Part VI — We Scholars
Original German
Sechstes Hauptstück:
Wir Gelehrten.
204 Auf die Gefahr hin, dass Moralisiren sich auch hier als Das herausstellt, was es immer war—nämlich als ein unverzagtes montrer ses plaies, nach Balzac -, möchte ich wagen, einer ungebührlichen und schädlichen Rangverschiebung entgegenzutreten, welche sich heute, ganz unvermerkt und wie mit dem besten Gewissen, zwischen Wissenschaft und Philosophie herzustellen droht. Ich meine, man muss von seiner Erfahrung aus—Erfahrung bedeutet, wie mich dünkt, immer schlimme Erfahrung?—ein Recht haben, über eine solche höhere Frage des Rangs mitzureden: um nicht wie die Blinden von der Farbe oder wie Frauen und Künstler gegen die Wissenschaft zu reden ("ach, diese schlimme Wissenschaft! seufzt deren Instinkt und Scham, sie kommt immer dahinter!" -). Die Unabhängigkeits-Erklärung des wissenschaftlichen Menschen, seine Emancipation von der Philosophie, ist eine der feineren Nachwirkungen des demokratischen Wesens und Unwesens: die Selbstverherrlichung und Selbstüberhebung des Gelehrten steht heute überall in voller Blüthe und in ihrem besten Frühlinge,—womit noch nicht gesagt sein soll, dass in diesem Falle Eigenlob lieblich röche. "Los von allen Herren!"—so will es auch hier der pöbelmännische Instinkt; und nachdem sich die Wissenschaft mit glücklichstem Erfolge der Theologie erwehrt hat, deren "Magd" sie zu lange war, ist sie nun in vollem Übermuthe und Unverstande darauf hin aus, der Philosophie Gesetze zu machen und ihrerseits einmal den "Herrn"—was sage ich! den Philosophen zu spielen. Mein Gedächtniss—das Gedächtniss eines wissenschaftlichen Menschen, mit Verlaub!—strotzt von Naivetäten des Hochmuths, die ich seitens junger Naturforscher und alter Ärzte über Philosophie und Philosophen gehört habe (nicht zu reden von den gebildetsten und eingebildetsten aller Gelehrten, den Philologen und Schulmännern, welche Beides von Berufs wegen sind -). Bald war es der Spezialist und Eckensteher, der sich instinktiv überhaupt gegen alle synthetischen Aufgaben und Fähigkeiten zur Wehre setzte; bald der fleissige Arbeiter, der einen Geruch von otium und der vornehmen Üppigkeit im Seelen-Haushalte des Philosophen bekommen hatte und sich dabei beeinträchtigt und verkleinert fühlte. Bald war es jene Farben-Blindheit des Nützlichkeits-Menschen, der in der Philosophie Nichts sieht, als eine Reihe widerlegter Systeme und einen verschwenderischen Aufwand, der Niemandem "zu Gute kommt". Bald sprang die Furcht vor verkappter Mystik und Grenzberichtigung des Erkennens hervor; bald die Missachtung einzelner Philosophen, welche sich unwillkürlich zur Missachtung der Philosophie verallgemeinert hatte. Am häufigsten endlich fand ich bei jungen Gelehrten hinter der hochmüthigen Geringschätzung der Philosophie die schlimme Nachwirkung eines Philosophen selbst, dem man zwar im Ganzen den Gehorsam gekündigt hatte, ohne doch aus dem Banne seiner wegwerfenden Werthschätzungen anderer Philosophen herausgetreten zu sein:—mit dem Ergebniss einer Gesammt-Verstimmung gegen alle Philosophie. (Dergestalt scheint mir zum Beispiel die Nachwirkung Schopenhauer's auf das neueste Deutschland zu sein:—er hat es mit seiner unintelligenten Wuth auf Hegel dahin gebracht, die ganze letzte Generation von Deutschen aus dem Zusammenhang mit der deutschen Cultur herauszubrechen, welche Cultur, Alles wohl erwogen, eine Höhe und divinatorische Feinheit des historischen Sinns gewesen ist: aber Schopenhauer selbst war gerade an dieser Stelle bis zur Genialität arm, unempfänglich, undeutsch.) Überhaupt in's Grosse gerechnet, mag es vor Allem das Menschliche, Allzumenschliche, kurz die Armseligkeit der neueren Philosophen selbst gewesen sein, was am gründlichsten der Ehrfurcht vor der Philosophie Abbruch gethan und dem pöbelmännischen Instinkte die Thore aufgemacht hat. Man gestehe es sich doch ein, bis zu welchem Grade unsrer modernen Welt die ganze Art der Heraklite, Plato's, Empedokles', und wie alle diese königlichen und prachtvollen Einsiedler des Geistes geheissen haben, abgeht; und mit wie gutem Rechte Angesichts solcher Vertreter der Philosophie, die heute Dank der Mode ebenso oben-auf als unten-durch sind—in Deutschland zum Beispiel die beiden Löwen von Berlin, der Anarchist Eugen Dühring und der Amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann—ein braver Mensch der Wissenschaft sich besserer Art und Abkunft fühlen darf. Es ist in Sonderheit der Anblick jener Mischmasch-Philosophen, die sich "Wirklichkeits-Philosophen" oder "Positivisten" nennen, welcher ein gefährliches Misstrauen in die Seele eines jungen, ehrgeizigen Gelehrten zu werfen im Stande ist: das sind ja besten Falls selbst Gelehrte und Spezialisten, man greift es mit Händen!—das sind ja allesammt überwundene und unter die Botmässigkeit der Wissenschaft Zurückgebrachte, welche irgendwann einmal mehr von sich gewollt haben, ohne ein Recht zu diesem "mehr" und seiner Verantwortlichkeit zu haben—und die jetzt, ehrsam, ingrimmig, rachsüchtig, den Unglauben an die Herren-Aufgabe und Herrschaftlichkeit der Philosophie mit Wort und That repräsentiren. Zuletzt: wie könnte es auch anders sein! Die Wissenschaft blüht heute und hat das gute Gewissen reichlich im Gesichte, während Das, wozu die ganze neuere Philosophie allmählich gesunken ist, dieser Rest Philosophie von heute, Misstrauen und Missmuth, wenn nicht Spott und Mitleiden gegen sich rege macht. Philosophie auf "Erkenntnisstheorie" reduzirt, thatsächlich nicht mehr als eine schüchterne Epochistik und Enthaltsamkeitslehre: eine Philosophie, die gar nicht über die Schwelle hinweg kommt und sich peinlich das Recht zum Eintritt verweigert—das ist Philosophie in den letzten Zügen, ein Ende, eine Agonie, Etwas das Mitleiden macht. Wie könnte eine solche Philosophie—herrschen!
205 Die Gefahren für die Entwicklung des Philosophen sind heute in Wahrheit so vielfach, dass man zweifeln möchte, ob diese Frucht überhaupt noch reif werden kann. Der Umfang und der Thurmbau der Wissenschaften ist in's Ungeheure gewachsen, und damit auch die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass der Philosoph schon als Lernender müde wird oder sich irgendwo festhalten und "spezialisiren" lässt: so dass er gar nicht mehr auf seine Höhe, nämlich zum Überblick, Umblick, Niederblick kommt. Oder er gelangt zu spät hinauf, dann, wenn seine beste Zeit und Kraft schon vorüber ist; oder beschädigt, vergröbert, entartet, so dass sein Blick, sein Gesammt-Werthurtheil wenig mehr bedeutet. Gerade die Feinheit seines intellektuellen Gewissens lässt ihn vielleicht unterwegs zögern und sich verzögern; er fürchtet die Verführung zum Dilettanten, zum Tausendfuss und Tausend-Fühlhorn, er weiss es zu gut, dass Einer, der vor sich selbst die Ehrfurcht verloren hat, auch als Erkennender nicht mehr befiehlt, nicht mehr führt: er müsste denn schon zum grossen Schauspieler werden wollen, zum philosophischen Cagliostro und Rattenfänger der Geister, kurz zum Verführer. Dies ist zuletzt eine Frage des Geschmacks: wenn es selbst nicht eine Frage des Gewissens wäre. Es kommt hinzu, um die Schwierigkeit des Philosophen noch einmal zu verdoppeln, dass er von sich ein Urtheil, ein ja oder Nein, nicht über die Wissenschaften, sondern über das Leben und den Werth des Lebens verlangt,—dass er ungern daran glauben lernt, ein Recht oder gar eine Pflicht zu diesem Urtheile zu haben, und sich nur aus den umfänglichsten—vielleicht störendsten, zerstörendsten—Erlebnissen heraus und oft zögernd, zweifelnd, verstummend seinen Weg zu jenem Rechte und jenem Glauben suchen muss. In der That, die Menge hat den Philosophen lange Zeit verwechselt und verkannt, sei es mit dem wissenschaftlichen Menschen und idealen Gelehrten, sei es mit dem religiös-gehobenen entsinnlichten "entweltlichten" Schwärmer und Trunkenbold Gottes; und hört man gar heute jemanden loben, dafür, dass er "weise" lebe oder "als ein Philosoph", so bedeutet es beinahe nicht mehr, als "klug und abseits". Weisheit: das scheint dem Pöbel eine Art Flucht zu sein, ein Mittel und Kunststück, sich gut aus einem schlimmen Spiele herauszuziehn; aber der rechte Philosoph—so scheint es uns, meine Freunde?—lebt "unphilosophisch" und "unweise", vor Allem unklug, und fühlt die Last und Pflicht zu hundert Versuchen und Versuchungen des Lebens:—er risquirt sich beständig, er spielt das schlimme Spiel…
206 Im Verhältnisse zu einem Genie, das heisst zu einem Wesen, welches entweder zeugt oder gebiert, beide Worte in ihrem höchsten Umfange genommen -, hat der Gelehrte, der wissenschaftliche Durchschnittsmensch immer etwas von der alten Jungfer: denn er versteht sich gleich dieser nicht auf die zwei werthvollsten Verrichtungen des Menschen. In der That, man gesteht ihnen Beiden, den Gelehrten und den alten Jungfern, gleichsam zur Entschädigung die Achtbarkeit zu—man unterstreicht in diesen Fällen die Achtbarkeit—und hat noch an dem Zwange dieses Zugeständnisses den gleichen Beisatz von Verdruss. Sehen wir genauer zu: was ist der wissenschaftliche Mensch? Zunächst eine unvornehme Art Mensch, mit den Tugenden einer unvornehmen, das heisst nicht herrschenden, nicht autoritativen und auch nicht selbstgenugsamen Art Mensch: er hat Arbeitsamkeit, geduldige Einordnung in Reih und Glied, Gleichmässigkeit und Maass im Können und Bedürfen, er hat den Instinkt für Seinesgleichen und für Das, was Seinesgleichen nöthig hat, zum Beispiel jenes Stück Unabhängigkeit und grüner Weide, ohne welches es keine Ruhe der Arbeit giebt, jenen Anspruch auf Ehre und Anerkennung (die zuerst und zuoberst Erkennung, Erkennbarkeit voraussetzt -), jenen Sonnenschein des guten Namens, jene beständige Besiegelung seines Werthes und seiner Nützlichkeit, mit der das innerliche Misstrauen, der Grund im Herzen aller abhängigen Menschen und Heerdenthiere, immer wieder überwunden werden muss. Der Gelehrte hat, wie billig, auch die Krankheiten und Unarten einer unvornehmen Art: er ist reich am kleinen Neide und hat ein Luchsauge für das Niedrige solcher Naturen, zu deren Höhen er nicht hinauf kann. Er ist zutraulich, doch nur wie Einer, der sich gehen, aber nicht strömen lässt; und gerade vor dem Menschen des grossen Stroms steht er um so kälter und verschlossener da,—sein Auge ist dann wie ein glatter widerwilliger See, in dem sich kein Entzücken, kein Mitgefühl mehr kräuselt. Das Schlimmste und Gefährlichste, dessen ein Gelehrter fähig ist, kommt ihm vom Instinkte der Mittelmässigkeit seiner Art: von jenem Jesuitismus der Mittelmässigkeit, welcher an der Vernichtung des ungewöhnlichen Menschen instinktiv arbeitet und jeden gespannten Bogen zu brechen oder—noch lieber!—abzuspannen sucht. Abspannen nämlich, mit Rücksicht, mit schonender Hand natürlich -, mit zutraulichem Mitleiden abspannen: das ist die eigentliche Kunst des Jesuitismus, der es immer verstanden hat, sich als Religion des Mitleidens einzuführen.—
207 Wie dankbar man auch immer dem objektiven Geiste entgegenkommen mag—und wer wäre nicht schon einmal alles Subjektiven und seiner verfluchten Ipsissimosität bis zum Sterben satt gewesen!—zuletzt muss man aber auch gegen seine Dankbarkeit Vorsicht lernen und der Übertreibung Einhalt thun, mit der die Entselbstung und Entpersönlichung des Geistes gleichsam als Ziel an sich, als Erlösung und Verklärung neuerdings gefeiert wird: wie es namentlich innerhalb der Pessimisten-Schule zu geschehn pflegt, die auch gute Gründe hat, dem "interesselosen Erkennen" ihrerseits die höchsten Ehren zu geben. Der objektive Mensch, der nicht mehr flucht und schimpft, gleich dem Pessimisten, der ideale Gelehrte, in dem der wissenschaftliche Instinkt nach tausendfachem Ganz- und Halb-Missrathen einmal zum Auf- und Ausblühen kommt, ist sicherlich eins der kostbarsten Werkzeuge, die es giebt: aber er gehört in die Hand eines Mächtigeren. Er ist nur ein Werkzeug, sagen wir: er ist ein Spiegel,—er ist kein "Selbstzweck". Der objektive Mensch ist in der That ein Spiegel: vor Allem, was erkannt werden will, zur Unterwerfung gewohnt, ohne eine andre Lust, als wie sie das Erkennen, das "Abspiegeln" giebt,—er wartet, bis Etwas kommt, und breitet sich dann zart hin, dass auch leichte Fusstapfen und das Vorüberschlüpfen geisterhafter Wesen nicht auf seiner Fläche und Haut verloren gehen. Was von "Person" an ihm noch übrig ist, dünkt ihm zufällig, oft willkürlich, noch öfter störend: so sehr ist er sich selbst zum Durchgang und Wiederschein fremder Gestalten und Ereignisse geworden. Er besinnt sich auf "Sich" zurück, mit Anstrengung, nicht selten falsch; er verwechselt sich leicht, er vergreift sich in Bezug auf die eignen Nothdürfte und ist hier allein unfein und nachlässig. Vielleicht quält ihn die Gesundheit oder die Kleinlichkeit und Stubenluft von Weib und Freund, oder der Mangel an Gesellen und Gesellschaft,—ja, er zwingt sich, über seine Qual nachzudenken: umsonst! Schon schweift sein Gedanke weg, zum allgemeineren Falle, und morgen weiss er so wenig als er es gestern wusste, wie ihm zu helfen ist. Er hat den Ernst für sich verloren, auch die Zeit: er ist heiter, nicht aus Mangel an Noth, sondern aus Mangel an Fingern und Handhaben für seine Noth. Das gewohnte Entgegenkommen gegen jedes Ding und Erlebniss, die sonnige und unbefangene Gastfreundschaft, mit der er Alles annimmt, was auf ihn stösst, seine Art von rücksichtslosem Wohlwollen, von gefährlicher Unbekümmertheit um Ja und Nein: ach, es giebt genug Fälle, wo er diese seine Tugenden büssen muss!—und als Mensch überhaupt wird er gar zu leicht das caput mortuum dieser Tugenden. Will man Liebe und Hass von ihm, ich meine Liebe und Hass, wie Gott, Weib und Thier sie verstehn -: er wird thun, was er kann, und geben, was er kann. Aber man soll sich nicht wundern, wenn es nicht viel ist,—wenn er da gerade sich unächt, zerbrechlich, fragwürdig und morsch zeigt. Seine Liebe ist gewollt, sein Hass künstlich und mehr un tour de force, eine kleine Eitelkeit und Übertreibung. Er ist eben nur ächt, so weit er objektiv sein darf: allein in seinem heitern Totalismus ist er noch "Natur" und "natürlich". Seine spiegelnde und ewig sich glättende Seele weiss nicht mehr zu bejahen, nicht mehr zu verneinen; er befiehlt nicht; er zerstört auch nicht. "Je ne méprise presque rien"—sagt er mit Leibnitz: man überhöre und unterschätze das presque nicht! Er ist auch kein Mustermensch; er geht Niemandem voran, noch nach; er stellt sich überhaupt zu ferne, als dass er Grund hätte, zwischen Gut und Böse Partei zu ergreifen. Wenn man ihn so lange mit dem Philosophen verwechselt hat, mit dem cäsarischen Züchter und Gewaltmenschen der Cultur: so hat man ihm viel zu hohe Ehren gegeben und das Wesentlichste an ihm übersehen,—er ist ein Werkzeug, ein Stück Sklave, wenn gewiss auch die sublimste Art des Sklaven, an sich aber Nichts,—presque rien! Der objektive Mensch ist ein Werkzeug, ein kostbares, leicht verletzliches und getrübtes Mess-Werkzeug und Spiegel-Kunstwerk, das man schonen und ehren soll; aber er ist kein Ziel, kein Ausgang und Aufgang, kein complementärer Mensch, in dem das übrige Dasein sich rechtfertigt, kein Schluss—und noch weniger ein Anfang, eine Zeugung und erste Ursache, nichts Derbes, Mächtiges, Auf-sich-Gestelltes, das Herr sein will: vielmehr nur ein zarter ausgeblasener feiner beweglicher Formen-Topf, der auf irgend einen Inhalt und Gehalt erst warten muss, um sich nach ihm "zu gestalten",—für gewöhnlich ein Mensch ohne Gehalt und Inhalt, ein "selbstloser" Mensch. Folglich auch Nichts für Weiber, in parenthesi.—
208 Wenn heute ein Philosoph zu verstehen giebt, er sei kein Skeptiker,—ich hoffe, man hat Das aus der eben gegebenen Abschilderung des objektiven Geistes herausgehört?—so hört alle Welt das ungern; man sieht ihn darauf an, mit einiger Scheu, man möchte so Vieles fragen, fragen… ja, unter furchtsamen Horchern, wie es deren jetzt in Menge giebt, heisst er von da an gefährlich. Es ist ihnen, als ob sie, bei seiner Ablehnung der Skepsis, von Ferne her irgend ein böses bedrohliches Geräusch hörten, als ob irgendwo ein neuer Sprengstoff versucht werde, ein Dynamit des Geistes, vielleicht ein neuentdecktes Russisches Nihilin, ein Pessimismus bonae voluntatis, der nicht bloss Nein sagt, Nein will, sondern—schrecklich zu denken! Nein thut. Gegen diese Art von "gutem Willen"—einem Willen zur wirklichen thätlichen Verneinung des Lebens—giebt es anerkanntermaassen heute kein besseres Schlaf- und Beruhigungsmittel, als Skepsis, den sanften holden einlullenden Mohn Skepsis; und Hamlet selbst wird heute von den Ärzten der Zeit gegen den "Geist" und sein Rumoren unter dem Boden verordnet. "Hat man denn nicht alle Ohren schon voll von schlimmen Geräuschen? sagt der Skeptiker, als ein Freund der Ruhe und beinahe als eine Art von Sicherheits-Polizei: dies unterirdische Nein ist fürchterlich! Stille endlich, ihr pessimistischen Maulwürfe!" Der Skeptiker nämlich, dieses zärtliche Geschöpf, erschrickt allzuleicht; sein Gewissen ist darauf eingeschult, bei jedem Nein, ja schon bei einem entschlossenen harten Ja zu zucken und etwas wie einen Biss zu spüren. Ja! und Nein!—das geht ihm wider die Moral; umgekehrt liebt er es, seiner Tugend mit der edlen Enthaltung ein Fest zu machen, etwa indem er mit Montaigne spricht: "was weiss ich?" Oder mit Sokrates: "ich weiss, dass ich Nichts weiss". Oder: "hier traue ich mir nicht, hier steht mir keine Thür offen." Oder: "gesetzt, sie stünde offen, wozu gleich eintreten!" Oder: "wozu nützen alle vorschnellen Hypothesen? Gar keine Hypothesen machen könnte leicht zum guten Geschmack gehören. Müsst ihr denn durchaus etwas Krummes gleich gerade biegen? Durchaus jedes Loch mit irgend welchem Werge ausstopfen? Hat das nicht Zeit? Hat die Zeit nicht Zeit? Oh ihr Teufelskerle, könnt ihr denn gar nicht warten? Auch das Ungewisse hat seine Reize, auch die Sphinx ist eine Circe, auch die Circe war eine Philosophin."—Also tröstet sich ein Skeptiker; und es ist wahr, dass er einigen Trost nöthig hat. Skepsis nämlich ist der geistigste Ausdruck einer gewissen vielfachen physiologischen Beschaffenheit, welche man in gemeiner Sprache Nervenschwäche und Kränklichkeit nennt; sie entsteht jedes Mal, wenn sich in entscheidender und plötzlicher Weise lang von einander abgetrennte Rassen oder Stände kreuzen. In dem neuen Geschlechte, das gleichsam verschiedene Maasse und Werthe in's Blut vererbt bekommt, ist Alles Unruhe, Störung, Zweifel, Versuch; die besten Kräfte wirken hemmend, die Tugenden selbst lassen einander nicht wachsen und stark werden, in Leib und Seele fehlt Gleichgewicht, Schwergewicht, perpendikuläre Sicherheit. Was aber in solchen Mischlingen am tiefsten krank wird und entartet, das ist der Wille: sie kennen das Unabhängige im Entschlusse, das tapfere Lustgefühl im Wollen gar nicht mehr,—sie zweifeln an der "Freiheit des Willens" auch noch in ihren Träumen. Unser Europa von heute, der Schauplatz eines unsinnig plötzlichen Versuchs von radikaler Stände- und folglich Rassenmischung, ist deshalb skeptisch in allen Höhen und Tiefen, bald mit jener beweglichen Skepsis, welche ungeduldig und lüstern von einem Ast zum andern springt, bald trübe wie eine mit Fragezeichen überladene Wolke,—und seines Willens oft bis zum Sterben satt! Willenslähmung: wo findet man nicht heute diesen Krüppel sitzen! Und oft noch wie geputzt! Wie verführerisch herausgeputzt! Es giebt die schönsten Prunk- und Lügenkleider für diese Krankheit; und dass zum Beispiel das Meiste von dem, was sich heute als "Objektivität", "Wissenschaftlichkeit", "l'art pour l'art", "reines willensfreies Erkennen" in die Schauläden stellt, nur aufgeputzte Skepsis und Willenslähmung ist,—für diese Diagnose der europäischen Krankheit will ich einstehn.—Die Krankheit des Willens ist ungleichmässig über Europa verbreitet: sie zeigt sich dort am grössten und vielfältigsten, wo die Cultur schon am längsten heimisch ist, sie verschwindet im dem Maasse, als "der Barbar" noch—oder wieder—unter dem schlotterichten Gewande von westländischer Bildung sein Recht geltend macht. Im jetzigen Frankreich ist demnach, wie man es ebenso leicht erschliessen als mit Händen greifen kann, der Wille am schlimmsten erkrankt; und Frankreich, welches immer eine meisterhafte Geschicklichkeit gehabt hat, auch die verhängnisvollen Wendungen seines Geistes in's Reizende und Verführerische umzukehren, zeigt heute recht eigentlich als Schule und Schaustellung aller Zauber der Skepsis sein Cultur-Übergewicht über Europa. Die Kraft zu wollen, und zwar einen Willen lang zu wollen, ist etwas stärker schon in Deutschland, und im deutschen Norden wiederum stärker als in der deutschen Mitte; erheblich stärker in England, Spanien und Corsika, dort an das Phlegma, hier an harte Schädel gebunden,—um nicht von Italien zu reden, welches zu jung ist, als dass es schon wüsste, was es wollte, und das erst beweisen muss, ob es wollen kann -, aber am allerstärksten und erstaunlichsten in jenem ungeheuren Zwischenreiche, wo Europa gleichsam nach Asien zurückfliesst, in Russland. Da ist die Kraft zu wollen seit langem zurückgelegt und aufgespeichert, da wartet der Wille—ungewiss, ob als Wille der Verneinung oder der Bejahung—in bedrohlicher Weise darauf, ausgelöst zu werden, um den Physikern von heute ihr Leibwort abzuborgen. Es dürften nicht nur indische Kriege und Verwicklungen in Asien dazu nöthig sein, damit Europa von seiner grössten Gefahr entlastet werde, sondern innere Umstürze, die Zersprengung des Reichs in kleine Körper und vor Allem die Einführung des parlamentarischen Blödsinns, hinzugerechnet die Verpflichtung für Jedermann, zum Frühstück seine Zeitung zu lesen. Ich sage dies nicht als Wünschender: mir würde das Entgegengesetzte eher nach dem Herzen sein,—ich meine eine solche Zunahme der Bedrohlichkeit Russlands, dass Europa sich entschliessen müsste, gleichermaassen bedrohlich zu werden, nämlich Einen Willen zu bekommen, durch das Mittel einer neuen über Europa herrschenden Kaste, einen langen furchtbaren eigenen Willen, der sich über Jahrtausende hin Ziele setzen könnte:—damit endlich die langgesponnene Komödie seiner Kleinstaaterei und ebenso seine dynastische wie demokratische Vielwollerei zu einem Abschluss käme. Die Zeit für kleine Politik ist vorbei: schon das nächste Jahrhundert bringt den Kampf um die Erd-Herrschaft,—den Zwang zur grossen Politik.
209 Inwiefern das neue kriegerische Zeitalter, in welches wir Europäer ersichtlich eingetreten sind, vielleicht auch der Entwicklung einer anderen und stärkeren Art von Skepsis günstig sein mag, darüber möchte ich mich vorläufig nur durch ein Gleichniss ausdrücken, welches die Freunde der deutschen Geschichte schon verstehen werden. Jener unbedenkliche Enthusiast für schöne grossgewachsene Grenadiere, welcher, als König von Preussen, einem militärischen und skeptischen Genie—und damit im Grunde jenem neuen, jetzt eben siegreich heraufgekommenen Typus des Deutschen—das Dasein gab, der fragwürdige tolle Vater Friedrichs des Grossen, hatte in Einem Punkte selbst den Griff und die Glücks-Kralle des Genies: er wusste, woran es damals in Deutschland fehlte, und welcher Mangel hundert Mal ängstlicher und dringender war, als etwa der Mangel an Bildung und gesellschaftlicher Form,—sein Widerwille gegen den jungen Friedrich kam aus der Angst eines tiefen Instinktes. Männer fehlten; und er argwöhnte zu seinem bittersten Verdrusse, dass sein eigner Sohn nicht Manns genug sei. Darin betrog er sich: aber wer hätte an seiner Stelle sich nicht betrogen? Er sah seinen Sohn dem Atheismus, dem esprit, der genüsslichen Leichtlebigkeit geistreicher Franzosen verfallen:—er sah im Hintergrunde die grosse Blutaussaugerin, die Spinne Skepsis, er argwöhnte das unheilbare Elend eines Herzens, das zum Bösen wie zum Guten nicht mehr hart genug ist, eines zerbrochnen Willens, der nicht mehr befiehlt, nicht mehr befehlen kann. Aber inzwischen wuchs in seinem Sohne jene gefährlichere und härtere neue Art der Skepsis empor—wer weiss, wie sehr gerade durch den Hass des Vaters und durch die eisige Melancholie eines einsam gemachten Willens begünstigt?—die Skepsis der verwegenen Männlichkeit, welche dem Genie zum Kriege und zur Eroberung nächst verwandt ist und in der Gestalt des grossen Friedrich ihren ersten Einzug in Deutschland hielt. Diese Skepsis verachtet und reisst trotzdem an sich; sie untergräbt und nimmt in Besitz; sie glaubt nicht, aber sie verliert sich nicht dabei; sie giebt dem Geiste gefährliche Freiheit, aber sie hält das Herz streng; es ist die deutsche Form der Skepsis, welche, als ein fortgesetzter und in's Geistigste gesteigerter Fridericianismus, Europa eine gute Zeit unter die Botmässigkeit des deutschen Geistes und seines kritischen und historischen Misstrauens gebracht hat. Dank dem unbezwinglich starken und zähen Manns-Charakter der grossen deutschen Philologen und Geschichts-Kritiker (welche, richtig angesehn, allesammt auch Artisten der Zerstörung und Zersetzung waren) stellte sich allmählich und trotz aller Romantik in Musik und Philosophie ein neuer Begriff vom deutschen Geiste fest, in dem der Zug zur männlichen Skepsis entscheidend hervortrat: sei es zum Beispiel als Unerschrockenheit des Blicks, als Tapferkeit und Härte der zerlegenden Hand, als zäher Wille zu gefährlichen Entdeckungsreisen, zu vergeistigten Nordpol-Expeditionen unter öden und gefährlichen Himmeln. Es mag seine guten Gründe haben, wenn sich warmblütige und oberflächliche Menschlichkeits-Menschen gerade vor diesem Geiste bekreuzigen: cet esprit fataliste, ironique, méphistophélique nennt ihn, nicht ohne Schauder, Michelet. Aber will man nachfühlen, wie auszeichnend diese Furcht vor dem "Mann" im deutschen Geiste ist, durch den Europa aus seinem "dogmatischen Schlummer" geweckt wurde, so möge man sich des ehemaligen Begriffs erinnern, der mit ihm überwunden werden musste,—und wie es noch nicht zu lange her ist, dass ein vermännlichtes Weib es in zügelloser Anmaassung wagen durfte, die Deutschen als sanfte herzensgute willensschwache und dichterische Tölpel der Theilnahme Europa's zu empfehlen. Man verstehe doch endlich das Erstaunen Napoleon's tief genug, als er Goethen zu sehen bekam: es verräth, was man sich Jahrhunderte lang unter dem "deutschen Geiste" gedacht hatte. "Voilà un homme!"—das wollte sagen: "Das ist ja ein Mann! Und ich hatte nur einen Deutschen erwartet!—-
210 Gesetzt also, dass im Bilde der Philosophen der Zukunft irgend ein Zug zu rathen giebt, ob sie nicht vielleicht, in dem zuletzt angedeuteten Sinne, Skeptiker sein müssen, so wäre damit doch nur ein Etwas an ihnen bezeichnet—und nicht sie selbst. Mit dem gleichen Rechte dürften sie sich Kritiker nennen lassen; und sicherlich werden es Menschen der Experimente sein. Durch den Namen, auf welchen ich sie zu taufen wagte, habe ich das Versuchen und die Lust am Versuchen schon ausdrücklich unterstrichen: geschah dies deshalb, weil sie, als Kritiker an Leib und Seele, sich des Experiments in einem neuen, vielleicht weiteren, vielleicht gefährlicheren Sinne zu bedienen lieben? Müssen sie, in ihrer Leidenschaft der Erkenntniss, mit verwegenen und schmerzhaften Versuchen weiter gehn, als es der weichmüthige und verzärtelte Geschmack eines demokratischen Jahrhunderts gut heissen kann?—Es ist kein Zweifel: diese Kommenden werden am wenigsten jener ernsten und nicht unbedenklichen Eigenschaften entrathen dürfen, welche den Kritiker vom Skeptiker abheben, ich meine die Sicherheit der Werthmaasse, die bewusste Handhabung einer Einheit von Methode, den gewitzten Muth, das Alleinstehn und Sich-verantworten-können; ja, sie gestehen bei sich eine Lust am Neinsagen und Zergliedern und eine gewisse besonnene Grausamkeit zu, welche das Messer sicher und fein zu führen weiss, auch noch, wenn das Herz blutet. Sie werden härter sein (und vielleicht nicht immer nur gegen sich), als humane Menschen wünschen mögen, sie werden sich nicht mit der "Wahrheit" einlassen, damit sie ihnen "gefalle" oder sie "erhebe" und "begeistere":—ihr Glaube wird vielmehr gering sein, dass gerade die Wahrheit solche Lustbarkeiten für das Gefühl mit sich bringe. Sie werden lächeln, diese strengen Geister, wenn Einer vor ihnen sagte "jener Gedanke erhebt mich: wie sollte er nicht wahr sein?" Oder: "jenes Werk entzückt mich: wie sollte es nicht schön sein?" Oder: "jener Künstler vergrössert mich: wie sollte er nicht gross sein?"—sie haben vielleicht nicht nur ein Lächeln, sondern einen ächten Ekel vor allem derartig Schwärmerischen, Idealistischen, Femininischen, Hermaphroditischen bereit, und wer ihnen bis in ihre geheimen Herzenskammern zu folgen wüsste, würde schwerlich dort die Absicht vorfinden, "christliche Gefühle" mit dem "antiken Geschmacke" und etwa gar noch mit dem "modernen Parlamentarismus" zu versöhnen (wie dergleichen Versöhnlichkeit in unserm sehr unsicheren, folglich sehr versöhnlichen Jahrhundert sogar bei Philosophen vorkommen soll). Kritische Zucht und jede Gewöhnung, welche zur Reinlichkeit und Strenge in Dingen des Geistes führt, werden diese Philosophen der Zukunft nicht nur von sich verlangen: sie dürften sie wie ihre Art Schmuck selbst zur Schau tragen,—trotzdem wollen sie deshalb noch nicht Kritiker heissen. Es scheint ihnen keine kleine Schmach, die der Philosophie angethan wird, wenn man dekretirt, wie es heute so gern geschieht: "Philosophie selbst ist Kritik und kritische Wissenschaft—und gar nichts ausserdem!" Mag diese Werthschätzung der Philosophie sich des Beifalls aller Positivisten Frankreichs und Deutschlands erfreuen (- und es wäre möglich, dass sie sogar dem Herzen und Geschmacke Kant's geschmeichelt hätte: man erinnere sich der Titel seiner Hauptwerke -): unsre neuen Philosophen werden trotzdem sagen: Kritiker sind Werkzeuge des Philosophen und eben darum, als Werkzeuge, noch lange nicht selbst Philosophen! Auch der grosse Chinese von Königsberg war nur ein grosser Kritiker.—
211 Ich bestehe darauf, dass man endlich aufhöre, die philosophischen Arbeiter und überhaupt die wissenschaftlichen Menschen mit den Philosophen zu verwechseln,—dass man gerade hier mit Strenge "Jedem das Seine" und Jenen nicht zu Viel, Diesen nicht viel zu Wenig gebe. Es mag zur Erziehung des wirklichen Philosophen nöthig sein, dass er selbst auch auf allen diesen Stufen einmal gestanden hat, auf welchen seine Diener, die wissenschaftlichen Arbeiter der Philosophie, stehen bleiben,—stehen bleiben müssen; er muss selbst vielleicht Kritiker und Skeptiker und Dogmatiker und Historiker und überdies Dichter und Sammler und Reisender und Räthselrather und Moralist und Seher und "freier Geist" und beinahe Alles gewesen sein, um den Umkreis menschlicher Werthe und Werth-Gefühle zu durchlaufen und mit vielerlei Augen und Gewissen, von der Höhe in jede Ferne, von der Tiefe in jede Höhe, von der Ecke in jede Weite, blicken zu können. Aber dies Alles sind nur Vorbedingungen seiner Aufgabe: diese Aufgabe selbst will etwas Anderes,—sie verlangt, dass er Werthe schaffe. Jene philosophischen Arbeiter nach dem edlen Muster Kant's und Hegel's haben irgend einen grossen Thatbestand von Werthschätzungen—das heisst ehemaliger Werthsetzungen, Werthschöpfungen, welche herrschend geworden sind und eine Zeit lang "Wahrheiten" genannt werden—festzustellen und in Formeln zu drängen, sei es im Reiche des Logischen oder des Politischen (Moralischen) oder des Künstlerischen. Diesen Forschern liegt es ob, alles bisher Geschehene und Geschätzte übersichtlich, überdenkbar, fasslich, handlich zu machen, alles Lange, ja "die Zeit" selbst, abzukürzen und die ganze Vergangenheit zu überwältigen: eine ungeheure und wundervolle Aufgabe, in deren Dienst sich sicherlich jeder feine Stolz, jeder zähe Wille befriedigen kann. Die eigentlichen Philosophen aber sind Befehlende und Gesetzgeber: sie sagen "so soll es sein!", sie bestimmen erst das Wohin? und Wozu? des Menschen und verfügen dabei über die Vorarbeit aller philosophischen Arbeiter, aller Überwältiger der Vergangenheit,—sie greifen mit schöpferischer Hand nach der Zukunft, und Alles, was ist und war, wird ihnen dabei zum Mittel, zum Werkzeug, zum Hammer. Ihr "Erkennen" ist Schaffen, ihr Schaffen ist eine Gesetzgebung, ihr Wille zur Wahrheit ist—Wille zur Macht.—Giebt es heute solche Philosophen? Gab es schon solche Philosophen? Muss es nicht solche Philosophen geben?…
212 Es will mir immer mehr so scheinen, dass der Philosoph als ein nothwendiger Mensch des Morgens und Übermorgens sich jederzeit mit seinem Heute in Widerspruch befunden hat und befinden musste: sein Feind war jedes Mal das Ideal von Heute. Bisher haben alle diese ausserordentlichen Förderer des Menschen, welche man Philosophen nennt, und die sich selbst selten als Freunde der Weisheit, sondern eher als unangenehme Narren und gefährliche Fragezeichen fühlten -, ihre Aufgabe, ihre harte, ungewollte, unabweisliche Aufgabe, endlich aber die Grösse ihrer Aufgabe darin gefunden, das böse Gewissen ihrer Zeit zu sein. Indem sie gerade den Tugenden der Zeit das Messer vivisektorisch auf die Brust setzten, verriethen sie, was ihr eignes Geheimniss war: um eine neue Grösse des Menschen zu wissen, um einen neuen ungegangenen Weg zu seiner Vergrösserung. Jedes Mal deckten sie auf, wie viel Heuchelei, Bequemlichkeit, Sich-gehen-lassen und Sich-fallen lassen, wie viel Lüge unter dem bestgeehrten Typus ihrer zeitgenössischen Moralität versteckt, wie viel Tugend überlebt sei; jedes Mal sagten sie: "wir müssen dorthin, dorthinaus, wo ihr heute am wenigsten zu Hause seid." Angesichts einer Welt der "modernen Ideen", welche Jedermann in eine Ecke und "Spezialität" bannen möchte, würde ein Philosoph, falls es heute Philosophen geben könnte, gezwungen sein, die Grösse des Menschen, den Begriff "Grösse" gerade in seine Umfänglichkeit und Vielfältigkeit, in seine Ganzheit im Vielen zu setzen: er würde sogar den Werth und Rang darnach bestimmen, wie viel und vielerlei Einer tragen und auf sich nehmen, wie weit Einer seine Verantwortlichkeit spannen könnte. Heute schwächt und verdünnt der Zeitgeschmack und die Zeittugend den Willen, Nichts ist so sehr zeitgemäss als Willensschwäche: also muss, im Ideale des Philosophen, gerade Stärke des Willens, Härte und Fähigkeit zu langen Entschliessungen in den Begriff "Grösse" hineingehören; mit so gutem Rechte als die umgekehrte Lehre und das Ideal einer blöden entsagenden demüthigen selbstlosen Menschlichkeit einem umgekehrten Zeitalter angemessen war, einem solchen, das gleich dem sechszehnten Jahrhundert an seiner aufgestauten Energie des Willens und den wildesten Wässern und Sturmfluthen der Selbstsucht litt. Zur Zeit des Sokrates, unter lauter Menschen des ermüdeten Instinktes, unter conservativen Altathenern, welche sich gehen liessen—"zum Glück", wie sie sagten, zum Vergnügen, wie sie thaten—und die dabei immer noch die alten prunkvollen Worte in den Mund nahmen, auf die ihnen ihr Leben längst kein Recht mehr gab, war vielleicht Ironie zur Grösse der Seele nöthig, jene sokratische boshafte Sicherheit des alten Arztes und Pöbelmanns, welcher schonungslos in's eigne Fleisch schnitt, wie in's Fleisch und Herz des "Vornehmen", mit einem Blick, welcher verständlich genug sprach: "verstellt euch vor mir nicht! Hier—sind wir gleich!" Heute umgekehrt, wo in Europa das Heerdenthier allein zu Ehren kommt und Ehren vertheilt, wo die "Gleichheit der Rechte" allzuleicht sich in die Gleichheit im Unrechte umwandeln könnte: ich will sagen in gemeinsame Bekriegung alles Seltenen, Fremden, Bevorrechtigten, des höheren Menschen, der höheren Seele, der höheren Pflicht, der höheren Verantwortlichkeit, der schöpferischen Machtfülle und Herrschaftlichkeit—heute gehört das Vornehm-sein, das Für-sich-sein-wollen, das Anders-sein-können, das Allein-stehn und auf-eigne-Faust-leben-müssen zum Begriff "Grösse"; und der Philosoph wird Etwas von seinem eignen Ideal verrathen, wenn er aufstellt: "der soll der Grösste sein, der der Einsamste sein kann, der Verborgenste, der Abweichendste, der Mensch jenseits von Gut und Böse, der Herr seiner Tugenden, der überreiche des Willens; dies eben soll Grösse heissen: ebenso vielfach als ganz, ebenso weit als voll sein können." Und nochmals gefragt: ist heute—Grösse möglich?
213 Was ein Philosoph ist, das ist deshalb schlecht zu lernen, weil es nicht zu lehren ist: man muss es "wissen", aus Erfahrung,—oder man soll den Stolz haben, es nicht zu wissen. Dass aber heutzutage alle Welt von Dingen redet, in Bezug auf welche sie keine Erfahrung haben kann, gilt am meisten und schlimmsten vom Philosophen und den philosophischen Zuständen:—die Wenigsten kennen sie, dürfen sie kennen, und alle populären Meinungen über sie sind falsch. So ist zum Beispiel jenes ächt philosophische Beieinander einer kühnen ausgelassenen Geistigkeit, welche presto läuft, und einer dialektischen Strenge und Nothwendigkeit, die keinen Fehltritt thut, den meisten Denkern und Gelehrten von ihrer Erfahrung her unbekannt und darum, falls jemand davon vor ihnen reden wollte, unglaubwürdig. Sie stellen sich jede Nothwendigkeit als Noth, als peinliches Folgen-müssen und Gezwungen-werden vor; und das Denken selbst gilt ihnen als etwas Langsames, Zögerndes, beinahe als eine Mühsal und oft genug als "des Schweisses der Edlen werth"—aber ganz und gar nicht als etwas Leichtes, Göttliches und dem Tanze, dem Übermuthe, Nächst-Verwandtes! "Denken" und eine Sache "ernst nehmen", "schwer nehmen"—das gehört bei ihnen zu einander: so allein haben sie es "erlebt" -. Die Künstler mögen hier schon eine feinere Witterung haben: sie, die nur zu gut wissen, dass gerade dann, wo sie Nichts mehr "willkürlich" und Alles nothwendig machen, ihr Gefühl von Freiheit, Feinheit, Vollmacht, von schöpferischem Setzen, Verfügen, Gestalten auf seine Höhe kommt,—kurz, dass Nothwendigkeit und "Freiheit des Willens" dann bei ihnen Eins sind. Es giebt zuletzt eine Rangordnung seelischer Zustände, welcher die Rangordnung der Probleme gemäss ist; und die höchsten Probleme stossen ohne Gnade Jeden zurück, der ihnen zu nahen wagt, ohne durch Höhe und Macht seiner Geistigkeit zu ihrer Lösung vorherbestimmt zu sein. Was hilft es, wenn gelenkige Allerwelts-Köpfe oder ungelenke brave Mechaniker und Empiriker sich, wie es heute so vielfach geschieht, mit ihrem Plebejer-Ehrgeize in ihre Nähe und gleichsam an diesen "Hof der Höfe" drängen! Aber auf solche Teppiche dürfen grobe Füsse nimmermehr treten: dafür ist im Urgesetz der Dinge schon gesorgt; die Thüren bleiben diesen Zudringlichen geschlossen, mögen sie sich auch die Köpfe daran stossen und zerstossen! Für jede hohe Welt muss man geboren sein; deutlicher gesagt, man muss für sie gezüchtet sein: ein Recht auf Philosophie—das Wort im grossen Sinne genommen—hat man nur Dank seiner Abkunft, die Vorfahren, das "Geblüt" entscheidet auch hier. Viele Geschlechter müssen der Entstehung des Philosophen vorgearbeitet haben; jede seiner Tugenden muss einzeln erworben, gepflegt, fortgeerbt, einverleibt worden sein, und nicht nur der kühne leichte zarte Gang und Lauf seiner Gedanken, sondern vor Allem die Bereitwilligkeit zu grossen Verantwortungen, die Hoheit herrschender Blicke und Niederblicke, das Sich-Abgetrennt-Fühlen von der Menge und ihren Pflichten und Tugenden, das leutselige Beschützen und Vertheidigen dessen, was missverstanden und verleumdet wird, sei es Gott, sei es Teufel, die Lust und Übung in der grossen Gerechtigkeit, die Kunst des Befehlens, die Weite des Willens, das langsame Auge, welches selten bewundert, selten hinauf blickt, selten liebt…
Musean translation
Complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the German and reviewed against it.
Part Six:
We Scholars.
204 At the risk that moralizing will prove here, too, to be what it has always been—namely, an undaunted showing of one’s wounds, to borrow from Balzac—I would venture to oppose an improper and harmful displacement of rank that today threatens to establish itself between science and philosophy, quite unnoticed and seemingly with the best conscience. I think one must have the right, on the basis of one’s experience—experience, it seems to me, always means bad experience?—to have a say in such a higher question of rank: so as not to speak like blind people about color, or like women and artists against science (“Ah, this wicked science!” sigh their instinct and shame, “it always finds things out!”—). The declaration of independence of the scientific human being, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler aftereffects of the democratic way and its mischief: the scholar’s self-glorification and self-exaltation are everywhere in full bloom today, in their finest spring—which is not to say that self-praise smells sweet in this case. “Away with all masters!”—here too the rabble instinct demands it; and after science has defended itself against theology with the happiest success, having been its “handmaid” for too long, it now aims, in sheer arrogance and incomprehension, to prescribe laws to philosophy and play the “master” itself for once—what am I saying! the philosopher. My memory—the memory of a scientific human being, if you please!—overflows with naive expressions of pride that I have heard from young natural scientists and old physicians concerning philosophy and philosophers (not to mention the most cultivated and conceited of all scholars, the philologists and schoolteachers, who are both by profession—). Sometimes it was the specialist and corner-dweller who instinctively resisted all synthetic tasks and abilities; sometimes the industrious worker who had caught a scent of leisure and noble luxuriance in the philosopher’s economy of soul and felt diminished and belittled by it. Sometimes it was the color blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing in philosophy but a succession of refuted systems and an extravagant expenditure that “benefits” no one. Sometimes fear of disguised mysticism and a redrawing of the boundaries of knowledge sprang out; sometimes contempt for individual philosophers that had involuntarily generalized into contempt for philosophy. Finally, most often I found behind young scholars’ haughty disdain for philosophy the harmful aftereffect of a philosopher himself, to whom they had certainly renounced obedience as a whole, without yet having escaped the spell of his disparaging valuations of other philosophers—with the result of a general ill humor toward all philosophy. (Such, for example, seems to me Schopenhauer’s aftereffect upon the latest Germany: with his unintelligent rage against Hegel, he managed to break the entire last generation of Germans out of its connection with German culture, a culture that, all things considered, was an eminence and divinatory subtlety of the historical sense: but at precisely this point Schopenhauer himself was poor to the point of genius, unreceptive, un-German.) Broadly reckoned, it may above all have been the human, all-too-human, in short the poverty of modern philosophers themselves, that most thoroughly damaged reverence for philosophy and opened the gates to the rabble instinct. Let us admit just how much our modern world lacks the whole breed of Heraclituses, Platos, Empedocleses, and whatever all those regal and magnificent hermits of the spirit were called; and with how much justification, faced with such representatives of philosophy as are today, thanks to fashion, as much on top as beneath contempt—in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann—an honest man of science may feel himself of a better breed and ancestry. It is particularly the sight of those mishmash philosophers who call themselves “philosophers of reality” or “positivists” that can cast a dangerous mistrust into the soul of a young, ambitious scholar: at best these are scholars and specialists themselves, it is palpable!—they are all defeated men brought back under the dominion of science, men who once wanted more of themselves without having a right to this “more” and its responsibility—and who now, respectably, bitterly, vindictively, represent in word and deed disbelief in philosophy’s masterly task and sovereignty. Finally: how could it be otherwise! Science flourishes today and has a good conscience written abundantly on its face, while what the whole of modern philosophy has gradually sunk to, this remnant of philosophy today, arouses mistrust and discontent, if not mockery and compassion. Philosophy reduced to “theory of knowledge,” in fact no more than a timid suspension of judgment and doctrine of abstinence: a philosophy that never even gets over the threshold and scrupulously denies itself the right to enter—that is philosophy in its last throes, an ending, an agony, something that moves one to compassion. How could such a philosophy—rule!
205 The dangers to the philosopher’s development today are in truth so manifold that one might doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and towering edifice of the sciences have grown to monstrous proportions, and with them the likelihood that the philosopher will tire while still learning or allow himself to be detained somewhere and “specialized”: so that he never again reaches his height, namely the point from which he can look over, around, and down. Or he reaches it too late, when his best time and strength are already past; or damaged, coarsened, degenerate, so that his gaze, his overall judgment of value, means little anymore. Perhaps it is precisely the subtlety of his intellectual conscience that makes him hesitate and delays him along the way; he fears the seduction of becoming a dilettante, a thousand-footer and thousand-feeler; he knows all too well that someone who has lost his reverence for himself no longer commands, no longer leads, even as a knower: unless he should want to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and Pied Piper of spirits, in short a seducer. Ultimately this is a question of taste: even if it were not a question of conscience. What is more, to double the philosopher’s difficulty once again, he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the value of life—he is reluctant to learn to believe that he has a right or even a duty to this judgment, and must seek his way to that right and that belief only through the most wide-ranging experiences—perhaps the most disturbing, most destructive—and often hesitating, doubting, falling silent. In fact, for a long time the multitude has confused and mistaken the philosopher for either the scientific man and ideal scholar, or the religiously exalted enthusiast and drunkard of God, detached from the senses and “removed from the world”; and when today one even hears someone praised for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it means almost nothing more than “prudently and out of the way.” Wisdom: to the rabble this seems a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting oneself out of a bad game in good shape; but the genuine philosopher—so it seems to us, my friends?—lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and duty of a hundred trials and temptations of life: he risks himself constantly, he plays the bad game…
206 Compared with a genius, that is, a being who either begets or gives birth, both words taken in their highest scope—the scholar, the average scientific human being, always has something of the old maid about him: for like her he knows nothing of the two most valuable human activities. Indeed, one grants both of them, scholars and old maids, respectability as a kind of compensation—one underlines respectability in these cases—and feels the same admixture of annoyance at having to make this concession. Let us look more closely: what is the scientific human being? First of all, an ignoble kind of human being, with the virtues of an ignoble kind, that is, one that neither rules nor holds authority nor is self-sufficient: he has industry, a patient willingness to take his place in rank and file, evenness and moderation in ability and need; he has an instinct for his own kind and for what his own kind needs—for example, that portion of independence and green pasture without which there is no peace for work, that claim to honor and recognition (which first and foremost presupposes being known, being recognizable—), that sunshine of a good name, that constant sealing of his value and usefulness with which the inward mistrust at the bottom of the heart of all dependent human beings and herd animals must be overcome again and again. As is only fitting, the scholar also has the ailments and bad habits of an ignoble kind: he is rich in petty envy and has a lynx’s eye for what is low in those natures to whose heights he cannot rise. He is familiar and confiding, but only like someone who lets himself go, not flow; and precisely before the human being of the great current he stands all the colder and more closed—his eye then resembles a smooth, reluctant lake in which no rapture, no fellow feeling raises a ripple anymore. The worst and most dangerous thing a scholar is capable of comes to him from his kind’s instinct of mediocrity: from that Jesuitism of mediocrity which instinctively works to destroy the exceptional human being and tries to break every taut bow or—still better!—unstring it. Unstring it, that is, considerately, with a gentle hand of course—unstring it with familiar compassion: that is the real art of Jesuitism, which has always known how to introduce itself as a religion of compassion.—
207 However gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit—and who has not at some point been sick to death of everything subjective and its accursed very-own-selfhood!—in the end one must also learn caution toward one’s gratitude and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the stripping of spirit of self and personality has lately been celebrated as though it were an end in itself, a redemption and transfiguration: as commonly happens in the pessimist school in particular, which also has good reasons of its own for paying the highest honors to “disinterested knowledge.” The objective human being, who no longer curses and scolds as the pessimist does, the ideal scholar in whom, after a thousand complete and partial failures, the scientific instinct for once comes to full bloom, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are: but he belongs in the hand of someone more powerful. He is only an instrument, let us say: he is a mirror—he is no “end in himself.” The objective human being is indeed a mirror: accustomed to submit before everything that wants to be known, with no other pleasure than that which knowing, “reflecting,” provides—he waits until something comes and then delicately spreads himself out, so that even light footsteps and the slipping past of ghostly beings will not be lost on his surface and skin. What still remains of a “person” in him seems to him accidental, often arbitrary, still more often a disturbance: so fully has he become to himself a passageway and reflection of alien forms and events. He thinks back to “himself” with effort, not infrequently wrongly; he easily confuses himself with something else, makes mistakes about his own needs, and only here is he unsubtle and careless. Perhaps his health troubles him, or the pettiness and stuffy air of wife and friend, or a lack of companions and company—yes, he forces himself to reflect on his trouble: in vain! Already his thought strays away to the more general case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how he can be helped. He has lost seriousness about himself, and time for himself as well: he is cheerful, not from lack of distress but from lack of fingers and handles for his distress. His habitual readiness to meet every thing and experience, the sunny and unprejudiced hospitality with which he accepts everything that strikes him, his kind of heedless benevolence, of dangerous unconcern about Yes and No: ah, there are enough cases in which he must pay for these virtues!—and as a human being in general he becomes all too easily the dead residue of these virtues. If one wants love and hatred from him, I mean love and hatred as God, woman, and animal understand them—he will do what he can and give what he can. But one should not be surprised if it is not much—if precisely here he proves inauthentic, fragile, questionable, and rotten. His love is willed, his hatred artificial and rather a feat of force, a little vanity and exaggeration. He is genuine only insofar as he may be objective: only in his cheerful totalism is he still “nature” and “natural.” His reflecting soul, forever smoothing itself, no longer knows how to affirm, no longer how to deny; he does not command; neither does he destroy. “I despise almost nothing,” he says with Leibniz: do not fail to hear or underestimate the “almost”! Nor is he a model human being; he leads no one and follows no one; in general he places himself too far away to have any reason to take sides between good and evil. If for so long he has been confused with the philosopher, with the Caesarian breeder and man of power in culture, then he has been given far too high an honor and the most essential thing about him overlooked—he is an instrument, a piece of slave, even if certainly the most sublime kind of slave, but nothing in himself—almost nothing! The objective human being is an instrument, a precious, easily injured and clouded measuring instrument and mirror-work of art, which one ought to treat gently and honor; but he is no goal, no departure and ascent, no complementary human being in whom the rest of existence finds its justification, no conclusion—and still less a beginning, a begetting and first cause, nothing solid, powerful, self-standing that wants to be master: rather, only a delicate, hollow-blown, fine, mobile vessel of forms that must first wait for some content and substance in order to “shape itself” accordingly—usually a human being without substance and content, a “selfless” human being. Consequently nothing for women either, to say it in parentheses.—
208 When a philosopher today gives us to understand that he is no skeptic—I hope this could be heard in the description of the objective spirit just given?—the whole world hears it unwillingly; people look at him with some apprehension, would like to ask so many questions, ask… indeed, among timid eavesdroppers, of whom there are now multitudes, he is henceforth considered dangerous. It is as though, at his rejection of skepticism, they heard some evil, threatening noise from far away, as though somewhere a new explosive were being tested, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilin, a pessimism of good will that not only says No, wills No, but—terrible to think!—does No. Against this kind of “good will”—a will to the real, active negation of life—there is admittedly no better sleeping potion and sedative today than skepticism, the gentle, lovely, lulling poppy of skepticism; and Hamlet himself is now prescribed by the physicians of the age against the “ghost” and its rumbling underground. “Aren’t everyone’s ears already full of evil noises?” says the skeptic, as a friend of peace and almost a kind of security police: “this subterranean No is terrible! Be quiet at last, you pessimistic moles!” For the skeptic, this tender creature, takes fright all too easily; his conscience is trained to flinch at every No, indeed even at a decisive, hard Yes, and to feel something like a bite. Yes! and No!—that goes against his morality; conversely, he loves to celebrate his virtue with noble abstention, saying, for example, with Montaigne: “What do I know?” Or with Socrates: “I know that I know nothing.” Or: “Here I do not trust myself; here no door stands open to me.” Or: “Supposing it stood open, why enter at once!” Or: “What use are all rash hypotheses? Making no hypotheses at all might easily be a matter of good taste. Must you absolutely straighten every crooked thing at once? Absolutely stuff every hole with some sort of tow? Can’t that wait? Doesn’t time have time? Oh, you daredevils, can you not wait at all? The uncertain has its charms too, the Sphinx too is a Circe, Circe too was a philosopher.”—Thus a skeptic consoles himself; and it is true that he needs some consolation. For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological constitution that in common language is called weak nerves and sickliness; it arises whenever races or classes long separated from one another cross in a decisive and sudden way. In the new generation, which inherits different standards and values into its blood, as it were, everything is unrest, disturbance, doubt, experiment; the best forces have an inhibiting effect, the virtues themselves do not let one another grow and become strong; body and soul lack balance, a center of gravity, perpendicular certainty. But what becomes most deeply sick and degenerates in such mixed people is the will: they no longer know independence of decision, the brave feeling of pleasure in willing—they doubt “freedom of the will” even in their dreams. Our Europe today, the scene of an absurdly sudden experiment in radical mixing of classes and consequently of races, is therefore skeptical at every height and depth, now with that agile skepticism which leaps impatiently and eagerly from one branch to another, now gloomy as a cloud overloaded with question marks—and often sick to death of its will! Paralysis of the will: where does one not find this cripple sitting today! And often so dressed up! So seductively dressed up! There are the most beautiful robes of pomp and falsehood for this sickness; and that, for example, most of what displays itself today in the shopwindows as “objectivity,” “scientific rigor,” “art for art’s sake,” “pure, will-less knowledge” is only dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will—for this diagnosis of Europe’s sickness I will answer.—The sickness of the will is distributed unevenly across Europe: it shows itself most strongly and variously where culture has been at home longest; it vanishes to the degree that “the barbarian” still—or once again—asserts his right beneath the loose-fitting garment of Western cultivation. In present-day France, accordingly, as one can as readily infer as grasp with one’s hands, the will is most gravely diseased; and France, which has always had a masterly skill at turning even the fatal turns of its spirit into something charming and seductive, shows its cultural ascendancy over Europe today precisely as a school and exhibition of all the enchantments of skepticism. The strength to will, and indeed to will one will for a long time, is already somewhat greater in Germany, and greater again in the German north than in Germany’s center; considerably greater in England, Spain, and Corsica, bound there to phlegm, here to hard skulls—not to speak of Italy, which is too young to know yet what it wants and must first prove whether it can will—but strongest and most astonishing of all in that enormous intermediate realm where Europe flows back into Asia, as it were, in Russia. There the strength to will has long been set aside and stored up; there the will waits—uncertain whether as a will of negation or affirmation—in a threatening manner to be released, to borrow their favorite word from today’s physicists. More than Indian wars and entanglements in Asia might be needed to relieve Europe of its greatest danger: internal upheavals, the shattering of the empire into small bodies, and above all the introduction of parliamentary idiocy, together with an obligation for everyone to read his newspaper at breakfast. I do not say this as one wishing for it: the opposite would be more to my heart—I mean such an increase in Russia’s threatening power that Europe would have to resolve to become equally threatening, namely to acquire one will, through the means of a new caste ruling over Europe, a long, terrible will of its own capable of setting goals across millennia—so that the long-spun comedy of its petty states, and likewise its dynastic and democratic multiplicity of wills, might at last come to an end. The time for petty politics is past: the very next century brings the struggle for dominion over the earth—the compulsion to great politics.
209 To what extent the new warlike age, which we Europeans have evidently entered, may perhaps also favor the development of another and stronger kind of skepticism, I would for the moment express only through a parable that friends of German history will understand. That unhesitating enthusiast for handsome, tall grenadiers who, as King of Prussia, gave life to a military and skeptical genius—and thereby, at bottom, to that new type of German now emerging victorious—the questionable, mad father of Frederick the Great, himself possessed the grasp and lucky claw of genius on one point: he knew what Germany lacked at that time, and which lack was a hundred times more alarming and urgent than, say, the lack of cultivation and social form—his aversion to the young Frederick came from the anxiety of a deep instinct. Men were lacking; and to his bitterest vexation he suspected that his own son was not man enough. In this he was mistaken: but who in his place would not have been mistaken? He saw his son succumbing to atheism, to wit, to the pleasure-loving frivolity of clever Frenchmen—he saw in the background the great bloodsucker, the spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable misery of a heart no longer hard enough for either evil or good, of a broken will that no longer commands, can no longer command. But meanwhile there was growing in his son that more dangerous and harder new kind of skepticism—who knows how much favored precisely by his father’s hatred and the icy melancholy of a will made solitary?—the skepticism of audacious manliness, most closely related to the genius for war and conquest, which made its first entrance into Germany in the figure of the great Frederick. This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes for itself; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe, but does not lose itself in doing so; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom but keeps the heart under strict discipline; it is the German form of skepticism which, as an ongoing Frederickianism heightened into the most spiritual realm, brought Europe for a considerable time under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks to the unconquerably strong and tenacious masculine character of the great German philologists and historical critics (who, properly seen, were all also artists of destruction and dissolution), a new concept of the German spirit gradually established itself, despite all the Romanticism in music and philosophy, in which the trait of masculine skepticism emerged decisively: for example, as fearlessness of the gaze, as courage and hardness of the dissecting hand, as a tenacious will to dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized North Pole expeditions beneath desolate and dangerous skies. There may be good reasons why warm-blooded and superficial devotees of humanity cross themselves before this very spirit: “that fatalistic, ironic, Mephistophelean spirit,” Michelet calls it, not without a shudder. But to feel how distinguishing this fear of the “man” in the German spirit is, through whom Europe was awakened from its “dogmatic slumber,” one should recall the former concept that had to be overcome along with it—and how it is not so long ago that a masculinized woman could dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans to Europe’s sympathy as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, poetic blockheads. Let us at last understand deeply enough Napoleon’s astonishment when he came to see Goethe: it betrays what people had understood by the “German spirit” for centuries. “There is a man!”—that meant: “Why, this is a man! And I had expected only a German!”—
210 Suppose, then, that some feature in the image of the philosophers of the future suggests that they may perhaps have to be skeptics in the sense just indicated: this would still describe only something about them—and not them themselves. With equal right they might allow themselves to be called critics; and certainly they will be people of experiments. In the name with which I ventured to christen them, I have already expressly underlined attempting and the pleasure in attempting: was this because, as critics in body and soul, they love to employ the experiment in a new, perhaps broader, perhaps more dangerous sense? Must they, in their passion for knowledge, go further with audacious and painful experiments than the softhearted and pampered taste of a democratic century can approve?—There is no doubt: these coming ones will least of all be able to dispense with those serious and not harmless qualities that distinguish the critic from the skeptic: I mean certainty of standards of value, the conscious handling of a unity of method, shrewd courage, the ability to stand alone and answer for oneself; indeed, they admit to themselves a pleasure in saying No and dissecting, and a certain deliberate cruelty that knows how to guide the knife surely and subtly even when the heart bleeds. They will be harder (and perhaps not always only toward themselves) than humane people might wish; they will not become involved with “truth” in order for it to “please” them or “elevate” and “inspire” them—rather, they will have little faith that truth in particular brings such entertainments for the feelings. They will smile, these stern spirits, if someone should say before them, “That thought elevates me: how could it not be true?” Or: “That work delights me: how could it not be beautiful?” Or: “That artist makes me greater: how could he not be great?”—Perhaps they will have not only a smile but a genuine disgust ready for everything of this enthusiastic, idealistic, feminine, hermaphroditic sort, and anyone who knew how to follow them into the secret chambers of their hearts would scarcely find there the intention of reconciling “Christian feelings” with “ancient taste” and perhaps even with “modern parliamentarianism” (as such readiness for reconciliation is said to occur even among philosophers in our very uncertain, consequently very conciliatory century). These philosophers of the future will demand of themselves not merely critical discipline and every habit that leads to cleanliness and rigor in matters of the spirit: they may even display them as their own kind of adornment—nevertheless, they do not on that account want to be called critics. It seems to them no slight disgrace done to philosophy when people decree, as they so love to do today: “Philosophy itself is criticism and critical science—and nothing whatever besides!” This valuation of philosophy may enjoy the applause of all the positivists of France and Germany (and it is possible it would even have flattered Kant’s heart and taste: recall the titles of his principal works—): our new philosophers will nonetheless say: critics are instruments of the philosopher and precisely for that reason, as instruments, are far from being philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Königsberg was only a great critic.—
211 I insist that people finally stop confusing philosophical laborers, and scientific human beings in general, with philosophers—that precisely here they rigorously give “to each his own,” not too much to the former and not far too little to the latter. It may be necessary for the real philosopher’s education that he himself should once have stood on all those steps where his servants, the scientific laborers of philosophy, remain—must remain; perhaps he must himself have been critic and skeptic and dogmatist and historian, and moreover poet and collector and traveler and solver of riddles and moralist and seer and “free spirit” and almost everything, in order to traverse the circumference of human values and feelings of value and to be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences, from the height into every distance, from the depth into every height, from the corner into every expanse. But all this is only the precondition of his task: this task itself wants something else—it demands that he create values. Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to establish some great body of valuations—that is, former positings and creations of value that have become dominant and are called “truths” for a time—and compress it into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or of politics (morality) or of art. It falls to these investigators to make everything that has happened and been valued until now surveyable, thinkable, comprehensible, manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even “time” itself, and to subdue the entire past: an immense and wonderful task in whose service every subtle pride, every tenacious will, can certainly find satisfaction. But the actual philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say, “Thus it shall be!” They first determine humanity’s Where to? and What for? and in doing so have at their disposal the preparatory work of all philosophical laborers, all subduers of the past—they reach for the future with a creative hand, and everything that is and was becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power.—Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?…
212 It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, as a necessary human being of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy each time was the ideal of today. Until now all these extraordinary advancers of humanity whom we call philosophers, and who seldom felt themselves friends of wisdom but rather unpleasant fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, and finally the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their age. By setting the vivisector’s knife to the breast of precisely the virtues of their age, they betrayed their own secret: that they knew of a new greatness of the human being, of a new, untrodden path to making him greater. Each time they uncovered how much hypocrisy, comfort, letting oneself go and letting oneself fall, how much falsehood lay hidden beneath the most honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue had outlived itself; each time they said: “We must go there, out there, where you are least at home today.” Faced with a world of “modern ideas” that would like to banish everyone to a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if philosophers could exist today, would be compelled to locate humanity’s greatness, the concept “greatness,” precisely in its breadth and multiplicity, in its wholeness in the many: he would even determine value and rank by how much and how many kinds of things someone could bear and take upon himself, how far he could stretch his responsibility. Today the taste and virtue of the age weaken and thin the will; nothing is so timely as weakness of will: thus, in the philosopher’s ideal, precisely strength of will, hardness, and the capacity for long-lasting resolutions must belong to the concept “greatness”; with as much justification as the opposite doctrine and ideal of a timid, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity suited an opposite age, one that, like the sixteenth century, suffered from its pent-up energy of will and the wildest waters and storm tides of selfishness. In the time of Socrates, among nothing but people of weary instinct, among conservative old Athenians who let themselves go—“toward happiness,” as they said, toward pleasure, as they acted—and still mouthed the old magnificent words to which their lives had long since ceased to give them a right, perhaps irony was necessary to greatness of soul, that Socratic, malicious assurance of the old physician and man of the rabble, who cut mercilessly into his own flesh as into the flesh and heart of the “noble,” with a gaze that spoke plainly enough: “Do not dissemble before me! Here—we are equal!” Today, conversely, when in Europe the herd animal alone receives and distributes honors, when “equality of rights” could all too easily turn into equality in wrongdoing: I mean into a common war against everything rare, strange, privileged, against the higher human being, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, creative fullness of power and sovereignty—today being noble, wanting to be for oneself, being able to be different, having to stand alone and live on one’s own authority belong to the concept “greatness”; and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he proposes: “He shall be greatest who can be most solitary, most hidden, most divergent, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the one overrich in will; precisely this shall be called greatness: being able to be as manifold as whole, as wide as full.” And to ask once again: is greatness—possible today?
213 What a philosopher is can be learned only poorly because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it from experience—or have the pride not to know it. But that today everyone talks about things of which they can have no experience is true most of all, and at its worst, of the philosopher and philosophical states: very few know them, are entitled to know them, and all popular opinions about them are false. Thus, for example, that genuinely philosophical conjunction of a bold, exuberant spirituality that runs presto and a dialectical rigor and necessity that takes no false step is unknown in the experience of most thinkers and scholars, and therefore, should someone wish to speak of it before them, unbelievable. They imagine every necessity as distress, as the painful need to follow and be compelled; and thinking itself counts for them as something slow, hesitant, almost a hardship and often enough as “worth the sweat of the noble”—but not at all as something light, divine, most closely related to dance and high spirits! “Thinking” and taking a matter “seriously,” taking it “heavily”—these belong together for them: that alone is how they have “experienced” it.—Artists may already have a subtler scent for this: they who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything “arbitrarily” and do everything necessarily, their feeling of freedom, subtlety, full power, of creative positing, disposing, shaping, reaches its height—in short, that necessity and “freedom of the will” are then one in them. Ultimately there is an order of rank among states of soul, to which the order of rank among problems corresponds; and the highest problems mercilessly repel everyone who dares approach them without being predestined to solve them by the height and power of his spirituality. What good does it do when agile all-purpose minds or clumsy, honest mechanics and empiricists crowd with their plebeian ambition into their vicinity, into this “court of courts,” as it were, as so frequently happens today! But coarse feet must never tread on such carpets: the primal law of things has already seen to that; the doors remain closed to these intruders, even if they knock and smash their heads against them! One must be born for every high world; more clearly, one must be bred for it: one has a right to philosophy—the word taken in its great sense—only thanks to one’s ancestry; ancestors, “blood,” decide here too. Many generations must have labored in preparation for the philosopher’s emergence; each of his virtues must individually have been acquired, cultivated, inherited, incorporated, and not only the bold, light, delicate walk and run of his thoughts, but above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the loftiness of commanding looks and downward looks, the feeling of separation from the multitude and its duties and virtues, the gracious protection and defense of what is misunderstood and slandered, whether God or devil, the pleasure and practice of great justice, the art of commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye that seldom admires, seldom looks upward, seldom loves…
Plain English translation
Complete machine-assisted Plain English translation, made independently and directly from the German and reviewed against it.
Sixth Part:
We Scholars.
204 At the risk that moralizing will turn out here, too, to be what it always was—fearlessly displaying one's wounds, as Balzac puts it—I want to challenge an improper and harmful shift in rank. It now threatens to establish itself between scholarship and philosophy, quite unnoticed and apparently with the clearest conscience. I think you must earn the right, through your own experience—doesn't experience always mean bad experience?—to join a discussion of such a high question of rank. Otherwise you will talk like blind people discussing color, or like women and artists attacking scholarship. ("Oh, this wicked scholarship!" their instinct and sense of shame sigh. "It always finds things out!") The scientific scholar's declaration of independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler aftereffects of democracy, in its good and bad forms. Everywhere today the scholar's self-glorification and overestimation of himself are in full bloom, enjoying their finest spring. That isn't meant to suggest that self-praise smells sweet in this case. "Away with all masters!" Here, too, that is what the rabble's instinct demands. Science successfully defended itself against theology, whose "servant" it had been for too long. Now, full of arrogance and misunderstanding, it is out to lay down laws for philosophy and have its own turn at playing "master"—what am I saying? At playing the philosopher. My memory—the memory of a scientific scholar, if you please!—is crammed with naively arrogant remarks I have heard young natural scientists and old doctors make about philosophy and philosophers. (Not to mention the most educated and conceited of all scholars, the philologists and schoolteachers, whose profession makes them both.) Sometimes it was the specialist, stuck in his corner, instinctively resisting every task and ability that brings things together. Sometimes it was the hardworking laborer who had caught a scent of leisure and noble abundance in the philosopher's spiritual household, and felt slighted and diminished by it. Sometimes it was the color blindness of the practical-minded person. He sees philosophy as nothing but a series of refuted systems and a wasteful expense that "does nobody any good." Sometimes fear of disguised mysticism and a redrawing of knowledge's boundaries came to the surface. Sometimes contempt for individual philosophers had involuntarily spread into contempt for philosophy. Finally, what I most often found behind young scholars' arrogant disdain for philosophy was the bad aftereffect of a philosopher himself. Although they had largely stopped obeying him, they had not escaped the spell of his contemptuous judgments of other philosophers. The result was a general ill humor toward all philosophy. (That, for example, is how Schopenhauer's effect on present-day Germany seems to me. His unintelligent rage against Hegel has managed to break the whole latest generation of Germans out of its connection with German culture. All things considered, that culture was an achievement of height and almost prophetic subtlety in the historical sense. But at this very point Schopenhauer himself was poor to the point of genius, unresponsive, un-German.) On the whole, it may above all have been the human, all too human element—in short, the poverty of the modern philosophers themselves—that most thoroughly damaged respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the rabble's instinct. Let's admit how completely our modern world lacks the whole kind represented by Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and all those other regal, magnificent hermits of the spirit, whatever their names were. And let's admit how much right an honest scientific scholar has to feel himself of a better kind and lineage than those representatives of philosophy who, thanks to fashion, are now both on top and in disgrace—in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the mixer of systems Eduard von Hartmann. In particular, the sight of those hotchpotch philosophers who call themselves "philosophers of reality" or "positivists" can plant a dangerous distrust in a young, ambitious scholar's soul. They are themselves, at best, scholars and specialists: you can practically touch the evidence! They are all defeated men, brought back under science's command. At some point they wanted to be more, without having a right to that "more" or to its responsibility. Now, respectable, bitter, and vengeful, they represent in word and deed a disbelief in philosophy's task of mastery and its power to rule. Finally, how could it be otherwise? Science flourishes today and wears a clear conscience all over its face. Meanwhile, what the whole of modern philosophy has gradually sunk into—this present-day remnant of philosophy—arouses distrust and discontent, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to a "theory of knowledge": in fact, no more than a timid doctrine of suspended judgment and abstinence. A philosophy that cannot even cross the threshold, and painfully denies itself the right to enter. That is philosophy breathing its last, an ending, a death struggle, something to be pitied. How could such a philosophy—rule!
205 The dangers facing a philosopher's development today are so many that we might doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The sciences have grown enormously in scope, building their tower higher and higher. That also makes it more likely that a philosopher will grow tired while still a student, or let himself get stuck somewhere and "specialize." Then he never reaches his proper height, where he can look over things, around him, and down. Or he gets up there too late, when his best years and strength are already gone. Or he arrives damaged, coarsened, deteriorated, so that his vision, his judgment of value as a whole, means little anymore. The very sensitivity of his intellectual conscience may make him hesitate and fall behind along the way. He fears being tempted into becoming a dabbler, with a thousand feet and a thousand antennae. He knows only too well that someone who has lost respect for himself no longer commands or leads even as a seeker of knowledge. Unless, that is, he wants to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper of minds—in short, a seducer. In the end, this is a question of taste, even if it weren't a question of conscience. Something else doubles the philosopher's difficulty. He demands from himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the value of life. He learns only reluctantly to believe he has a right, or even a duty, to make this judgment. Only through the widest range of experiences—perhaps the most disruptive and destructive ones—can he search out his way to that right and that belief, often hesitating, doubting, falling silent. For a long time the masses have in fact confused and misunderstood the philosopher. They have taken him either for the scientific researcher and ideal scholar, or for the religiously uplifted enthusiast, detached from the senses, "removed from the world," drunk on God. And when you hear someone praised today for living "wisely" or "like a philosopher," it means little more than "prudently and out of the way." Wisdom seems to the rabble to be a kind of escape, a means and a clever trick for getting out of a bad game in good shape. But the real philosopher—isn't that how it seems to us, my friends?—lives "unphilosophically" and "unwisely," above all imprudently. He feels the burden and duty of a hundred trials and temptations of life. He constantly risks himself. He plays the bad game…
206 Compared with a genius—that is, a being who either fathers or gives birth, taking both words in their fullest sense—the scholar, the average scientific person, always has something of the old maid about him. Like her, he has no understanding of the two most valuable human functions. In fact, we grant both scholars and old maids respectability, as a kind of compensation—we stress respectability in these cases. And being forced to make this concession leaves the same trace of annoyance. Let's look more closely: what is the scientific person? First, a type of person who is not noble. He has the virtues of a type that is not noble: one that does not rule, does not carry authority, and is not self-sufficient. He is industrious, patiently takes his place in the ranks, and is steady and moderate in his abilities and needs. He has an instinct for people like himself and for what they need: for example, that bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no peace for work; that claim to honor and recognition (which first and foremost presupposes being known, being recognizable); that sunshine of a good name; that constant confirmation of his value and usefulness. This must keep overcoming the inner distrust at the bottom of every dependent person's and herd animal's heart. Naturally, the scholar also has the illnesses and bad habits of a type that is not noble. He is full of petty envy, with a lynx's eye for the low points of those natures whose heights he cannot reach. He is friendly, but only like someone who lets himself go without letting himself flow. Faced with a person who is a mighty stream, he becomes all the colder and more closed. His eye is then like a smooth, unwelcoming lake, with no ripple of delight or fellow feeling. The worst and most dangerous thing a scholar is capable of comes from his type's instinct for mediocrity. It comes from that Jesuitism of mediocrity which instinctively works to destroy the exceptional person and tries to break every taut bow—or, preferably, to unstring it. Unstring it considerately, of course, with a gentle hand—unstring it with friendly pity. That is Jesuitism's real art. It has always known how to present itself as the religion of pity.—
207 However gratefully we may welcome the objective mind—and who hasn't at some point been sick to death of everything subjective and its damned fixation on its very own self?—we must eventually learn to be wary even of our gratitude. We must stop the exaggeration that has recently celebrated the mind's loss of self and personality as though it were a goal in itself, a redemption and transfiguration. This happens especially in the pessimists' school, which also has good reasons of its own for giving the highest honors to "disinterested knowledge." The objective person no longer curses and rails as the pessimist does. He is the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct finally blossoms and flourishes, after a thousand complete or partial failures. He is certainly one of the most valuable tools there are. But he belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool—let's say he is a mirror—not an "end in himself." The objective person is in fact a mirror. He is accustomed to submitting to everything that wants to be known, with no pleasure other than the pleasure of knowing, of "reflecting." He waits for something to come, and then spreads himself out gently so that even light footsteps and the fleeting passage of ghostly beings leave their trace on his surface and skin. Whatever "person" is still left in him seems accidental to him, often arbitrary, and even more often a nuisance. He has become so much a passageway and reflection for other shapes and events. He thinks back to "himself" with effort, and often gets it wrong. He easily mistakes himself for something else, misjudges his own basic needs, and only here is he insensitive and careless. Perhaps his health troubles him, or his wife and friend's pettiness and stale indoor air, or a lack of companions and company. Yes, he forces himself to think about his trouble—but in vain! His thoughts are already wandering off to the more general case. Tomorrow he will know as little as he did yesterday about how he can be helped. He has lost his seriousness about himself, and his time for himself as well. He is cheerful, not because he has no troubles, but because he has no fingers and handles with which to grasp his own troubles. His habitual openness to every thing and experience; the sunny, unprejudiced hospitality with which he accepts whatever comes his way; his kind of indiscriminate goodwill, his dangerous indifference to Yes and No—oh, there are plenty of cases in which he must pay for these virtues! And as a human being altogether, he all too easily becomes their lifeless residue. If you ask love and hatred of him—I mean love and hatred as God, woman, and animal understand them—he will do what he can and give what he can. But you shouldn't be surprised if it isn't much, if just here he proves false, fragile, questionable, and rotten. His love is willed, his hatred artificial and more of a feat of effort, a little vanity and exaggeration. He is genuine only insofar as he is allowed to be objective. Only in his cheerful embrace of everything is he still "nature" and "natural." His reflecting soul, forever smoothing itself out, no longer knows how to affirm or deny. He does not command; he does not destroy either. "I despise almost nothing," he says with Leibniz. Don't miss or underestimate that "almost"! Nor is he a model human being. He neither leads nor follows anyone. He generally stands too far away to have any reason to take sides between good and evil. For so long he has been confused with the philosopher, with the Caesar-like breeder and forceful shaper of culture. That has given him far too much honor and overlooked the essential thing about him: he is a tool, something of a slave, certainly the most refined kind of slave, but nothing in himself—almost nothing! The objective person is a tool, a valuable measuring instrument and artistic mirror, easily damaged and clouded, to be treated carefully and honored. But he is not a goal, not a going forth and rising up, not a completing human being in whom the rest of existence finds its justification, not a conclusion—and still less a beginning, a begetting and first cause. He is nothing solid, powerful, self-supporting that wants to be master. Rather, he is only a delicate, fine, flexible vessel for shapes, blown hollow, which must wait for some content and substance before it can "shape itself" accordingly. Usually he is a person without substance or content, a "selfless" person. So, incidentally, nothing for women either.—
208 When a philosopher today makes it clear that he is no skeptic—I hope that came through in the description of the objective mind just given?—everyone is unhappy to hear it. People look at him with a certain fear. There are so many things they would like to ask, to ask… Yes, among the timid eavesdroppers, of whom there are now so many, he is considered dangerous from that point on. His rejection of skepticism makes them feel as if they were hearing some evil, threatening noise from far away, as if a new explosive were being tested somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit. Perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilin, a pessimism of good will: one that doesn't merely say No and will No, but—terrifying thought!—does No. Against this kind of "good will," a will actually to deny life through action, it is generally agreed that there is no better sleeping pill and sedative today than skepticism: the soft, lovely, lulling poppy of skepticism. The doctors of our time even prescribe Hamlet himself against the "ghost" and its rumbling underground. "Haven't we all heard enough bad noises already?" says the skeptic, as a friend of peace and almost a kind of security police. "This underground No is dreadful! Be quiet at last, you pessimistic moles!" The skeptic, this tender creature, is much too easily frightened. His conscience has been trained to flinch and feel something like a bite at every No, indeed even at a firm, hard Yes. Yes! And No! That goes against his morality. Instead, he loves celebrating his virtue with noble abstention. He might say with Montaigne, "What do I know?" Or with Socrates, "I know that I know nothing." Or, "Here I don't trust myself; no door stands open to me here." Or, "Suppose it did stand open—why go straight in?" Or, "What use are all these hasty hypotheses? Making no hypotheses at all could easily be a matter of good taste. Must you immediately straighten out everything crooked? Must you stuff every hole with some bit of tow? Can't it wait? Doesn't time have time? Oh, you daredevils, can't you wait at all? Uncertainty has its charms too; the Sphinx is a Circe too; Circe was a philosopher too." That is how a skeptic comforts himself. And it is true that he needs some comfort. Skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physical condition that people commonly call weak nerves and sickliness. It arises whenever races or classes long separated from each other interbreed in a sudden and decisive way. The new generation inherits different standards and values in its blood, so to speak. Everything in it is unrest, disturbance, doubt, experiment. Its best powers hold each other back. Even its virtues stop each other from growing strong. Body and soul lack balance, a center of gravity, the certainty of standing upright. But what sickens and degenerates most deeply in such mixed people is the will. They no longer know independence in deciding or the brave pleasure of willing. They doubt "freedom of the will" even in their dreams. Our Europe today is the scene of an absurdly sudden experiment in radically mixing classes, and therefore races. That is why it is skeptical from top to bottom. Sometimes its skepticism is restless, leaping impatiently and greedily from branch to branch; sometimes it is gloomy as a cloud overloaded with question marks—and often it is sick to death of its own will! Paralysis of the will: where today do we not find this cripple sitting! And often how dressed up! How seductively dressed up! There are the most beautiful clothes of splendor and deception for this illness. Most of what displays itself in the shop windows today as "objectivity," "scientific rigor," "art for art's sake," or "pure, will-less knowledge," for example, is only dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will. I will stand by this diagnosis of Europe's illness. This disease of the will is unevenly spread across Europe. It shows itself most strongly and in the most forms where culture has been at home longest. It disappears to the extent that "the barbarian" still—or once again—asserts his rights under the loose-fitting garment of Western education. In today's France, then, the will is most seriously ill: you can reach this conclusion as easily as you can grasp the evidence. France has always been masterfully skilled at turning even disastrous changes in its spirit into something charming and seductive. Today it shows its cultural superiority over Europe precisely as a school and display of all the charms of skepticism. The power to will, and to keep willing one will for a long time, is already somewhat stronger in Germany, and stronger again in northern Germany than in its center. It is considerably stronger in England, Spain, and Corsica, bound to a placid temperament in the first case, and hard skulls in the others. I won't speak of Italy, which is too young yet to know what it wants, and must first prove whether it can will. But it is strongest and most astonishing of all in that vast middle realm where Europe seems to flow back into Asia: Russia. There the power to will has long been set aside and stored up. There the will waits threateningly to be released—to borrow today's physicists' favorite word—uncertain whether it will be a will to denial or affirmation. To relieve Europe of its greatest danger might require more than wars in India and entanglements in Asia. It might require internal upheavals, the empire's breakup into small bodies, and above all the introduction of parliamentary idiocy, along with everyone's obligation to read his newspaper over breakfast. I don't say this as a wish. The opposite would be more to my liking: I mean, such an increase in Russia's threat that Europe would have to decide to become equally threatening. It would have to acquire one will, through a new caste ruling over Europe: a long, terrible will of its own, able to set goals across thousands of years. Then at last its long-drawn-out comedy of petty states would end, along with its many conflicting dynastic and democratic wills. The time for petty politics is over. The very next century will bring the struggle for rule over the earth—the compulsion to grand politics.
209 How far the new age of war, which we Europeans have plainly entered, may also favor the development of another, stronger kind of skepticism is something I want, for now, to express only through an image. Friends of German history will understand it. That heedless enthusiast for handsome, tall grenadiers, who as king of Prussia brought a military and skeptical genius into the world—and thus, fundamentally, that new type of German now rising to victory—the dubious, crazed father of Frederick the Great, himself had a genius's grasp and lucky claw in one respect. He knew what Germany lacked at the time, and what lack was a hundred times more alarming and urgent than, say, a lack of education and social polish. His dislike of the young Frederick came from the fear of a deep instinct. Men were lacking. And to his bitterest annoyance, he suspected that his own son wasn't man enough. He was wrong about that. But who in his place wouldn't have been wrong? He saw his son surrendering to atheism, to wit, to the pleasure-loving lightheartedness of clever Frenchmen. In the background he saw the great bloodsucker, the spider of skepticism. He suspected the incurable misery of a heart no longer hard enough for either evil or good, of a broken will that no longer commanded and could no longer command. Meanwhile, however, that more dangerous and harder new kind of skepticism was growing in his son. Who knows how much it was helped precisely by his father's hatred and by the icy melancholy of a will forced into solitude? It was the skepticism of daring manliness, closely related to genius for war and conquest, which first entered Germany in the figure of the great Frederick. This skepticism despises yet still seizes for itself; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe, yet does not lose itself in doing so. It gives the mind dangerous freedom but keeps the heart under strict control. This is the German form of skepticism. As a continuing, ever more spiritual Frederickianism, it brought Europe for a good while under the rule of the German mind and its critical and historical distrust. Thanks to the unbeatably strong and tough masculine character of the great German philologists and historical critics (who, properly seen, were all also artists of destruction and dissolution), a new idea of the German mind gradually took hold, despite all the Romanticism in music and philosophy. Its decisive feature was the tendency toward masculine skepticism: for example, a fearless eye, courage and hardness in the dissecting hand, a persistent will to dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritual North Pole expeditions under desolate and dangerous skies. Warm-blooded, superficial champions of humanity may have good reasons for crossing themselves against precisely this spirit. Michelet calls it, not without a shudder, "this fatalistic, ironic, Mephistophelean spirit." But to feel how much distinction there is in this fear of the "man" within the German mind, through whom Europe was awakened from its "dogmatic slumber," remember the earlier idea that this one had to overcome. Remember how recently a masculinized woman could still presume, with unbridled arrogance, to recommend the Germans to Europe's sympathy as gentle, kindhearted, weak-willed, poetic fools. At last, understand deeply enough Napoleon's astonishment when he caught sight of Goethe. It reveals what people had understood by the "German mind" for centuries. "Here is a man!" That meant: “Why, this is a man! And I had only expected a German!”—
210 Suppose, then, that we can guess one feature in the picture of the philosophers of the future: perhaps they must be skeptics in the sense just suggested. That would still describe only something about them, not the philosophers themselves. They could just as rightly allow themselves to be called critics. And certainly they will be people who experiment. In the name I dared to give them, I already expressly emphasized trying things out and the pleasure of trying. Was that because, as critics in body and soul, they like to use experiments in a new, perhaps broader, perhaps more dangerous sense? Must their passion for knowledge take them further in daring and painful experiments than a democratic century's softhearted, pampered taste can approve? There is no doubt: these coming people will need, above all, those serious and not entirely harmless qualities that distinguish the critic from the skeptic. I mean certainty in standards of value, the conscious use of a unified method, resourceful courage, the ability to stand alone and answer for themselves. Yes, they admit to themselves a pleasure in saying No and taking things apart, and a certain thoughtful cruelty that knows how to guide the knife surely and delicately, even while the heart bleeds. They will be harder (perhaps not always only on themselves) than humane people might wish. They will not involve themselves with "truth" so that it may "please," "uplift," and "inspire" them. Rather, they will have little faith that truth, of all things, brings such treats for the feelings. These stern minds will smile if someone says in front of them, "That thought uplifts me: how could it not be true?" Or, "That work delights me: how could it not be beautiful?" Or, "That artist makes me greater: how could he not be great?" Perhaps they will have not only a smile but genuine disgust ready for everything so dreamy, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic. Anyone who knew how to follow them into the secret chambers of their hearts would hardly find an intention there to reconcile "Christian feelings" with "the taste of antiquity," or perhaps even with "modern parliamentarianism." (They say such a readiness to reconcile things occurs even among philosophers in our very uncertain and therefore very conciliatory century.) These philosophers of the future will not merely demand of themselves critical discipline and every habit that leads to cleanliness and rigor in matters of the mind. They may even display them as their own kind of jewelry. For all that, they still won't want to be called critics. They see no small disgrace being done to philosophy when people decree, as they so much like to do today, "Philosophy itself is criticism and critical scholarship—and absolutely nothing else!" This assessment of philosophy may enjoy the applause of all the positivists in France and Germany. (It might even have flattered Kant's heart and taste: remember the titles of his main works.) Our new philosophers will still say: critics are the philosopher's tools, and precisely as tools, they are a long way from being philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinese man of Königsberg was only a great critic.—
211 I insist that people finally stop confusing philosophical workers, and scientific scholars generally, with philosophers. Here in particular, we must strictly give "each his due," not too much to the former, and not far too little to the latter. To educate a real philosopher, it may be necessary for him to have stood on all the steps where his servants, the scholarly workers in philosophy, remain—and must remain. He himself may have to have been a critic, skeptic, dogmatist, historian, and, besides, a poet, collector, traveler, riddle solver, moralist, seer, "free spirit," and almost everything. That would let him travel around the whole range of human values and feelings of value. With many kinds of eyes and consciences, he could look from the heights into every distance, from the depths up to every height, from the corner into every open expanse. But all this only prepares for his task. The task itself wants something different: it demands that he create values. Those philosophical workers modeled on the noble examples of Kant and Hegel must establish some great existing body of value judgments—earlier acts of setting and creating values that have become dominant and are called "truths" for a time—and compress it into formulas, whether in logic, politics (morality), or art. These researchers have the job of making everything that has happened and been valued so far easy to survey, think over, grasp, and handle. They must shorten everything long, indeed "time" itself, and master the whole past. This is an enormous and wonderful task, in whose service any fine pride and any persistent will can certainly find satisfaction. But actual philosophers are commanders and lawmakers. They say, "This is how it must be!" They first determine humanity's Where to? and What for? In doing so, they have at their disposal the preliminary work of all philosophical workers, all those who have mastered the past. They reach for the future with a creative hand. Everything that is and was becomes their means, their tool, their hammer. Their "knowing" is creating; their creating is lawmaking; their will to truth is—will to power. Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers already? Must there not be such philosophers?…
212 It seems to me increasingly that the philosopher, as a person needed for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always been, and had to be, at odds with his today. His enemy was always today's ideal. Up to now, all these exceptional people who advance humanity, whom we call philosophers, have rarely felt themselves to be friends of wisdom. They have felt more like unpleasant fools and dangerous question marks. They have found their task—a hard, unwanted, unavoidable task—and finally its greatness, in being their time's bad conscience. By setting the vivisector's knife to the chest of the very virtues of their age, they revealed their own secret: they knew of a new human greatness, a new, untrodden path to making humanity greater. Each time, they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfort, self-indulgence, and letting oneself sink, how much lying lay hidden under the most honored form of their contemporaries' morality; how much virtue had outlived itself. Each time they said, "We must go there, out there, where you feel least at home today." Faced with a world of "modern ideas" that wants to confine everyone to a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher—if philosophers could exist today—would be forced to locate human greatness, the idea of "greatness," precisely in breadth and variety, in wholeness within multiplicity. He would even judge value and rank by how much, and how many different things, a person could carry and take upon himself, and how far he could extend his responsibility. Today's taste and virtue weaken and thin out the will. Nothing is more in keeping with the times than weakness of will. So, in the philosopher's ideal, "greatness" must include strength of will, hardness, and the ability to make long-lasting decisions. This is just as right as the opposite teaching, the ideal of a timid, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age. Such an age, like the sixteenth century, suffered from its pent-up energy of will and the wildest waters and storm tides of selfishness. In Socrates' time, he was surrounded by people with worn-out instincts, conservative old Athenians who let themselves go—"for happiness," they said; for pleasure, their actions said. They still kept using the old magnificent words to which their lives had long ceased to give them any right. Then greatness of soul may have needed irony: that malicious Socratic certainty of the old doctor and man of the people who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that spoke clearly enough: "Don't pretend in front of me! Here—we are equal!" Today, by contrast, in Europe the herd animal alone receives and hands out honors. "Equality of rights" could all too easily turn into equality in wrongdoing: I mean a joint war against everything rare, strange, privileged, against the higher human being, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the fullness of creative power and mastery. Today, being noble, wanting to be on one's own, being able to be different, having to stand alone and live on one's own initiative belong to the idea of "greatness." And the philosopher will reveal something of his own ideal when he proposes: "The greatest shall be the one who can be the loneliest, the most hidden, the most different; the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, overflowing with will. This is what greatness shall mean: being able to be as varied as one is whole, as broad as one is full." And once again the question: is greatness possible today?
213 What a philosopher is can hardly be learned, because it cannot be taught. You must "know" it from experience—or have the pride not to know it. These days everyone talks about things they can have no experience of. This is most true, and worst, in the case of the philosopher and philosophical states of mind. Very few know them or are allowed to know them, and every popular opinion about them is false. Take, for example, that genuinely philosophical combination of bold, exuberant spirituality, running at top speed, and a rigor and necessity in reasoning that never puts a foot wrong. Most thinkers and scholars have no experience of it. So if someone tried to tell them about it, they wouldn't believe it. They imagine every necessity as distress, as having painfully to follow and being forced. Thinking itself counts for them as something slow, hesitant, almost a hardship, and often enough as "worthy of the sweat of the noble"—but not at all as something light, divine, and closely related to dancing and high spirits! "Thinking" and "taking something seriously," "taking it heavily"—these belong together for them. That alone is how they have "experienced" it. Artists may have a finer nose here. They know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything "arbitrarily" and do everything necessarily, their feeling of freedom, subtlety, full power, of creatively setting, disposing, and shaping, reaches its height. In short, necessity and "freedom of the will" are then one for them. Finally, there is a ranking of states of soul, to which the ranking of problems corresponds. The highest problems mercilessly repel anyone who dares approach them without being destined to solve them through the height and power of his spirituality. What good does it do when nimble, all-purpose minds or clumsy, honest mechanics and empiricists crowd near them with their plebeian ambition, as happens so often today, pushing into this "court of courts," so to speak! But coarse feet must never step on such carpets. The fundamental law of things has already made sure of that. The doors stay closed to these intruders, even if they bump their heads against them and smash them! You must be born for every high world. More plainly, you must have been bred for it. You have a right to philosophy—taking the word in its great sense—only through your descent. Ancestors, "blood," decide here too. Many generations must have worked to prepare the philosopher's emergence. Each of his virtues must have been individually acquired, nurtured, inherited, and absorbed. Not only the bold, light, delicate walking and running of his thoughts, but above all the readiness for great responsibilities; the loftiness of commanding looks and downward looks; the feeling of being separate from the masses and their duties and virtues; the friendly protection and defense of what is misunderstood and slandered, whether God or devil; the pleasure and practice of great justice; the art of commanding; the breadth of the will; the slow eye that rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves…
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Part VI — We Scholars 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 7 of 11 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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