume several kinds of causality until the attempt to get by with a single kind has been pushed to its furthest limit—to the point of absurdity, if I may say so. That is a morality of method we cannot evade today. It follows "from its definition," as a mathematician would say. The question, in the end, is whether we really recognize the will as something that acts, whether we believe in the causality of the will. If we do—and at bottom our belief in it is precisely our belief in causality itself—then we must try setting up the causality of the will as, hypothetically, the only causality. "Will" can naturally act only on "will," not on "substances"—not on "nerves," for example. In short, we must dare the hypothesis that wherever "effects" are recognized, will acts on will, and that every mechanical event, insofar as a force is active in it, is precisely will-force, an effect of will. Finally, suppose we succeeded in explaining our whole life of drives as the development and branching of one basic form of will—namely the will to power, as my proposition has it. Suppose we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and also find in it the solution to the problem of reproduction and nourishment—it is one problem. Then we would have earned the right to define all active force unambiguously as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world defined and described according to its "intelligible character"—it would be "will to power" and nothing else.
37 "What? Doesn't that mean, in popular terms: God has been refuted, but the devil has not—?" On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And, for the devil's sake, who forces you to speak in popular terms!
38 Think how things ended up, even in the full light of modern times, with the French Revolution: that horrifying and, judged close up, unnecessary farce. From a distance, noble and enthusiastic spectators all over Europe read their own indignations and enthusiasms into it for so long and so passionately until the text disappeared beneath the interpretation. In the same way, a noble posterity might once again misunderstand the whole past, and perhaps only then make the sight of it bearable. Or rather: hasn't this happened already? Weren't we ourselves that "noble posterity"? And isn't it over precisely now, insofar as we understand this?
39 No one will easily take a teaching to be true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous. Perhaps we should except those charming "idealists" who gush over the good, the true, and the beautiful, and let every kind of colorful, clumsy, good-natured wishfulness swim about together in their pond. Happiness and virtue are not arguments. But people—even thoughtful minds—like to forget that making people unhappy and evil are no more counterarguments. Something could be true even if it were harmful and dangerous to the highest degree. Indeed, it could be part of the basic nature of existence that full knowledge of it would destroy us. In that case, the strength of a spirit would be measured by how much "truth" it could just barely endure—or, more plainly, by the degree to which it needed truth diluted, veiled, sweetened, dulled, falsified. But there can be no doubt that evil and unhappy people are better placed to discover certain parts of the truth, and have a greater chance of succeeding. Not to mention evil people who are happy—a species the moralists keep silent about. Perhaps hardness and cunning provide better conditions for the growth of a strong, independent spirit and philosopher than that gentle, subtle, yielding good nature and art of taking things lightly that people value, and rightly value, in a scholar. This assumes what must come first: that we do not narrow the concept "philosopher" to the philosopher who writes books—or even puts his philosophy into books! Stendhal contributes one last feature to the portrait of the free-spirited philosopher. For the sake of German taste, I must underline it—because it goes against German taste. "To be a good philosopher," says this last great psychologist, "one must be dry, clear, without illusions. A banker who has made a fortune has part of the character needed to make discoveries in philosophy—that is, to see clearly into what is."
40 Everything deep loves a mask. The very deepest things even hate images and likenesses. Might the opposite be the only proper disguise for a god's shame to walk around in? A questionable question: it would be strange if some mystic had not already dared something like it in his own mind. Some events are so delicate that we do well to bury them under something crude and make them unrecognizable. After certain acts of love and extravagant generosity, nothing is wiser than to take a stick and beat the eyewitness soundly, thereby clouding his memory. Some people know how to cloud and mistreat their own memory, to take revenge at least on this one confidant. Shame is inventive. It is not the worst things that we are most ashamed of. There is more than malice behind a mask—there is so much goodness in cunning. I could imagine someone with something precious and vulnerable to hide rolling through life coarse and round like an old green wine barrel with heavy hoops. The delicacy of his shame wants it that way. A person whose shame has depth also encounters his destinies and delicate decisions on paths that few ever reach, and whose existence his nearest and most trusted people must not know about. His danger to life is hidden from their eyes, and so is the security of life he has won back. Such a hidden person instinctively uses speech to be silent and to conceal, and has endless ways to avoid communicating. He wants and encourages a mask of himself to wander in his place through his friends' hearts and minds. And if he does not want it, one day his eyes will open to the fact that a mask of him is there anyway—and that this is good. Every deep spirit needs a mask. More than that: a mask keeps growing around every deep spirit, thanks to the constantly false—that is, shallow—interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.
41 We must give ourselves tests to show that we are destined for independence and command, and do so at the right time. We must not avoid our tests, even though they may be the most dangerous game we can play, and are ultimately tests performed with only ourselves as witnesses and before no other judge. Do not stay attached to a person, even the best-loved: every person is a prison, and also a corner. Do not stay attached to a fatherland, even the one that suffers most and most needs help. It is already less difficult to free your heart from a victorious fatherland. Do not stay attached to pity, even for higher people whose rare torment and helplessness chance has let us glimpse. Do not stay attached to a science, even if it tempts you with the most precious discoveries, seemingly saved up just for us. Do not stay attached to your own detachment, to that voluptuous distance and foreignness of the bird that keeps fleeing higher so it can see more and more beneath it—the danger of the flier. Do not stay attached to our own virtues and, as a whole, become the victim of some single feature in us, our "hospitality," for example. This is the danger of dangers for souls of high nature and abundant wealth, who deal with themselves wastefully, almost indifferently, and push the virtue of generosity to the point of vice. We must know how to preserve ourselves: the strongest test of independence.
42 A new kind of philosopher is coming. I dare to christen them with a name that is not without danger. As I guess at them, as they let themselves be guessed at—for part of their nature is to want to remain a riddle in some respect—these philosophers of the future might have a right, perhaps also a wrong, to be called experimenters and tempters. In the end, this name itself is only an experiment and, if you like, a temptation.
43 Are these coming philosophers new friends of "truth"? Quite probably, since all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must go against their pride, and against their taste too, for their truth to be a truth for everyone as well. That has been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic efforts so far. "My judgment is my judgment: another person does not readily have a right to it too," such a philosopher of the future may say. We must get rid of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many people. "Good" is no longer good when the neighbor takes the word into his mouth. And how could there even be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: what can be common always has little value. In the end, things must stand as they stand and have always stood: great things remain for the great, abysses for the deep, tenderness and shudders for the sensitive, and, altogether and in short, everything rare for the rare.
44 After all this, do I still need to say expressly that these philosophers of the future will also be free, very free spirits? They certainly will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, something that does not want to be mistaken for or confused with something else. But in saying this, I feel an obligation almost as much to them as to ourselves, who are their heralds and forerunners—we free spirits! It is to blow away from all of us an old, stupid prejudice and misunderstanding that has shrouded the concept "free spirit" in fog for far too long. In every country of Europe, and likewise in America, something now misuses this name: a very narrow, captive, chained kind of spirit that wants roughly the opposite of what lies in our intentions and instincts. Not to mention that, where those new philosophers now coming are concerned, these spirits must be all the more like shut windows and bolted doors. In short and bluntly, these falsely named "free spirits" belong among the levelers, as eloquent, pen-busy slaves of democratic taste and its "modern ideas." They are all people without solitude, without a solitude of their own, clumsy, decent fellows whose courage and respectable conduct we should not deny. But they are simply unfree and laughably superficial, above all in their basic inclination to see the forms of the old society as more or less the cause of all human misery and failure. In doing so, they happily stand truth on its head! What they would like to pursue with all their strength is the herd's universal green-pasture happiness, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone. The two songs and teachings they sing most tirelessly are "equality of rights" and "sympathy for everything that suffers." They regard suffering itself as something that must be abolished. We who think the other way around have opened an eye and a conscience to the question of where and how the plant "human being" has so far grown upward most vigorously. We think that this has always happened under the opposite conditions. First the danger of its situation had to grow to monstrous proportions; its power to invent and disguise—its "spirit"—had to develop subtlety and daring under long pressure and compulsion; its will to life had to be intensified into an unconditional will to power. We think that hardness, violence, slavery, danger in the streets and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, the art of temptation, and devilry of every kind—that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and snakelike in human beings—serves to raise the species "human being" just as well as its opposite does. We do not even say enough when we say only that. In any case, in what we say and keep silent about here, we stand at the other end from all modern ideology and herd wishes—perhaps as their antipodes? Is it any wonder that we "free spirits" are not exactly the most communicative spirits? That we do not want to reveal in every respect from what a spirit can free itself, and where it may then be driven? And as for that dangerous formula "beyond good and evil," with which we at least protect ourselves from being confused with others: we are something different from "libres-penseurs," "liberi pensatori," "freethinkers," and whatever else these decent advocates of "modern ideas" like to call themselves. At home in many countries of the spirit, or at least guests there; escaping again and again from the dull, pleasant corners into which prior loves and hates, youth, ancestry, chance encounters with people and books, or even the weariness of travel seemed to banish us; full of malice toward the lures of dependence hidden in honors, or money, or offices, or the excitements of the senses; grateful even for distress and illnesses with their changing course, because they always freed us from some rule and its "prejudice"; grateful to God, devil, sheep, and worm in us; curious to the point of vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible things; ready for every craft that demands sharp thinking and sharp senses, ready for every risk thanks to a surplus of "free will"; with front-souls and back-souls whose ultimate intentions no one easily sees, with foregrounds and backgrounds that no foot could walk to the end of; hidden under cloaks of light, conquerors although we look like heirs and spendthrifts; organizers and collectors from morning to evening, misers with our wealth and our stuffed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemes, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls of work even in broad daylight; yes, when necessary, even scarecrows—and today it is necessary, insofar as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude: this is the kind of people we are, we free spirits! And perhaps you too are something of this kind, you who are coming? You new philosophers?
About this section
Part II — The Free Spirit is part of Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is part 3 of 11 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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