Part VII — Our Virtues

Part Seven:

Our Virtues.

214 Our virtues?—It is likely that we too still have our virtues, although, as is only fitting, they will not be those trusting, four-square virtues for whose sake we hold our grandfathers in honor, but also keep them a little at arm’s length. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we firstborn of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity and art of disguise, our mellowed and, as it were, sweetened cruelty in spirit and senses—if we should have virtues, we shall presumably have only those that have learned best to get along with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent needs: well then, let us look for them in our labyrinths!—where, as everyone knows, so many things lose their way, so many things are lost entirely. And is there anything more beautiful than looking for one’s own virtues? Does this not almost mean already: believing in one’s own virtue? But this “believing in one’s virtue”—is it not at bottom the same thing that used to be called one’s “good conscience,” that venerable, long-tailed conceptual pigtail our grandfathers hung behind their heads, often enough behind their understanding as well? It seems, then, that however little we may otherwise consider ourselves old-fashioned and grandfatherishly respectable, in one respect we are nevertheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience: we too still wear their pigtail.—Ah! If you knew how soon, how very soon—things will be different! …

215 Just as in the realm of the stars there are sometimes two suns determining the orbit of one planet, just as in certain cases suns of different colors shine around a single planet, now with red light, now with green, then striking it at the same time and flooding it with many colors: so we modern human beings, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our “starry sky,” are determined by different moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colors, they are seldom unambiguous—and there are enough cases in which we perform many-colored actions.

216 Love one’s enemies? I believe that has been well learned: it happens a thousandfold today, on a small scale and a large one; indeed, something higher and more sublime sometimes happens already—we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best—but all this unconsciously, without noise, without display, with that shame and concealment of goodness which forbid the mouth the solemn word and the formula of virtue. Morality as a pose—offends our taste today. This too is progress: just as it was progress in our fathers that religion as a pose finally came to offend their taste, including hostility and Voltairean bitterness toward religion (and everything that once belonged to the gestural language of freethinking). It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, with which all Puritan litany, all moral preaching and ostentatious uprightness refuse to harmonize.

217 Beware of those who attach great importance to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in moral discrimination! They never forgive us if they have once made a blunder before us (or even at our expense)—they inevitably become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if they remain our “friends.”—Blessed are the forgetful: for they also “get over” their stupidities.

218 The psychologists of France—and where else are there still psychologists today?—have still not exhausted their bitter and manifold pleasure in bourgeois stupidity, as though… enough, they betray something by it. Flaubert, for example, the honest bourgeois of Rouen, finally saw, heard, and tasted nothing else: it was his kind of self-torture and subtler cruelty. Now, for a change—for it is getting boring—I recommend another thing to delight in: the unconscious cunning with which all the good, fat, honest spirits of mediocrity behave toward higher spirits and their tasks, that subtle, entangled, Jesuitical cunning a thousand times subtler than the understanding and taste of this middle class in its best moments—even than the understanding of its victims—as yet another proof that “instinct” is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence discovered so far. In short, you psychologists, study the philosophy of the “rule” in its struggle with the “exception”: there you have a spectacle good enough for gods and divine malice! Or, still more plainly: practice vivisection on the “good human being,” on the “human being of good will”… on yourselves!

219 Moral judging and condemning are the favorite revenge of the intellectually limited upon those who are less so, also a kind of compensation for nature’s having endowed them poorly, and finally an opportunity to acquire spirit and become subtle—malice spiritualizes. At the bottom of their hearts it does them good that there is a standard before which even those heaped with the goods and privileges of the spirit stand equal to them—they fight for the “equality of all before God” and almost need belief in God for that very purpose. Among them are the strongest opponents of atheism. Anyone who said to them, “A lofty intellect is beyond comparison with any goodness and respectability of a merely moral human being,” would drive them into a rage—I shall take care not to do so. Rather, I would like to flatter them with my proposition that a lofty intellect itself exists only as the final offspring of moral qualities; that it is a synthesis of all those states attributed to the “merely moral” human being, after each has been acquired individually through long discipline and practice, perhaps in entire chains of generations; that a lofty intellect is precisely the spiritualization of justice and of that kindly severity which knows itself charged with maintaining the order of rank in the world, among things themselves—and not only among human beings.

220 With the praise of the “disinterested” so popular today, one must, perhaps not without some danger, make oneself aware of what the people actually take an interest in, and what things the common man cares about thoroughly and deeply at all: including the educated, even scholars and, unless everything deceives us, almost philosophers too. The fact that emerges is that the vast majority of what interests and excites subtler, more pampered tastes, what interests and excites every higher nature, seems entirely “uninteresting” to the average human being—if he nevertheless notices devotion to it, he calls it “disinterested” and wonders how it is possible to act “without interest.” There have been philosophers who knew how to lend this popular astonishment a seductive and mystically otherworldly expression (perhaps because they did not know the higher nature from experience?)—instead of stating the naked and perfectly straightforward truth that a “disinterested” action is a very interesting and interested action, provided … “And love?”—What! Even an action out of love is supposed to be “unegoistic”? But you blockheads—! “And praise of the self-sacrificing?”—But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and received something in return—perhaps something of himself for something of himself—that he gave here in order to have more there, perhaps to be more altogether, or at least to feel himself “more.” But this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more pampered spirit is reluctant to linger: so badly does truth already need to stifle a yawn here when she has to answer. Ultimately she is a woman: one should not do violence to her.

221 “It happens,” said a moralistic pedant and dealer in minutiae, “that I honor and distinguish an unselfish human being: not, however, because he is unselfish, but because he seems to me to have a right to benefit another human being at his own expense. Enough: the question is always who he is and who that other is. In someone destined and made to command, for example, self-denial and modestly stepping aside would not be a virtue but the squandering of a virtue: so it seems to me. Every unegoistic morality that takes itself unconditionally and addresses everyone sins not only against taste: it is an incitement to sins of omission, one more seduction under the mask of philanthropy—and precisely a seduction and injury of the higher, rarer, privileged. One must force moralities first of all to bow before the order of rank, one must press their presumption upon their consciences—until they finally reach a clear understanding among themselves that it is immoral to say: ‘What is right for one is fair for another.’”—Thus my moralistic pedant and good fellow: did he really deserve to be laughed at when he exhorted moralities to morality in this way? But one should not be too right if one wants the laughter on one’s side; a grain of wrongness even belongs to good taste.

222 Wherever compassion is preached today—and, rightly heard, no other religion is being preached anymore—let the psychologist open his ears: through all the vanity, through all the noise peculiar to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine sound of self-contempt. It belongs to that darkening and disfigurement of Europe which has been growing for a century now (and whose first symptoms are already documented in a thoughtful letter from Galiani to Madame d’Épinay): if it is not their cause! The human being of “modern ideas,” this proud ape, is wildly dissatisfied with himself: that much is certain. He suffers: and his vanity wants him only to “suffer with others” …

223 The European of mixed ancestry—a tolerably ugly plebeian, all in all—simply needs a costume: he needs history as the storeroom of costumes. To be sure, he notices that none of them fits his body properly—he changes and changes. Look at the nineteenth century with regard to these swift preferences and changes of stylistic masquerade; also at the moments of despair that “nothing suits” us.—Useless to parade oneself as Romantic or classical or Christian or Florentine or baroque or “national,” in morals and arts: “it is not becoming”! But “the spirit,” particularly “the historical spirit,” finds its advantage even in this despair: again and again a new piece of the past and of foreign lands is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, above all studied—we are the first learned age in the matter of “costumes,” I mean moralities, articles of faith, tastes in art, and religions, prepared as no age has ever been for carnival on a grand scale, for the most spiritual Mardi Gras laughter and high spirits, for the transcendental height of supreme idiocy and Aristophanic mockery of the world. Perhaps it is precisely here that we shall yet discover the realm of our invention, that realm where we too can still be original, perhaps as parodists of world history and buffoons of God—perhaps, even if nothing else from today has a future, our laughter still has a future!

224 The historical sense (or the ability to divine quickly the order of rank among the valuations by which a people, a society, a human being has lived, the “divinatory instinct” for the relationships among these valuations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of the forces at work): this historical sense, which we Europeans claim as our distinctive characteristic, came to us in the wake of the enchanting and mad half-barbarism into which Europe was plunged by the democratic mixing of classes and races—only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and way of life, of cultures that formerly lay hard beside one another, above one another, flows into us “modern souls” thanks to that mixing; our instincts now run back in every direction, we ourselves are a kind of chaos—but in the end “the spirit,” as I said, finds its advantage in this. Through our half-barbarism in body and desire we have secret access everywhere, such as a noble age never possessed, above all access to the labyrinth of unfinished cultures and to every half-barbarism that has ever existed on earth; and insofar as the most considerable part of human culture so far has been precisely half-barbarism, “historical sense” means almost a sense and instinct for everything, a taste and tongue for everything: by which it immediately proves itself an ignoble sense. We enjoy Homer again, for example: perhaps it is our happiest advantage that we know how to taste Homer, whom people of a noble culture (say, the French of the seventeenth century, such as Saint-Évremond, who reproaches him for his vast mind, even their final echo, Voltaire) do not and did not so readily know how to make their own—whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy. Their palate’s very definite Yes and No, their readily aroused disgust, their hesitant reserve toward everything strange, their dread of the bad taste even of lively curiosity, and in general that ill will of every noble and self-sufficient culture toward admitting a new appetite, a dissatisfaction with what is its own, an admiration of what is foreign: all this sets and disposes them unfavorably even toward the best things in the world that are not their property or could not become their prey—and no sense is more incomprehensible to such people than precisely the historical sense and its submissive plebeian curiosity. It is no different with Shakespeare, that astonishing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste, over whom an old Athenian from Aeschylus’s circle of friends would have laughed or fretted himself half to death: but we accept precisely this wild array of colors, this jumble of the most delicate, coarsest, and most artificial, with a secret familiarity and warmth; we enjoy him as the refinement of art saved up precisely for us, and let ourselves be disturbed as little by the offensive fumes and proximity of the English rabble in which Shakespeare’s art and taste live as we would on the Chiaia in Naples: where, enchanted and willing, we go our way with all our senses, however much the sewers of the rabble quarters hang in the air. We people of the “historical sense”: as such we have our virtues, there is no denying it—we are undemanding, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-overcoming, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating—with all that, perhaps we are not very “tasteful.” Let us finally admit to ourselves: what we people of the “historical sense” find hardest to grasp, to feel, to taste in sympathy, to love in sympathy, what finds us prejudiced and almost hostile at bottom, is precisely the perfect and ultimately ripe in every culture and art, the truly noble in works and human beings, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and cold quality shown by all things that have attained perfection. Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense necessarily opposes good taste, at least the very best taste, and it is precisely the little, brief, and highest strokes of happiness and transfigurations of human life, such as shine out here and there, that we can reproduce in ourselves only poorly, only hesitantly, only with effort: those moments and miracles when a great force voluntarily stopped short before the measureless and boundless—when an abundance of subtle pleasure was enjoyed in sudden restraint and petrification, in standing fast and fixing oneself upon a still trembling ground. Measure is foreign to us, let us admit it; our thrill is precisely the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like the rider on a horse snorting forward, we let the reins fall before the infinite, we modern human beings, we half-barbarians—and find our bliss only where we are also most—in danger.

225 Whether hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaimonism: all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to accompanying states and secondary matters, are foreground ways of thinking and naiveties upon which everyone conscious of shaping forces and an artist’s conscience will look down not without mockery, nor without compassion. Compassion for you! That, to be sure, is not compassion as you mean it: it is not compassion for social “distress,” for “society” and its sick and unfortunate, for people vicious and broken from the beginning, as they lie on the ground all around us; still less is it compassion for grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave strata striving for dominion—they call it “freedom.” Our compassion is a higher, more farsighted compassion—we see how humanity diminishes itself, how you diminish it!—and there are moments when we watch precisely your compassion with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this compassion—when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. You want, if possible—and there is no madder “if possible”—to abolish suffering; and we?—it seems we would rather have it even higher and worse than ever! Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal, that seems to us an end! A state that soon makes the human being ridiculous and contemptible—that makes one wish for his downfall! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created every elevation of humanity so far? That tension of the soul in misfortune which breeds its strength, its shudders at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever has ever been given it of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not given it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In the human being, creature and creator are united: in the human being there is material, fragment, excess, clay, filth, nonsense, chaos; but in the human being there is also creator, sculptor, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity, and seventh day—do you understand this opposition? And that your compassion is for the “creature in the human being,” for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, made to glow, refined—for what necessarily must suffer and ought to suffer? And our compassion—do you not grasp for whom our opposite compassion is intended, when it resists your compassion as the worst of all pampering and weaknesses?—Compassion against compassion, then!—But, to say it again, there are higher problems than all problems of pleasure and pain and compassion; and every philosophy that comes down only to these is a naivety.—

226 We immoralists!—This world that concerns us, in which we have to fear and love, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle commanding, subtle obeying, a world of “almost” in every respect, delicate, treacherous, pointed, tender: yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We are spun into a strict net and shirt of duties and cannot get out—and precisely in this we too are “people of duty”! Sometimes, it is true, we may dance in our “chains” and among our “swords”; more often, it is no less true, we gnash our teeth beneath them and grow impatient at all the secret hardness of our fate. But we may do what we like: the blockheads and appearances say against us, “These are people without duty”—we always have the blockheads and appearances against us!

227 Honesty—supposing this is our virtue, from which we cannot get free, we free spirits—well then, let us work at it with all our malice and love and never tire of “perfecting” ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have left: may its radiance someday remain lying over this aging culture and its dull, gloomy seriousness like a gilded, blue, mocking evening light! And if one day our honesty nevertheless grows tired and sighs and stretches its limbs and finds us too hard, and would like things better, easier, tenderer, like a pleasant vice: let us remain hard, we last Stoics! And let us send to its aid whatever devilry we have in us—our disgust at the clumsy and approximate, our “we strive for the forbidden,” our adventurer’s courage, our shrewd and pampered curiosity, our subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the world, which roams and raves hungrily around all the realms of the future—let us come to the aid of our “god” with all our “devils”! It is likely that people will misunderstand and misidentify us on that account: what does it matter! They will say, “Their ‘honesty’—that is their devilry, and nothing more!” What does it matter! And even if they were right! Have not all gods so far been such devils grown holy and rebaptized? And what, in the end, do we know about ourselves? And what the spirit that leads us wants to be called? (It is a matter of names.) And how many spirits we harbor? Our honesty, we free spirits—let us take care that it does not become our vanity, our finery and pomp, our limit, our stupidity! Every virtue tends toward stupidity, every stupidity toward virtue; “stupid to the point of sainthood,” they say in Russia—let us take care not to end up becoming saints and bores out of honesty! Is life not a hundred times too short to—be bored in it? One would really have to believe in eternal life to …

228 May I be forgiven the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and belonged among the sleeping aids—and that nothing has damaged “virtue” more in my eyes than this tediousness of its advocates; by which I would not wish to have failed to recognize their general usefulness. It is very important that as few people as possible think about morality—consequently it is very important that morality should not someday become interesting! But do not worry! Things remain today as they have always been: I see no one in Europe who has any conception (or conveys one) that reflection on morality could be pursued dangerously, treacherously, seductively—that doom might lie in it! Look, for example, at the indefatigable, unavoidable English utilitarians, how clumsily and honorably they walk along, walk on in Bentham’s footsteps (a Homeric simile puts it more clearly), just as he himself already walked in the footsteps of the honorable Helvétius (no, he was not a dangerous human being, this Helvétius!). Not a new thought, nothing of a subtler turning and folding of an old thought, not even a real history of what was thought before: an impossible literature altogether, unless one knows how to pickle it for oneself with some malice. For into these moralists too (whom one absolutely must read with ulterior thoughts, if one must read them—) that old English vice called cant and amounting to moral Tartuffery has crept, this time concealed under the new form of scientific rigor; nor is there any lack of secret defense against pangs of conscience, from which, as is only fitting, a race of former Puritans will suffer in every scientific engagement with morality. (Is a moralist not the opposite of a Puritan? Namely, as a thinker who takes morality as questionable, worthy of a question mark, in short as a problem? Ought moralizing not to be—immoral?) Ultimately they all want English morality to be vindicated: insofar as this best serves humanity, or the “general utility,” or “the happiness of the greatest number”—no! the happiness of England; they would like with all their strength to prove to themselves that striving for English happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion (and, at the highest point, a seat in Parliament), is also the right path of virtue, indeed that whatever virtue has existed in the world so far has consisted precisely in such striving. Not one of all these ponderous herd animals with troubled consciences (who undertake to plead the cause of egoism as the cause of general welfare—) wants to know or smell anything of the fact that “general welfare” is no ideal, no goal, no concept comprehensible in any way, but only an emetic—that what is fair to one cannot by any means be fair to another, that the demand for one morality for all is harmful precisely to higher human beings, in short, that there is an order of rank between human being and human being, consequently also between morality and morality. These utilitarian Englishmen are a modest and thoroughly mediocre kind of human being, and, as I said: insofar as they are boring, one cannot think highly enough of their utility. They ought to be encouraged still further: as has been attempted, in part, with the following rhymes.

Hail to you, good cart pushers,Always “the longer, the better,”Ever stiffer in head and knee,Uninspired, never funny,Indestructibly mediocre,Without genius, without wit!

229 In those late ages entitled to pride themselves on humanity, so much fear, so much superstition born of fear of the “wild, cruel animal” remains—the very animal whose subjugation constitutes the pride of those more humane ages—that even palpable truths remain unspoken for centuries, as though by agreement, because they appear to help that wild animal, finally put to death, return to life. Perhaps I venture something by letting such a truth escape me: let others catch it again and give it so much “milk of pious ways of thinking” to drink that it lies quiet and forgotten in its old corner.—One ought to unlearn one’s ideas about cruelty and open one’s eyes; one ought at last to learn impatience, so that such immodest, fat errors as old and new philosophers have fattened up, for example concerning tragedy, no longer go strutting virtuously and brazenly about. Almost everything we call “higher culture” rests on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty—this is my proposition; that “wild animal” has not been put to death at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely—deified itself. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what acts agreeably in so-called tragic compassion, indeed at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and tenderest shudders of metaphysics, derives its sweetness solely from the ingredient of cruelty mixed into it. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard before burning stakes or bullfights, the Japanese of today who crowds toward tragedy, the Parisian suburban worker homesick for bloody revolutions, the female Wagnerian who, with her will unhinged, lets Tristan and Isolde “wash over” her—what all these enjoy and strive with mysterious ardor to drink into themselves are the spiced potions of the great Circe “Cruelty.” Here, to be sure, one must chase away the clumsy psychology of former times, which knew only how to teach that cruelty arose at the sight of another’s suffering: there is an abundant, overabundant enjoyment of one’s own suffering too, of making oneself suffer—and wherever the human being lets himself be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation, as among Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general to desensualization, defleshing, contrition, to the Puritan spasm of penitence, to vivisection of the conscience and the Pascalian sacrifice of the intellect, he is secretly enticed and driven forward by his cruelty, by those dangerous shudders of cruelty turned against himself. Finally, consider that even the knower, in forcing his spirit to know against the inclination of the spirit and often enough against the wishes of his heart as well—namely, to say No where he would like to affirm, love, worship—acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty; every taking of things deeply and thoroughly is already an act of violence, a will to hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which ceaselessly wants to move toward appearance and surfaces—there is already a drop of cruelty in every will to knowledge.

230 Perhaps what I have said here about a “fundamental will of the spirit” is not immediately understood: allow me an explanation.—That commanding something which the people call “the spirit” wants to be master within and around itself and to feel itself master: it has the will to go from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that binds together, subdues, lusts to rule, and truly rules. Its needs and capacities in this are the same as those physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The spirit’s strength in appropriating what is alien reveals itself in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or push away what is entirely contradictory: just as it arbitrarily underlines more strongly, highlights, and falsifies to suit itself certain features and lines in the alien, in every piece of “external world.” Its intention here is to incorporate new “experiences,” to arrange new things within old series—hence growth; more precisely still, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased strength. This same will is served by an apparently opposing drive of the spirit, a suddenly erupting resolve for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting out, a closing of its windows, an inward saying No to this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive state against much that can be known, a satisfaction with darkness, with the enclosing horizon, a saying Yes to ignorance and approving it: as all this is necessary according to the degree of its power of appropriation, its “digestive power,” to speak figuratively—and indeed “the spirit” is most like a stomach. Likewise there belongs here the spirit’s occasional will to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a mischievous inkling that things are not this way or that, that one merely lets them count as this way or that, a pleasure in all uncertainty and ambiguity, a jubilant self-enjoyment in a corner’s arbitrary narrowness and secrecy, in what is all too near, in the foreground, in what is magnified, diminished, displaced, beautified, a self-enjoyment in the arbitrariness of all these expressions of power. Finally, there belongs here that not harmless readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them, that constant pressure and urge of a creative, formative, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys its multiplicity of masks and cunning, enjoys the feeling of its security too—for precisely through its arts of Proteus it is best defended and hidden!—Against this will to appearance, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak, in short to the surface—for every surface is a cloak—there works that sublime inclination of the knower who takes and wants to take things deeply, in their manifold aspects, thoroughly: as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every brave thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided he has, as is proper, hardened and sharpened his eye for himself long enough and is accustomed to strict discipline and also strict words. He will say, “There is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit”—let the virtuous and the amiable try to talk him out of it! Indeed, it would sound prettier if, instead of cruelty, people attributed to us, whispered about us, praised in us something like an “extravagant honesty”—us free, very free spirits—and perhaps this really is how our—posthumous fame will someday sound? For the present—for there is time enough until then—we ourselves might be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such moral tinsel and fringes of words: all our work so far makes precisely this taste and its cheerful luxuriance distasteful to us. They are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful—there is something in them that makes one’s pride swell. But we hermits and marmots, in all the secrecy of a hermit’s conscience, have long since persuaded ourselves that this worthy verbal pomp, too, belongs to the old false finery, junk, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that beneath such flattering color and overpainting, too, the terrible original text homo natura must be recognized once again. Namely, to translate the human being back into nature; to gain mastery over the many vain and enthusiastic interpretations and secondary meanings that have so far been scribbled and painted over that eternal original text homo natura; to bring it about that from now on the human being stands before the human being as, hardened in the discipline of science, he already stands today before the rest of nature, with fearless Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the enticing tunes of old metaphysical birdcatchers who have piped to him all too long: “You are more! You are higher! You are of another origin!”—that may be a strange and mad task, but it is a task—who would deny it! Why did we choose it, this mad task? Or, to ask differently: “Why knowledge at all?”—Everyone will ask us about that. And we, pressed in this way, we who have already asked ourselves the same question hundreds of times, we found and find no better answer …

231 Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does, which does not merely “preserve” us either—as the physiologist knows. But at the bottom of us, quite “down there,” there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, selected questions. At every cardinal problem an unchangeable “that is I” speaks; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot learn differently, but only learn to the end—only discover completely what “stands firm” in him about it. In time one finds certain solutions to problems that inspire strong faith precisely in us; perhaps from then on one calls them one’s “convictions.” Later—one sees in them only footsteps toward self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are—more correctly, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fate, to the unteachable quite “down there.”—After this abundant courtesy I have just committed toward myself, I may perhaps be permitted a little more readily to speak out a few truths about “woman in herself”: provided it is now known from the outset how very much they are only—my truths.—

232 Woman wants to become independent: and to that end she begins enlightening men about “woman in herself”—this is among the worst advances in Europe’s general disfigurement. For what must these clumsy attempts at feminine scientific rigor and self-exposure bring to light! Woman has so much reason for shame; in woman there is so much hidden pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, petty unruliness and immodesty—just study her dealings with children!—which at bottom has so far been best held back and subdued by fear of man. Woe when the “eternally boring in woman”—she is rich in it!—is allowed to venture out! When she begins thoroughly and on principle to unlearn her cleverness and art, the art of grace, play, banishing cares, lightening burdens and taking things lightly, when she begins to unlearn her subtle aptitude for pleasant desires! Already female voices are growing loud which, by holy Aristophanes, inspire terror; with medical explicitness they threaten what woman wants first and last from man. Is it not the worst of taste when woman thus sets about becoming scientific? Until now, fortunately, enlightenment was men’s affair, men’s gift—we remained “among ourselves” in it; and ultimately, with everything women write about “woman,” one may reserve a healthy mistrust as to whether woman actually wants enlightenment about herself—and can want it… If a woman is not seeking a new adornment for herself in this—I do think adorning oneself belongs to the eternal feminine?—well then, she wants to inspire fear of herself: perhaps she wants dominion through it. But she does not want truth: what does woman care about truth! From the beginning nothing has been more alien, repugnant, hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern appearance and beauty. Let us admit it, we men: it is precisely this art and this instinct that we honor and love in woman: we who have a hard time and gladly seek relief in the company of beings under whose hands, glances, and tender follies our seriousness, our heaviness and depth, appear to us almost as a folly. Finally I ask: has a woman herself ever yet granted depth to a woman’s head, justice to a woman’s heart? And is it not true that, broadly reckoned, “woman” has so far been most disdained by woman herself—and not at all by us?—We men wish woman would not continue compromising herself through enlightenment: just as it was man’s solicitude and gentleness toward woman when the Church decreed: “Let woman keep silent in church!” It was for woman’s benefit when Napoleon gave the all-too-eloquent Madame de Staël to understand: “Let woman keep silent in politics!”—and I think it is a true friend of women who calls out to women today: “Let woman keep silent about woman!”

233 It betrays corruption of the instincts—quite apart from betraying bad taste—when a woman appeals precisely to Madame Roland or Madame de Staël or Monsieur George Sand, as though this proved something in favor of “woman in herself.” Among men, those named are the three comic women in themselves—nothing more!—and precisely the best involuntary counterarguments to emancipation and female sovereignty.

234 Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the appalling thoughtlessness with which the nourishment of the family and the master of the house is attended to! Woman does not understand what food means: and wants to be a cook! If woman were a thinking creature, then surely, as cook for millennia, she would have had to discover the greatest physiological facts, and likewise bring the art of healing into her possession! Through bad female cooks—through the complete lack of reason in the kitchen—human development has been held back longest and harmed most grievously: even today things are little better. An address to young ladies of good families.

235 There are turns and casts of the spirit, there are maxims, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society suddenly crystallizes. Among them is that remark Madame de Lambert once made to her son: “My friend, never permit yourself any follies except those that will give you great pleasure”—incidentally, the most motherly and cleverest words ever addressed to a son.

236 What Dante and Goethe believed about woman—the former when he sang, “She looked upward, and I at her,” the latter when he translated it, “The eternal feminine draws us upward”—I do not doubt that every nobler woman will resist this belief, for she believes precisely this of the eternal masculine …

237 Seven Little Sayings on Women.

How the longest boredom fliesWhen a man crawls to our side!

Age, alas! and scholarshipGive even feeble virtue strength.

Black attire and silent waysDress each woman—smartly.

Whom to thank for happiness?God!—and her who makes my dress.

Young: a cave-house decked with flowers.Old: a dragon rushes out.

Noble name and pretty leg,Man as well: were he but mine!

Brief speech, far-reaching sense—Slippery ice for the female ass!

237a Until now women have been treated by men like birds that have strayed down to them from some height: as something finer, more vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, more soulful—but as something one must lock up so it does not fly away.

238 To blunder in the fundamental problem “man and woman,” to deny here the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps to dream here of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness, and a thinker who has proved shallow at this dangerous point—shallow in instinct!—may be considered suspect in general, more than that, given away, exposed: he will probably be too “short” for all fundamental questions of life, including the life of the future, and unable to descend to any depth. A man, on the other hand, who has depth in his spirit as in his desires, including that depth of benevolence capable of severity and hardness and easily confused with them, can think about woman only in an Oriental way: he must conceive woman as possession, as property that can be locked away, as something predestined for service and attaining its perfection in it—here he must take his stand on Asia’s immense reason, on Asia’s superiority of instinct: as the Greeks once did, those best heirs and pupils of Asia who, as is well known, from Homer down to the time of Pericles, with increasing culture and breadth of strength, became step by step stricter toward woman, in short, more Oriental. How necessary, how logical, how even humanly desirable this was: let each reflect on that for himself!

239 In no age has the weaker sex been treated with such respect by men as in our age—this belongs to the democratic inclination and basic taste, just as does irreverence toward age—what wonder that this respect is immediately abused again? They want more, they learn to demand, they finally find that tribute of respect almost insulting already; they would prefer competition for rights, indeed the actual struggle: enough, woman is losing her shame. Let us add at once that she is also losing her taste. She unlearns fear of man: but the woman who “unlearns fear” surrenders her most feminine instincts. That woman ventures forth when what inspires fear in man—more precisely, when the man in man—is no longer wanted and bred to greatness is fair enough, comprehensible enough; what is harder to comprehend is that in doing so—woman degenerates. This is happening today: let us not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: “woman as clerk” stands at the gate of the modern society taking shape. As she thus takes possession of new rights, strives to become “master” and writes woman’s “progress” on her banners and little flags, the reverse is taking place with terrible clarity: woman is going backward. Since the French Revolution, woman’s influence in Europe has diminished to the same degree as her rights and claims have increased; and the “emancipation of woman,” insofar as women themselves (and not merely male shallow minds) demand and promote it, thus proves a remarkable symptom of the growing weakening and blunting of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity of which a well-constituted woman—who is always a clever woman—would have to feel ashamed to the depths. To lose one’s scent for the ground on which one most surely attains victory; to neglect practice in one’s proper art of arms; to let oneself go before man, perhaps even “as far as a book,” where formerly one disciplined oneself into subtle, cunning humility; to work with virtuous impudence against man’s belief in a fundamentally different ideal veiled in woman, in something eternally and necessarily feminine; to talk man emphatically and chatteringly out of the idea that woman must be maintained, provided for, protected, spared, like a more delicate, strangely wild and often pleasant domestic animal; the clumsy, indignant gathering together of everything slavelike and serflike that woman’s position in the existing order of society has had and still has about it (as though slavery were a counterargument and not rather a condition of every higher culture, every elevation of culture)—what does all this mean, if not a crumbling of the feminine instincts, a defeminization? To be sure, there are enough idiotic friends of women and corrupters of women among the learned asses of the male sex who advise woman to defeminize herself in this way and copy all the stupidities from which “man” in Europe, European “manliness,” is sick—who would like to bring woman down as far as “general education,” perhaps even to reading newspapers and politicking. Here and there they even want to make free spirits and literary people of women: as though a woman without piety were not something entirely repugnant or ridiculous to a deep and godless man; almost everywhere they ruin women’s nerves with the sickliest and most dangerous of all kinds of music (our newest German music) and make them more hysterical every day and less capable of their first and last vocation, bearing strong children. They want to “cultivate” them still further altogether and, as they say, make the “weaker sex” strong through culture: as though history did not teach as emphatically as possible that human “cultivation” and weakening—namely weakening, fragmentation, sickening of the strength of will—have always kept pace with one another, and that the mightiest and most influential women in the world (most recently Napoleon’s mother) owed their power and ascendancy over men precisely to their strength of will—and not to schoolmasters! What inspires respect and often enough fear in woman is her nature, which is more “natural” than man’s, her genuine predatory, cunning suppleness, her tiger’s claw beneath the glove, her naivety in egoism, her uneducability and inward wildness, the incomprehensibility, breadth, roaming character of her desires and virtues … What, despite all fear, inspires compassion for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is that she appears more suffering, more vulnerable, more in need of love, and more condemned to disappointment than any animal. Fear and compassion: with these feelings man has until now stood before woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which tears apart as it delights.—What? And is this now to end? And is the disenchantment of woman at work? Is the making of woman boring slowly coming on? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal that has always been most attractive to you, from which danger threatens you again and again! Your old fable could become “history” once more—once more a monstrous stupidity could become master over you and carry you off! And no god hidden beneath it, no! Only an “idea,” a “modern idea”! …

Seventh Part:

Our Virtues.

214 Our virtues? We probably still have our virtues too. As is only reasonable, they won't be those sincere, blockish virtues for which we honor our grandfathers, but also keep them at a little distance. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we first arrivals of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our variety and skill at disguise, our mellowed and almost sweetened cruelty of mind and senses—if we have virtues, they will probably only be those that have learned to get along best with our most secret, heartfelt inclinations, our hottest needs. Well then, let's look for them in our labyrinths! As everyone knows, many things get lost there, many things disappear for good. And is there anything more beautiful than looking for your own virtues? Doesn't that almost mean already believing in your own virtue? But this "believing in your virtue"—isn't it basically the same thing people used to call their "good conscience"? That venerable concept, a long pigtail our grandfathers hung down behind their heads, and often enough behind their understanding too? So, however little we may otherwise consider ourselves old-fashioned and grandfatherishly respectable, in one thing we are still these grandfathers' worthy grandsons. We last Europeans with a good conscience: we still wear their pigtail too. Oh! If you knew how soon, how very soon, things will—change!…

215 Sometimes in the realm of stars, two suns determine a single planet's orbit. In certain cases suns of different colors shine around one planet, lighting it now red, now green, and then striking it at the same time and flooding it with mixed colors. In just this way, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our "starry sky," we modern people are governed by different moralities. Our actions shine alternately in different colors. They seldom have just one meaning—and there are plenty of cases when we do multicolored deeds.

216 Love your enemies? I think that lesson has been well learned. It happens a thousand times over today, on a small and a large scale. Yes, sometimes something higher and more sublime already happens: we learn to despise when we love, precisely when we love best. But all of this happens unconsciously, quietly, without display, with that bashfulness and secrecy of goodness which forbids the solemn word and the virtuous formula from reaching our lips. Morality as a pose goes against our taste today. This too is progress, just as it was progress when our fathers finally lost their taste for religion as a pose—including hostility and Voltaire-like bitterness toward religion, and everything that once belonged to the gestures of free thinking. There is music in our conscience, a dance in our minds, with which no Puritan litany, no moral sermon, and no show of earnest respectability can harmonize.

217 Beware of people who attach great value to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in moral judgment! They never forgive us if they have once made a mistake in front of us—or even done wrong to us. They inevitably become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if they remain our "friends." Blessed are the forgetful, for they "get over" their stupidities too.

218 France's psychologists—and where else are there psychologists today?—still haven't exhausted their bitter, varied enjoyment of bourgeois stupidity, as if… enough, they give something away by it. Flaubert, for example, that honest citizen of Rouen, ended up seeing, hearing, and tasting nothing else. It was his kind of self-torment and subtler cruelty. For a change—because this is getting boring—I now recommend something else to delight in: the unconscious cunning with which all the good, fat, honest minds of mediocrity deal with higher minds and their tasks. It is a subtle, tangled, Jesuitical cunning, a thousand times subtler than this middle group's understanding and taste at their best—even subtler than its victims' understanding. Yet another proof that "instinct" is the most intelligent of all the kinds of intelligence discovered so far. In short, you psychologists, study the philosophy of the "rule" as it fights the "exception." There you have a spectacle good enough for gods and divine malice! Or, still more plainly: vivisect the "good person," the "person of good will"… yourselves!

219 Moral judgment and condemnation are the favorite revenge of people with limited minds on those whose minds are less limited. They are also a kind of compensation for having been poorly provided for by nature, and finally an opportunity to gain cleverness and become subtle. Malice sharpens the mind. Deep in their hearts, it does them good that there is a standard by which even people showered with the mind's gifts and privileges are their equals. They fight for the "equality of all before God," and almost need belief in God just for that. The strongest opponents of atheism are among them. Someone who told them, "A high degree of intellectual development is beyond comparison with any goodness or respectability of a merely moral person," would drive them into a rage. I will take care not to do that. Instead, I would like to flatter them with my proposition that a high degree of intellectual development itself exists only as the final product of moral qualities. It brings together all the states attributed to the "merely moral" person, after they have been acquired individually through long discipline and practice, perhaps across whole chains of generations. High intellectual development is precisely the spiritual development of justice and of that kindly severity which knows it has the task of preserving the order of rank in the world, among things themselves—and not only among people.

220 With the praise of the "disinterested" so popular now, we must become aware—perhaps not without some danger—of what actually interests the people. What things does the ordinary person really care about, thoroughly and deeply? Include the educated, even scholars, and, unless everything is misleading, almost the philosophers too. What emerges is this: most of what interests and excites finer, more demanding tastes, every higher nature, seems completely "uninteresting" to the average person. If he nevertheless notices devotion to it, he calls that devotion "disinterested" and wonders how it is possible to act "without interest." There have been philosophers who even knew how to give this popular astonishment a seductive, mystical, otherworldly expression. (Perhaps because they didn't know the higher nature from experience?) Instead, they should have stated the bare, perfectly reasonable truth: the "disinterested" action is a very interesting and interested action, provided… "And love?" What! Even an action done out of love is supposed to be "unselfish"? But you fools—! "And praise of the person who makes sacrifices?" But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows he wanted something in return, and got it. Perhaps he gave something of himself for something of himself; he gave something up here to have more there, perhaps to be more altogether, or at least to feel himself "more." But this is a realm of questions and answers where a more demanding mind doesn't like to linger. Here truth already has such a hard time suppressing a yawn when it has to answer. After all, truth is a woman. We shouldn't do violence to her.

221 "Sometimes," said a moral pedant and picker of nits, "I honor and distinguish an unselfish person. But not because he is unselfish. It is because he seems to me to have a right to benefit another person at his own expense. In short, the question is always who he is and who the other person is. For someone destined and made to command, for example, self-denial and modestly standing back would not be a virtue but a waste of a virtue: that is how it seems to me. Every unselfish morality that takes itself as unconditional and addresses everyone doesn't merely offend against taste. It incites sins of omission. It is one more seduction behind a mask of love for humanity—and a seduction that harms precisely the higher, rarer, privileged people. Moralities must be forced, before anything else, to bow to the order of rank. Their presumption must be driven into their consciences, until they finally reach agreement that it is immoral to say, 'What is right for one is fair for another.'" So said my moral pedant and good fellow. Did he deserve to be laughed at for urging moralities to be moral in this way? But you shouldn't be too right if you want the laughter on your side. A grain of wrongness is even part of good taste.

222 Wherever pity is preached today—and if you listen properly, no other religion is being preached anymore—the psychologist should open his ears. Through all the vanity, through all the noise characteristic of these preachers, as of all preachers, he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine sound of self-contempt. It belongs to that darkening and disfiguring of Europe that has been growing for a century now (its first symptoms are already documented in a thoughtful letter from Galiani to Madame d’Épinay): if it isn't its cause! The man of "modern ideas," this proud ape, is wildly dissatisfied with himself: that much is certain. He suffers, and his vanity wants him only to "suffer with others"…

223 The European of mixed descent—a fairly ugly plebeian, all in all—absolutely needs a costume. He needs history as his costume storeroom. Of course, he notices that none of them fits him properly, so he changes and changes. Look at the nineteenth century's quick infatuations and changes of stylistic masquerade, and at its moments of despair because "nothing suits" us. It's no use presenting ourselves as Romantic or classical or Christian or Florentine or Baroque or "national," in morals and the arts: "it doesn't look good on us"! But the "mind," especially the "historical mind," finds its advantage even in this despair. Another piece of the past or of a foreign country is constantly being tried, put on, taken off, packed away, and above all studied. We are the first learned age when it comes to "costumes": I mean moralities, articles of faith, artistic tastes, and religions. We are prepared as no age has ever been for carnival on a grand scale, for the most intellectual carnival laughter and high spirits, for the transcendental height of the greatest nonsense and Aristophanes-like mockery of the world. Perhaps it is precisely here that we will discover the realm of our invention, where we too can still be original, perhaps as parodists of world history and God's clowns. Perhaps, even if nothing else from today has a future, our laughter does!

224 The historical sense is the ability to guess quickly the ranking of values by which a people, a society, or a person has lived. It is the "divining instinct" for the relationships among these value judgments, for the relation between the authority of values and the authority of the forces at work. We Europeans claim this historical sense as our special feature. It came to us in the wake of that enchanting, mad half-barbarism into which Europe's democratic mixing of classes and races has plunged it. Only the nineteenth century knows this sense as its sixth sense. Thanks to that mixing, the past of every form and way of life, of cultures that used to lie harshly beside and on top of one another, flows into us "modern souls." Our instincts now run backward in every direction. We ourselves are a kind of chaos. In the end, as I said, "the mind" finds its advantage in this. Our half-barbarism of body and desire gives us secret access everywhere, such as a noble age never possessed. Above all, it gives us access to the labyrinth of unfinished cultures and to every half-barbarism that has ever existed on earth. And since the largest part of human culture so far has been precisely half-barbarism, "historical sense" almost means a sense and instinct for everything, a taste and tongue for everything. This immediately shows it to be an ignoble sense. For example, we enjoy Homer again. Perhaps our happiest advantage is that we know how to savor Homer. People of a noble culture cannot and could not make him their own so easily; they scarcely allowed themselves to enjoy him. Take the French of the seventeenth century, such as Saint-Évremond, who faults him for his vast mind, or even Voltaire, their final echo. Their palate's very definite Yes and No, their readily aroused disgust, their hesitant reserve toward everything strange, their fear of the bad taste even of lively curiosity—in general, every noble and self-sufficient culture's unwillingness to admit a new desire, dissatisfaction with its own possessions, admiration for the foreign—all this puts them in an unfavorable position and mood toward even the best things in the world that they do not own or could not capture. No sense is more incomprehensible to such people than precisely the historical sense and its servile plebeian curiosity. It is no different with Shakespeare, that astonishing blend of Spanish, Moorish, and Saxon tastes. An ancient Athenian who was a friend of Aeschylus would have laughed or raged himself half to death over him. But we accept precisely this wild mix of colors, this jumble of the most delicate, the coarsest, and the most artificial, with a secret familiarity and warmth. We enjoy him as an artistic refinement reserved especially for us. The foul fumes and the closeness of the English rabble, amid which Shakespeare's art and taste live, bother us as little as they would on the Chiaia in Naples. There we go on our way, enchanted and willing, with all our senses, however much the slum districts' sewers hang in the air. We people of the "historical sense" have our virtues as such; that is undeniable. We are undemanding, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-overcoming, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating. For all that, perhaps we are not very "tasteful." Let's finally admit it: what we people of the "historical sense" find hardest to grasp, feel, savor, and love as others have is precisely what is perfect and fully ripe in every culture and art. It is what is truly noble in works and people, their moment of smooth seas and halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and cold quality shown by all things that have reached perfection. Deep down, we are prejudiced and almost hostile toward it. Perhaps our great virtue, the historical sense, necessarily opposes good taste, at least the very best taste. Precisely those small, brief, and highest strokes of happiness and transfigurations of human life that shine out here and there are hard for us to reproduce in ourselves. We do it only hesitantly, only by forcing ourselves. I mean those moments and miracles when a great force voluntarily stopped before the measureless and limitless; when an excess of subtle pleasure was enjoyed in suddenly being tamed and turned to stone, in standing firm and fixing oneself on still-trembling ground. Measure is foreign to us; let's admit it. What thrills us is precisely the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a horse snorting as it charges forward, we modern people, we half-barbarians, drop the reins before the infinite—and find our bliss only where we are also most—in danger.

225 Whether hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaimonism, all these ways of thinking measure the value of things by pleasure and suffering—by accompanying states and side issues. They are superficial, naive ways of thinking. Anyone conscious of creative powers and an artist's conscience will look down on them with some mockery, and some pity too. Pity for you! Admittedly, that isn't pity as you mean it. It isn't pity for social "distress," for "society" and its sick and unfortunate people, for those vicious and broken from the start, who lie on the ground all around us. Still less is it pity for grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave classes striving for mastery—they call it "freedom." Our pity is a higher, more farsighted pity. We see how human beings are growing smaller, how you make them smaller! And there are moments when we watch precisely your pity with indescribable anxiety, when we resist this pity, when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any lightheartedness. You want, if possible—and there is no crazier "if possible"—to abolish suffering. And we? It seems we would rather have it greater and worse than ever! Well-being as you understand it is no goal: to us it seems an ending! A state that soon makes human beings ridiculous and contemptible, that makes one wish for their downfall! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—don't you know that this discipline alone has produced every elevation of humanity so far? That tension of the soul in misfortune, which breeds its strength; its shudders at the sight of great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, and using misfortune; and whatever has ever been given to it of depth, mystery, masks, spirit, cunning, and greatness—wasn't it given under suffering, under the discipline of great suffering? In human beings, creature and creator are united. In human beings there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos. But in human beings there is also creator, shaper, hardness of the hammer, divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day. Do you understand this contrast? And that your pity concerns the "creature in the human being": what must be shaped, broken, forged, torn, burned, made to glow, purified—what necessarily must suffer and should suffer? And our pity—don't you grasp whom our opposite pity concerns, when it resists your pity as the worst of all pampering and weaknesses? Pity against pity, then! But, to say it again, there are higher problems than all problems of pleasure, suffering, and pity. And every philosophy that comes down to these alone is naive.—

226 We immoralists! This world that concerns us, in which we have things to fear and love, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle commanding and subtle obeying, a world of the "almost" in every respect, tricky, treacherous, sharp, tender—yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and overfamiliar curiosity! We are spun into a tight web and shirt of duties and cannot get out. In precisely this, we too are "people of duty"! Sometimes, it is true, we dance in our "chains" and among our "swords." More often, no less truly, we grind our teeth under them and grow impatient with all the hidden hardness of our fate. But whatever we may do, the fools and appearances say against us, "These are people without duty." We always have the fools and appearances against us!

227 Honesty—supposing this is our virtue, from which we free spirits cannot get free—well, we want to work on it with all our malice and love. We won't tire of "perfecting" ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have left. May its light one day remain over this aging culture and its dull, gloomy seriousness like a gilded, blue, mocking evening light! And if one day our honesty nevertheless grows tired and sighs and stretches its limbs, finds us too hard, and wants things better, easier, gentler, like a pleasant vice—let's stay hard, we last Stoics! Let's send to its aid whatever devilry we have in us: our disgust at what is clumsy and approximate, our "we strive for the forbidden," our adventurous courage, our resourceful and demanding curiosity, our subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to power and to overcoming the world, which roams and raves greedily around all the realms of the future. Let's send all our "devils" to help our "god"! People will probably misunderstand and misidentify us for it. What does it matter! They will say, "Their 'honesty'—that's their devilry, and nothing more!" What does it matter! Even if they were right! Haven't all gods so far been devils of that sort, renamed and made holy? And in the end, what do we know about ourselves? Or about what the spirit guiding us wants to be called? (It's a matter of names.) Or about how many spirits we harbor? We free spirits must take care that our honesty doesn't become our vanity, our decoration and show, our limit, our stupidity! Every virtue tends toward stupidity, every stupidity toward virtue. "Stupid to the point of sainthood," they say in Russia. Let's make sure that honesty doesn't finally turn us into saints and bores! Isn't life a hundred times too short to be—bored in it? You would have to believe in eternal life to…

228 Forgive me for discovering that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and has belonged among sleeping pills—and that nothing has lowered "virtue" more in my eyes than its advocates' boringness. I don't mean to deny their general usefulness by saying so. It matters greatly that as few people as possible think about morality. Consequently, it matters very greatly that morality shouldn't become interesting one day! But don't worry! Things are still as they always were. I see nobody in Europe who has any idea—or gives any idea—that thinking about morality could be pursued dangerously, treacherously, seductively, that there could be something fateful in it! Look, for example, at the tireless, unavoidable English utilitarians, how clumsily and respectably they walk on and on in Bentham's footsteps—a Homeric comparison says it more clearly—just as he himself already walked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvétius. (No, this Helvétius was no dangerous man!) Not a new thought, no subtler turn or fold of an old thought, not even a real history of earlier thinking: altogether an unbearable literature, unless you know how to spice it with a little malice. That old English vice called cant, moral hypocrisy in the manner of Tartuffe, has crept into these moralists too. (You absolutely must read them with ulterior thoughts, if you must read them at all.) This time it hides beneath the new form of scientific rigor. Nor is there any lack of secret attempts to ward off the pangs of conscience that a race of former Puritans would naturally suffer whenever it studies morality scientifically. (Isn't a moralist a Puritan's opposite? That is, a thinker who takes morality as questionable, deserving a question mark—in short, as a problem? Shouldn't moralizing be—immoral?) In the end, they all want English morality proved right, insofar as this best serves humanity, or "general usefulness," or "the happiness of the greatest number"—no! England's happiness. They want with all their might to prove to themselves that striving for English happiness—I mean for comfort and fashion, and at the highest level, a seat in Parliament—is also the right path of virtue. Indeed, that whatever virtue has existed in the world so far has consisted in just such striving. Not one of these lumbering herd animals with troubled consciences, who undertake to plead the cause of selfishness as the cause of general welfare, wants to know or even smell a hint that "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no concept that can be grasped in any way, but only something to make you vomit. That what is fair for one cannot by any means therefore be fair for another; that demanding one morality for all harms precisely the higher human beings; in short, that there is an order of rank between person and person, and therefore also between morality and morality. These utilitarian Englishmen are a modest, thoroughly mediocre kind of person. And as I said, insofar as they are boring, you cannot think highly enough of their utility. They should be encouraged further, as the following rhymes have partly tried to do.

Hail to you, good cart-pushers,Always "longer means more pleasing,"Ever stiffer, head and knee,Uninspired, without humor,Indestructibly mediocre,Without genius, without wit!

229 In those later ages that are entitled to pride themselves on their humanity, so much fear, so much superstition born of fear of the "wild, cruel beast" remains—their pride as more humane ages consists precisely in having mastered it—that even obvious truths go unspoken for centuries, as if by agreement. They seem likely to bring that wild beast, finally killed off, back to life. Perhaps I am taking a risk by letting one such truth slip out. Others may catch it again and give it so much "milk of pious thinking" to drink that it lies quiet and forgotten in its old corner. We must rethink cruelty and open our eyes. We must finally learn impatience, so that such brazen, fat errors no longer wander about virtuously and boldly, errors like those ancient and modern philosophers have fed up concerning tragedy, for example. Almost everything we call "higher culture" rests on making cruelty more spiritual and deepening it: that is my proposition. That "wild beast" hasn't been killed off at all. It lives, it flourishes, it has only—become divine. What makes up tragedy's painful pleasure is cruelty. What feels pleasant in so-called tragic pity—and basically in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics—gets its sweetness only from the ingredient of cruelty mixed into it. The Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard watching burning stakes or bullfights, the Japanese person of today crowding toward tragedy, the worker from the outskirts of Paris who longs for bloody revolutions, the female Wagnerian who disconnects her will and lets Tristan and Isolde "happen to her"—what all these people enjoy and try to drink into themselves with mysterious heat are the spiced potions of the great Circe "Cruelty." Here, of course, we must chase away the clumsy psychology of earlier times, which could teach only that cruelty arises at the sight of someone else's suffering. There is abundant, overabundant pleasure in one's own suffering too, in making oneself suffer. Wherever human beings let themselves be persuaded into self-denial in the religious sense, or self-mutilation, as among the Phoenicians and ascetics, or into stripping away the senses and the flesh, into contrition, Puritan spasms of repentance, vivisection of the conscience, and Pascal's sacrifice of the intellect, they are secretly lured and driven forward by their cruelty. They are driven by those dangerous shudders of cruelty turned against themselves. Finally, consider that even the seeker of knowledge acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty. He forces his mind to know against its own inclination, and often enough against his heart's wishes too: to say No, that is, where he would like to affirm, love, and worship. Even taking anything deeply and thoroughly is an act of violence, a wish to hurt the mind's basic will, which constantly wants appearance and surfaces. Even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty.

230 Perhaps what I have said here about a "basic will of the mind" isn't immediately clear. Allow me an explanation. That commanding something that people call "the mind" wants to be master within itself and around itself, and to feel itself master. It has the will to move from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that binds together, tames, thirsts for mastery, and truly rules. In this, its needs and capacities are the same as those physiologists identify in everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The mind's power to make something foreign its own shows itself in a strong tendency to make the new resemble the old, to simplify variety, to overlook or push away what completely contradicts it. In the same way, it arbitrarily stresses certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the "outside world," brings them forward, and falsifies them to suit itself. Its intention is to absorb new "experiences," to fit new things into old sequences—in other words, to grow. More precisely still, it wants the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power. An apparently opposite drive of the mind serves this same will: a suddenly erupting decision for ignorance, for deliberately shutting itself off, closing its windows, saying No inwardly to this or that thing, not letting it approach. It is a kind of defensive state against much that could be known, a satisfaction with darkness, with the closing horizon, an affirmation and approval of ignorance. All this is necessary according to the degree of its power to absorb, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively—and "the mind" really does most resemble a stomach. The mind's occasional wish to let itself be deceived belongs here too. Perhaps it has a playful suspicion that things aren't really so, that we are merely letting them count as so. There is pleasure in all uncertainty and ambiguity, a jubilant enjoyment of itself in the deliberately chosen narrowness and secrecy of a corner, in what is too close, in the foreground, in what is enlarged, reduced, shifted, beautified. It enjoys itself in the arbitrariness of all these expressions of power. Finally, this also includes the mind's not entirely harmless readiness to deceive other minds and disguise itself before them: that constant pressure and urge of a creative, shaping, changeable force. Here the mind enjoys its variety of masks and its cunning. It also enjoys the sense of safety they give it. After all, its Proteus-like transformations are its best defense and hiding place! Against this will to appearance, simplification, mask, cloak—in short, surface, since every surface is a cloak—works that sublime inclination of the seeker of knowledge, who takes things deeply, in their many aspects, and thoroughly, and wants to do so. It is a kind of cruelty of intellectual conscience and taste. Every brave thinker will acknowledge it in himself, provided he has, as he should, hardened and sharpened his eye for himself long enough, and is used to strict discipline and strict words too. He will say, "There is something cruel in my mind's inclination." Let the virtuous and lovable people try to talk him out of it! It would indeed sound nicer if people attributed to us, whispered about us, praised in us an "excessive honesty" instead of cruelty—to us free, very free spirits. And perhaps that really is how our—posthumous fame will sound one day? For now—there is still time before that—we ourselves are probably least inclined to dress ourselves in such moral tinsel and fringe. All our work so far makes precisely this taste and its cheerful extravagance distasteful to us. They are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, the heroism of the truthful person. There is something in them that swells one's pride. But we hermits and marmots, in all the secrecy of a hermit's conscience, have long persuaded ourselves that this dignified verbal display too belongs to unconscious human vanity's old deceptive finery, junk, and gold dust. Even under such flattering paint and repainting, the terrible basic text homo natura must be recognized again. That is, to translate the human being back into nature; to master the many vain and dreamy interpretations and extra meanings that have so far been scribbled and painted over that eternal basic text homo natura; to make human beings from now on face human beings as they already face the rest of nature today, hardened by the discipline of science, with fearless Oedipus eyes and sealed-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the enticing tunes of old metaphysical birdcatchers. For too long they have piped to him: "You are more! You are higher! You come from somewhere else!" This may be a strange and mad task, but it is a task—who would deny that! Why did we choose it, this mad task? Or, to ask differently, "Why knowledge at all?" Everyone will ask us this. And pressed in this way, we who have already asked ourselves the same question hundreds of times—we have found, and find, no better answer…

231 Learning changes us. It does what all nourishment does, which doesn't merely "preserve" us either—as the physiologist knows. But at our foundation, right "down below," there is indeed something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decisions and answers to predetermined, selected questions. With every fundamental problem, an unchanging "this is me" speaks. About man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot learn differently, but only finish learning: only finish discovering what is "fixed" in him about them. Early on we find certain solutions to problems that inspire strong belief precisely in us. Perhaps from then on we call them our "convictions." Later, we see them only as footsteps toward self-knowledge, signposts to the problem that we are—or more correctly, to the great stupidity that we are, to our spiritual fate, to the unteachable thing right "down below." Following this generous courtesy I have just shown myself, perhaps I may more readily be allowed to state a few truths about "woman as such"—provided people now know from the start how very much these are only—my truths.—

232 Woman wants to become independent. To that end, she is beginning to enlighten men about "woman as such." This is one of the worst advances in Europe's general disfigurement. For what must these clumsy attempts at female scientific rigor and self-exposure bring to light! Woman has so much reason for shame. There is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty unruliness and immodesty hidden in woman—just study her dealings with children! Until now, fear of man has basically been the best way of pushing it back and taming it. Woe when the "eternally boring in woman"—she is rich in it!—is allowed to venture out! When she begins thoroughly and on principle to unlearn her cleverness and art: the art of charm, of playing, of chasing cares away, of easing things and taking them lightly! When she unlearns her subtle skill at arousing pleasant desires! Already female voices are being raised which, by holy Aristophanes, are terrifying. They threaten, with medical explicitness, what woman wants from man first and last. Isn't it the worst taste for woman to set about becoming scientific in this way? Up to now, fortunately, enlightenment has been men's business, men's gift—we kept it "among ourselves." And when women write about "woman," we may ultimately retain a healthy distrust as to whether woman really wants—and can want—enlightenment about herself… If a woman isn't looking for some new decoration for herself in this—I do think dressing up belongs to the Eternal Feminine?—then she wants to make people afraid of her. Perhaps she wants to rule through it. But she does not want truth. What does woman care about truth! From the start, nothing has been more foreign, repugnant, hostile to woman than truth. Her great art is lying; her highest concern is appearance and beauty. Let's admit it, we men: it is precisely this art and this instinct that we honor and love in woman. We have a hard time and gladly seek relief in the company of beings under whose hands, looks, and gentle follies our seriousness, weight, and depth seem to us almost like folly. Finally, I ask this question: has a woman herself ever granted depth to a woman's head, justice to a woman's heart? And isn't it true that, by and large, "woman" has so far been most disdained by woman herself—and not at all by us? We men wish woman would stop compromising herself through enlightenment. It was a man's care and consideration for woman when the Church decreed, "Let woman be silent in church!" It was for woman's benefit when Napoleon made it clear to the all-too-eloquent Madame de Staël: "Let woman be silent in politics!" And I think it is a true friend of women who calls to them today, "Let woman be silent about woman!"

233 It reveals corrupted instincts—quite apart from revealing bad taste—when a woman appeals precisely to Madame Roland or Madame de Staël or Monsieur George Sand, as if that proved something in favor of "woman as such." Among men, these three are the comic women as such—nothing more! And precisely the best unintended counterarguments against emancipation and female self-rule.

234 Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the appalling thoughtlessness with which the family and master of the house are fed! Woman doesn't understand what food means—and wants to be a cook! If woman were a thinking creature, then, having been a cook for thousands of years, she would surely have discovered the greatest facts of physiology and taken possession of the art of healing as well! Bad female cooks—the complete lack of reason in the kitchen—have held human development back longest and harmed it worst. Even today things are little better. An address to daughters of the upper classes.

235 There are turns and throws of the mind, sayings, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society suddenly crystallizes. One is Madame de Lambert's passing remark to her son: "My friend, never allow yourself any follies except those that will give you great pleasure." Incidentally, this is the most motherly and wisest thing ever said to a son.

236 What Dante and Goethe believed about woman—the former when he sang, "She looked upward, and I at her," the latter when he translated it as "The Eternal Feminine draws us upward"—I have no doubt that every nobler woman will resist this belief. For she believes precisely this about the Eternal Masculine…

237 Seven Little Sayings about Women.

How the longest boredom fleeswhen a man comes crawling to us!

Age, alas! and scholarshipalso give weak virtue strength.

Black clothing and silencemake every woman look smart.

Whom do I thank for my good fortune?God!—and my dressmaker.

Young: a cave-house decked with flowers.Old: a dragon comes out.

Noble name, a pretty leg,Man as well: oh, if he were mine!

Short speech, long meaning—Slippery ice for the female donkey!

237a Until now, men have treated women like birds that strayed down to them from some height: as something finer, more vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, more soulful—but as something that must be caged so it doesn't fly away.

238 To go wrong on the basic problem of "man and woman," to deny the deepest antagonism and the need for an eternally hostile tension here, perhaps to dream of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations—this is a typical sign of a shallow mind. A thinker who has proved shallow at this dangerous point—shallow in his instinct!—may be considered suspect altogether. More than that, he has given himself away, been exposed. He will probably fall "short" on all the basic questions of life, including future life, and be unable to descend into any depth. A man who has depth, on the other hand, in his mind as in his desires, including that depth of goodwill which can be stern and hard and is easily mistaken for sternness and hardness, can only think of woman in an Oriental way. He must understand woman as a possession, as property that can be locked up, as something predestined for service and fulfilled in it. Here he must take his stand on Asia's tremendous reason, on Asia's superiority of instinct. That is what the Greeks once did, those best heirs and students of Asia. As we know, from Homer to the time of Pericles, as their culture and the breadth of their power increased, they also became stricter toward woman step by step—in short, more Oriental. How necessary, how logical, how even desirable from a human point of view this was: think it over for yourselves!

239 In no age has the weaker sex been treated by men with such respect as in ours. That belongs to democracy's inclination and basic taste, just like disrespect for old age. Is it any wonder that this respect is immediately abused? Women want more, learn to demand, and finally find that tribute of respect almost insulting already. They would prefer competition for rights, indeed an actual fight. In short, woman is losing her sense of shame. Let's add at once that she is losing her taste too. She is unlearning her fear of man. But the woman who "unlearns fear" surrenders her most womanly instincts. It is natural enough, and understandable enough, that woman ventures forward when what inspires fear in man—or, to be more precise, when the man in man—is no longer wanted and bred to greatness. What is harder to understand is that precisely in doing so—woman degenerates. This is happening today: let's not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has defeated the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now strives for a clerk's economic and legal independence. "Woman as clerk" stands at the gate of the emerging modern society. As she seizes new rights in this way, tries to become "master," and writes woman's "progress" on her banners and little flags, the opposite is happening with terrible clarity: woman is going backward. Since the French Revolution, woman's influence in Europe has diminished in proportion to the increase in her rights and claims. And insofar as the "emancipation of woman" is demanded and promoted by women themselves, not just by shallow-minded men, it proves to be a remarkable symptom of the growing weakness and blunting of the most womanly instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a woman who has turned out well—who is always a clever woman—would have to be thoroughly ashamed. Losing the scent for the ground on which you are surest to win; neglecting practice in your own particular art of arms; letting yourself go before man, perhaps even "as far as a book," where you formerly kept yourself disciplined and subtly, cunningly humble; brazenly and virtuously working against man's belief in a fundamentally different ideal veiled within woman, in something Eternally and Necessarily Feminine; insistently and chatteringly talking man out of the idea that woman must be maintained, provided for, protected, and treated gently like a more delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animal; clumsily and indignantly gathering up everything slavish and serflike that woman's position in the existing social order has had and still has—as if slavery were a counterargument rather than a condition of every higher culture, every elevation of culture—what does all this mean, if not a crumbling of female instincts, a loss of womanliness? Of course, there are plenty of idiotic friends of women and corrupters of women among the learned donkeys of the male sex. They advise woman to strip herself of womanliness in this way and copy all the stupidities from which "man" in Europe, European "manliness," is suffering. They would like to bring woman down to "general education," perhaps even to reading newspapers and talking politics. Here and there people even want to make women into free spirits and literary people—as if a woman without piety weren't something completely repugnant or ridiculous to a deep and godless man! Almost everywhere their nerves are being ruined by the sickliest and most dangerous of all kinds of music—our latest German music—and they are being made more hysterical daily, less capable of their first and last calling, bearing strong children. People want to "cultivate" them even more in general and, as they say, make the "weaker sex" strong through culture. As if history didn't teach as emphatically as possible that "cultivation" and weakening of human beings—namely the weakening, fragmentation, and sickening of willpower—have always gone hand in hand! And that the world's most powerful and influential women, most recently Napoleon's mother, owed their power and superiority over men precisely to their willpower—and not to schoolmasters! What inspires respect for woman, and often enough fear, is her nature, which is more "natural" than man's. It is her genuine, cunning suppleness as a beast of prey, her tiger's claw beneath the glove, her naivety in selfishness, her inability to be trained and her inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, vastness, and roaming of her desires and virtues… What, despite all fear, inspires pity for this dangerous and beautiful cat "woman" is that she seems to suffer more, to be more vulnerable, more in need of love, and more doomed to disappointment than any animal. Fear and pity: with these feelings man has stood before woman up to now, always with one foot already in tragedy, which tears apart as it delights. What? And is that supposed to be over now? Is woman's disenchantment under way? Is woman's becoming boring slowly approaching? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal that has always attracted you most, from which danger threatens you again and again! Your old fable could once more become "history." Once more a tremendous stupidity could master you and carry you away! And no god hidden beneath it, no! Only an "idea," a "modern idea"!…