Why I Am So Clever
Original German
1 WARUM ICH einiges mehr weiß? Warum ich überhaupt so klug bin? Ich habe nie über Fragen nachgedacht, die keine sind, — ich habe mich nicht verschwendet. — Eigentliche religiöse Schwierigkeiten zum Beispiel kenne ich nicht aus Erfahrung. Es ist mir gänzlich entgangen, inwiefern ich „sündhaft“ sein sollte. Insgleichen fehlt mir ein zuverlässiges Kriterium dafür, was ein Gewissensbiß ist: nach dem, was man darüber hört, scheint mir ein Gewissensbiß nichts Achtbares... Ich möchte nicht eine Handlung hinterdrein in Stich lassen, ich würde vorziehn, den schlimmen Ausgang, die Folgen grundsätzlich aus der Werthfrage wegzulassen. Man verliert beim schlimmen Ausgang gar zu leicht den richtigen Blick für Das, was man that: ein Gewissensbiß scheint mir eine Art „böser Blick.“ Etwas, das fehlschlägt, um so mehr bei sich in Ehren halten, weil es fehlschlug — das gehört eher schon zu meiner Moral. — „Gott,“ „Unsterblichkeit der Seele,“ „Erlösung,“ „Jenseits“ lauter Begriffe, denen ich keine Aufmerksamkeit, auch keine Zeit geschenkt habe, selbst als Kind nicht, — ich war vielleicht nie kindlich genug dazu? — Ich kenne den Atheismus durchaus nicht als Ergebniß, noch weniger als Ereigniß: er versteht sich bei mir aus Instinkt. Ich bin zu neugierig, zu fragwürdig, zu übermüthig, um mir eine faustgrobe Antwort gefallen zu lassen. Gott ist eine faustgrobe Antwort, eine Undelicatesse gegen uns Denker —, im Grunde sogar bloß ein faustgrobes Verbot an uns: ihr sollt nicht denken!... Ganz anders interessirt mich eine Frage, an der mehr das „Heil der Menschheit“ hängt, als an irgend einer Theologen-Curiosität: die Frage der Ernährung. Man kann sie sich, zum Handgebrauch, so formuliren: „wie hast gerade du dich zu ernähren, um zu deinem Maximum von Kraft, von virtù im Renaissance-Stile, von moralinfreier Tugend zu kommen?“ — Meine Erfahrungen sind hier so schlimm als möglich; ich bin erstaunt, diese Frage so spät gehört, aus diesen Erfahrungen so spät „Vernunft“ gelernt zu haben. Nur die vollkommne Nichtswürdigkeit unsrer deutschen Bildung — ihr „Idealismus“ — erklärt mir einigermaaßen, weshalb ich gerade hier rückständig bis zur Heiligkeit war. Diese „Bildung“, welche von vornherein die Realitäten aus den Augen verlieren lehrt, um durchaus problematischen, sogenannten idealen Zielen nachzujagen, zum Beispiel der „klassischen Bildung“: — als ob es nicht von vornherein verurtheilt wäre, „klassisch“ und „deutsch“ in Einen Begriff zu einigen! Mehr noch, es wirkt erheiternd, — man denke sich einmal einen „klassisch gebildeten“ Leipziger! — In der That, ich habe bis zu meinen reifsten Jahren immer nur schlecht gegessen, — moralisch ausgedrückt „unpersönlich“, „selbstlos“, „altruistisch“, zum Heil der Köche und andrer Mitchristen. Ich verneinte zum Beispiel durch Leipziger Küche, gleichzeitig mit meinem ersten Studium Schopenhauer’s (1865), sehr ernsthaft meinen „Willen zum Leben“. Sich zum Zweck unzureichender Ernährung auch noch den Magen verderben — dies Problem schien mir die genannte Küche zum Verwundern glücklich zu lösen. (Man sagt, 1866 habe darin eine Wendung hervorgebracht —.) Aber die deutsche Küche überhaupt — was hat sie nicht Alles auf dem Gewissen! Die Suppe vor der Mahlzeit (noch in Venetianischen Kochbüchern des 16. Jahrhunderts alla tedesca genannt); die ausgekochten Fleische, die fett und mehlig gemachten Gemüse; die Entartung der Mehlspeise zum Briefbeschwerer! Rechnet man gar noch die geradezu viehischen Nachguß-Bedürfnisse der alten, durchaus nicht bloß alten Deutschen dazu, so versteht man auch die Herkunft des deutschen Geistes — aus betrübten Eingeweiden... Der deutsche Geist ist eine Indigestion, er wird mit Nichts fertig. — Aber auch die englische Diät, die, im Vergleich mit der deutschen, selbst der französischen, eine Art „Rückkehr zur Natur“, nämlich zum Canibalismus ist, geht meinem eignen Instinkt tief zuwider; es scheint mir, daß sie dem Geist schwere Füße giebt — Engländerinnen-Füße... Die beste Küche ist die Piemont’s. — Alkoholika sind mir nachtheilig; ein Glas Wein oder Bier des Tags reicht vollkommen aus, mir aus dem Leben ein „Jammerthal“ zu machen, — in München leben meine Antipoden. Gesetzt, daß ich dies ein wenig spät begriff, erlebt habe ich’s eigentlich von Kindesbeinen an. Als Knabe glaubte ich, Weintrinken sei wie Tabakrauchen anfangs nur eine Vanitas junger Männer, später eine schlechte Gewöhnung. Vielleicht, daß an diesem herben Urtheil auch der Naumburger Wein mit schuld ist. Zu glauben, daß der Wein erheitert, dazu müßte ich Christ sein, will sagen glauben, was gerade für mich eine Absurdität ist. Seltsam genug, bei dieser extremen Verstimmbarkeit durch kleine, stark verdünnte Dosen Alkohol, werde ich beinahe zum Seemann, wenn es sich um starke Dosen handelt. Schon als Knabe hatte ich hierin meine Tapferkeit. Eine lange lateinische Abhandlung in Einer Nachtwache niederzuschreiben und auch noch abzuschreiben, mit dem Ehrgeiz in der Feder, es meinem Vorbilde Sallust in Strenge und Gedrängtheit nachzuthun, und einigen Grog von schwerstem Kaliber über mein Latein zu gießen, dies stand schon, als ich Schüler der ehrwürdigen Schulpforta war, durchaus nicht im Widerspruch zu meiner Physiologie, noch vielleicht auch zu der des Sallust — wie sehr auch immer zur ehrwürdigen Schulpforta... Später, gegen die Mitte des Lebens hin, entschied ich mich freilich immer strenger gegen jedwedes „geistige“ Getränk: ich, ein Gegner des Vegetarierthums aus Erfahrung, ganz wie Richard Wagner, der mich bekehrt hat, weiß nicht ernsthaft genug die unbedingte Enthaltung von Alcoholicis allen geistigeren Naturen anzurathen. Wasser thut’s... Ich ziehe Orte vor, wo man überall Gelegenheit hat, aus fließenden Brunnen zu schöpfen (Nizza, Turin, Sils); ein kleines Glas läuft mir nach wie ein Hund. In vino veritas: es scheint, daß ich auch hier wieder über den Begriff „Wahrheit“ mit aller Welt uneins bin: — bei mir schwebt der Geist über dem Wasser... Ein paar Fingerzeige noch aus meiner Moral. Eine starke Mahlzeit ist leichter zu verdauen als eine zu kleine. Daß der Magen als Ganzes in Thätigkeit tritt, erste Voraussetzung einer guten Verdauung. Man muß die Größe seines Magens kennen. Aus gleichem Grunde sind jene langwierigen Mahlzeiten zu widerrathen, die ich unterbrochne Opferfeste nenne, die an der table d’hôte. — Keine Zwischenmahlzeiten, keinen Café: Café verdüstert. Thee nur morgens zuträglich. Wenig aber energisch; Thee sehr nachtheilig und den ganzen Tag ankränkelnd, wenn er nur um einen Grad zu schwach ist. Jeder hat hier sein Maaß, oft zwischen den engsten und delikatesten Grenzen. In einem sehr agaçanten Klima ist Thee als Anfang unräthlich: man soll eine Stunde vorher eine Tasse dicken entölten Cacao’s den Anfang machen lassen. — So wenig als möglich sitzen; keinem Gedanken Glauben schenken, der nicht im Freien geboren ist und bei freier Bewegung, — in dem nicht auch die Muskeln ein Fest feiern. Alle Vorurtheile kommen aus den Eingeweiden. — Das Sitzfleisch — ich sagte es schon einmal — die eigentliche Sünde wider den heiligen Geist. —
2 MIT der Frage der Ernährung ist nächstverwandt die Frage nach Ort und Klima. Es steht Niemandem frei, überall zu leben; und wer große Aufgaben zu lösen hat, die seine ganze Kraft herausfordern, hat hier sogar eine sehr enge Wahl. Der klimatische Einfluß auf den Stoffwechsel, seine Hemmung, seine Beschleunigung, geht so weit, daß ein Fehlgriff in Ort und Klima Jemanden nicht nur seiner Aufgabe entfremden, sondern ihm dieselbe überhaupt vorenthalten kann: er bekommt sie nie zu Gesicht. Der animalische Vigor ist nie groß genug bei ihm geworden, daß jene in’s Geistigste überströmende Freiheit erreicht wird, wo Jemand erkennt: das kann ich allein... Eine zur schlechten Gewohnheit gewordne noch so kleine Eingeweide-Trägheit genügt vollständig, um aus einem Genie etwas Mittelmäßiges, etwas „Deutsches“ zu machen; das deutsche Klima allein ist ausreichend, um starke und selbst heroisch angelegte Eingeweide zu entmuthigen. Das Tempo des Stoffwechsels steht in einem genauen Verhältniß zur Beweglichkeit oder Lahmheit der Füße des Geistes; der „Geist“ selbst ist ja nur eine Art dieses Stoffwechsels. Man stelle sich die Orte zusammen, wo es geistreiche Menschen giebt und gab, wo Witz, Raffinement, Bosheit zum Glück gehörten, wo das Genie fast nothwendig sich heimisch machte: sie haben alle eine ausgezeichnet trockne Luft. Paris, die Provence, Florenz, Jerusalem, Athen — diese Namen beweisen Etwas: das Genie ist bedingt durch trockne Luft, durch reinen Himmel, — das heißt durch rapiden Stoffwechsel, durch die Möglichkeit, große, selbst ungeheure Mengen Kraft sich immer wieder zuzuführen. Ich habe einen Fall vor Augen, wo ein bedeutend und frei angelegter Geist bloß durch Mangel an Instinkt-Feinheit im Klimatischen eng, verkrochen, Spezialist und Sauertopf wurde. Und ich selber hätte zuletzt dieser Fall werden können, gesetzt, daß mich nicht die Krankheit zur Vernunft, zum Nachdenken über die Vernunft in der Realität gezwungen hätte. Jetzt, wo ich die Wirkungen klimatischen und meteorologischen Ursprungs aus langer Übung an mir als an einem sehr feinen und zuverlässigen Instrumente ablese und bei einer kurzen Reise schon, etwa von Turin nach Mailand, den Wechsel in den Graden der Luftfeuchtigkeit physiologisch bei mir nachrechne, denke ich mit Schrecken an die unheimliche Thatsache, daß mein Leben bis auf die letzten 10 Jahre, die lebensgefährlichen Jahre, immer sich nur in falschen und mir geradezu verbotenen Orten abgespielt hat. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thüringen überhaupt, Leipzig, Basel, Venedig — ebenso viele Unglücks-Orte für meine Physiologie. Wenn ich überhaupt von meiner ganzen Kindheit und Jugend keine willkommne Erinnerung habe, so wäre es eine Thorheit, hier sogenannte „moralische“ Ursachen geltend zu machen, — etwa den unbestreitbaren Mangel an zureichender Gesellschaft: denn dieser Mangel besteht heute wie er immer bestand, ohne daß er mich hinderte, heiter und tapfer zu sein. Sondern die Unwissenheit in physiologicis — der verfluchte „Idealismus“ — ist das eigentliche Verhängniß in meinem Leben, das Überflüssige und Dumme darin, Etwas, aus dem nichts Gutes gewachsen, für das es keine Ausgleichung, keine Gegenrechnung giebt. Aus den Folgen dieses „Idealismus“ erkläre ich mir alle Fehlgriffe, alle großen Instinkt-Abirrungen und „Bescheidenheiten“ abseits der Aufgabe meines Lebens, zum Beispiel, daß ich Philologe wurde — warum zum Mindesten nicht Arzt oder sonst irgend etwas Augen-Aufschließendes? In meiner Basler Zeit war meine ganze geistige Diät, die Tages-Eintheilung eingerechnet, ein vollkommen sinnloser Mißbrauch außerordentlicher Kräfte, ohne eine irgendwie den Verbrauch deckende Zufuhr von Kräften, ohne ein Nachdenken selbst über Verbrauch und Ersatz. Es fehlte jede feinere Selbstigkeit, jede Obhut eines gebieterischen Instinkts, es war ein Sich-gleichsetzen mit Irgendwem, eine „Selbstlosigkeit“, ein Vergessen seiner Distanz, — Etwas, das ich mir nie verzeihe. Als ich fast am Ende war, dadurch, daß ich fast am Ende war, wurde ich nachdenklich über diese Grund-Unvernunft meines Lebens — den „Idealismus“. Die Krankheit brachte mich erst zur Vernunft. —
3 DIE Wahl in der Ernährung; die Wahl von Klima und Ort; — das Dritte, worin man um keinen Preis einen Fehlgriff thun darf, ist die Wahl seiner Art Erholung. Auch hier sind je nach dem Grade, in dem ein Geist sui generis ist, die Grenzen des ihm Erlaubten, das heißt Nützlichen, eng und enger. In meinem Fall gehört alles Lesen zu meinen Erholungen: folglich zu dem, was mich von mir losmacht, was mich in fremden Wissenschaften und Seelen spazieren gehn läßt, — was ich nicht mehr ernst nehme. Lesen erholt mich eben von meinem Ernste. In tief arbeitsamen Zeiten sieht man keine Bücher bei mir: ich würde mich hüten, Jemanden in meiner Nähe reden oder gar denken zu lassen. Und das hieße ja lesen... Hat man eigentlich beobachtet, daß in jener tiefen Spannung, zu der die Schwangerschaft den Geist und im Grunde den ganzen Organismus verurtheilt, der Zufall, jede Art Reiz von außen her zu vehement wirkt, zu tief „einschlägt“? Man muß dem Zufall, dem Reiz von außen her so viel als möglich aus dem Wege gehn; eine Art Selbst-Vermauerung gehört zu den ersten Instinkt-Klugheiten der geistigen Schwangerschaft. Werde ich es erlauben, daß ein fremder Gedanke heimlich über die Mauer steigt? — Und das hieße ja lesen... Auf die Zeiten der Arbeit und Fruchtbarkeit folgt die Zeit der Erholung: heran mit euch, ihr angenehmen, ihr geistreichen, ihr gescheuten Bücher! — Werden es deutsche Bücher sein?... Ich muß ein Halbjahr zurückrechnen, daß ich mich mit einem Buch in der Hand ertappe. Was war es doch? — Eine ausgezeichnete Studie von Victor Brochard, les Sceptiques Grecs, in der auch meine Laertiana gut benutzt sind. Die Skeptiker, der einzige ehrenwerte Typus unter dem so zwei- bis fünfdeutigen Volk der Philosophen!... Sonst nehme ich meine Zuflucht fast immer zu denselben Büchern, einer kleinen Zahl im Grunde, den gerade für mich bewiesenen Büchern. Es liegt vielleicht nicht in meiner Art, Viel und Vielerlei zu lesen: ein Lesezimmer macht mich krank. Es liegt auch nicht in meiner Art, Viel oder Vielerlei zu lieben. Vorsicht, selbst Feindseligkeit gegen neue Bücher gehört eher schon zu meinem Instinkte als „Toleranz“, „largeur du cœur“ und andre „Nächstenliebe“... Eine kleine Anzahl älterer Franzosen ist es, zu denen ich immer wieder zurückkehre: ich glaube nur an französische Bildung und halte Alles, was sich sonst in Europa „Bildung“ nennt, für Mißverständniß, nicht zu reden von der deutschen Bildung... Die wenigen Fälle hoher Bildung, die ich in Deutschland vorfand, waren alle französischer Herkunft, vor Allem Frau Cosima Wagner, bei weitem die erste Stimme in Fragen des Geschmacks, die ich gehört habe. — Daß ich Pascal nicht lese, sondern liebe, als das lehrreichste Opfer des Christenthums, langsam hingemordet, erst leiblich, dann psychologisch, die ganze Logik dieser schauderhaftesten Form unmenschlicher Grausamkeit; daß ich Etwas von Montaigne’s Muthwillen im Geiste, wer weiß? vielleicht auch im Leibe habe; daß mein Artisten-Geschmack die Namen Molière, Corneille und Racine nicht ohne Ingrimm gegen ein wüstes Genie wie Shakespeare in Schutz nimmt: das schließt zuletzt nicht aus, daß mir nicht auch die allerletzten Franzosen eine charmante Gesellschaft wären. Ich sehe durchaus nicht ab, in welchem Jahrhundert der Geschichte man so neugierige und zugleich so delikate Psychologen zusammenfischen könnte, wie im jetzigen Paris: ich nenne versuchsweise — denn ihre Zahl ist gar nicht klein — die Herren Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, oder um Einen von der starken Rasse hervorzuheben, einen echten Lateiner, dem ich besonders zugethan bin, Guy de Maupassant. Ich ziehe diese Generation, unter uns gesagt, sogar ihren großen Lehrern vor, die allesamt durch deutsche Philosophie verdorben sind (Herr Taine zum Beispiel durch Hegel, dem er das Mißverständniß großer Menschen und Zeiten verdankt). Soweit Deutschland reicht, verdirbt es die Cultur. Der Krieg erst hat den Geist in Frankreich „erlöst“... Stendhal, einer der schönsten Zufälle meines Lebens — denn Alles, was in ihm Epoche macht, hat der Zufall, niemals eine Empfehlung, mir zugetrieben — ist ganz unschätzbar mit seinem vorwegnehmenden Psychologen-Auge, mit seinem Thatsachen-Griff, der an die Nähe des größten Thatsächlichen erinnert (ex ungue Napoleonem —); endlich nicht am Wenigsten als ehrlicher Atheist — eine in Frankreich spärliche und fast kaum auffindbare Species – Prosper Mérimée in Ehren… Vielleicht bin ich selbst auf Stendhal neidisch? Er hat mir den besten Atheisten-Witz weggenommen, den gerade ich hätte machen können: „die einzige Entschuldigung Gottes ist, daß er nicht existirt“… Ich selbst habe irgendwo gesagt: was war der größte Einwand gegen das Dasein bisher? Gott…
4 Den höchsten Begriff vom Lyriker hat mir Heinrich Heine gegeben. Ich suche umsonst in allen Reichen der Jahrtausende nach einer gleich süßen und leidenschaftlichen Musik. Er besaß jene göttliche Bosheit, ohne die ich mir das Vollkommne nicht zu denken vermag, – ich schätze den Werth von Menschen, von Rassen darnach ab, wie nothwendig sie den Gott nicht abgetrennt vom Satyr zu verstehn wissen. – Und wie er das Deutsche handhabt! Man wird einmal sagen, daß Heine und ich bei weitem die ersten Artisten der deutschen Sprache gewesen sind – in einer unausrechenbaren Entfernung von Allem, was bloße Deutsche mit ihr gemacht haben. – Mit Byron’s Manfred muß ich tief verwandt sein: ich fand alle diese Abgründe in mir, – mit dreizehn Jahren war ich für dies Werk reif. Ich habe kein Wort, bloß einen Blick für Die, welche in Gegenwart des Manfred das Wort Faust auszusprechen wagen. Die Deutschen sind unfähig jedes Begriffs von Größe: Beweis Schumann. Ich habe eigens, aus Ingrimm gegen diesen süßlichen Sachsen, eine Gegenouvertüre zum Manfred componirt, von der Hans von Bülow sagte, dergleichen habe er nie auf Notenpapier gesehn: das sei Nothzucht an der Euterpe. – Wenn ich meine höchste Formel für Shakespeare suche, so finde ich immer nur die, daß er den Typus Cäsar concipirt hat. Dergleichen erräth man nicht, – man ist es oder man ist es nicht. Der große Dichter schöpft nur aus seiner Realität – bis zu dem Grade, daß er hinterdrein sein Werk nicht mehr aushält… Wenn ich einen Blick in meinen Zarathustra geworfen habe, gehe ich eine halbe Stunde im Zimmer auf und ab, unfähig, über einen unerträglichen Krampf von Schluchzen Herr zu werden. – Ich kenne keine herzzerreißendere Lektüre als Shakespeare: was muß ein Mensch gelitten haben, um dergestalt es nöthig zu haben, Hanswurst zu sein! – Versteht man den Hamlet? Nicht der Zweifel, die Gewißheit ist Das, was wahnsinnig macht… Aber dazu muß man tief, Abgrund, Philosoph sein, um so zu fühlen… Wir fürchten uns Alle vor der Wahrheit… Und, daß ich es bekenne: ich bin dessen instinktiv sicher und gewiß, daß Lord Bacon der Urheber, der Selbstthierquäler dieser unheimlichsten Art Litteratur ist: was geht mich das erbarmungswürdige Geschwätz amerikanischer Wirr- und Flachköpfe an? Aber die Kraft zur mächtigsten Realität der Vision ist nicht nur verträglich mit der mächtigsten Kraft zur That, zum Ungeheuren der That, zum Verbrechen – sie setzt sie selbst voraus… Wir wissen lange nicht genug von Lord Bacon, dem ersten Realisten in jedem großen Sinn des Wortes, um zu wissen, was er Alles gethan, was er gewollt, was er mit sich erlebt hat… Und zum Teufel, meine Herren Kritiker! Gesetzt, ich hätte meinen Zarathustra auf einen fremden Namen getauft, zum Beispiel auf den Richard Wagner’s, der Scharfsinn von zwei Jahrtausenden hätte nicht ausgereicht, zu errathen, daß der Verfasser von „Menschliches, Allzumenschliches“ der Visionär des Zarathustra ist…
5 Hier, wo ich von den Erholungen meines Lebens rede, habe ich ein Wort nöthig, um meine Dankbarkeit für Das auszudrücken, was mich in ihm bei weitem am Tiefsten und Herzlichsten erholt hat. Dies ist ohne allen Zweifel der intimere Verkehr mit Richard Wagner gewesen. Ich lasse den Rest meiner menschlichen Beziehungen billig; ich möchte um keinen Preis die Tage von Tribschen aus meinem Leben weggeben, Tage des Vertrauens, der Heiterkeit, der sublimen Zufälle – der tiefen Augenblicke… Ich weiß nicht, was Andre mit Wagner erlebt haben: über unsern Himmel ist nie eine Wolke hinweggegangen. – Und hiermit komme ich nochmals auf Frankreich zurück, – ich habe keine Gründe, ich habe bloß einen verachtenden Mundwinkel gegen Wagnerianer et hoc genus omne übrig, welche Wagner damit zu ehren glauben, daß sie ihn sich ähnlich finden… So wie ich bin, in meinen tiefsten Instinkten Allem, was deutsch ist, fremd, so daß schon die Nähe eines Deutschen meine Verdauung verzögert, war die erste Berührung mit Wagner auch das erste Aufathmen in meinem Leben: ich empfand, ich verehrte ihn als Ausland, als Gegensatz, als leibhaften Protest gegen alle „deutschen Tugenden“. – Wir, die wir in der Sumpfluft der Fünfziger Jahre Kinder gewesen sind, sind mit Nothwendigkeit Pessimisten für den Begriff „deutsch“; wir können gar nichts Anderes sein als Revolutionäre, – wir werden keinen Zustand der Dinge zugeben, wo der Mucker obenauf ist. Es ist mir vollkommen gleichgültig, ob er heute in andern Farben spielt, ob er sich in Scharlach kleidet und Husaren-Uniformen anzieht… Wohlan! Wagner war ein Revolutionär – er lief vor den Deutschen davon… Als Artist hat man keine Heimat in Europa außer Paris; die délicatesse in allen fünf Kunstsinnen, die Wagner’s Kunst voraussetzt, die Finger für nuances, die psychologische Morbidität, findet sich nur in Paris. Man hat nirgendwo sonst diese Leidenschaft in Fragen der Form, diesen Ernst in der mise en scène – es ist der Pariser Ernst par excellence. Man hat in Deutschland gar keinen Begriff von der ungeheuren Ambition, die in der Seele eines Pariser Künstlers lebt. Der Deutsche ist gutmüthig – Wagner war durchaus nicht gutmüthig… Aber ich habe schon zur Genüge ausgesprochen (in „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“ S. 256f.), wohin Wagner gehört, wem er seine Nächstverwandten hat: es ist die französische Spät-Romantik, jene hochfliegende und hochemporreißende Art von Künstlern wie Delacroix, wie Berlioz, mit einem fond von Krankheit, von Unheilbarkeit im Wesen, lauter Fanatiker des Ausdrucks, Virtuosen durch und durch… Wer war der erste intelligente Anhänger Wagner’s überhaupt? Charles Baudelaire, derselbe, der zuerst Delacroix verstand, jener typische décadent, in dem sich ein ganzes Geschlecht von Artisten wiedererkannt hat – er war vielleicht auch der letzte… Was ich Wagnern nie vergeben habe? Daß er zu den Deutschen condescendirte, – daß er reichsdeutsch wurde… So weit Deutschland reicht, verdirbt es die Cultur. –
6 Alles erwogen, hätte ich meine Jugend nicht ausgehalten ohne Wagnerische Musik. Denn ich war verurtheilt zu Deutschen. Wenn man von einem unerträglichen Druck loskommen will, so hat man Haschisch nöthig. Wohlan, ich hatte Wagner nöthig. Wagner ist das Gegengift gegen alles Deutsche par excellence, – Gift, ich bestreite es nicht… Von dem Augenblick an, wo es einen Klavierauszug des Tristan gab – mein Compliment, Herr von Bülow! –, war ich Wagnerianer. Die älteren Werke Wagner’s sah ich ich unter mir – noch zu gemein, zu „deutsch“… Aber ich suche heute noch nach einem Werke von gleich gefährlicher Fascination, von einer gleich schauerlichen und süßen Unendlichkeit, wie der Tristan ist, – ich suche in allen Künsten vergebens. Alle Fremdheiten Lionardo da Vinci’s entzaubern sich beim ersten Tone des Tristan. Dies Werk ist durchaus das non plus ultra Wagner’s; er erholte sich von ihm mit den Meistersingern und dem Ring. Gesünder werden – das ist ein Rückschritt bei einer Natur wie Wagner… Ich nehme es als Glück ersten Rangs, zur rechten Zeit gelebt und gerade unter Deutschen gelebt zu haben, um reif für dies Werk zu sein: so weit geht bei mir die Neugierde des Psychologen. Die Welt ist arm für Den, der niemals krank genug für diese „Wollust der Hölle“ gewesen ist: es ist erlaubt, es ist fast geboten, hier eine Mystiker-Formel anzuwenden. – Ich denke, ich kenne besser als irgend Jemand das Ungeheure, das Wagner vermag, die fünfzig Welten fremder Entzückungen, zu denen Niemand außer ihm Flügel hatte; und so wie ich bin, stark genug, um mir auch das Fragwürdigste und Gefährlichste noch zum Vortheil zu wenden und damit stärker zu werden, nenne ich Wagner den großen Wohlthäter meines Lebens. Das, worin wir verwandt sind, daß wir tiefer gelitten haben, auch an einander, als Menschen dieses Jahrhunderts zu leiden vermöchten, wird unsre Namen ewig wieder zusammenbringen; und so gewiß Wagner unter Deutschen bloß ein Mißverständniß ist, so gewiß bin ich’s und werde es immer sein. – Zwei Jahrhunderte psychologische und artistische Disciplin zuerst, meine Herrn Germanen!… Aber das holt man nicht nach. –
7 Ich sage noch ein Wort für die ausgesuchtesten Ohren: was ich eigentlich von der Musik will. Daß sie heiter und tief ist, wie ein Nachmittag im Oktober. Daß sie eigen, ausgelassen, zärtlich, ein kleines süßes Weib von Niedertracht und Anmuth ist… Ich werde nie zulassen, daß ein Deutscher wissen könne, was Musik ist. Was man deutsche Musiker nennt, die größten voran, sind Ausländer, Slaven, Croaten, Italiäner, Niederländer – oder Juden; im andern Falle Deutsche der starken Rasse, ausgestorbene Deutsche, wie Heinrich Schütz, Bach und Händel. Ich selbst bin immer noch Pole genug, um gegen Chopin den Rest der Musik hinzugeben: ich nehme, aus drei Gründen, Wagner’s Siegfried-Idyll aus, vielleicht auch Einiges von Liszt, der die vornehmen Orchester-Accente vor allen Musikern voraus hat; zuletzt noch Alles, was jenseits der Alpen gewachsen ist – diesseits… Ich würde Rossini nicht zu missen wissen, noch weniger meinen Süden in der Musik, die Musik meines Venediger mästro Pietro Gasti. Und wenn ich jenseits der Alpen sage, sage ich eigentlich nur Venedig. Wenn ich ein andres Wort für Musik suche, so finde ich immer nur das Wort Venedig. Ich weiß keinen Unterschied zwischen Thränen und Musik zu machen, – ich weiß das Glück, den Süden nicht ohne Schauder von Furchtsamkeit zu denken.
An der Brücke standjüngst ich in brauner Nacht.Ferner kam Gesang;goldener Tropfen quoll’süber die zitternde Fläche weg.Gondeln, Lichter, Musik –trunken schwamm’s in die Dämmrung hinaus…
Meine Seele, ein Saitenspiel,sang sich, unsichtbar berührt,heimlich ein Gondellied dazu,zitternd vor bunter Seligkeit.– Hörte Jemand ihr zu?…
8 In Alledem – in der Wahl von Nahrung, von Ort und Klima, von Erholung – gebietet ein Instinkt der Selbsterhaltung, der sich als Instinkt der Selbstvertheidigung am unzweideutigsten ausspricht. Vieles nicht sehn, nicht hören, nicht an sich herankommen lassen – erste Klugheit, erster Beweis dafür, daß man kein Zufall, sondern eine Necessität ist. Das gangbare Wort für diesen Selbstvertheidigungs-Instinkt ist Geschmack. Sein Imperativ befiehlt nicht nur Nein zu sagen, wo das Ja eine „Selbstlosigkeit“ sein würde, sondern auch so wenig als möglich Nein zu sagen. Sich trennen, sich abscheiden von dem, wo immer und immer wieder das Nein nöthig werden würde. Die Vernunft darin ist, daß Defensiv-Ausgaben, selbst noch so kleine, zur Regel, zur Gewohnheit werdend, eine außerordentliche und vollkommen überflüssige Verarmung bedingen. Unsere großen Ausgaben sind die häufigsten kleinen. Das Abwehren, das Nicht-heran-kommen-lassen ist eine Ausgabe – man täusche sich hierüber nicht –, eine zu negativen Zwecken verschwendete Kraft. Man kann, bloß in der beständigen Noth der Abwehr, schwach genug werden, um sich nicht mehr wehren zu können. – Gesetzt, ich trete aus meinem Haus heraus und fände, statt des stillen und aristokratischen Turin, die deutsche Kleinstadt: mein Instinkt würde sich zu sperren haben, um Alles das zurückzudrängen, was aus dieser plattgedrückten und feigen Welt auf ihn eindringt. Oder ich fände die deutsche Großstadt, dies gebaute Laster, wo nichts wächst, wo jedwedes Ding, Gutes und Schlimmes, eingeschleppt ist. Müßte ich nicht darüber zum Igel werden? – Aber Stacheln zu haben ist eine Vergeudung, ein doppelter Luxus sogar, wenn es freisteht, keine Stacheln zu haben, sondern offne Hände…
Eine andre Klugheit und Selbstvertheidigung besteht darin, daß man so selten als möglich reagirt und daß man sich Lagen und Bedingungen entzieht, wo man verurtheilt wäre, seine „Freiheit“, seine Initiative gleichsam auszuhängen und ein bloßes Reagens zu werden. Ich nehme als Gleichniß den Verkehr mit Büchern. Der Gelehrte, der im Grunde nur noch Bücher „wälzt“ – der Philologe mit mäßigem Ansatz des Tags ungefähr 200 – verliert zuletzt ganz und gar das Vermögen, von sich aus zu denken. Wälzt er nicht, so denkt er nicht. Er antwortet auf einen Reiz (– einen gelesenen Gedanken), wenn er denkt, – er reagirt zuletzt bloß noch. Der Gelehrte giebt seine ganze Kraft im Ja- und Neinsagen, in der Kritik von bereits Gedachtem ab, – er selber denkt nicht mehr… Der Instinkt der Selbstvertheidigung ist bei ihm mürbe geworden; im andern Falle würde er sich gegen Bücher wehren. Der Gelehrte – ein décadent. – Das habe ich mit Augen gesehn: begabte, reich und frei angelegte Naturen schon in den dreißiger Jahren „zu Schanden gelesen“, bloß noch Streichhölzer, die man reiben muß, damit sie Funken –, „Gedanken“ geben. – Frühmorgens beim Anbruch des Tags, in aller Frische, in der Morgenröthe seiner Kraft, ein Buch lesen – das nenne ich lasterhaft! –
9 An dieser Stelle ist nicht mehr zu umgehn, die eigentliche Antwort auf die Frage, wie man wird, was man ist, zu geben. Und damit berühre ich das Meisterstück in der Kunst der Selbsterhaltung – der Selbstsucht… Angenommen nämlich, daß die Aufgabe, die Bestimmung, das Schicksal der Aufgabe über ein durchschnittliches Maaß bedeutend hinausliegt, so würde keine Gefahr größer sein, als sich selbst mit dieser Aufgabe zu Gesicht zu bekommen. Daß man wird, was man ist, setzt voraus, daß man nicht im Entferntesten ahnt, was man ist. Aus diesem Gesichtspunkte haben selbst die Fehlgriffe des Lebens ihren eignen Sinn und Werth, die zeitweiligen Nebenwege und Abwege, die Verzögerungen, die „Bescheidenheiten“, der Ernst, auf Aufgaben verschwendet, die jenseits der Aufgabe liegen. Darin kommt eine große Klugheit, sogar die oberste Klugheit zum Ausdruck: wo nosce te ipsum das Recept zum Untergang wäre, wird Sich-Vergessen, Sich-Mißverstehn, Sich-Verkleinern, -Verengern, -Vermittelmäßigen zur Vernunft selber. Moralisch ausgedrückt: Nächstenliebe, Leben für Andre und Anderes kann die Schutzmaaßregel zur Erhaltung der härtesten Selbstigkeit sein: Dies ist der Ausnahmefall, in welchem ich, gegen meine Regel und Überzeugung, die Partei der „selbstlosen“ Triebe nehme: sie arbeiten hier im Dienste der Selbstsucht, Selbstzucht. – Man muß die ganze Oberfläche des Bewußtseins – Bewußtsein ist eine Oberfläche – rein erhalten von irgend einem der großen Imperative. Vorsicht selbst vor jedem großen Worte, jeder großen Attitüde! Lauter Gefahren, daß der Instinkt zu früh „sich versteht“. – Inzwischen wächst und wächst die organisirende, die zur Herrschaft berufene „Idee“ in der Tiefe, – sie beginnt zu befehlen, sie leitet langsam aus Nebenwegen und Abwegen zurück, sie bereitet einzelne Qualitäten und Tüchtigkeiten vor, die einmal als Mittel zum Ganzen sich unentbehrlich erweisen werden, – sie bildet der Reihe nach alle dienenden Vermögen aus, bevor sie irgend Etwas von der dominirenden Aufgabe, von „Ziel“, „Zweck“, „Sinn“ verlauten läßt. – Nach dieser Seite hin betrachtet ist mein Leben einfach wundervoll. Zur Aufgabe einer Umwerthung der Werthe waren vielleicht mehr Vermögen nöthig, als je in einem Einzelnen bei einander gewohnt haben, vor Allem auch Gegensätze von Vermögen, ohne daß diese sich stören, zerstören dürften. Rangordnung der Vermögen; Distanz; die Kunst zu trennen, ohne zu verfeinden; Nichts vermischen, Nichts „versöhnen“; eine ungeheure Vielheit, die trotzdem das Gegenstück des Chaos ist – dies war die Vorbedingung, die lange geheime Arbeit und Künstlerschaft meines Instinkts. Seine höhere Obhut zeigte sich in dem Maaße stark, daß ich in keinem Falle auch nur geahnt habe, was in mir wächst, – daß alle meine Fähigkeiten plötzlich, reif, in ihrer letzten Vollkommenheit eines Tags hervorsprangen. Es fehlt in meiner Erinnerung, daß ich mich je bemüht hätte, – es ist kein Zug von Ringen in meinem Leben nachweisbar, ich bin der Gegensatz einer heroischen Natur. Etwas „wollen“, nach Etwas „streben“, einen „Zweck“, einen „Wunsch“ im Auge haben – das kenne ich Alles nicht aus Erfahrung. Noch in diesem Augenblick sehe ich auf meine Zukunft – eine weite Zukunft! – wie auf ein glattes Meer hinaus: kein Verlangen kräuselt sich auf ihm. Ich will nicht im Geringsten, daß Etwas anders wird als es ist; ich selber will nicht anders werden… Aber so habe ich immer gelebt. Ich habe keinen Wunsch gehabt. Jemand, der nach seinem vierundvierzigsten Jahre sagen kann, daß er sich nie um Ehren, um Weiber, um Geld bemüht hat! – Nicht daß sie mir gefehlt hätten… So war ich zum Beispiel eines Tags Universitätsprofessor, – ich hatte nie im Entferntesten an dergleichen gedacht, denn ich war kaum 24 Jahr alt. So war ich zwei Jahr früher eines Tags Philolog: in dem Sinne, daß meine erste philologische Arbeit, mein Anfang in jedem Sinne, von meinem Lehrer Ritschl für sein „Rheinisches Museum“ zum Druck verlangt wurde (Ritschl – ich sage es mit Verehrung – der einzige geniale Gelehrte, den ich bis heute zu Gesicht bekommen habe. Er besaß jene angenehme Verderbtheit, die uns Thüringer auszeichnet und mit der sogar ein Deutscher sympathisch wird: – wir ziehn selbst, um zur Wahrheit zu gelangen, noch die Schleichwege vor. Ich möchte mit diesen Worten meinen näheren Landsmann, den klugen Leopold von Ranke, durchaus nicht unterschätzt haben…).
10 Man wird mich fragen, warum ich eigentlich alle diese kleinen und nach herkömmlichem Urtheil gleichgültigen Dinge erzählt habe; ich schade mir selbst damit, um so mehr, wenn ich große Aufgaben zu vertreten bestimmt sei. Antwort: diese kleinen Dinge – Ernährung, Ort, Klima, Erholung, die ganze Casuistik der Selbstsucht – sind über alle Begriffe hinaus wichtiger als Alles, was man bisher wichtig nahm. Hier gerade muß man anfangen, umzulernen. Das, was die Menschheit bisher ernsthaft erwogen hat, sind nicht einmal Realitäten, bloße Einbildungen, strenger geredet, Lügen aus den schlechten Instinkten kranker, im tiefsten Sinne schädlicher Naturen heraus – alle die Begriffe „Gott“, „Seele“, „Tugend“, „Sünde“, „Jenseits“, „Wahrheit“, „ewiges Leben“… Aber man hat die Größe der menschlichen Natur, ihre „Göttlichkeit“ in ihnen gesucht… Alle Fragen der Politik, der Gesellschafts-Ordnung, der Erziehung sind dadurch bis in Grund und Boden gefälscht, daß man die schädlichsten Menschen für große Menschen nahm, – daß man die „kleinen“ Dinge, will sagen die Grundangelegenheiten des Lebens selber, verachten lehrte… Vergleiche ich mich nun mit den Menschen, die man bisher als erste Menschen ehrte, so ist der Unterschied handgreiflich. Ich rechne diese angeblich „Ersten“ nicht einmal zu den Menschen überhaupt, – sie sind für mich Ausschuß der Menschheit, Ausgeburten von Krankheit und rachsüchtigen Instinkten: sie sind lauter unheilvolle, im Grunde unheilbare Unmenschen, die am Leben Rache nehmen… Ich will dazu der Gegensatz sein: mein Vorrecht ist, die höchste Feinheit für alle Zeichen gesunder Instinkte zu haben. Es fehlt jeder krankhafte Zug an mir; ich bin selbst in Zeiten schwerer Krankheit nicht krankhaft geworden; umsonst, daß man in meinem Wesen einen Zug von Fanatismus sucht. Man wird mir aus keinem Augenblicke meines Lebens irgend eine anmaaßliche oder pathetische Haltung nachweisen können. Das Pathos der Attitüde gehört nicht zur Größe; wer Attitüden überhaupt nöthig hat, ist falsch… Vorsicht vor allen pittoresken Menschen! – Das Leben ist mir leicht geworden, am leichtesten, wenn es das Schwerste von mir verlangte. Wer mich in den siebzig Tagen dieses Herbstes gesehn hat, wo ich, ohne Unterbrechung, lauter Sachen ersten Ranges gemacht habe, die kein Mensch mir nachmacht – oder vormacht, mit einer Verantwortlichkeit für alle Jahrtausende nach mir, wird keinen Zug von Spannung an mir wahrgenommen haben, um so mehr eine überströmende Frische und Heiterkeit. Ich aß nie mit angenehmeren Gefühlen, ich schlief nie besser. – Ich kenne keine andre Art, mit großen Aufgaben zu verkehren als das Spiel: dies ist, als Anzeichen der Größe, eine wesentliche Voraussetzung. Der geringste Zwang, die düstre Miene, irgend ein harter Ton im Halse sind alles Einwände gegen einen Menschen, um wie viel mehr gegen sein Werk!… Man darf keine Nerven haben… Auch an der Einsamkeit leiden ist ein Einwand, – ich habe immer nur an der „Vielsamkeit“ gelitten… In einer absurd frühen Zeit, mit sieben Jahren, wußte ich bereits, daß mich nie ein menschliches Wort erreichen würde: hat man mich je darüber betrübt gesehn? – Ich habe heute noch die gleiche Leutseligkeit gegen Jedermann, ich bin selbst voller Auszeichnung für die Niedrigsten: in dem Allen ist nicht ein Gran von Hochmuth, von geheimer Verachtung. Wen ich verachte, der erräth, daß er von mir verachtet wird: ich empöre durch mein bloßes Dasein Alles, was schlechtes Blut im Leibe hat… Meine Formel für die Größe am Menschen ist amor fati: daß man Nichts anders haben will, vorwärts nicht, rückwärts nicht, in alle Ewigkeit nicht. Das Nothwendige nicht bloß ertragen, noch weniger verhehlen – aller Idealismus ist Verlogenheit vor dem Nothwendigen –, sondern es lieben…
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 Why do I know a little more? Why am I so clever at all? I have never thought about questions that are not questions—I have not squandered myself.—Genuinely religious difficulties, for instance, are outside my experience. It has entirely escaped me in what sense I am supposed to be “sinful.” I likewise lack a reliable criterion for what a pang of conscience is: from what one hears about it, a pang of conscience seems to me nothing worthy of respect… I would not want to abandon an action after the fact; I would prefer, as a matter of principle, to leave the bad outcome, the consequences, out of the question of value. When the outcome is bad, it is all too easy to lose the right view of what one did: a pang of conscience seems to me a kind of “evil eye.” To hold something in all the greater honor within oneself when it fails, because it failed—that is rather more in keeping with my morality.—“God,” “immortality of the soul,” “redemption,” “the beyond”: all concepts to which I have given neither attention nor time, not even as a child—perhaps I was never childish enough for that?—I know atheism neither as a conclusion nor, still less, as an event: with me it is instinctively self-evident. I am too curious, too questioning, too high-spirited to put up with a bludgeoning answer. God is a bludgeoning answer, an offense against the delicacy of us thinkers—at bottom, even a bludgeoning prohibition addressed to us: you shall not think!… A quite different question interests me, one on which the “salvation of humanity” depends more than on any theological curiosity: the question of nutrition. For practical use, one can formulate it like this: “How must you, in particular, nourish yourself to attain your maximum of strength, of vigor in the Renaissance style, of virtue free of moraline?”—My experiences here have been as bad as possible; I am astonished that I heard this question so late, learned “reason” from these experiences so late. Only the utter worthlessness of our German education—its “idealism”—goes some way toward explaining why, in precisely this matter, I was backward to the point of saintliness. This “education,” which teaches us from the outset to lose sight of realities in pursuit of thoroughly dubious, so-called ideal goals, “classical education,” for example—as if the attempt to unite “classical” and “German” in a single concept were not doomed from the outset! More than that, it is amusing—just imagine a “classically educated” native of Leipzig!—In fact, until my most mature years I always ate badly—in moral terms, “impersonally,” “selflessly,” “altruistically,” for the salvation of cooks and other fellow Christians. Through Leipzig cooking, for example, at the same time as my first study of Schopenhauer (1865), I very earnestly denied my “will to live.” To ruin one's stomach into the bargain, for the sake of inadequate nourishment—the cooking in question seemed to me to solve this problem with astonishing success. (They say that 1866 brought a change in this respect—.) But German cooking in general—what does it not have on its conscience! Soup before the meal (still called “in the German style” in Venetian cookbooks of the 16th century); meat boiled to exhaustion, vegetables made fatty and floury; the degeneration of flour-based dishes into paperweights! Add to this the downright bestial need to wash it all down among the old Germans—and by no means just the old ones—and one understands the origins of the German spirit too: in afflicted bowels… The German spirit is an indigestion; it cannot cope with anything.—But the English diet, which, compared with the German and even the French, is a kind of “return to nature,” namely to cannibalism, also runs profoundly counter to my own instinct; it seems to me to give the spirit heavy feet—Englishwomen's feet… The best cooking is that of Piedmont.—Alcoholic drinks do me harm; one glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to make my life a “vale of tears”—my antipodes live in Munich. Granted that I understood this rather late, I have actually experienced it from childhood on. As a boy I believed that drinking wine, like smoking tobacco, was at first merely a vanity of young men, and later a bad habit. Perhaps Naumburg wine bears some of the blame for this tart judgment. To believe that wine cheers people, I would have to be a Christian—that is, believe what is, for me in particular, an absurdity. Strangely enough, despite this extreme susceptibility to being put out of sorts by small, heavily diluted doses of alcohol, I become almost a sailor when it comes to strong doses. Even as a boy I had my courage in this respect. To write a long Latin treatise in a single night's vigil and then copy it out as well, my pen fired by the ambition to match my model Sallust in rigor and concision, and to pour a few grogs of the heaviest caliber over my Latin—even when I was a pupil at venerable Schulpforta, this in no way contradicted my physiology, nor perhaps Sallust's either—however much it contradicted venerable Schulpforta… Later, toward the middle of life, I did, of course, come down ever more firmly against any “spirituous” drink: an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard Wagner, who converted me, I cannot urge complete abstinence from alcohol earnestly enough upon all the more spiritual natures. Water will do… I prefer places where one can draw from flowing fountains everywhere (Nice, Turin, Sils); a little glass follows me around like a dog. In wine, truth: it seems that here too I am at odds with the whole world over the concept of “truth”—with me the spirit hovers over the water… A few more pointers from my morality. A substantial meal is easier to digest than one that is too small. The first prerequisite for good digestion is that the stomach as a whole should go into action. One must know the size of one's stomach. For the same reason, those protracted meals that I call interrupted sacrificial feasts, the set-menu meals, are to be avoided.—No eating between meals, no coffee: coffee darkens the spirits. Tea is beneficial only in the morning. Little, but potent; tea is very harmful and leaves one ailing all day if it is even one degree too weak. Everyone has a measure here, often within the narrowest and most delicate limits. In a very irritating climate, tea is inadvisable as a start: a cup of thick, defatted cocoa should be allowed to make the start an hour beforehand.—Sit as little as possible; put no faith in any thought that was not born outdoors and in free movement—one in which the muscles too do not celebrate a festival. All prejudices come from the bowels.—The sedentary backside—I have said it once before—the true sin against the Holy Spirit.—
2 Closely related to the question of nutrition is the question of place and climate. No one is free to live everywhere; and someone who has great tasks to accomplish, tasks that call upon all his strength, has a very narrow choice indeed. The influence of climate on metabolism, its slowing or speeding up, reaches so far that a mistake in place and climate can not only estrange someone from his task but withhold it from him altogether: he never catches sight of it. His animal vigor has never grown great enough to attain that freedom which overflows into the most spiritual sphere, where someone recognizes: I alone can do this… The slightest sluggishness of the bowels, once it has become a bad habit, is quite enough to turn a genius into something mediocre, something “German”; the German climate alone is sufficient to discourage even strong and heroically constituted bowels. The tempo of metabolism stands in an exact relation to the mobility or lameness of the spirit's feet; the “spirit” itself is, after all, only a form of this metabolism. Assemble the places where there are and have been people of spirit, where wit, refinement, malice have been part of happiness, where genius has almost inevitably made itself at home: they all have exceptionally dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens—these names prove something: genius is conditioned by dry air, by clear skies—that is, by rapid metabolism, by the possibility of continually replenishing great, even tremendous quantities of strength. I have a case in mind in which a spirit endowed for greatness and freedom became narrow, withdrawn, a specialist and a sourpuss, simply through a lack of instinctive subtlety in matters of climate. And I myself could ultimately have become such a case, had illness not forced me to see reason, to reflect on the reason inherent in reality. Now that long practice has taught me to read the effects of climate and weather in myself as on a very fine and reliable instrument, and even on a short journey, say from Turin to Milan, I register physiologically the change in degrees of humidity, I think with horror of the uncanny fact that, apart from the last 10 years, the years of mortal danger, my life has always been spent in the wrong places, places downright forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia in general, Leipzig, Basel, Venice—so many places of disaster for my physiology. If I have no welcome memory at all of my entire childhood and youth, it would be foolish to invoke so-called “moral” causes here—for example, the undeniable lack of adequate company: for that lack persists today as it always has, without preventing me from being cheerful and brave. Rather, ignorance in matters of physiology—the accursed “idealism”—is the true calamity in my life, its superfluous and stupid element, something from which no good has grown, for which there is no compensation, no counterbalance. The consequences of this “idealism” explain to me all the mistakes, all the great instinctual aberrations and “modesties” that led me away from the task of my life: that I became a philologist, for example—why not at least a physician, or something else that opens one's eyes? In my Basel years my whole spiritual diet, including the division of my day, was a completely senseless misuse of exceptional powers, without any supply of strength remotely sufficient to cover the expenditure, without even a thought for expenditure and replenishment. Every finer sense of self was lacking, every safeguard of a commanding instinct; it was a putting oneself on a level with just anyone, a “selflessness,” a forgetting of one's distance—something I never forgive myself. When I was almost at the end, because I was almost at the end, I began to reflect on this fundamental unreason of my life—“idealism.” Only illness brought me to reason.—
3 The choice of food; the choice of climate and place—the third thing in which one must make no mistake at any price is the choice of one's own kind of recreation. Here too, depending on the degree to which a spirit is unique, the bounds of what is permissible—that is, useful—to it grow narrower and narrower. In my case all reading belongs among my recreations: consequently among the things that release me from myself, that let me stroll through other people's fields of knowledge and souls—things I no longer take seriously. Reading gives me recreation precisely from my seriousness. In times of deep work one sees no books around me: I would take care not to let anyone speak, let alone think, in my presence. And that, after all, would be reading… Has anyone actually observed that, in that deep tension to which pregnancy condemns the spirit and, at bottom, the whole organism, chance, every kind of stimulus from outside, acts too violently, “strikes home” too deeply? One must avoid chance, stimuli from outside, as much as possible; a kind of walling oneself in is among the first acts of instinctive wisdom in spiritual pregnancy. Shall I allow an alien thought to climb secretly over the wall?—And that, after all, would be reading… The time of work and fruitfulness is followed by the time of recreation: come along, you pleasant, you spirited, you clever books!—Will they be German books?… I have to count back half a year to catch myself with a book in my hand. What was it again?—An excellent study by Victor Brochard, les Sceptiques Grecs, in which good use is also made of my Laertiana. The skeptics, the only honorable type among that tribe of philosophers with their two to five layers of ambiguity!… Otherwise I almost always take refuge in the same books, a small number at bottom, the books proven for me in particular. Perhaps it is not in my nature to read much or widely: a reading room makes me ill. Nor is it in my nature to love much or widely. Caution, even hostility toward new books, belongs to my instinct rather more than “tolerance,” “generosity of heart,” and other forms of “love of one's neighbor”… It is to a small number of older French writers that I keep returning: I believe only in French culture and regard everything else in Europe that calls itself “culture” as a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture… The few instances of high culture I found in Germany were all of French origin, above all Mrs. Cosima Wagner, by far the foremost voice in matters of taste that I have heard.—That I do not read Pascal but love him, as Christianity's most instructive victim, slowly murdered, first bodily, then psychologically, the whole logic of this most horrifying form of inhuman cruelty; that I have something of Montaigne's mischievous exuberance in my spirit—who knows? perhaps in my body too; that my artist's taste defends the names Molière, Corneille, and Racine, not without fury at a savage genius like Shakespeare: all this does not, in the end, prevent even the very latest French writers from being charming company for me. I simply cannot see in what century of history one could fish out a collection of psychologists as curious and at the same time as delicate as those in present-day Paris: I name, by way of example—for their number is by no means small—the gentlemen Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, or, to single out one of the strong race, a true Latin for whom I have a particular fondness, Guy de Maupassant. Between ourselves, I prefer this generation even to their great teachers, who have all been spoiled by German philosophy (Mr. Taine, for example, by Hegel, to whom he owes his misunderstanding of great people and ages). Wherever Germany reaches, it spoils culture. Only the war “redeemed” the spirit in France… Stendhal, one of the loveliest accidents of my life—for everything that marks an epoch in it has come to me by chance, never by recommendation—is quite priceless with his anticipatory psychologist's eye, with his grasp of facts that recalls the proximity of the greatest man of fact (from the claw, Napoleon—); finally, not least as an honest atheist—a scarce and scarcely discoverable species in France, with all due respect to Prosper Mérimée… Perhaps I am even jealous of Stendhal? He took from me the best atheist's joke, the one that I above all could have made: “God's only excuse is that he does not exist”… I myself have said somewhere: what has been the greatest objection to existence so far? God…
4 Heinrich Heine gave me my highest conception of the lyric poet. I search in vain through all the realms of the millennia for music as sweet and passionate. He possessed that divine malice without which I cannot conceive of perfection—I assess the value of people, of races, by how essential they find it to understand the god as inseparable from the satyr.—And how he handles German! One day it will be said that Heine and I were by far the foremost artists of the German language—at an incalculable distance from everything mere Germans have done with it.—I must be deeply related to Byron's Manfred: I found all these abysses within me—at thirteen I was ripe for this work. I have no word, only a look, for those who dare utter the word Faust in the presence of Manfred. The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: Schumann is the proof. In fury at this saccharine Saxon, I expressly composed a counter-overture to Manfred, of which Hans von Bülow said that he had never seen anything like it on music paper: it was the rape of Euterpe.—When I seek my highest formula for Shakespeare, I find only this: he conceived the type of Caesar. One does not divine such a thing—one is it or one is not. The great poet draws only from his own reality—to the point where afterward he can no longer bear his work… When I have glanced into my Zarathustra, I pace up and down the room for half an hour, unable to master an unbearable spasm of sobbing.—I know no reading more heartrending than Shakespeare: what must a person have suffered to have such a need to be a buffoon!—Does one understand Hamlet? Not doubt, but certainty is what drives one mad… But one must be deep, an abyss, a philosopher, to feel this way… We are all afraid of the truth… And, let me confess it: I am instinctively sure and certain that Lord Bacon is the author—the torturer of his own animal self—of this uncanniest kind of literature: what do I care about the pitiable chatter of American muddleheads and shallow minds? But the power to achieve the mightiest reality of vision is not merely compatible with the mightiest power for action, for monstrous action, for crime—it actually presupposes it… We know far too little about Lord Bacon, the first realist in every great sense of the word, to know all that he did, what he wanted, what he experienced within himself… And to the devil with you, gentlemen critics! Suppose I had christened my Zarathustra with someone else's name, Richard Wagner's, for example: the acumen of two millennia would not have sufficed to guess that the author of “Human, All Too Human” is the visionary of Zarathustra…
5 Here, where I speak of the recreations of my life, I need a word to express my gratitude for what has given me by far the deepest and most heartfelt recreation in it. This was, without any doubt, my more intimate association with Richard Wagner. I set little store by the rest of my human relationships; at no price would I give up the days at Tribschen from my life, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime accidents—of deep moments… I do not know what others experienced with Wagner: no cloud ever passed across our sky.—And this brings me back once more to France—I have no arguments, only a contemptuous curl of the lip left for Wagnerians and all their kind who believe they honor Wagner by finding him like themselves… Being as I am, in my deepest instincts a stranger to everything German, so that the mere proximity of a German slows my digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also the first time in my life I could breathe freely: I felt and revered him as a foreign land, as an opposite, as a living protest against all “German virtues.”—We who were children in the swamp air of the fifties are necessarily pessimists about the concept “German”; we cannot be anything but revolutionaries—we will admit no state of affairs in which the sanctimonious hypocrite has the upper hand. It is entirely indifferent to me whether today he changes his colors, dresses in scarlet and puts on hussar uniforms… Well then! Wagner was a revolutionary—he ran away from the Germans… As an artist, one has no home in Europe except Paris; the delicacy in all five artistic senses that Wagner's art presupposes, the fingers sensitive to nuance, the psychological morbidity, are found only in Paris. Nowhere else is there this passion in questions of form, this seriousness about staging—it is the quintessential Parisian seriousness. In Germany there is no conception at all of the tremendous ambition that lives in the soul of a Parisian artist. The German is good-natured—Wagner was anything but good-natured… But I have already said enough (in “Beyond Good and Evil,” S. 256f.) about where Wagner belongs, where he has his closest kin: it is French late Romanticism, that high-flying and uplifting kind of artist such as Delacroix, such as Berlioz, with a foundation of sickness, of incurability in their nature, all fanatics of expression, virtuosos through and through… Who was Wagner's first intelligent follower at all? Charles Baudelaire, the same man who first understood Delacroix, that typical decadent in whom a whole generation of artists recognized itself—perhaps he was also the last… What have I never forgiven Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans—that he became a German of the Reich… Wherever Germany reaches, it spoils culture.—
6 All things considered, I could not have endured my youth without Wagner's music. For I was condemned to Germans. When one wants to escape an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish. Well then, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the supreme antidote to everything German—poison, I do not deny it… From the moment there was a piano score of Tristan—my compliments, Mr. von Bülow!—I was a Wagnerian. I saw Wagner's earlier works as beneath me—still too vulgar, too “German”… But to this day I seek a work of equally dangerous fascination, of an infinity as terrifying and sweet as Tristan's—I seek in vain through all the arts. All the strangeness of Lionardo da Vinci is stripped of its magic at the first note of Tristan. This work is unquestionably Wagner's unsurpassed achievement; he recovered from it with the Meistersinger and the Ring. To grow healthier—that is a regression in a nature like Wagner's… I count it a piece of good fortune of the first rank to have lived at the right time, and precisely among Germans, so as to be ripe for this work: that is how far the psychologist's curiosity goes in me. The world is poor for anyone who has never been sick enough for this “voluptuous bliss of hell”: one is permitted, almost obliged, to use a mystic's formula here.—I think I know better than anyone the tremendous things Wagner can do, the fifty worlds of unfamiliar rapture for which no one but he had wings; and being as I am, strong enough to turn even the most questionable and dangerous things to my advantage and grow stronger through them, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. What makes us akin—that we have suffered more deeply, even from one another, than people of this century could suffer—will forever bring our names together again; and as surely as Wagner among Germans is nothing but a misunderstanding, so surely am I one and will always remain one.—Two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline first, my Germanic gentlemen!… But that cannot be made up for.—
7 One more word for the most discerning ears: what I actually want from music. That it be cheerful and deep, like an afternoon in October. That it be distinctive, exuberant, tender, a sweet little woman of malice and grace… I will never allow that a German could know what music is. Those called German musicians, the greatest above all, are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Netherlanders—or Jews; otherwise, Germans of the strong race, extinct Germans, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach, and Handel. I myself am still Pole enough to give up the rest of music for Chopin: for three reasons I make an exception for Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, perhaps also for a few things by Liszt, who has the noble orchestral accents beyond all other musicians; finally, for everything that has grown beyond the Alps—on this side… I could not do without Rossini, still less without my South in music, the music of my Venetian maestro Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps, I really mean only Venice. When I seek another word for music, I find only the word Venice. I cannot distinguish tears from music—I cannot think of happiness, of the South, without a shudder of apprehension.
By the bridge I stoodlately in the brown night.From afar came singing;in golden drops it welledover the trembling surface.Gondolas, lights, music—drunkenly it floated out into dusk…
My soul, a stringed instrument,sang to itself, invisibly touched,a gondola song with it in secret,trembling with many-colored bliss.—Was anyone listening to it?…
8 In all this—in the choice of food, of place and climate, of recreation—an instinct of self-preservation commands, expressing itself most unequivocally as an instinct of self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear them, not to let them approach one—the first act of wisdom, the first proof that one is not an accident but a necessity. The common word for this instinct of self-defense is taste. Its imperative commands not only that one say No where Yes would be a “selflessness,” but also that one say No as little as possible. To separate oneself, to part from whatever would make a No necessary again and again. The reason for this is that defensive expenditures, however small, when they become the rule, the habit, bring about an extraordinary and wholly unnecessary impoverishment. Our great expenditures are the small ones we make most often. Warding off, not letting things approach, is an expenditure—let us not deceive ourselves about this—a strength squandered on negative purposes. Merely through the constant need for defense, one can become too weak to defend oneself any longer.—Suppose I stepped out of my house and found, instead of quiet, aristocratic Turin, the German small town: my instinct would have to bar the way, to repel everything assailing it from this flattened and cowardly world. Or I might find the German metropolis, this vice made architecture, where nothing grows, where every single thing, good and bad, has been dragged in. Would I not have to become a hedgehog?—But to have spines is a waste, a double luxury indeed, when one is free to have no spines but open hands…
Another act of wisdom and self-defense consists in reacting as seldom as possible and withdrawing from situations and conditions in which one would be condemned, as it were, to hang up one's “freedom,” one's initiative, and become a mere reagent. I take dealings with books as an illustration. The scholar who at bottom does nothing but “pore over” books—the philologist, at a modest estimate, some 200 a day—eventually loses the capacity to think for himself altogether. If he is not poring, he is not thinking. He responds to a stimulus (—a thought he has read) when he thinks—in the end he merely reacts. The scholar spends all his strength in saying Yes and No, in criticizing what has already been thought—he himself no longer thinks… His instinct of self-defense has become brittle; otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar—a decadent.—I have seen it with my own eyes: gifted natures, richly and freely endowed, already in their thirties “read to ruin,” mere matches that must be struck to give off sparks—“thoughts.”—Early in the morning, at daybreak, in all one's freshness, in the dawn of one's strength, to read a book—that is what I call vicious!—
9 At this point it can no longer be avoided: I must give the real answer to the question of how one becomes what one is. And with that I touch upon the masterstroke in the art of self-preservation—of selfishness… Suppose, namely, that the task, the calling, the destiny of the task lies far beyond the average measure: then no danger would be greater than catching sight of oneself with this task. Becoming what one is presupposes that one has not the remotest inkling of what one is. From this perspective, even life's missteps have their own meaning and value, the temporary byways and wrong turns, the delays, the “modesties,” the seriousness squandered on tasks that lie beyond the task. Here a great wisdom, even the highest wisdom, finds expression: where “know yourself” would be a recipe for ruin, forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, more mediocre becomes reason itself. In moral terms: love of one's neighbor, living for others and other things, can be the protective measure that preserves the most adamant selfhood: this is the exceptional case in which, against my rule and conviction, I take the side of the “selfless” drives: here they work in the service of selfishness, self-discipline.—One must keep the whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—clear of any of the great imperatives. Beware even of every grand word, every grand attitude! All are dangers that the instinct may “understand itself” too soon.—Meanwhile the organizing “idea,” the one called to rule, grows and grows in the depths—it begins to command, it slowly leads back from byways and wrong turns, it prepares individual qualities and capabilities that will one day prove indispensable as means to the whole—it trains all the serving capacities in succession before letting anything be heard of the dominant task, of “goal,” “purpose,” “meaning.”—Seen from this side, my life is simply marvelous. For the task of a revaluation of values, perhaps more capacities were needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual, above all opposing capacities that must not be allowed to hinder or destroy one another. An order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of separating without making enemies; mixing nothing, “reconciling” nothing; a tremendous multiplicity that is nevertheless the opposite of chaos—this was the precondition, the long secret labor and artistry of my instinct. Its higher guardianship proved so strong that in no case did I even suspect what was growing within me—that all my abilities suddenly sprang forth one day, ripe, in their final perfection. I have no memory of ever having exerted myself—no trace of struggle can be found in my life; I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To “will” something, to “strive” for something, to have a “goal,” a “wish” in view—all this is outside my experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future—a wide future!—as upon a smooth sea: no longing ripples over it. I do not in the least want anything to be different from what it is; I myself do not want to become different… But that is how I have always lived. I have had no wish. Someone who, after his forty-fourth year, can say that he has never exerted himself for honors, for women, for money!—Not that I have lacked them… Thus one day I was a university professor—I had never remotely thought of such a thing, for I was barely 24 years old. Thus, two years earlier, one day I was a philologist: in the sense that my first philological work, my beginning in every sense, was requested for publication by my teacher Ritschl for his “Rheinisches Museum” (Ritschl—I say it with reverence—the only scholar of genius I have set eyes on to this day. He possessed that pleasant corruption which distinguishes us Thuringians and with which even a German becomes likable: we prefer the back routes even in reaching the truth. With these words I would by no means wish to have underrated my fellow countryman from nearer home, the clever Leopold von Ranke…).
10 I will be asked why I have related all these small things, things indifferent by conventional judgment; I am harming myself by doing so, all the more if I am destined to stand for great tasks. Answer: these small things—nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness—are more important, beyond all conception, than everything people have taken to be important until now. Here, precisely, one must begin to relearn. What humanity has so far seriously considered are not even realities, mere imaginings, more strictly speaking, lies born of the bad instincts of sick natures, harmful in the deepest sense—all the concepts “God,” “soul,” “virtue,” “sin,” “the beyond,” “truth,” “eternal life”… Yet people have sought the greatness of human nature, its “divinity,” in them… All questions of politics, of social order, of education have been falsified to their very foundations by taking the most harmful people for great people—by teaching contempt for the “small” things, meaning the fundamental concerns of life itself… If I now compare myself with those people hitherto honored as the foremost human beings, the difference is palpable. I do not even count these supposedly “foremost” among human beings at all—to me they are humanity's rejects, offspring of sickness and vengeful instincts: nothing but baleful, fundamentally incurable monsters who take revenge on life… I want to be their opposite: my privilege is to have the highest sensitivity to every sign of healthy instincts. There is no morbid trait in me; even in times of severe illness I have not become morbid; one searches my nature in vain for a trace of fanaticism. No one will be able to point to any moment of my life when I struck a presumptuous or grandiloquent pose. Grandiose posturing does not belong to greatness; anyone who needs poses at all is false… Beware all picturesque people!—Life has become easy for me, easiest when it demanded the hardest things of me. Anyone who saw me during the seventy days of this autumn, when, without interruption, I did nothing but things of the first rank that no one can imitate—or show me how to do—with a responsibility for all the millennia after me, will have perceived no trace of tension in me, but all the more an overflowing freshness and cheerfulness. I have never eaten with more pleasant feelings, never slept better.—I know no other way of dealing with great tasks than play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential prerequisite. The slightest constraint, the gloomy face, any harsh note in the throat are all objections to a person—how much more to his work!… One must have no nerves… To suffer from solitude is also an objection—I have only ever suffered from “multitude”… At an absurdly early age, at seven, I already knew that no human word would ever reach me: has anyone ever seen me saddened by it?—To this day I have the same affability toward everyone; I even treat the lowliest with every distinction: in all this there is not a grain of arrogance, of secret contempt. Anyone I despise divines that I despise him: by my mere existence I outrage everything that has bad blood in its veins… My formula for greatness in a human being is love of fate: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not for all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but to love it…
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 Why do I know a little more? Why am I so clever at all? I have never thought about questions that aren't really questions—I haven't wasted myself.—For example, I have no firsthand experience of real religious difficulties. I have completely failed to see how I could be “sinful.” I also have no reliable way to tell what a guilty conscience is. From what one hears about it, a guilty conscience seems to me nothing to respect… I wouldn't want to abandon an action afterward. I would rather leave a bad outcome, the consequences, out of the question of its value altogether. When something ends badly, it's all too easy to lose the right view of what one did. A guilty conscience seems to me a kind of “evil eye.” To value something all the more in one's own eyes when it fails, because it failed—that's closer to my morality.—“God,” “immortality of the soul,” “redemption,” “the afterlife”: I have given none of these ideas any attention or time, not even as a child. Perhaps I was never childish enough for that?—For me, atheism is certainly not a conclusion, still less an event. It comes naturally, by instinct. I am too curious, too full of questions, too high-spirited to accept a crude, heavy-handed answer. God is a crude, heavy-handed answer, an offense against the good taste of us thinkers. At bottom, he is even just a crude ban imposed on us: you must not think!… A very different question interests me. The “salvation of humanity” depends on it more than on any theological oddity: the question of food. For practical use, you can put it this way: “How should you, in particular, eat to reach your greatest strength, your greatest force of character in the Renaissance sense, your greatest virtue free from moralizing?”—My experiences here have been as bad as possible. I am amazed that I heard this question so late and learned “sense” from these experiences so late. Only the complete worthlessness of our German education—its “idealism”—helps me understand why, in this very matter, I was backward enough to be a saint. This “education” teaches people from the start to lose sight of realities and chase thoroughly questionable, so-called ideal goals, such as a “classical education.” As if joining “classical” and “German” in one idea weren't doomed from the start! More than that, it's funny. Just picture a “classically educated” man from Leipzig!—In fact, until I was well into adulthood, I always ate badly. In moral language, I ate “impersonally,” “selflessly,” “altruistically,” for the good of cooks and other fellow Christians. Through Leipzig cooking, for example, I very seriously denied my “will to live” at the same time as I first studied Schopenhauer (1865). To upset your stomach while also getting too little nourishment—this was a problem that cooking seemed to solve with astonishing success. (People say 1866 brought a change in this respect.) But German cooking in general—what doesn't it have on its conscience! Soup before the meal, still called “in the German style” in Venetian cookbooks of the 16th century. Meat boiled to death. Vegetables made fatty and floury. Flour-based dishes turned into paperweights! Add to that the downright animal need of the old Germans—and by no means just the old ones—to pour drink on top, and you can also understand where the German spirit comes from: unhappy bowels… The German spirit is indigestion. It can't get through anything.—But the English diet also goes deeply against my own instinct. Compared with the German diet, even with the French, it is a kind of “return to nature”—that is, to cannibalism. It seems to give the mind heavy feet—the feet of Englishwomen… The best cooking is Piedmont's.—Alcohol is bad for me. One glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to turn my life into a “vale of tears.” My complete opposites live in Munich. Though I understood this rather late, I have actually experienced it since childhood. As a boy, I thought drinking wine, like smoking tobacco, was at first just young men's vanity and later a bad habit. Perhaps Naumburg wine also had something to do with this harsh judgment. To believe that wine cheers people up, I would have to be a Christian. In other words, I would have to believe something that is absurd precisely for me. Strangely enough, though small, heavily diluted doses of alcohol can upset my mood so badly, I become almost a sailor when it comes to strong doses. Even as a boy, I was brave in this respect. I could write a long essay in Latin in a single night and then make a clean copy of it too. My pen was driven by the ambition to match my model Sallust in strictness and conciseness, and I poured several very strong grogs over my Latin. Even when I was a pupil at the venerable Schulpforta, this was in no way at odds with my body's nature. Perhaps it wasn't at odds with Sallust's either—however much it was at odds with the venerable Schulpforta… Later, toward the middle of my life, I did take an ever firmer stand against every kind of “spirited” drink. I oppose vegetarianism on the basis of experience, just like Richard Wagner, who converted me. And I can't urge complete abstinence from alcohol strongly enough on all more intellectual people. Water does the job… I prefer places where you can draw water from flowing fountains everywhere: Nice, Turin, Sils. A little glass follows me around like a dog. In wine there is truth: it seems that here too I disagree with everyone else about the meaning of “truth.” In my case, the spirit hovers over the water… A few more hints from my morality. A substantial meal is easier to digest than one that's too small. The first condition for good digestion is that the stomach gets to work as a whole. You must know the size of your stomach. For the same reason, I advise against those drawn-out meals at the communal hotel table, which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts.—No snacks between meals, no coffee: coffee darkens the mood. Tea is good for you only in the morning. A little, but strong. Tea is very harmful and makes you feel ill all day if it is even one degree too weak. Everyone has their own measure here, often within very narrow and delicate limits. In a very irritating climate, tea isn't a good way to start. You should begin with a cup of thick, defatted cocoa an hour earlier.—Sit as little as possible. Don't trust any thought that wasn't born outdoors and in free movement—one in which the muscles aren't holding a celebration too. All prejudices come from the bowels.—Sitting on your backside—I have said this before—is the real sin against the Holy Spirit.—
2 Closely related to the question of food is the question of place and climate. No one is free to live just anywhere. And anyone who has great tasks to carry out, tasks that demand all their strength, has a very narrow choice here. Climate affects the metabolism, slowing it down or speeding it up, so much that a wrong choice of place and climate can do more than separate someone from their task. It can keep the task from them altogether. They never even see it. Their physical energy has never grown strong enough to reach that freedom which overflows into the highest activity of the mind, where someone realizes: only I can do this… Even the slightest sluggishness of the bowels, once it has become a bad habit, is quite enough to turn a genius into something average, something “German.” The German climate alone is enough to discourage strong bowels, even bowels with a heroic bent. The speed of the metabolism is directly linked to how nimble or lame the mind's feet are. The “mind” itself is only a form of this metabolism. Make a list of the places where people with lively minds live and have lived, where wit, refinement, and malice were part of happiness, where genius almost inevitably made itself at home. They all have remarkably dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens—these names prove something. Genius depends on dry air, on clear skies—that is, on a rapid metabolism, on the ability to take in large, even enormous amounts of energy again and again. I have a case in mind where a mind built for greatness and freedom became narrow, withdrawn, specialized, and sour, simply because its instinct wasn't sensitive enough to climate. And I myself might have ended up as that case, if illness hadn't forced me to see sense, to think about the sense in reality. Now, after long practice, I read the effects of climate and weather in myself as on a very fine and reliable instrument. Even on a short trip, say from Turin to Milan, I work out the change in degrees of humidity from its effects on my body. So I look back with horror at the unnerving fact that, except for the last 10 years, the years when my life was in danger, I have always lived in the wrong places, places positively forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia in general, Leipzig, Basel, Venice—every one of them a place of disaster for my body. I have no welcome memory of my entire childhood and youth. But it would be foolish to blame so-called “moral” causes for this—for instance, the undeniable lack of suitable company. That lack exists today just as it always did, without stopping me from being cheerful and brave. Instead, ignorance about the body—that damned “idealism”—has been the real curse of my life, the needless and stupid part of it. Nothing good has grown from it, and nothing makes up for it or balances it out. I explain all my wrong choices, all my great failures of instinct and acts of “modesty” away from my life's task, as the results of this “idealism.” For example, that I became a philologist. Why not at least a doctor, or something else that opens one's eyes? During my time in Basel, my whole mental diet, including how I divided up the day, was a completely senseless misuse of extraordinary powers. I took in nothing like enough strength to cover what I used up. I didn't even think about what I spent and how to replace it. I lacked any finer sense of myself, any care from an instinct that knew how to command. I put myself on a level with just anyone. It was “selflessness,” a forgetting of my distance from others—something I never forgive myself for. When I was almost at the end, because I was almost at the end, I began thinking about this basic unreason in my life—“idealism.” Only illness brought me to my senses.—
3 The choice of food; the choice of climate and place. The third choice one must never get wrong, at any price, is the choice of one's own kind of relaxation. Here too, the more a mind is one of a kind, the narrower the limits of what is allowed it—that is, what is useful to it. In my case, all reading is a form of relaxation. So it belongs among the things that free me from myself, that let me go for a walk through other people's fields of knowledge and minds—things I no longer take seriously. Reading gives me a rest from my own seriousness. When I am deeply at work, you won't see any books around me. I would take care not to let anyone speak near me, or even think. And reading would mean just that… Has anyone really noticed how, in the deep tension that pregnancy imposes on the mind and basically on the whole body, chance, any kind of stimulus from outside, acts too strongly, “strikes home” too deeply? One must avoid chance and outside stimulation as much as possible. A kind of walling oneself in is among the first wise moves of instinct during a pregnancy of the mind. Will I allow a foreign thought to climb secretly over the wall? And reading would mean just that… After the times of work and fertility comes the time of relaxation. Come here, you pleasant, witty, clever books!—Will they be German books?… I have to look back six months to catch myself with a book in my hand. What was it? An excellent study by Victor Brochard, les Sceptiques Grecs, which also makes good use of my Laertiana. The skeptics, the only honorable type in that two-to-five-faced tribe of philosophers!… Otherwise, I almost always turn to the same books. There are only a few of them, really: the books that have proved their worth specifically for me. Perhaps it's not in my nature to read a lot or to read widely. A reading room makes me ill. Nor is it in my nature to love a lot or to love widely. Caution, even hostility toward new books, is more a part of my instinct than “tolerance,” “generosity of heart,” and other forms of “love of one's neighbor”… I keep returning to a small number of older French writers. I believe only in French culture. I consider everything else in Europe that calls itself “culture” a misunderstanding, not to mention German culture… The few examples of high culture I found in Germany were all French in origin. Above all, Mrs. Cosima Wagner, by far the foremost voice on questions of taste that I have ever heard.—I don't read Pascal, I love him, as Christianity's most instructive victim: slowly murdered, first physically, then psychologically, with all the logic of this most horrifying form of inhuman cruelty. I have something of Montaigne's mischievous high spirits in my mind, and who knows, perhaps in my body too. My artistic taste defends the names Molière, Corneille, and Racine, not without anger at a wild genius like Shakespeare. But none of this rules out my also finding the very latest French writers charming company. I simply can't see in what century of history one could gather psychologists as curious and at the same time as sensitive as those in Paris today. Let me name a few—for there are quite a lot of them—Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître. Or, to single out one of the strong race, a true Latin whom I especially like, Guy de Maupassant. Between ourselves, I even prefer this generation to their great teachers. All those teachers have been spoiled by German philosophy—Mr. Taine, for example, by Hegel, to whom he owes his misunderstanding of great people and periods. Wherever Germany reaches, it spoils culture. Only the war “set free” the mind in France… Stendhal, one of the finest chance discoveries of my life—for everything that marks a turning point in my life has come to me by chance, never through a recommendation—is quite priceless. He has a psychologist's eye that sees things ahead of time, and a grip on facts that recalls his closeness to the greatest realist: you can tell Napoleon by his claw.—Not least, he is priceless as an honest atheist, a rare and almost impossible-to-find species in France, with all due respect to Prosper Mérimée… Perhaps I myself envy Stendhal? He took away from me the best atheist joke, the one I in particular could have made: “God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist”… I myself have said somewhere: what has been the greatest objection to existence up to now? God…
4 Heinrich Heine gave me the highest idea of what a lyric poet can be. I search in vain through all the realms of thousands of years for music as sweet and passionate. He had that divine malice without which I can't imagine perfection. I judge the value of people and races by how necessary they find it to see the god and the satyr as inseparable.—And how he handles German! One day people will say that Heine and I were by far the greatest artists of the German language—at an incalculable distance from everything that mere Germans have done with it.—I must be deeply related to Byron's Manfred. I found all those depths within myself. At thirteen, I was ready for this work. I have no words, only a look, for those who dare to mention Faust in the presence of Manfred. The Germans are incapable of any idea of greatness. Schumann is the proof. Out of anger at this sugary Saxon, I deliberately composed a counter-overture to Manfred. Hans von Bülow said he had never seen anything like it on music paper: it was rape of Euterpe.—When I look for my highest way of describing Shakespeare, I always find only this: he conceived the Caesar type. You don't guess something like that. You either are it or you aren't. A great poet draws only on his own reality—to the point that afterward he can no longer bear his own work… After I have glanced into my Zarathustra, I walk up and down the room for half an hour, unable to control an unbearable fit of sobbing.—I know no reading more heartbreaking than Shakespeare. How much a person must have suffered to need so badly to play the clown!—Does anyone understand Hamlet? It's not doubt but certainty that drives people mad… But to feel that way, you have to be deep, an abyss, a philosopher… We are all afraid of the truth… And let me admit it: I am instinctively sure and certain that Lord Bacon is the creator of this most unnerving kind of literature, torturing the animal in himself. What do I care about the pitiful chatter of muddled and shallow American minds? But the power to make visions overwhelmingly real is not just compatible with the greatest power to act, to carry out monstrous deeds, to commit crime—it actually requires that power… We know nowhere near enough about Lord Bacon, the first realist in every great sense of the word, to know all that he did, all that he wanted, all that he experienced within himself… And damn you, gentlemen critics! Suppose I had put someone else's name on my Zarathustra, Richard Wagner's, for example. The sharp insight of two thousand years would not have been enough to guess that the author of “Human, All Too Human” was the visionary of Zarathustra…
5 Here, as I speak of the things that have refreshed me in life, I need to say a word of thanks for what has refreshed me by far the most deeply and warmly. Without any doubt, this was my close friendship with Richard Wagner. I would let the rest of my human relationships go cheap. I wouldn't give up the days at Tribschen from my life at any price: days of trust, cheerfulness, sublime moments of chance—the deep moments… I don't know what others experienced with Wagner. No cloud ever crossed our sky.—And this brings me back to France once more. I have no arguments left for Wagnerians and all that sort, only a contemptuous curl of the lip. They think they honor Wagner by finding him like themselves… Being who I am, a stranger in my deepest instincts to everything German, so much so that just being near a German slows my digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also the first time in my life I could breathe freely. I felt and honored him as a foreign country, as an opposite, as a living protest against all the “German virtues.”—We who were children in the swampy air of the fifties are necessarily pessimists about the idea of “German.” We can be nothing but revolutionaries. We will accept no state of affairs in which the religious hypocrite comes out on top. I don't care at all whether he appears in different colors today, whether he dresses in scarlet and puts on hussar uniforms… Well then! Wagner was a revolutionary—he ran away from the Germans… As an artist, one has no home in Europe except Paris. The delicacy in all five artistic senses that Wagner's art requires, the fingers sensitive to fine shades of difference, the sickliness of the mind—these are found only in Paris. Nowhere else is there this passion about form, this seriousness about staging. It is Parisian seriousness in its fullest sense. In Germany, people have no idea of the enormous ambition living in the soul of a Parisian artist. The German is good-natured. Wagner was not good-natured at all… But I have already said enough (in “Beyond Good and Evil,” S. 256f.) about where Wagner belongs, who his closest relatives are. They belong to late French Romanticism: that kind of artist who soars high and sweeps others high along with him, like Delacroix, like Berlioz. All of them have a foundation of sickness, of something incurable in their nature. All are fanatics of expression, masters of technique through and through… Who was Wagner's first intelligent follower? Charles Baudelaire, the same man who first understood Delacroix, that typical decadent in whom a whole generation of artists recognized itself. Perhaps he was also the last… What have I never forgiven Wagner for? That he stooped to the Germans—that he became a German of the empire… Wherever Germany reaches, it spoils culture.—
6 All things considered, I couldn't have endured my youth without Wagner's music. For I was condemned to Germans. When you want to escape an unbearable pressure, you need hashish. Well, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the supreme antidote to everything German—a poison, I don't deny it… From the moment a piano arrangement of Tristan appeared—my compliments, Mr. von Bülow!—I was a Wagnerian. I saw Wagner's earlier works as beneath me: still too vulgar, too “German”… But even today I am looking for a work as dangerously fascinating, with an infinity as frightening and sweet, as Tristan. I search in vain through all the arts. All the strangeness of Lionardo da Vinci loses its spell at the first note of Tristan. This work is Wagner's very highest achievement. He recovered from it with Meistersinger and the Ring. Getting healthier is a step backward for someone with Wagner's nature… I count it a piece of the very greatest luck that I lived at the right time, and lived precisely among Germans, so that I was ready for this work. That is how far my curiosity as a psychologist goes. The world is poor for anyone who has never been sick enough for this “sensual pleasure of hell.” We may, we almost must, use a mystic's phrase here.—I think I know better than anyone the enormous things Wagner can do, the fifty worlds of unfamiliar ecstasy for which no one but him had wings. And being who I am, strong enough to turn even the most questionable and dangerous things to my advantage and grow stronger through them, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. What we have in common is that we have suffered more deeply, even from each other, than people of this century could suffer. This will keep bringing our names together forever. And just as surely as the Germans simply misunderstand Wagner, they misunderstand me and always will.—Two centuries of psychological and artistic training first, my Germanic gentlemen!… But you can't make up for missing that.—
7 One more word for the most sensitive ears: what I really want from music. I want it to be cheerful and deep, like an afternoon in October. I want it to have a character of its own, to be wild, tender, a sweet little woman full of malice and grace… I will never admit that a German could know what music is. Those called German musicians, the greatest first of all, are foreigners: Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutch—or Jews. Otherwise they are Germans of the strong race, Germans who have died out, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach, and Handel. I myself am still Polish enough to give up all other music for Chopin. For three reasons, I make an exception for Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, perhaps also for some things by Liszt, who surpasses all other musicians in the noble accents of his orchestration. Finally, I also except everything that has grown on the far side of the Alps—on this side… I couldn't do without Rossini, still less without my South in music, the music of my Venetian master Pietro Gasti. And when I say the far side of the Alps, I really mean only Venice. When I look for another word for music, I always find only the word Venice. I can't tell tears and music apart. I cannot think of happiness, of the South, without a shiver of fear.
By the bridge I stoodrecently, in the brown night.Singing came from far away;it welled up in golden dropsacross the trembling surface.Gondolas, lights, music—drunkenly it floated out into the twilight…
My soul, a stringed instrument,sang to itself, touched by something unseen,a secret gondola song along with it,trembling with happiness in many colors.—Was anyone listening to it?…
8 In all this—in the choice of food, place and climate, and relaxation—an instinct for self-preservation is in command. It shows itself most clearly as an instinct for self-defense. Not seeing many things, not hearing them, not letting them reach you: this is the first piece of wisdom, the first proof that you are not an accident but a necessity. The usual word for this instinct of self-defense is taste. Its command is not only to say no where saying yes would be “selflessness,” but also to say no as little as possible. Separate yourself, move away from whatever would make you say no again and again. The sense in this is that even the smallest expenses on defense, once they become a rule, a habit, make us extraordinarily and quite needlessly poorer. Our big expenses are the small ones that happen most often. Warding things off, not letting them get near, is an expense—don't fool yourself about this. It is strength wasted for negative purposes. Simply through the constant need to defend yourself, you can grow too weak to defend yourself anymore.—Suppose I stepped out of my house and found, instead of quiet, aristocratic Turin, a small German town. My instinct would have to brace itself to push back everything pressing in on it from this flattened, cowardly world. Or suppose I found the big German city, this vice turned into buildings, where nothing grows, where every single thing, good or bad, has been brought in from elsewhere. Wouldn't I have to become a hedgehog?—But having spines is a waste, even a double luxury, when you are free to have no spines, but open hands instead…
Another wise form of self-defense is to react as rarely as possible and to escape situations and conditions where you would be forced to hang up your “freedom,” your initiative, so to speak, and become nothing but something that reacts. Take the example of dealing with books. The scholar who basically does nothing but “turn over” books—about 200 a day for a philologist, by a modest estimate—eventually loses the ability to think for himself altogether. If he isn't turning over books, he isn't thinking. When he thinks, he is answering a stimulus—a thought he has read. In the end, all he does is react. The scholar uses up all his strength saying yes and no, criticizing what has already been thought. He no longer thinks himself… His instinct for self-defense has worn out. Otherwise, he would defend himself against books. The scholar—a decadent.—I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted people, born with rich and free natures, already “read to ruin” in their thirties. They are nothing but matches that you have to strike to make them give off sparks—“thoughts.”—Early in the morning, as day breaks, in all your freshness, in the dawn of your strength, to read a book—I call that a vice!—
9 At this point I can no longer avoid giving the real answer to the question of how you become what you are. This brings me to the masterpiece in the art of self-preservation—of selfishness… Suppose that one's task, one's calling, the destiny of that task, lies far beyond the ordinary measure. Then nothing would be more dangerous than seeing oneself together with this task. Becoming what you are requires that you have not the faintest idea what you are. From this point of view, even life's mistakes have their own meaning and value: the temporary side roads and wrong turns, the delays, the acts of “modesty,” the seriousness wasted on tasks outside the task. This expresses great wisdom, even the highest wisdom. Where “know yourself” would be a recipe for ruin, forgetting yourself, misunderstanding yourself, making yourself smaller, narrower, more average, becomes reason itself. In moral terms, loving your neighbor, living for others and other things, can be a protective measure that preserves the hardest sense of self. This is the exceptional case in which, against my rule and conviction, I take the side of the “selfless” drives. Here they work in the service of selfishness, self-discipline.—One must keep the whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—clear of any of the great commands. Be careful even of every grand word, every grand pose! They all risk making the instinct “understand itself” too early.—Meanwhile, the organizing “idea,” the one called to rule, keeps growing and growing in the depths. It begins to command. It slowly leads us back from side roads and wrong turns. It prepares individual qualities and skills that will one day prove essential as means to the whole. It develops all the serving abilities one after another before it lets anything be heard of the ruling task, of “goal,” “purpose,” “meaning.”—Seen from this side, my life is simply wonderful. The task of a revaluation of values may have needed more abilities than have ever lived together in one individual. Above all, it needed opposing abilities too, without letting them interfere with or destroy each other. A ranking of abilities; distance; the art of separating without creating enemies; mixing nothing, “reconciling” nothing; an enormous variety that is still the opposite of chaos—this was the precondition, the long, secret work and artistry of my instinct. Its higher care proved so strong that I never had even a guess at what was growing in me. All my abilities suddenly sprang out one day, mature, in their final perfection. I have no memory of ever making an effort. No trace of struggle can be found in my life. I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To “want” something, to “strive” for something, to have a “purpose,” a “wish” in view—I have no firsthand experience of any of this. Even at this moment I look out on my future—a vast future!—as on a smooth sea. No longing ripples across it. I don't want anything at all to be different from what it is. I myself don't want to become different… But I have always lived like this. I have had no wish. Someone who, past the age of forty-four, can say he has never pursued honors, women, or money!—Not that I lacked them… For example, one day I was a university professor. I had never remotely thought of such a thing, since I was barely 24 years old. In the same way, two years earlier, one day I was a philologist. I mean that my teacher Ritschl asked to print my first work in philology, my beginning in every sense, in his “Rheinisches Museum.” (Ritschl—I say this with respect—is the only scholar of genius I have seen to this day. He had that pleasant roguishness that marks us Thuringians and with which even a German becomes likable. Even to reach the truth, we still prefer the back roads. With these words I certainly don't mean to undervalue my closer countryman, the clever Leopold von Ranke…).
10 People will ask why I have told them all these little things, things usually thought unimportant. They will say I am harming myself by doing so, all the more if I am meant to stand for great tasks. My answer: these little things—food, place, climate, relaxation, all the fine points of selfishness—are more important beyond all measure than everything people have considered important up to now. This is exactly where we must begin to learn differently. The things humanity has seriously considered up to now aren't even realities. They are mere imaginings, or, to speak more strictly, lies born from the bad instincts of sick people, people harmful in the deepest sense: all those ideas of “God,” “soul,” “virtue,” “sin,” “the afterlife,” “truth,” “eternal life”… Yet people have looked for the greatness of human nature, its “divinity,” in them… Every question of politics, social order, and education has been falsified to its very roots because people took the most harmful people for great people. They taught us to despise the “little” things—that is, the basic matters of life itself… If I now compare myself with those honored up to now as the foremost human beings, the difference is plain to see. I don't even count these supposedly “foremost” ones as human beings at all. To me, they are humanity's rejects, monstrous offspring of sickness and vengeful instincts. They are all disastrous, basically incurable monsters who take revenge on life… I want to be their opposite. My special advantage is that I have the finest sensitivity to every sign of healthy instincts. There isn't a sickly trait in me. Even during serious illness, I never became sickly. Anyone looking for a trace of fanaticism in my nature will look in vain. No one will be able to point to any moment in my life when I took an arrogant or theatrical pose. The drama of a pose is not part of greatness. Anyone who needs poses at all is fake… Beware of all people who make a striking picture!—Life has been easy for me, easiest when it demanded the hardest things from me. Anyone who saw me during the seventy days of this fall, when I did nothing but first-rate things without a break, things no one can copy from me—or show me beforehand—with a responsibility for all the thousands of years after me, will have noticed no trace of tension in me. All the more so, they will have noticed an overflowing freshness and cheerfulness. I have never eaten with more pleasant feelings, never slept better.—I know no other way of dealing with great tasks than play. As a sign of greatness, this is an essential condition. The slightest strain, a gloomy face, any harsh tone in the throat, all count against a person—how much more against their work!… You must have no nerves… To suffer from loneliness also counts against you. I have only ever suffered from “too much company”… At an absurdly early age, at seven, I already knew that no human word would ever reach me. Has anyone ever seen me saddened by that?—Even today I am just as friendly toward everyone. I even show special respect to the lowliest. In all this there isn't a grain of arrogance or secret contempt. Anyone I despise guesses that I despise them. My mere existence outrages everyone with bad blood in their body… My formula for greatness in a human being is love of fate: not wanting anything to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not merely putting up with what is necessary, still less hiding it—all idealism is dishonesty in the face of what is necessary—but loving it…
About this section
Why I Am So Clever 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 4 of 17 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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