Why I Am So Wise
Original German
1 Das Glück meines Daseins, seine Einzigkeit vielleicht, liegt in seinem Verhängniß: ich bin, um es in Räthselform auszudrücken, als mein Vater bereits gestorben, als meine Mutter lebe ich noch und werde alt. Diese doppelte Herkunft, gleichsam aus der obersten und der untersten Sprosse an der Leiter des Lebens, décadent zugleich und Anfang – dies, wenn irgend Etwas, erklärt jene Neutralität, jene Freiheit von Partei im Verhältniß zum Gesammtprobleme des Lebens, die mich vielleicht auszeichnet. Ich habe für die Zeichen von Aufgang und Niedergang eine feinere Witterung als je ein Mensch gehabt hat, ich bin der Lehrer par excellence hierfür, – ich kenne Beides, ich bin Beides. – Mein Vater starb mit sechsunddreißig Jahren: er war zart, liebenswürdig und morbid, wie ein nur zum Vorübergehn bestimmtes Wesen, – eher eine gütige Erinnerung an das Leben, als das Leben selbst. Im gleichen Jahre, wo sein Leben abwärts gieng, gieng auch das meine abwärts: im sechsunddreißigsten Lebensjahre kam ich auf den niedrigsten Punkt meiner Vitalität, – ich lebte noch, doch ohne drei Schritt weit vor mich zu sehn. Damals – es war 1879 – legte ich meine Basler Professur nieder, lebte den Sommer über wie ein Schatten in St. Moritz und den nächsten Winter, den sonnenärmsten meines Lebens, als Schatten in Naumburg. Dies war mein Minimum: „Der Wanderer und sein Schatten“ entstand währenddem. Unzweifelhaft, ich verstand mich damals auf Schatten… Im Winter darauf, meinem ersten Genueser Winter, brachte jene Versüßung und Vergeistigung, die mit einer extremen Armuth an Blut und Muskel beinahe bedingt ist, die „Morgenröthe“ hervor. Die vollkommne Helle und Heiterkeit, selbst Exuberanz des Geistes, welche das genannte Werk wiederspiegelt, verträgt sich bei mir nicht nur mit der tiefsten physiologischen Schwäche, sondern sogar mit einem Exceß von Schmerzgefühl. Mitten in Martern, die ein ununterbrochner dreitägiger Gehirn-Schmerz sammt mühseligem Schleim-Erbrechen mit sich bringt, – besaß ich eine Dialektiker-Klarheit par excellence und dachte Dinge sehr kaltblütig durch, zu denen ich in gesünderen Verhältnissen nicht Kletterer, nicht raffinirt, nicht kalt genug bin. Meine Leser wissen vielleicht, in wie fern ich Dialektik als décadence-Symptom betrachte, zum Beispiel im allerberühmtesten Fall: im Fall des Sokrates. – Alle krankhaften Störungen des Intellekts, selbst jene Halbbetäubung, die das Fieber im Gefolge hat, sind mir bis heute gänzlich fremde Dinge geblieben, über deren Natur und Häufigkeit ich mich erst auf gelehrtem Wege zu unterrichten hatte. Mein Blut läuft langsam. Niemand hat je an mir Fieber constatiren können. Ein Arzt, der mich länger als Nervenkranken behandelte, sagte schließlich: „Nein! an Ihren Nerven liegt’s nicht, ich selber bin nur nervös“. Schlechterdings unnachweisbar irgend eine lokale Entartung; kein organisch bedingtes Magenleiden, wie sehr auch immer, als Folge der Gesammterschöpfung, die tiefste Schwäche des gastrischen Systems. Auch das Augenleiden, dem Blindwerden zeitweilig sich gefährlich annähernd, nur Folge, nicht ursächlich: sodaß mit jeder Zunahme an Lebenskraft auch die Sehkraft wieder zugenommen hat. – Eine lange, allzulange Reihe von Jahren bedeutet bei mir Genesung, – sie bedeutet leider auch zugleich Rückfall, Verfall, Periodik einer Art décadence. Brauche ich, nach alledem, zu sagen, daß ich in Fragen der décadence erfahren bin? Ich habe sie vorwärts und rückwärts buchstabirt. Selbst jene Filigran-Kunst des Greifens und Begreifens überhaupt, jene Finger für nuances, jene Psychologie des „Um-die-Ecke-sehns“ und was sonst mir eignet, ward damals erst erlernt, ist das eigentliche Geschenk jener Zeit, in der Alles sich bei mir verfeinerte, die Beobachtung selbst wie alle Organe der Beobachtung. Von der Kranken-Optik aus nach gesünderen Begriffen und Werthen, und wiederum umgekehrt aus der Fülle und Selbstgewißheit des reichen Lebens hinuntersehn in die heimliche Arbeit des décadence-Instinkts – das war meine längste Übung, meine eigentliche Erfahrung, wenn irgend worin wurde ich darin Meister. Ich habe es jetzt in der Hand, ich habe die Hand dafür, Perspektiven umzustellen: erster Grund, weshalb für mich allein vielleicht eine „Umwerthung der Werthe“ überhaupt möglich ist. –
2 Abgerechnet nämlich, daß ich ein décadent bin, bin ich auch dessen Gegensatz. Mein Beweis dafür ist, unter Anderem, daß ich instinktiv gegen die schlimmen Zustände immer die rechten Mittel wählte: während der décadent an sich immer die ihm nachtheiligen Mittel wählt. Als summa summarum war ich gesund, als Winkel, als Specialität war ich décadent. Jene Energie zur absoluten Vereinsamung und Herauslösung aus gewohnten Verhältnissen, der Zwang gegen mich, mich nicht mehr besorgen, bedienen, beärzteln zu lassen – das verräth die unbedingte Instinkt-Gewißheit darüber, was damals vor Allem noth that: Ich nahm mich selbst in die Hand, ich machte mich selbst wieder gesund: die Bedingung dazu – jeder Physiologe wird das zugeben – ist, daß man im Grunde gesund ist. Ein typisch morbides Wesen kann nicht gesund werden, noch weniger sich selbst gesund machen; für einen typisch Gesunden kann umgekehrt Kranksein sogar ein energisches Stimulans zum Leben, zum Mehrleben sein. So in der That erscheint mir jetzt jene lange Krankheits-Zeit: ich entdeckte das Leben gleichsam neu, mich selber eingerechnet, ich schmeckte alle guten und selbst kleinen Dinge, wie sie Andere nicht leicht schmecken könnten, – ich machte aus meinem Willen zur Gesundheit, zum Leben, meine Philosophie… Denn man gebe Acht darauf: die Jahre meiner niedrigsten Vitalität waren es, wo ich aufhörte, Pessimist zu sein: der Instinkt der Selbst-Wiederherstellung verbot mir eine Philosophie der Armuth und Entmuthigung… Und woran erkennt man im Grunde die Wohlgerathenheit! Daß ein wohlgerathner Mensch unsern Sinnen wohlthut: daß er aus einem Holze geschnitzt ist, das hart, zart und wohlriechend zugleich ist. Ihm schmeckt nur, was ihm zuträglich ist; sein Gefallen, seine Lust hört auf, wo das Maaß des Zuträglichen überschritten wird. Er erräth Heilmittel gegen Schädigungen, er nützt schlimme Zufälle zu seinem Vortheil aus; was ihn nicht umbringt, macht ihn stärker. Er sammelt instinktiv aus Allem, was er sieht, hört, erlebt, seine Summe: er ist ein auswählendes Princip, er läßt Viel durchfallen. Er ist immer in seiner Gesellschaft, ob er mit Büchern, Menschen oder Landschaften verkehrt: er ehrt, indem er wählt, indem er zuläßt, indem er vertraut. Er reagirt auf alle Art Reize langsam, mit jener Langsamkeit, die eine lange Vorsicht und ein gewollter Stolz ihm angezüchtet haben, – er prüft den Reiz, der herankommt, er ist fern davon, ihm entgegenzugehn. Er glaubt weder an „Unglück“ noch an „Schuld“: er wird fertig, mit sich, mit Anderen, er weiß zu vergessen, – er ist stark genug, daß ihm Alles zum Besten gereichen muß. – Wohlan, ich bin das Gegenstück eines décadent: denn ich beschrieb eben mich.
3 Diese doppelte Reihe von Erfahrungen, diese Zugänglichkeit zu anscheinend getrennten Welten wiederholt sich in meiner Natur in jeder Hinsicht, – ich bin ein Doppelgänger, ich habe auch das „zweite“ Gesicht noch außer dem ersten. Und vielleicht auch noch das dritte… Schon meiner Abkunft nach ist mir ein Blick erlaubt jenseits aller bloß lokal, bloß national bedingten Perspektiven, es kostet mich keine Mühe, ein „guter Europäer“ zu sein. Andrerseits bin ich vielleicht mehr deutsch, als jetzige Deutsche, bloße Reichsdeutsche es noch zu sein vermöchten, – ich, der letzte antipolitische Deutsche. Und doch waren meine Vorfahren polnische Edelleute: ich habe von daher viel Rassen-Instinkte im Leibe, wer weiß? zuletzt gar noch das liberum veto. Denke ich daran, wie oft ich unterwegs als Pole angeredet werde und von Polen selbst, wie selten man mich für einen Deutschen nimmt, so könnte es scheinen, daß ich nur zu den angesprenkelten Deutschen gehörte. Aber meine Mutter, Franziska Oehler, ist jedenfalls etwas sehr Deutsches; insgleichen meine Großmutter väterlicher Seits, Erdmuthe Krause. Letztere lebte ihre ganze Jugend mitten im guten alten Weimar, nicht ohne Zusammenhang mit dem Goethe’schen Kreise. Ihr Bruder, der Professor der Theologie Krause in Königsberg, wurde nach Herder’s Tode als Generalsuperintendent nach Weimar berufen. Es ist nicht unmöglich, daß ihre Mutter, meine Urgroßmutter, unter dem Namen „Muthgen“ im Tagebuch des jungen Goethe vorkommt. Sie verheirathete sich zum zweiten Mal mit dem Superintendenten Nietzsche in Eilenburg; an dem Tage des großen Kriegsjahres 1813, wo Napoleon mit seinem Generalstab in Eilenburg einzog, am 10. Oktober, hatte sie ihre Niederkunft. Sie war, als Sächsin, eine große Verehrerin Napoleon’s; es könnte sein, das ich’s auch noch bin. Mein Vater, 1813 geboren, starb 1849. Er lebte, bevor er das Pfarramt der Gemeinde Röcken unweit Lützen übernahm, einige Jahre auf dem Altenburger Schlosse und unterrichtete die vier Prinzessinnen daselbst. Seine Schülerinnen sind die Königin von Hannover, die Großfürstin Constantin, die Großherzogin von Oldenburg und die Prinzeß Therese von Sachsen-Altenburg. Er war voll tiefer Pietät gegen den preußischen König Friedrich Wilhelm den Vierten, von dem er auch sein Pfarramt erhielt; die Ereignisse von 1848 betrübten ihn über die Maaßen. Ich selber, am Geburtstage des genannten Königs geboren, am 15. Oktober, erhielt, wie billig, die Hohenzollern-Namen Friedrich Wilhelm. Einen Vorteil hatte jedenfalls die Wahl dieses Tages: mein Geburtstag war meine ganze Kindheit hindurch ein Festtag. – Ich betrachte es als ein großes Vorrecht, einen solchen Vater gehabt zu haben: es scheint mir sogar, daß sich damit Alles erklärt, was ich sonst an Vorrechten habe, – das Leben, das große Ja zum Leben nicht eingerechnet. Vor Allem, daß es für mich keiner Absicht dazu bedarf, sondern eines bloßen Abwartens, um unfreiwillig in eine Welt hoher und zarter Dinge einzutreten: ich bin dort zu Hause, meine innerste Leidenschaft wird dort erst frei. Daß ich für dies Vorrecht beinahe mit dem Leben zahlte, ist gewiß kein unbilliger Handel. – Um nur Etwas von meinem Zarathustra zu verstehn, muß man vielleicht ähnlich bedingt sein, wie ich es bin, – mit Einem Fuße jenseits des Lebens…
4 Ich habe nie die Kunst verstanden, gegen mich einzunehmen – auch das verdanke ich meinem unvergleichlichen Vater –, und selbst noch, wenn es mir von großem Werthe schien. Ich bin sogar, wie sehr immer das unchristlich scheinen mag, nicht einmal gegen mich eingenommen. Man mag mein Leben hin- und herwenden, man wird darin nur selten, im Grunde nur Ein Mal Spuren davon entdecken, daß Jemand bösen Willen gegen mich gehabt hätte, – vielleicht aber etwas zu viel Spuren von gutem Willen… Meine Erfahrungen selbst mit Solchen, an denen Jedermann schlechte Erfahrungen macht, sprechen ohne Ausnahme zu deren Gunsten; ich zähme jeden Bär, ich mache die Hanswürste noch sittsam. In den sieben Jahren, wo ich an der obersten Klasse des Basler Pädagogiums Griechisch lehrte, habe ich keinen Anlaß gehabt, eine Strafe zu verhängen; die Faulsten waren bei mir fleißig. Dem Zufall bin ich immer gewachsen; ich muß unvorbereitet sein, um meiner Herr zu sein. Das Instrument, es sei, welches es wolle, es sei so verstimmt, wie nur das Instrument „Mensch“ verstimmt werden kann – ich müßte krank sein, wenn es mir nicht gelingen sollte, ihm etwas Anhörbares abzugewinnen. Und wie oft habe ich das von den „Instrumenten“ selber gehört, daß sie sich noch nie so gehört hätten… Am schönsten vielleicht von jenem unverzeihlich jung gestorbenen Heinrich von Stein, der einmal, nach sorgsam eingeholter Erlaubniß, auf drei Tage in Sils-Maria erschien, Jedermann erklärend, daß er nicht wegen des Engadins komme. Dieser ausgezeichnete Mensch, der mit der ganzen ungestümen Einfalt eines preußischen Junkers in den Wagner’schen Sumpf hineingewatet war (– und außerdem noch in den Dühring’schen!) war diese drei Tage wie umgewandelt durch einen Sturmwind der Freiheit, gleich Einem, der plötzlich in seine Höhe gehoben wird und Flügel bekommt. Ich sagte ihm immer, das mache die gute Luft hier oben, so gehe es Jedem, man sei nicht umsonst 6000 Fuß über Bayreuth, – aber er wollte mir’s nicht glauben… Wenn trotzdem an mir manche kleine und große Missethat verübt worden ist, so war nicht der „Wille“, am wenigsten der böse Wille Grund davon: eher schon hätte ich mich – ich deutete es eben an – über den guten Willen zu beklagen, der keinen kleinen Unfug in meinem Leben angerichtet hat. Meine Erfahrungen geben mir ein Anrecht auf Mißtrauen überhaupt hinsichtlich der sogenannten „selbstlosen“ Triebe, der gesammten zu Rath und That bereiten „Nächstenliebe“. Sie gilt mir an sich als Schwäche, als Einzelfall der Widerstands-Unfähigkeit gegen Reize, – das Mitleiden heißt nur bei décadents eine Tugend. Ich werfe den Mitleidigen vor, daß ihnen die Scham, die Ehrfurcht, das Zartgefühl vor Distanzen leicht abhanden kommt, daß Mitleiden im Handumdrehen nach Pöbel riecht und schlechten Manieren zum Verwechseln ähnlich sieht, – daß mitleidige Hände unter Umständen geradezu zerstörerisch in ein großes Schicksal, in eine Vereinsamung unter Wunden, in ein Vorrecht auf schwere Schuld hineingreifen können. Die Überwindung des Mitleids rechne ich unter die vornehmen Tugenden: ich habe als „Versuchung Zarathustra’s“ einen Fall gedichtet, wo ein großer Nothschrei an ihn kommt, wo das Mitleiden wie eine letzte Sünde ihn überfallen, ihn von sich abspenstig machen will. Hier Herr bleiben, hier die Höhe seiner Aufgabe rein halten von den viel niedrigeren und kurzsichtigeren Antrieben, welche in den sogenannten selbstlosen Handlungen thätig sind, das ist die Probe, die letzte Probe vielleicht, die ein Zarathustra abzulegen hat – sein eigentlicher Beweis von Kraft…
5 Auch noch in einem anderen Punkte bin ich bloß mein Vater noch einmal und gleichsam sein Fortleben nach einem allzufrühen Tode. Gleich Jedem, der nie unter seines Gleichen lebte und dem der Begriff „Vergeltung“ so unzugänglich ist wie etwa der Begriff „gleiche Rechte“, verbiete ich mir in Fällen, wo eine kleine oder sehr große Thorheit an mir begangen wird, jede Gegenmaaßregel, jede Schutzmaaßregel, – wie billig, auch jede Vertheidigung, jede „Rechtfertigung“. Meine Art Vergeltung besteht darin, der Dummheit so schnell wie möglich eine Klugheit nachzuschicken: so holt man sie vielleicht noch ein. Im Gleichniß geredet: ich schicke einen Topf mit Confitüren, um eine sauere Geschichte loszuwerden… Man hat nur Etwas an mir schlimm zu machen, ich „vergelte“ es, dessen sei man sicher: ich finde über Kurzem eine Gelegenheit, dem „Missethäter“ meinen Dank auszudrücken (mitunter sogar für die Missethat) – oder ihn um Etwas zu bitten, was verbindlicher sein kann als Etwas geben… Auch scheint es mir, daß das gröbste Wort, der gröbste Brief noch gutartiger, noch honnetter sind als Schweigen. Solchen, die schweigen, fehlt es fast immer an Feinheit und Höflichkeit des Herzens; Schweigen ist ein Einwand, Hinunterschlucken macht nothwendig einen schlechten Charakter, – es verdirbt selbst den Magen. Alle Schweiger sind dyspeptisch. – Man sieht, ich möchte die Grobheit nicht unterschätzt wissen, sie ist bei weitem die humanste Form des Widerspruchs und, inmitten der modernen Verzärtelung, eine unsrer ersten Tugenden. – Wenn man reich genug dazu ist, ist es selbst ein Glück, Unrecht zu haben. Ein Gott, der auf die Erde käme, dürfte gar nichts Andres thun, als Unrecht, — nicht die Strafe, sondern die Schuld auf sich zu nehmen wäre erst göttlich.
6 DIE Freiheit vom Ressentiment, die Aufklärung über das Ressentiment — wer weiß, wie sehr ich zuletzt auch darin meiner langen Krankheit zu Dank verpflichtet bin! Das Problem ist nicht gerade einfach: man muß es aus der Kraft heraus und aus der Schwäche heraus erlebt haben. Wenn irgend Etwas überhaupt gegen Kranksein, gegen Schwachsein geltend gemacht werden muß, so ist es, daß in ihm der eigentliche Heilinstinkt, das ist der Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt im Menschen mürbe wird. Man weiß von Nichts loszukommen, man weiß mit Nichts fertig zu werden, man weiß Nichts zurückzustoßen, — Alles verletzt. Mensch und Ding kommen zudringlich nahe, die Erlebnisse treffen zu tief, die Erinnerung ist eine eiternde Wunde. Kranksein ist eine Art Ressentiment selbst. — Hiergegen hat der Kranke nur Ein großes Heilmittel, — ich nenne es den russischen Fatalismus, jenen Fatalismus ohne Revolte, mit dem sich ein russischer Soldat, dem der Feldzug zu hart wird, zuletzt in den Schnee legt. Nichts überhaupt mehr annehmen, an sich nehmen, in sich hineinnehmen, — überhaupt nicht mehr reagiren... Die große Vernunft dieses Fatalismus, der nicht immer nur der Muth zum Tode ist, als lebenerhaltend unter den lebensgefährlichsten Umständen, ist die Herabsetzung des Stoffwechsels, dessen Verlangsamung, eine Art Wille zum Winterschlaf. Ein paar Schritte weiter in dieser Logik, und man hat den Fakir, der wochenlang in einem Grabe schläft... Weil man zu schnell sich verbrauchen würde, wenn man überhaupt reagirte, reagirt man gar nicht mehr: dies ist die Logik. Und mit Nichts brennt man rascher ab, als mit den Ressentiments-Affekten. Der Ärger, die krankhafte Verletzlichkeit, die Ohnmacht zur Rache, die Lust, der Durst nach der Rache, das Giftmischen in jedem Sinne — das ist für Erschöpfte sicherlich die nachtheiligste Art zu reagiren: ein rapider Verbrauch von Nervenkraft, eine krankhafte Steigerung schädlicher Ausleerungen, zum Beispiel der Galle in den Magen, ist damit bedingt. Das Ressentiment ist das Verbotene an sich für den Kranken — sein Böses: leider auch sein natürlichster Hang. — Das begriff jener tiefe Physiolog Buddha. Seine „Religion“, die man besser als eine Hygiene bezeichnen dürfte, um sie nicht mit so erbarmungswürdigen Dingen wie das Christentum ist, zu vermischen, machte ihre Wirkung abhängig von dem Sieg über das Ressentiment: die Seele davon frei machen — erster Schritt zur Genesung. „Nicht durch Feindschaft kommt Feindschaft zu Ende, durch Freundschaft kommt Feindschaft zu Ende“: das steht am Anfang der Lehre Buddha’s — so redet nicht die Moral, so redet die Physiologie. — Das Ressentiment, aus der Schwäche geboren, Niemandem schädlicher als dem Schwachen selbst, — im andern Falle, wo eine reiche Natur die Voraussetzung ist, ein überflüssiges Gefühl, ein Gefühl, über das Herr zu bleiben beinahe der Beweis des Reichthums ist. Wer den Ernst kennt, mit dem meine Philosophie den Kampf mit den Rach- und Nachgefühlen bis in die Lehre vom „freien Willen“ hinein aufgenommen hat — der Kampf mit dem Christenthum ist nur ein Einzelfall daraus — wird verstehn, weshalb ich mein persönliches Verhalten, meine Instinkt-Sicherheit in der Praxis hier gerade an’s Licht stelle. In den Zeiten der décadence verbot ich sie mir als schädlich; sobald das Leben wieder reich und stolz genug dazu war, verbot ich sie mir als unter mir. Jener „russische Fatalismus“, von dem ich sprach, trat darin bei mir hervor, daß ich beinahe unerträgliche Lagen, Orte, Wohnungen, Gesellschaften, nachdem sie einmal, durch Zufall, gegeben waren, Jahre lang zäh festhielt, — es war besser, als sie ändern, als sie veränderbar zu fühlen, — als sich gegen sie aufzulehnen... Mich in diesem Fatalismus stören, mich gewaltsam aufwecken nahm ich damals tödtlich übel: — in Wahrheit war es auch jedes Mal tödtlich gefährlich. — Sich selbst wie ein Fatum nehmen, nicht sich „anders“ wollen — das ist in solchen Zuständen die große Vernunft selbst.
7 EIN ander Ding ist der Krieg. Ich bin meiner Art nach kriegerisch. Angreifen gehört zu meinen Instinkten. Feind sein können, Feind sein — das setzt vielleicht eine starke Natur voraus, jedenfalls ist es bedingt in jeder starken Natur. Sie braucht Widerstände, folglich sucht sie Widerstand: das aggressive Pathos gehört ebenso nothwendig zur Stärke als das Rach- und Nachgefühl zur Schwäche. Das Weib zum Beispiel ist rachsüchtig: das ist in seiner Schwäche bedingt, so gut wie seine Reizbarkeit für fremde Noth. — Die Stärke des Angreifenden hat in der Gegnerschaft, die er nöthig hat, eine Art Maaß; jedes Wachsthum verräth sich im Aufsuchen eines gewaltigeren Gegners — oder Problems: denn ein Philosoph, der kriegerisch ist, fordert auch Probleme zum Zweikampf heraus. Die Aufgabe ist nicht, überhaupt über Widerstände Herr zu werden, sondern über solche, an denen man seine ganze Kraft, Geschmeidigkeit und Waffen-Meisterschaft einzusetzen hat, — über gleiche Gegner... Gleichheit vor dem Feinde — erste Voraussetzung zu einem rechtschaffnen Duell. Wo man verachtet, kann man nicht Krieg führen; wo man befiehlt, wo man Etwas unter sich sieht, hat man nicht Krieg zu führen. — Meine Kriegs-Praxis ist in vier Sätze zu fassen. Erstens: ich greife nur Sachen an, die siegreich sind, — ich warte unter Umständen, bis sie siegreich sind. Zweitens: ich greife nur Sachen an, wo ich keine Bundesgenossen finden würde, wo ich allein stehe, — wo ich mich allein compromittire... Ich habe nie einen Schritt öffentlich gethan, der nicht compromittirte: das ist mein Kriterium des rechten Handelns. Drittens: ich greife nie Personen an, — ich bediene mich der Person nur wie eines starken Vergrößerungsglases, mit dem man einen allgemeinen, aber schleichenden, aber wenig greifbaren Nothstand sichtbar machen kann. So griff ich David Strauß an, genauer den Erfolg eines altersschwachen Buchs bei der deutschen „Bildung“, — ich ertappte diese Bildung dabei auf der That... So griff ich Wagnern an, genauer die Falschheit, die Instinkt-Halbschlächtigkeit unsrer „Cultur“, welche die Raffinirten mit den Reichen, die Späten mit den Großen verwechselt. Viertens: ich greife nur Dinge an, wo jedwede Personen-Differenz ausgeschlossen ist, wo jeder Hintergrund schlimmer Erfahrungen fehlt. Im Gegentheil, angreifen ist bei mir ein Beweis des Wohlwollens, unter Umständen der Dankbarkeit. Ich ehre, ich zeichne aus damit, daß ich meinen Namen mit dem einer Sache, einer Person verbinde: für oder wider — das gilt mir darin gleich. Wenn ich dem Christenthum den Krieg mache, so steht dies mir zu, weil ich von dieser Seite aus keine Fatalitäten und Hemmungen erlebt habe, — die ernstesten Christen sind mir immer gewogen gewesen. Ich selber, ein Gegner des Christenthums de rigueur, bin ferne davon, es dem Einzelnen nachzutragen, was das Verhängniß von Jahrtausenden ist. —
8 DARF ich noch einen letzten Zug meiner Natur anzudeuten wagen, der mir im Umgang mit Menschen keine kleine Schwierigkeit macht? Mir eignet eine vollkommen unheimliche Reizbarkeit des Reinlichkeits-Instinkts, so daß ich die Nähe oder — was sage ich? — das Innerlichste, die „Eingeweide“ jeder Seele physiologisch wahrnehme — rieche... Ich habe an dieser Reizbarkeit psychologische Fühlhörner, mit denen ich jedes Geheimniß betaste und in die Hand bekomme: der viele verborgene Schmutz auf dem Grunde mancher Natur, vielleicht in schlechtem Blut bedingt, aber durch Erziehung übertüncht, wird mir fast bei der ersten Berührung schon bewußt. Wenn ich recht beobachtet habe, empfinden solche meiner Reinlichkeit unzuträgliche Naturen die Vorsicht meines Ekels auch ihrerseits: sie werden damit nicht wohlriechender... So wie ich mich immer gewöhnt habe — eine extreme Lauterkeit gegen mich ist meine Daseins-Voraussetzung, ich komme um unter unreinen Bedingungen —, schwimme und bade und plätschere ich gleichsam beständig im Wasser, in irgend einem vollkommen durchsichtigen und glänzenden Elemente. Das macht mir aus dem Verkehr mit Menschen keine kleine Gedulds-Probe; meine Humanität besteht nicht darin, mitzufühlen, wie der Mensch ist, sondern es auszuhalten, daß ich ihn mitfühle... Meine Humanität ist eine beständige Selbstüberwindung. — Aber ich habe Einsamkeit nöthig, will sagen, Genesung, Rückkehr zu mir, den Athem einer freien leichten spielenden Luft... Mein ganzer Zarathustra ist ein Dithyrambus auf die Einsamkeit, oder, wenn man mich verstanden hat, auf die Reinheit... Zum Glück nicht auf die reine Torheit... — Wer Augen für Farben hat, wird ihn diamanten nennen. — Der Ekel am Menschen, am „Gesindel“ war immer meine größte Gefahr... Will man die Worte hören, in denen Zarathustra von der Erlösung vom Ekel redet?
»Was geschah mir doch? Wie erlöste ich mich vom Ekel?
Wer verjüngte mein Auge? Wie erflog ich die Höhe, wo kein Gesindel mehr am Brunnen sitzt?
Schuf mein Ekel selber mir Flügel und quellenahnende Kräfte? Wahrlich, in’s Höchste mußte ich fliegen, daß ich den Born der Lust wiederfände! —
Oh ich fand ihn, meine Brüder! Hier im Höchsten quillt mir der Born der Lust! Und es giebt ein Leben, an dem kein Gesindel mittrinkt!
Fast zu heftig strömst du mir, Quell der Lust! Und oft leerst du den Becher wieder, dadurch, daß du ihn füllen willst.
Und noch muß ich lernen, bescheidener dir zu nahen: allzuheftig strömt dir noch mein Herz entgegen:
— mein Herz, auf dem mein Sommer brennt, der kurze, heiße, schwermüthige, überselige: wie verlangt mein Sommer-Herz nach deiner Kühle!
Vorbei die zögernde Trübsal meines Frühlings! Vorüber die Schneeflocken meiner Bosheit im Juni! Sommer wurde ich ganz und Sommer-Mittag, —
— ein Sommer im Höchsten mit kalten Quellen und seliger Stille: oh kommt, meine Freunde, daß die Stille noch seliger werde!
Denn dies ist unsre Höhe und unsre Heimat: zu hoch und zu steil wohnen wir hier allen Unreinen und ihrem Durste.
Werft nur eure reinen Augen in den Born meiner Lust, ihr Freunde! Wie sollte er darob trübe werden? Entgegenlachen soll er euch mit seiner Reinheit.
Auf dem Baume Zukunft bauen wir unser Nest; Adler sollen uns Einsamen Speise bringen in ihren Schnäbeln!
Wahrlich, keine Speise, an der Unsaubere mitessen dürften!
Feuer würden sie zu fressen wähnen und sich die Mäuler verbrennen.
Wahrlich, keine Heimstätten halten wir hier bereit für Unsaubere! Eishöhle würde ihren Leibern unser Glück heißen und ihren Geistern!
Und wie starke Winde wollen wir über ihnen leben, Nachbarn den Adlern, Nachbarn dem Schnee, Nachbarn der Sonne: also leben starke Winde.
Und einem Winde gleich will ich einst noch zwischen sie blasen und mit meinem Geiste ihrem Geiste den Athem nehmen: so will es meine Zukunft.
Wahrlich, ein starker Wind ist Zarathustra allen Niederungen: und solchen Rath räth er seinen Feinden und Allem, was spuckt und speit: hütet euch, gegen den Wind zu speien!...«
Musean translation
A complete machine-assisted Musean translation directly from the German of the 1908 Insel edition, including its concluding poem. This early edition's readings and omissions are retained, not replaced with later critical restorations.
1 The good fortune of my existence, perhaps its uniqueness, lies in its fate: to put it as a riddle, as my father I have already died; as my mother I still live and grow old. This double descent, as it were from the highest and lowest rungs on the ladder of life, at once a decadent and a beginning—this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from taking sides in relation to the whole problem of life, which perhaps distinguishes me. I have a finer scent for the signs of ascent and decline than any human being has ever possessed; in this I am the teacher par excellence—I know both; I am both.—My father died at thirty-six: he was delicate, lovable, and sickly, like a creature destined only for a passing visit—more a kindly remembrance of life than life itself. At the age when his life began its descent, mine did too: in my thirty-sixth year I reached the lowest point of my vitality—I still lived, yet could not see three steps ahead. At that time—it was 1879—I resigned my professorship at Basel, lived through the summer like a shadow in St. Moritz, and the following winter, the most sunless of my life, as a shadow in Naumburg. This was my lowest ebb: “The Wanderer and His Shadow” came into being meanwhile. Without doubt I understood shadows then… In the winter that followed, my first winter in Genoa, that sweetening and spiritualization almost inseparable from an extreme poverty of blood and muscle brought forth “Dawn”. The perfect brightness and cheerfulness, even exuberance of spirit, reflected in that work are compatible in me not only with the profoundest physiological weakness, but even with an excess of pain. Amid the torments of an unbroken three-day headache, accompanied by laborious vomiting of mucus, I possessed a dialectical clarity par excellence and thought things through with great composure—things for which, in healthier circumstances, I am not climber enough, not refined enough, not cold enough. My readers perhaps know to what extent I regard dialectic as a symptom of decadence, for instance in the most celebrated case: that of Socrates.—All morbid disturbances of the intellect, even that half-stupor which fever brings in its wake, have remained entirely foreign to me to this day; I first had to learn their nature and frequency from scholarly books. My blood runs slowly. No one has ever been able to detect a fever in me. A doctor who had long treated me for nervous illness finally said, “No! There is nothing wrong with your nerves; it is only I who am nervous.” No localized degeneration whatever can be demonstrated; no organically caused stomach ailment, however profound the weakness of the gastric system resulting from general exhaustion. The eye trouble too, at times perilously close to blindness, was only a consequence, not a cause: with every increase in vitality, my eyesight also improved.—A long, all too long succession of years means recovery for me—unfortunately, it also means relapse, decline, the recurrence of a kind of decadence. Need I say, after all this, that I am experienced in questions of decadence? I have spelled it out forward and backward. Even that filigree art of grasping and comprehending in general, those fingers for nuances, that psychology of “seeing around corners,” and whatever else is mine, was learned only then: it is the true gift of that time, when everything in me grew more refined, observation itself as much as all the organs of observation. To look from the sick person's perspective toward healthier concepts and values, and then, conversely, from the fullness and self-assurance of rich life down into the secret labor of the instinct of decadence—that was my longest exercise, my true experience; if I became a master in anything, it was in this. Now it is in my hands; I have the hand for it: to shift perspectives. That is the first reason why a “revaluation of values” may perhaps be possible for me alone.—
2 Apart from being a decadent, I am also its opposite. Among other things, my proof is that I have always instinctively chosen the right remedies against bad conditions, whereas the decadent as such always chooses the remedies harmful to him. As a whole I was healthy; as an aspect, as a specialty, I was decadent. That energy for absolute isolation and release from familiar conditions, that compulsion against myself to stop allowing myself to be cared for, waited on, doctored—that betrays an absolute instinctive certainty about what was then needed above all! I took myself in hand; I made myself healthy again: the condition for this—every physiologist will admit it—is that one is fundamentally healthy. A typically sickly creature cannot become healthy, still less make itself healthy; for someone typically healthy, by contrast, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus to life, to more life. That, indeed, is how that long period of illness appears to me now: I discovered life anew, as it were, myself included; I tasted all good and even little things as others could not easily taste them—I made my philosophy out of my will to health, to life… For mark this: the years of my lowest vitality were those in which I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement… And how, at bottom, does one recognize the well-constituted person! By the pleasure such a person gives our senses: he is carved from a wood at once hard, delicate, and fragrant. He relishes only what agrees with him; his liking, his pleasure, ends where the measure of what benefits him is exceeded. He divines remedies against injuries; he turns misfortunes to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger. From everything he sees, hears, experiences, he instinctively gathers his sum: he is a principle of selection; he lets much fall away. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, people, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting. He reacts slowly to every kind of stimulus, with that slowness bred into him by long caution and a deliberate pride—he examines the approaching stimulus; he is far from going out to meet it. He believes neither in “misfortune” nor in “guilt”: he comes to terms with himself, with others; he knows how to forget—he is strong enough that everything must turn out for his best.—Well then, I am the opposite of a decadent, for I have just described myself.
3 This double sequence of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, repeats itself in my nature in every respect—I am a double; I have the “second” sight as well as the first. And perhaps the third as well… My very descent permits me a vision beyond all merely local, merely nationally conditioned perspectives; it costs me no effort to be a “good European.” On the other hand, I am perhaps more German than Germans of today, mere Germans of the Reich, could still be—I, the last antipolitical German. And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: from them I carry much racial instinct in my body, who knows? Perhaps even the liberum veto in the end. When I consider how often I am addressed as a Pole while traveling, and by Poles themselves, how seldom I am taken for a German, it might seem that I belong only among the speckled Germans. But my mother, Franziska Oehler, is in any case something very German; so too my paternal grandmother, Erdmuthe Krause. The latter spent her whole youth in good old Weimar, not without connections to Goethe's circle. Her brother, Professor of Theology Krause in Königsberg, was called to Weimar as general superintendent after Herder's death. It is not impossible that her mother, my great-grandmother, appears under the name “Muthgen” in the young Goethe's diary. She married Superintendent Nietzsche in Eilenburg as her second husband; on the day of the great war year 1813 when Napoleon entered Eilenburg with his general staff, October 10, she gave birth. As a Saxon she was a great admirer of Napoleon; it could be that I still am too. My father, born in 1813, died in 1849. Before taking up the pastorate of the community of Röcken near Lützen, he lived for several years at Altenburg Castle, teaching the four princesses there. His pupils were the Queen of Hanover, the Grand Duchess Constantine, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, and Princess Therese of Saxe-Altenburg. He was full of deep reverence for the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, from whom he also received his pastorate; the events of 1848 distressed him beyond measure. Born on that king's birthday, October 15, I naturally received the Hohenzollern names Friedrich Wilhelm. The choice of that day had at least one advantage: throughout my childhood my birthday was a holiday.—I consider it a great privilege to have had such a father; it even seems to me that this explains everything else I possess by way of privilege—life, the great Yes to life, not included. Above all, it takes no intention on my part, only a little waiting, to enter involuntarily into a world of lofty and delicate things: there I am at home; only there is my deepest passion set free. That I almost paid for this privilege with my life is certainly no unfair bargain.—To understand anything of my Zarathustra, one must perhaps be conditioned much as I am—with one foot beyond life…
4 I have never understood the art of turning people against me—for that too I thank my incomparable father—not even when it seemed to me of great value. Indeed, however unchristian it may appear, I am not even prejudiced against myself. Turn my life this way and that, and only rarely, at bottom only once, will you discover traces of someone's having borne me ill will—perhaps, however, rather too many traces of good will… Even my experiences with those with whom everyone has bad experiences speak without exception in their favor; I tame every bear; I make even buffoons behave. In the seven years when I taught Greek in the highest class of the Basel Pädagogium, I never had occasion to impose a punishment; even the idlest boys worked hard for me. I am always a match for chance; I must be unprepared to be master of myself. Whatever the instrument, however out of tune—as out of tune as only the instrument “human being” can become—I would have to be ill if I could not coax something worth hearing from it. And how often I have heard from the “instruments” themselves that they had never heard themselves sound so… Most beautifully, perhaps, from Heinrich von Stein, who died unforgivably young: once, after carefully obtaining permission, he appeared for three days in Sils-Maria, announcing to everyone that he was not coming for the Engadin. This excellent man, who with all the headlong simplicity of a Prussian Junker had waded into Wagner's swamp—and Dühring's too!—was as if transformed during those three days by a whirlwind of freedom, like someone suddenly lifted to his own height and given wings. I kept telling him it was the good air up here, that everyone felt the same, that one was not six thousand feet above Bayreuth for nothing—but he would not believe me… If, despite this, many wrongs great and small have been done me, it was not “will,” least of all ill will, that caused them: I might sooner have complained—as I have just suggested—of the good will that has caused no little mischief in my life. My experiences give me the right to distrust the so-called “selfless” drives in general, the whole of that “love of one's neighbor” ever ready with advice and action. In itself I regard it as weakness, as a particular case of the inability to resist stimuli—only among decadents does pity pass for a virtue. I reproach the compassionate with readily losing shame, reverence, and a delicate sense of distances; with pity's smelling of the rabble in an instant and looking indistinguishably like bad manners; with compassionate hands sometimes intruding with downright destructive force into a great destiny, a solitude among wounds, a privilege of bearing grave guilt. I count the overcoming of pity among the noble virtues: in “Zarathustra's Temptation” I invented a case in which a great cry of distress reaches him, in which pity assails him like a final sin and seeks to estrange him from himself. To remain master here, to keep the height of one's task free from the much lower and more shortsighted impulses at work in so-called selfless actions—that is the trial, perhaps the final trial a Zarathustra must undergo—his true proof of strength…
5 In yet another respect I am simply my father once again, as it were his continued life after an all too early death. Like anyone who has never lived among his equals and to whom the concept of “retaliation” is as inaccessible as, say, the concept of “equal rights,” I forbid myself, when some small or very great folly is committed against me, every countermeasure, every protective measure—and naturally every defense, every “justification.” My kind of retaliation consists in sending a clever response after a stupidity as quickly as possible: perhaps that way it can still catch up with it. To speak in a parable: I send a pot of preserves to be rid of a sour affair… Let someone do me an injury and I “repay” him, be sure of that: before long I find an opportunity to express my thanks to the “evildoer”—sometimes even for the evil deed—or to ask something of him, which can be more binding than giving something. It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter, is more good-natured, more honorable, than silence. Those who remain silent almost always lack refinement and courtesy of heart: silence is an objection; swallowing things down necessarily makes for a bad character—it spoils even the stomach. All silent people are dyspeptic.—Clearly, I would not have rudeness undervalued; it is by far the most humane form of disagreement and, amid modern coddling, one of our foremost virtues.—If one is rich enough for it, it is even good fortune to be in the wrong. A god who came to earth ought to do nothing but wrong: to take upon himself not the punishment but the guilt would first be divine.
6 Freedom from resentment, understanding resentment—who knows how greatly, in the end, I am indebted to my long illness for this too! The problem is not exactly simple: one must have lived it from within strength and from within weakness. If anything at all must be held against being sick, against being weak, it is that the true healing instinct, the human instinct of defense and arms, grows weary in that condition. One knows how to be rid of nothing, how to cope with nothing, how to repel nothing—everything wounds. People and things draw importunately near; experiences strike too deep; memory is a festering wound. Being sick is a kind of resentment itself.—Against this the sick person has only one great remedy—I call it Russian fatalism: that fatalism without revolt with which a Russian soldier, when the campaign grows too hard, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to take anything at all, take it upon oneself, take it into oneself—no longer to react at all… The great wisdom of this fatalism, which is not always merely the courage to die, lies in reducing the metabolism, slowing it down, a kind of will to hibernation, as a means of preserving life under the most life-threatening circumstances. A few steps further in this logic, and one has the fakir who sleeps for weeks in a grave… Because one would exhaust oneself too quickly if one reacted at all, one ceases to react altogether: that is the logic. And nothing burns one out more quickly than the affects of resentment. Vexation, morbid vulnerability, impotence to revenge oneself, the desire, the thirst for revenge, the mixing of poison in every sense—this is assuredly the most harmful way for the exhausted to react: it entails a rapid expenditure of nervous energy, a morbid increase in harmful secretions, of bile into the stomach, for instance. Resentment is what is forbidden in itself to the sick person—his evil: unfortunately, also his most natural inclination.—That profound physiologist Buddha understood this. His “religion,” which might better be called a hygiene, so as not to confuse it with such pitiable things as Christianity, made its effect depend on victory over resentment: to free the soul from that—the first step toward recovery. “Hostility is not ended by hostility; hostility is ended by friendship”: this stands at the beginning of Buddha's teaching—thus speaks not morality, thus speaks physiology.—Resentment, born of weakness, harmful to no one more than to the weak person himself—in the other case, where a rich nature is presupposed, an expendable feeling, a feeling that to remain master of is almost the proof of wealth. Whoever knows the earnestness with which my philosophy has taken up the struggle against feelings of revenge and rancor, right into the doctrine of “free will”—the struggle against Christianity is only one particular instance of this—will understand why I bring to light here precisely my personal conduct, my instinctive certainty in practice. In times of decadence I forbade myself those feelings as harmful; as soon as life was again rich and proud enough for them, I forbade them as beneath me. That “Russian fatalism” of which I spoke showed itself in me in my clinging tenaciously for years to almost unbearable situations, places, lodgings, and company, once chance had provided them—it was better than changing them, than feeling them to be changeable—than rebelling against them… To be disturbed in this fatalism, to be violently awakened, I took as a mortal offense at the time—in truth, it was mortally dangerous each time as well.—To accept oneself like a destiny, not to wish oneself “different”—in such conditions that is great wisdom itself.
7 War is another matter. By nature I am warlike. To attack belongs among my instincts. To be able to be an enemy, to be an enemy—this perhaps presupposes a strong nature; in any case it is a condition of every strong nature. It needs resistance, consequently it seeks resistance: the aggressive passion belongs as necessarily to strength as the feelings of revenge and rancor belong to weakness. Woman, for instance, is vengeful: this is conditioned by her weakness, as is her susceptibility to the distress of others.—The strength of an attacker has a kind of measure in the opposition he needs; every growth betrays itself in seeking a mightier opponent—or problem: for a warlike philosopher also challenges problems to a duel. The task is not to become master over resistance in general, but over opponents against whom one must bring all one's strength, agility, and mastery of weapons—over equal opponents… Equality before the enemy—the first prerequisite for an honorable duel. Where one despises, one cannot wage war; where one commands, where one sees something beneath oneself, one must not wage war.—My practice in war can be summed up in four propositions. First: I attack only causes that are victorious—under some circumstances I wait until they are victorious. Second: I attack only causes against which I would find no allies, where I stand alone—where I compromise myself alone… I have never taken a public step that did not compromise me: that is my criterion of right action. Third: I never attack persons—I use a person only as a powerful magnifying glass with which to make visible a general but insidious and elusive state of distress. Thus I attacked David Strauss—or more precisely, the success of a senile book among German “culture”—I caught that culture in the act… Thus I attacked Wagner—or more precisely, the falseness, the hybridity of instinct in our “culture,” which confuses the sophisticated with the rich, the latecomers with the great. Fourth: I attack only things where every personal difference is excluded, where every background of bad experiences is absent. On the contrary, attacking is with me a proof of goodwill, sometimes of gratitude. I honor, I distinguish, by linking my name with that of a cause, a person: whether for or against makes no difference to me. If I wage war on Christianity, I have the right to do so because I have experienced no misfortunes or hindrances from that quarter—the most earnest Christians have always been well disposed toward me. I myself, an opponent of Christianity as a matter of obligation, am far from holding against an individual what is the doom of millennia.—
8 May I dare to suggest one final trait in my nature that causes me no small difficulty in dealings with people? I possess an utterly uncanny sensitivity in the instinct for cleanliness, so that I perceive physiologically—smell—the proximity, or what am I saying, the innermost being, the “entrails” of every soul… In this sensitivity I have psychological antennae with which I touch and grasp every secret: the great quantity of hidden filth at the bottom of many a nature, perhaps conditioned by bad blood but whitewashed by upbringing, becomes apparent to me almost at the first contact. If I have observed correctly, such natures, intolerable to my cleanliness, also sense the caution of my disgust: they become no more fragrant for that… Just as I have always been accustomed—an extreme honesty with myself is the condition of my existence; under unclean conditions I perish—I am, as it were, perpetually swimming, bathing, and splashing in water, in some perfectly transparent and shining element. That makes dealing with people no small trial of patience for me; my humanity consists not in sharing the feeling of what a human being is, but in enduring the fact that I share that feeling… My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.—But I need solitude, which is to say recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air… My whole Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude, or, if I have been understood, on purity… Fortunately, not on pure folly… Whoever has eyes for colors will call it diamond-like.—Disgust at human beings, at the “rabble,” was always my greatest danger… Will you hear the words in which Zarathustra speaks of redemption from disgust?
“What happened to me? How did I redeem myself from disgust?
Who rejuvenated my eye? How did I fly to the height where no rabble sits beside the well?
Did my disgust itself create wings for me and powers to divine springs? Truly, I had to fly to the highest to find the wellspring of delight again!—
Oh, I found it, my brothers! Here in the highest the wellspring of delight gushes for me! And there is a life from which no rabble drinks!
Almost too violently you flow for me, wellspring of delight! And often you empty the cup again by wanting to fill it.
And I must still learn to approach you more modestly: all too violently my heart still streams toward you:
—my heart, on which my summer burns, that short, hot, melancholy, overblessed summer: how my summer-heart longs for your coolness!
Gone is the hesitant affliction of my spring! Gone are the snowflakes of my malice in June! Wholly summer I became, and summer noon—
—a summer in the highest, with cold springs and blissful stillness: oh, come, my friends, that the stillness may grow more blissful still!
For this is our height and our home: too high and steep we dwell here for all the unclean and their thirst.
Cast only your pure eyes into the wellspring of my delight, my friends! How could it grow clouded by that? With its own purity it shall laugh back at you.
On the tree of the future we build our nest; eagles shall bring us solitary ones food in their beaks!
Truly, no food of which the unclean might partake!
They would think they were eating fire and burn their mouths.
Truly, no dwellings do we hold ready here for the unclean! An ice cave our happiness would be called by their bodies and their spirits!
And like strong winds we wish to live above them, neighbors to the eagles, neighbors to the snow, neighbors to the sun: thus live strong winds.
And like a wind I will one day blow among them and with my spirit take the breath from their spirit: thus wills my future.
Truly, a strong wind is Zarathustra to all lowlands; and this is the counsel he gives his enemies and everything that spits and spews: beware of spitting against the wind!…”
Plain English translation
A complete machine-assisted Plain English translation made independently and directly from the same German edition, including its concluding poem. This is the 1908 text, not a modern critical edition.
1 The good fortune of my life, perhaps its uniqueness, lies in its fate. To put it as a riddle: as my father, I have already died; as my mother, I am still alive and growing old. This double origin comes, as it were, from the highest and lowest rungs on the ladder of life. I am both a decadent and a beginning. If anything explains my neutrality toward the whole problem of life, my freedom from taking sides, which may set me apart, this does. I have a keener nose for signs of rising and decline than any human being has ever had. I am the supreme teacher in this field—I know both, I am both.—My father died at 36. He was delicate, lovable, and sickly, like a being meant only to pass through—more a kindly memory of life than life itself. At the same age when his life went downhill, mine did too. In my 36th year I reached the lowest point of my vitality. I was still alive, but unable to see three steps ahead. That was in 1879. I gave up my professorship at Basel, lived like a shadow in St. Moritz through the summer, and spent the next winter, the least sunny of my life, as a shadow in Naumburg. That was my lowest point. I wrote “The Wanderer and His Shadow” during that time. There is no doubt that I understood shadows then… The next winter, my first in Genoa, brought forth “Dawn.” It grew out of that sweetness and refinement of mind that almost inevitably come with an extreme lack of blood and muscle. The complete brightness and cheerfulness, even overflowing energy of mind, reflected in that work are compatible in me not just with the deepest physical weakness, but even with extreme pain. In the middle of the torments brought on by three days of unbroken pain in the brain and exhausting vomiting of mucus, I had the clearest possible grasp of logical argument. I thought things through very coolly that, in healthier conditions, I am not enough of a climber, not subtle enough, not cold enough to reach. My readers may know how far I see this kind of logical argument as a symptom of decadence—for example, in the most famous case of all, that of Socrates.—To this day, all sickly disturbances of the mind have remained completely foreign to me, even the half-stunned state that comes with fever. I had to learn about their nature and frequency from scholarly study. My blood runs slowly. No one has ever been able to detect a fever in me. A doctor who treated me for a nervous disorder for quite some time finally said: “No! Your nerves aren't the problem. I'm just nervous myself.” No localized degeneration can be demonstrated at all. There is no stomach disease with an organic cause, however extreme the weakness of my digestive system may be as a result of general exhaustion. Even my eye trouble, which at times came dangerously close to blindness, was only a result, not a cause. So every increase in vitality also brought an improvement in my eyesight.—For me, a long, far too long series of years means recovery. Unfortunately, it also means relapse, decline, the recurring cycle of a kind of decadence. After all this, do I need to say that I am experienced in questions of decadence? I have spelled it out forward and backward. Even that delicate art of grasping and understanding in general, those fingers for fine shades of difference, that psychology of “seeing around corners,” and whatever else belongs to me, were only learned then. They are the real gift of that time, when everything in me grew more sensitive, observation itself as well as all the organs of observation. To look from the sick person's point of view toward healthier ideas and values, and then, in reverse, to look down from the fullness and self-assurance of a rich life into the secret work of the instinct of decadence—that was my longest practice, my real experience. If I became a master at anything, it was this. Now it is in my hands; I have the skill to switch perspectives. That is the first reason why a “revaluation of values” may be possible for me alone.—
2 For, besides being a decadent, I am also its opposite. One proof is that I always instinctively chose the right remedies for bad conditions. A decadent as such always chooses remedies that harm him. Taken as a whole, I was healthy; in one corner, in one particular respect, I was decadent. That energy for complete isolation and breaking away from familiar circumstances, the force I used on myself to stop letting people look after me, wait on me, and doctor me—all this shows the absolute certainty of my instinct about what was needed above all at that time. I took myself in hand. I made myself healthy again. The condition for doing this—every physiologist will admit it—is that you are basically healthy. A being who is typically sickly cannot become healthy, still less make himself healthy. For someone typically healthy, on the other hand, sickness can even be a powerful spur to life, to more life. That is indeed how that long period of sickness looks to me now. I discovered life anew, as it were, including myself. I tasted all the good things, even the small things, as others could not easily taste them. I made my will to health, to life, into my philosophy… For notice this: it was in the years when my vitality was lowest that I stopped being a pessimist. The instinct to restore myself forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement… And how, at bottom, do you recognize someone who has turned out well? Such a person is pleasant to our senses. He is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and fragrant at the same time. He likes the taste only of what is good for him. His liking, his pleasure, stops where the limit of what benefits him is passed. He senses the remedies for injuries. He turns bad accidents to his advantage. What does not kill him makes him stronger. He instinctively gathers his own total from everything he sees, hears, and experiences. He is a principle of selection; he lets much fall away. Whether he is dealing with books, people, or landscapes, he is always in his own company. He honors things by choosing them, by admitting them, by trusting them. He responds slowly to every kind of stimulus, with the slowness that long caution and deliberate pride have trained into him. He examines the stimulus that approaches him; he is far from going out to meet it. He believes neither in “bad luck” nor in “guilt.” He comes to terms with himself and with others. He knows how to forget. He is strong enough that everything must turn out for his good.—Well then, I am the opposite of a decadent: what I just described was myself.
3 This double series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, repeats itself in every part of my nature. I am a double; besides my first sight, I also have “second” sight. And perhaps third sight too… My ancestry alone lets me look beyond every perspective shaped merely by a locality or a nation. Being a “good European” takes no effort for me. On the other hand, perhaps I am more German than today's Germans, mere Germans of the Reich, could still manage to be—I, the last antipolitical German. And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen. I carry many racial instincts in my body from that source. Who knows? Perhaps, in the end, even the unrestricted right to veto. When I think how often people address me as a Pole on my travels, even Poles themselves, and how rarely they take me for a German, it might seem that I was only one of the Germans speckled with foreign blood. But my mother, Franziska Oehler, is certainly something very German, as is my grandmother on my father's side, Erdmuthe Krause. The latter spent her whole youth in good old Weimar, with some connections to Goethe's circle. Her brother, Krause, a professor of theology in Königsberg, was called to Weimar as general superintendent after Herder's death. It is not impossible that her mother, my great-grandmother, appears under the name “Muthgen” in the young Goethe's diary. She married a second time, to Superintendent Nietzsche in Eilenburg. In the great war year of 1813, she gave birth on the day Napoleon entered Eilenburg with his general staff, October 10. As a Saxon, she was a great admirer of Napoleon. It could be that I still am too. My father, born in 1813, died in 1849. Before taking over as pastor of the congregation in Röcken, near Lützen, he lived for several years at Altenburg Castle, where he taught the four princesses. His pupils are the Queen of Hanover, the Grand Duchess Constantine, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, and Princess Therese of Saxe-Altenburg. He felt deep devotion to the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who also gave him his position as pastor. The events of 1848 saddened him beyond measure. I myself was born on that king's birthday, October 15, and, fittingly, received the Hohenzollern names Friedrich Wilhelm. The choice of that day had at least one advantage: throughout my childhood, my birthday was a holiday.—I see it as a great privilege to have had such a father. In fact, it seems to explain all my other privileges—not counting life, the great Yes to life. Above all, I do not need to make any deliberate effort, but only to wait, to enter without willing it a world of lofty and delicate things. I am at home there. Only there is my deepest passion set free. That I nearly paid for this privilege with my life is certainly no unfair bargain.—To understand even a little of my Zarathustra, perhaps you need to be constituted much as I am—with one foot beyond life…
4 I have never understood the art of turning people against me—another thing I owe to my incomparable father—even when doing so seemed very valuable to me. In fact, however unchristian it may seem, I am not even against myself. Turn my life this way and that, and you will rarely find traces of anyone having wished me harm—at bottom, only once. But perhaps you will find rather too many traces of good will… Even my experiences with people everyone else has bad experiences with speak without exception in their favor. I tame every bear; I even make clowns behave decently. In the seven years when I taught Greek to the highest class at the Basel preparatory school, I never had reason to give a punishment. The laziest students worked hard for me. I am always a match for chance. I have to be unprepared to be master of myself. Whatever the instrument, however out of tune it may be—even as out of tune as the instrument “human being” can become—I would have to be sick not to get something worth hearing out of it. And how often I have heard from the “instruments” themselves that they had never heard themselves like that before… Perhaps the finest case was Heinrich von Stein, who died unforgivably young. Once, after carefully obtaining permission, he appeared in Sils-Maria for three days, explaining to everyone that he was not coming because of the Engadin. This excellent man had waded into the Wagnerian swamp with all the headstrong simplicity of a Prussian landed nobleman—and into Dühring's swamp as well! During those three days, he seemed transformed by a gale of freedom, like someone suddenly lifted to his own height and given wings. I kept telling him it was the good air up here, that everyone felt that way, that we were not 6000 feet above Bayreuth for nothing—but he would not believe me… If, despite this, people have done me various small and large wrongs, “will” was not the reason, least of all ill will. Rather—as I have just suggested—I would have cause to complain about good will, which has done no small amount of mischief in my life. My experiences entitle me to distrust the so-called “selfless” drives in general, all that “love of one's neighbor” ready with advice and action. I see it as weakness in itself, as a particular case of being unable to resist stimuli. Only decadents call pity a virtue. My charge against the pitying is that they easily lose their sense of shame, their respect, their delicate feeling for distances. Pity quickly smells of the mob and looks so like bad manners that you can mistake one for the other. Under some circumstances, pitying hands can actually reach in and destroy a great destiny, a wounded solitude, a privilege of bearing grave guilt. I count overcoming pity among the noble virtues. In “Zarathustra's Temptation” I imagined a case in which a great cry of distress reaches him, and pity tries to fall on him like a final sin and turn him away from himself. To remain master here, to keep the height of his task free from the much lower and more shortsighted impulses at work in so-called selfless actions—that is the test, perhaps the final test, that a Zarathustra has to pass, his real proof of strength…
5 In one other respect, too, I am simply my father over again, as though he lived on after dying far too soon. Like anyone who has never lived among his equals, and to whom the idea of “retaliation” is as inaccessible as, say, the idea of “equal rights,” I forbid myself any countermeasure or protective measure when someone does something foolish to me, whether small or very large. Naturally, I also forbid any defense, any “justification.” My way of retaliating is to send something clever after the stupidity as quickly as possible: perhaps it can still catch up with it. To put it in an image: I send a jar of jam to get rid of a sour business… People only need to do me some harm, and I will “pay them back”—they can be sure of that. Before long, I find an opportunity to express my thanks to the “wrongdoer,” sometimes even for the wrongdoing, or to ask him for something, which can create a stronger bond than giving something… It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter, is still kinder and more honest than silence. Those who keep silent almost always lack delicacy and politeness of heart. Silence is an objection. Swallowing things down inevitably makes for a bad character—it even ruins the stomach. Everyone who keeps silent has indigestion.—You see, I do not want rudeness to be underrated. It is by far the most humane form of disagreement and, amid modern oversensitivity, one of our foremost virtues.—If you are rich enough for it, being in the wrong is even a piece of good fortune. A god who came to earth would have to do nothing but wrong. Taking on not the punishment but the guilt would be truly divine.
6 Freedom from resentment, insight into resentment—who knows how much I ultimately owe my long illness for these too! The problem is not exactly simple. You have to have experienced it from a position of strength and from a position of weakness. If anything must be held against sickness and weakness, it is that they wear down the real healing instinct in a person, the instinct to defend and arm oneself. You cannot get free of anything, cannot deal with anything, cannot push anything back—everything hurts you. People and things press too close. Experiences strike too deep. Memory is a festering wound. Being sick is itself a kind of resentment.—Against this, the sick person has just one great remedy. I call it Russian fatalism: that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier finally lies down in the snow when a campaign becomes too hard. To stop accepting anything at all, taking anything on, taking anything in—to stop reacting altogether… The great good sense of this fatalism, which is not always just the courage to die, lies in preserving life under the most dangerous conditions by reducing the metabolism, slowing it down—a kind of will to hibernate. Follow this logic a few steps further and you have the fakir who sleeps in a grave for weeks… Because you would use yourself up too quickly if you reacted at all, you stop reacting completely: that is the logic. And nothing burns you out faster than the emotions of resentment. Anger, sickly sensitivity to hurt, powerlessness to take revenge, the desire, the thirst for revenge, the mixing of poison in every sense—this is certainly the most harmful way for exhausted people to react. It necessarily brings a rapid drain on nervous energy, a sickly increase in harmful discharges, such as bile into the stomach. For the sick person, resentment is what is forbidden in itself—his evil. Unfortunately, it is also his most natural inclination.—That profound physiologist Buddha understood this. His “religion,” which would be better called a system of hygiene, so as not to confuse it with such pitiful things as Christianity, made its effect depend on victory over resentment. Freeing the soul from that is the first step toward recovery. “Hostility does not end through hostility; hostility ends through friendship”: this stands at the beginning of Buddha's teaching. That is not morality speaking; that is physiology.—Resentment is born of weakness, and harms no one more than the weak person himself. In the other case, where a rich nature is the starting point, it is a needless feeling. Keeping mastery over it is almost the proof of that richness. Anyone who knows how seriously my philosophy has taken up the struggle against feelings of revenge and lingering resentment, right into the doctrine of “free will”—the struggle against Christianity is only one particular case—will understand why I am bringing my personal conduct, my certainty of instinct in practice, to light on this very point. In times of decadence, I forbade myself those feelings as harmful. As soon as life was rich and proud enough again, I forbade them as beneath me. The “Russian fatalism” I spoke of showed itself in the way I stubbornly held on for years to almost unbearable situations, places, lodgings, and company once chance had put them there. This was better than changing them, than feeling that they could be changed, than rebelling against them… At that time I took deadly offense at anyone who disturbed me in this fatalism or forcibly woke me up. In truth, each time it was also a deadly danger.—To accept yourself as a fate, not to want yourself to be “different”—in such conditions, that is great good sense itself.
7 War is another matter. I am warlike by nature. Attacking is one of my instincts. Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy—perhaps this requires a strong nature; in any case, it is part of every strong nature. Such a nature needs resistance, so it seeks resistance. The aggressive passion belongs to strength as necessarily as feelings of revenge and lingering resentment belong to weakness. Woman, for example, is vengeful. That comes from her weakness, just as her sensitivity to other people's distress does.—The strength of an attacker has a kind of measure in the opposition he needs. Every growth in strength reveals itself in seeking a more powerful opponent—or problem. For a warlike philosopher challenges problems to single combat too. The task is not to overcome just any resistance, but resistance that requires you to use all your strength, flexibility, and skill with weapons—opponents who are your equals… Equality with the enemy is the first condition for an honest duel. Where you despise, you cannot wage war. Where you command, where you see something beneath you, you have no business waging war.—My practice in war can be summed up in four statements. First: I attack only causes that are victorious. Sometimes I wait until they are victorious. Second: I attack only causes against which I would find no allies, where I stand alone—where I alone put myself in a compromising position… I have never taken a public step that did not put me in a compromising position. That is my test of right action. Third: I never attack people. I use a person only as a powerful magnifying glass to make visible a general but creeping, hard-to-grasp state of distress. That is how I attacked David Strauss—more precisely, the success of a senile book among German “educated society.” I caught that society in the act… That is how I attacked Wagner—more precisely, the falseness and mongrel instincts of our “culture,” which confuses the refined with the rich, the latecomers with the great. Fourth: I attack only things where any personal disagreement is ruled out, where there is no background of bad experiences. On the contrary, with me an attack is proof of good will, sometimes of gratitude. I honor and single out a cause or a person by linking my name with theirs. Whether I am for or against them makes no difference to me in this respect. If I wage war on Christianity, I have the right to do so because I have suffered no misfortunes or obstacles from that quarter. The most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me. I myself, an uncompromising opponent of Christianity, am far from holding against an individual what is the fate of thousands of years.—
8 May I dare to point out one final trait of my nature, one that causes me no small difficulty in dealing with people? My instinct for cleanliness is sensitive to a completely uncanny degree. I physically sense—smell—the presence, or rather, what am I saying?—the innermost part, the “guts,” of every soul… This sensitivity gives me psychological feelers with which I touch and take hold of every secret. The great amount of hidden dirt at the bottom of many a nature, perhaps rooted in bad blood but whitewashed by upbringing, becomes clear to me almost at the first contact. If I have observed correctly, these natures that are bad for my cleanliness also sense the caution of my disgust. That does not make them smell any better… As I have always been used to doing—complete honesty with myself is a condition of my existence; I perish in impure conditions—I am, as it were, constantly swimming, bathing, and splashing in water, in some completely transparent and shining element. This makes dealing with people no small test of patience for me. My humanity does not consist in feeling what people are like, but in enduring that I feel it… My humanity is a constant overcoming of myself.—But I need solitude, by which I mean recovery, a return to myself, the breath of free, light, playful air… My whole Zarathustra is a song of praise to solitude—or, if you have understood me, to purity… Fortunately, not to pure folly…—Anyone with eyes for colors will call it diamond-like.—Disgust with humanity, with the “rabble,” has always been my greatest danger… Would you like to hear the words in which Zarathustra speaks of release from disgust?
“What happened to me, then? How did I free myself from disgust?
Who made my eye young again? How did I fly up to the height where no rabble sits by the well anymore?
Did my disgust itself create wings for me, and powers to sense springs? Yes, I had to fly to the greatest heights to find the fountain of pleasure again!—
Oh, I found it, my brothers! Here at the greatest heights the fountain of pleasure springs up for me! And there is a life that no rabble drinks from!
You flow almost too fiercely for me, spring of pleasure! And often you empty the cup again by wanting to fill it.
And I must still learn to approach you more modestly: my heart still flows too fiercely toward you:
—my heart, on which my summer burns, that short, hot, sad, overjoyed summer: how my summer heart longs for your coolness!
The lingering sadness of my spring is past! The snowflakes of my malice in June are over! I have become all summer and summer noon—
—a summer at the greatest heights, with cold springs and blissful stillness. Oh, come, my friends, so the stillness may grow still more blissful!
For this is our height and our home. We live too high and steep here for all the unclean and their thirst.
Just cast your pure eyes into the fountain of my pleasure, my friends! How could that make it cloudy? It should laugh back at you with its own purity.
On the tree of the future we build our nest. Eagles are to bring food in their beaks to us who live alone!
Yes, no food that the unclean would be allowed to share!
They would think they were eating fire and would burn their mouths.
Yes, we keep no homes ready here for the unclean! Our happiness would mean a cave of ice to their bodies and their minds!
And like strong winds we want to live above them, neighbors to the eagles, neighbors to the snow, neighbors to the sun: that is how strong winds live.
And like a wind I want one day to blow among them and with my spirit take the breath away from their spirit: that is what my future wills.
Yes, Zarathustra is a strong wind to all lowlands. And this is the advice he gives his enemies and everything that spits and spews: beware of spitting against the wind!…”
About this section
Why I Am So Wise is part of Ecce Homo 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 chapter 3 of 17 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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