Preface
Original German
zur zweiten Ausgabe.
1 Diesem Buche thut vielleicht nicht nur Eine Vorrede noth; und zuletzt bliebe immer noch der Zweifel bestehn, ob Jemand, ohne etwas Aehnliches erlebt zu haben, dem Erlebnisse dieses Buchs durch Vorreden näher gebracht werden kann. Es scheint in der Sprache des Thauwinds geschrieben: es ist Uebermuth, Unruhe, Widerspruch, Aprilwetter darin, so dass man beständig ebenso an die Nähe des Winters als an den Sieg über den Winter gemahnt wird, der kommt, kommen muss, vielleicht schon gekommen ist … Die Dankbarkeit strömt fortwährend aus, als ob eben das Unerwartetste geschehn sei, die Dankbarkeit eines Genesenden, — denn die Genesung war dieses Unerwartetste. „Fröhliche Wissenschaft“: das bedeutet die Saturnalien eines Geistes, der einem furchtbaren langen Drucke geduldig widerstanden hat — geduldig, streng, kalt, ohne sich zu unterwerfen, aber ohne Hoffnung —, und der jetzt mit Einem Male von der Hoffnung angefallen wird, von der Hoffnung auf Gesundheit, von der Trunkenheit der Genesung. Was Wunders, dass dabei viel Unvernünftiges und Närrisches an’s Licht kommt, viel muthwillige Zärtlichkeit, selbst auf Probleme verschwendet, die ein stachlichtes Fell haben und nicht danach angethan sind, geliebkost und gelockt zu werden. Dies ganze Buch ist eben Nichts als eine Lustbarkeit nach langer Entbehrung und Ohnmacht, das Frohlocken der wiederkehrenden Kraft, des neu erwachten Glaubens an ein Morgen und Uebermorgen, des plötzlichen Gefühls und Vorgefühls von Zukunft, von nahen Abenteuern, von wieder offenen Meeren, von wieder erlaubten, wieder geglaubten Zielen. Und was lag nunmehr Alles hinter mir! Dieses Stück Wüste, Erschöpfung, Unglaube, Vereisung mitten in der Jugend, dieses eingeschaltete Greisenthum an unrechter Stelle, diese Tyrannei des Schmerzes überboten noch durch die Tyrannei des Stolzes, der die Folgerungen des Schmerzes ablehnte — und Folgerungen sind Tröstungen —, diese radikale Vereinsamung als Nothwehr gegen eine krankhaft hellseherisch gewordene Menschenverachtung, diese grundsätzliche Einschränkung auf das Bittere, Herbe, Wehethuende der Erkenntniss, wie sie der Ekel verordnete, der aus einer unvorsichtigen geistigen Diät und Verwöhnung — man heisst sie Romantik — allmählich gewachsen war —, oh wer mir das Alles nachfühlen könnte! Wer es aber könnte, würde mir sicher noch mehr zu Gute halten als etwas Thorheit, Ausgelassenheit, „fröhliche Wissenschaft“, — zum Beispiel die Handvoll Lieder, welche dem Buche dies Mal beigegeben sind — Lieder, in denen sich ein Dichter auf eine schwer verzeihliche Weise über alle Dichter lustig macht. — Ach, es sind nicht nur die Dichter und ihre schönen „lyrischen Gefühle“, an denen dieser Wieder-Erstandene seine Bosheit auslassen muss: wer weiss, was für ein Opfer er sich sucht, was für ein Unthier von parodischem Stoff ihn in Kürze reizen wird? „Incipit tragoedia“ — heisst es am Schlusse dieses bedenklich-unbedenklichen Buchs: man sei auf seiner Hut! Irgend etwas ausbündig Schlimmes und Boshaftes kündigt sich an: incipit parodia, es ist kein Zweifel …
2 — Aber lassen wir Herrn Nietzsche: was geht es uns an, dass Herr Nietzsche wieder gesund wurde? … Ein Psychologe kennt wenig so anziehende Fragen, wie die nach dem Verhältniss von Gesundheit und Philosophie, und für den Fall, dass er selber krank wird, bringt er seine ganze wissenschaftliche Neugierde mit in seine Krankheit. Man hat nämlich, vorausgesetzt, dass man eine Person ist, nothwendig auch die Philosophie seiner Person: doch giebt es da einen erheblichen Unterschied. Bei dem Einen sind es seine Mängel, welche philosophiren, bei dem Andern seine Reichthümer und Kräfte. Ersterer hat seine Philosophie nöthig, sei es als Halt, Beruhigung, Arznei, Erlösung, Erhebung, Selbstentfremdung; bei Letzterem ist sie nur ein schöner Luxus, im besten Falle die Wollust einer triumphirenden Dankbarkeit, welche sich zuletzt noch in kosmischen Majuskeln an den Himmel der Begriffe schreiben muss. Im andern, gewöhnlicheren Falle aber, wenn die Nothstände Philosophie treiben, wie bei allen kranken Denkern — und vielleicht überwiegen die kranken Denker in der Geschichte der Philosophie —: was wird aus dem Gedanken selbst werden, der unter den Druck der Krankheit gebracht wird? Dies ist die Frage, die den Psychologen angeht: und hier ist das Experiment möglich. Nicht anders als es ein Reisender macht, der sich vorsetzt, zu einer bestimmten Stunde aufzuwachen und sich dann ruhig dem Schlafe überlässt: so ergeben wir Philosophen, gesetzt, dass wir krank werden, uns zeitweilig mit Leib und Seele der Krankheit — wir machen gleichsam vor uns die Augen zu. Und wie Jener weiss, dass irgend Etwas nicht schläft, irgend Etwas die Stunden abzählt und ihn aufwecken wird, so wissen auch wir, dass der entscheidende Augenblick uns wach finden wird, — dass dann Etwas hervorspringt und den Geist auf der That ertappt, ich meine auf der Schwäche oder Umkehr oder Ergebung oder Verhärtung oder Verdüsterung und wie alle die krankhaften Zustände des Geistes heissen, welche in gesunden Tagen den Stolz des Geistes wider sich haben (denn es bleibt bei dem alten Reime „der stolze Geist, der Pfau, das Pferd sind die drei stolzesten Thier’ auf der Erd“ —). Man lernt nach einer derartigen Selbst-Befragung, Selbst-Versuchung, mit einem feineren Auge nach Allem, was überhaupt bisher philosophirt worden ist, hinsehn: man erräth besser als vorher die unwillkürlichen Abwege, Seitengassen, Ruhestellen, Sonnenstellen des Gedankens, auf die leidende Denker gerade als Leidende geführt und verführt werden, man weiss nunmehr, wohin unbewusst der kranke Leib und sein Bedürfniss den Geist drängt, stösst, lockt — nach Sonne, Stille, Milde, Geduld, Arznei, Labsal in irgend einem Sinne. Jede Philosophie, welche den Frieden höher stellt als den Krieg, jede Ethik mit einer negativen Fassung des Begriffs Glück, jede Metaphysik und Physik, welche ein Finale kennt, einen Endzustand irgend welcher Art, jedes vorwiegend aesthetische oder religiöse Verlangen nach einem Abseits, Jenseits, Ausserhalb, Oberhalb erlaubt zu fragen, ob nicht die Krankheit das gewesen ist, was den Philosophen inspirirt hat. Die unbewusste Verkleidung physiologischer Bedürfnisse unter die Mäntel des Objektiven, Ideellen, Rein-Geistigen geht bis zum Erschrecken weit, — und oft genug habe ich mich gefragt, ob nicht, im Grossen gerechnet, Philosophie bisher überhaupt nur eine Auslegung des Leibes und ein Missverständniss des Leibes gewesen ist. Hinter den höchsten Werthurtheilen, von denen bisher die Geschichte des Gedankens geleitet wurde, liegen Missverständnisse der leiblichen Beschaffenheit verborgen, sei es von Einzelnen, sei es von Ständen oder ganzen Rassen. Man darf alle jene kühnen Tollheiten der Metaphysik, sonderlich deren Antworten auf die Frage nach dem Werth des Daseins, zunächst immer als Symptome bestimmter Leiber ansehn; und wenn derartigen Welt-Bejahungen oder Welt-Verneinungen in Bausch und Bogen, wissenschaftlich gemessen, nicht ein Korn von Bedeutung innewohnt, so geben sie doch dem Historiker und Psychologen um so werthvollere Winke, als Symptome, wie gesagt, des Leibes, seines Gerathens und Missrathens, seiner Fülle, Mächtigkeit, Selbstherrlichkeit in der Geschichte, oder aber seiner Hemmungen, Ermüdungen, Verarmungen, seines Vorgefühls vom Ende, seines Willens zum Ende. Ich erwarte immer noch, dass ein philosophischer Arzt im ausnahmsweisen Sinne des Wortes — ein Solcher, der dem Problem der Gesammt-Gesundheit von Volk, Zeit, Rasse, Menschheit nachzugehen hat — einmal den Muth haben wird, meinen Verdacht auf die Spitze zu bringen und den Satz zu wagen: bei allem Philosophiren handelte es sich bisher gar nicht um „Wahrheit“, sondern um etwas Anderes, sagen wir um Gesundheit, Zukunft, Wachsthum, Macht, Leben …
3 — Man erräth, dass ich nicht mit Undankbarkeit von jener Zeit schweren Siechthums Abschied nehmen möchte, deren Gewinn auch heute noch nicht für mich ausgeschöpft ist: so wie ich mir gut genug bewusst bin, was ich überhaupt in meiner wechselreichen Gesundheit vor allen Vierschrötigen des Geistes voraus habe. Ein Philosoph, der den Gang durch viele Gesundheiten gemacht hat und immer wieder macht, ist auch durch ebensoviele Philosophien hindurchgegangen: er kann eben nicht anders als seinen Zustand jedes Mal in die geistigste Form und Ferne umzusetzen, — diese Kunst der Transfiguration ist eben Philosophie. Es steht uns Philosophen nicht frei, zwischen Seele und Leib zu trennen, wie das Volk trennt, es steht uns noch weniger frei, zwischen Seele und Geist zu trennen. Wir sind keine denkenden Frösche, keine Objektivir- und Registrir-Apparate mit kalt gestellten Eingeweiden, — wir müssen beständig unsre Gedanken aus unsrem Schmerz gebären und mütterlich ihnen Alles mitgeben, was wir von Blut, Herz, Feuer, Lust, Leidenschaft, Qual, Gewissen, Schicksal, Verhängniss in uns haben. Leben — das heisst für uns Alles, was wir sind, beständig in Licht und Flamme verwandeln, auch Alles, was uns trifft, wir können gar nicht anders. Und was die Krankheit angeht: würden wir nicht fast zu fragen versucht sein, ob sie uns überhaupt entbehrlich ist? Erst der grosse Schmerz ist der letzte Befreier des Geistes, als der Lehrmeister des grossen Verdachtes, der aus jedem U ein X macht, ein ächtes rechtes X, das heisst den vorletzten Buchstaben vor dem letzten … Erst der grosse Schmerz, jener lange langsame Schmerz, der sich Zeit nimmt, in dem wir gleichsam wie mit grünem Holze verbrannt werden, zwingt uns Philosophen, in unsre letzte Tiefe zu steigen und alles Vertrauen, alles Gutmüthige, Verschleiernde, Milde, Mittlere, wohinein wir vielleicht vordem unsre Menschlichkeit gesetzt haben, von uns zu thun. Ich zweifle, ob ein solcher Schmerz „verbessert“ —; aber ich weiss, dass er uns vertieft. Sei es nun, dass wir ihm unsern Stolz, unsern Hohn, unsre Willenskraft entgegenstellen lernen und es dem Indianer gleichthun, der, wie schlimm auch gepeinigt, sich an seinem Peiniger durch die Bosheit seiner Zunge schadlos hält; sei es, dass wir uns vor dem Schmerz in jenes orientalische Nichts zurückziehn — man heisst es Nirvana —, in das stumme, starre, taube Sich-Ergeben, Sich-Vergessen, Sich-Auslöschen: man kommt aus solchen langen gefährlichen Uebungen der Herrschaft über sich als ein andrer Mensch heraus, mit einigen Fragezeichen mehr, vor Allem mit dem Willen, fürderhin mehr, tiefer, strenger, härter, böser, stiller zu fragen als man bis dahin gefragt hatte. Das Vertrauen zum Leben ist dahin: das Leben selbst wurde zum Problem. — Möge man ja nicht glauben, dass Einer damit nothwendig zum Düsterling geworden sei! Selbst die Liebe zum Leben ist noch möglich, — nur liebt man anders. Es ist die Liebe zu einem Weibe, das uns Zweifel macht … Der Reiz alles Problematischen, die Freude am X ist aber bei solchen geistigeren, vergeistigteren Menschen zu gross, als dass diese Freude nicht immer wieder wie eine helle Gluth über alle Noth des Problematischen, über alle Gefahr der Unsicherheit, selbst über die Eifersucht des Liebenden zusammenschlüge. Wir kennen ein neues Glück: …
4 Zuletzt, dass das Wesentlichste nicht ungesagt bleibe: man kommt aus solchen Abgründen, aus solchem schweren Siechthum, auch aus dem Siechthum des schweren Verdachts, neugeboren zurück, gehäutet, kitzlicher, boshafter, mit einem feineren Geschmacke für die Freude, mit einer zarteren Zunge für alle guten Dinge, mit lustigeren Sinnen, mit einer zweiten gefährlicheren Unschuld in der Freude, kindlicher zugleich und hundert Mal raffinierter als man jemals vorher gewesen war. Oh wie Einem nunmehr der Genuss zuwider ist, der grobe dumpfe braune Genuss, wie ihn sonst die Geniessenden, unsre „Gebildeten“, unsre Reichen und Regierenden verstehn! Wie boshaft wir nunmehr dem grossen Jahrmarkts-Bumbum zuhören, mit dem sich der „gebildete Mensch“ und Grossstädter heute durch Kunst, Buch und Musik zu „geistigen Genüssen“, unter Mithülfe geistiger Getränke, nothzüchtigen lässt! Wie uns jetzt der Theater-Schrei der Leidenschaft in den Ohren weh thut, wie unsrem Geschmacke der ganze romantische Aufruhr und Sinnen-Wirrwarr, den der gebildete Pöbel liebt, sammt seinen Aspirationen nach dem Erhabenen, Gehobenen, Verschrobenen fremd geworden ist! Nein, wenn wir Genesenden überhaupt eine Kunst noch brauchen, so ist es eine andre Kunst — eine spöttische, leichte, flüchtige, göttlich unbehelligte, göttlich künstliche Kunst, welche wie eine helle Flamme in einen unbewölkten Himmel hineinlodert! Vor Allem: eine Kunst für Künstler, nur für Künstler! Wir verstehn uns hinterdrein besser auf Das, was dazu zuerst noth thut, die Heiterkeit, jede Heiterkeit, meine Freunde! auch als Künstler —: ich möchte es beweisen. Wir wissen Einiges jetzt zu gut, wir Wissenden: oh wie wir nunmehr lernen, gut zu vergessen, gut nicht-zu-wissen, als Künstler! Und was unsre Zukunft betrifft: man wird uns schwerlich wieder auf den Pfaden jener ägyptischen Jünglinge finden, welche Nachts Tempel unsicher machen, Bildsäulen umarmen und durchaus Alles, was mit guten Gründen verdeckt gehalten wird, entschleiern, aufdecken, in helles Licht stellen wollen. Nein, dieser schlechte Geschmack, dieser Wille zur Wahrheit, zur „Wahrheit um jeden Preis“, dieser Jünglings-Wahnsinn in der Liebe zur Wahrheit — ist uns verleidet: dazu sind wir zu erfahren, zu ernst, zu lustig, zu gebrannt, zu tief … Wir glauben nicht mehr daran, dass Wahrheit noch Wahrheit bleibt, wenn man ihr die Schleier abzieht; wir haben genug gelebt, um dies zu glauben. Heute gilt es uns als eine Sache der Schicklichkeit, dass man nicht Alles nackt sehn, nicht bei Allem dabei sein, nicht Alles verstehn und „wissen“ wolle. „Ist es wahr, dass der liebe Gott überall zugegen ist?“ fragte ein kleines Mädchen seine Mutter: „aber ich finde das unanständig“ — ein Wink für Philosophen! Man sollte die Scham besser in Ehren halten, mit der sich die Natur hinter Räthsel und bunte Ungewissheiten versteckt hat. Vielleicht ist die Wahrheit ein Weib, das Gründe hat, ihre Gründe nicht sehn zu lassen? Vielleicht ist ihr Name, griechisch zu reden, Baubo? … Oh diese Griechen! Sie verstanden sich darauf, zu leben: dazu thut Noth, tapfer bei der Oberfläche, der Falte, der Haut stehn zu bleiben, den Schein anzubeten, an Formen, an Töne, an Worte, an den ganzen Olymp des Scheins zu glauben! Diese Griechen waren oberflächlich — aus Tiefe! Und kommen wir nicht eben darauf zurück, wir Wagehalse des Geistes, die wir die höchste und gefährlichste Spitze des gegenwärtigen Gedankens erklettert und uns von da aus umgesehn haben, die wir von da aus hinabgesehn haben? Sind wir nicht eben darin — Griechen? Anbeter der Formen, der Töne, der Worte? Eben darum — Künstler?
Ruta bei Genua,im Herbst 1886.
Musean translation
Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation of the expanded second edition (E. W. Fritzsch, Leipzig, 1887): the preface, the verse prologue “Jest, Cunning and Revenge”, all five books (aphorisms 1–383), and the appendix “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird”. Made directly from the German, read from the printed pages; verse stays verse, and Nietzsche’s own emphases, dashes and numbered divisions are kept.
to the second edition.
1 This book needs perhaps not one preface only; and in the end the doubt would still remain whether anyone who has not lived through something like it could be brought closer to the experience of this book by way of prefaces. It seems written in the language of the thawing wind: there is high spirits in it, unrest, contradiction, April weather, so that one is continually reminded as much of the nearness of winter as of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has come already … Gratitude keeps streaming out, as though just the most unexpected thing had happened, the gratitude of a convalescent — for convalescence was this most unexpected thing. “Gay science”: that means the Saturnalia of a spirit that has patiently withstood a terrible long pressure — patiently, strictly, coldly, without submitting, but without hope —, and that is now suddenly overcome by hope, by the hope of health, by the drunkenness of convalescence. What wonder that much unreasonable and foolish stuff comes to light in this, much capricious tenderness, squandered even on problems that have a bristly hide and were not made to be petted and coaxed. This whole book is nothing but a festivity after long privation and impotence, the jubilation of returning strength, of a newly awakened faith in a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow, of the sudden feeling and forefeeling of the future, of near adventures, of seas open again, of goals permitted again, believed in again. And what now lay behind me! That stretch of desert, exhaustion, unbelief, freezing in the middle of youth, that old age slipped in where it did not belong, that tyranny of pain outdone still by the tyranny of pride, which rejected the consequences of pain — and consequences are consolations —, that radical isolation as a defense against a contempt for humanity turned morbidly clairvoyant, that principled restriction to the bitter, harsh, hurtful side of knowledge, as the nausea prescribed it, the nausea that had grown slowly out of an imprudent spiritual diet and coddling — people call it romanticism —, oh who could feel all that after me! Whoever could, would certainly forgive me more than a little folly, exuberance, “gay science” — for instance the handful of songs that are given to the book this time — songs in which a poet makes fun of all poets in a way that is hard to forgive. — Ah, it is not only the poets and their fine “lyrical feelings” on whom this man come back to life must unleash his malice: who knows what victim he is looking for, what monster of parodic material will soon entice him? “Incipit tragoedia” — so it says at the end of this questionable-unquestionable book: let one be on one's guard! Something exceptionally bad and malicious is announcing itself: incipit parodia, there is no doubt …
2 — But let us leave Herr Nietzsche: what is it to us that Herr Nietzsche got well again? … A psychologist knows few questions as attractive as that of the relation between health and philosophy, and in the case where he himself falls ill, he brings all his scientific curiosity along into his illness. One has, namely, provided that one is a person, necessarily also the philosophy of one's person: yet there is a considerable difference here. In the one case it is his deficiencies that philosophize, in the other his riches and powers. The former needs his philosophy, be it as a support, a calming, a medicine, a redemption, an exaltation, a self-estrangement; in the latter it is only a beautiful luxury, at best the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that in the end still has to write itself in cosmic capitals across the sky of concepts. In the other, more ordinary case, however, when distress drives one to philosophy, as with all sick thinkers — and perhaps sick thinkers predominate in the history of philosophy —: what becomes of the thought itself when it is brought under the pressure of illness? This is the question that concerns the psychologist: and here the experiment is possible. Not otherwise than a traveler does, who resolves to wake at a certain hour and then abandons himself quietly to sleep: so we philosophers, supposing that we fall ill, give ourselves over for a time, body and soul, to the illness — we shut our eyes, so to speak, before ourselves. And as that traveler knows that something is not sleeping, that something is counting the hours and will wake him, so we too know that the decisive moment will find us awake, — that then something leaps out and catches the spirit in the act, I mean in the weakness or the reversal or the resignation or the hardening or the darkening and whatever else the morbid states of the spirit are called, states that in healthy days have the pride of the spirit against them (for the old rhyme holds: “the proud spirit, the peacock, the horse are the three proudest animals on earth” —). After such a self-questioning, self-temptation, one learns to look with a finer eye at everything that has so far been philosophized: one guesses better than before the involuntary detours, side streets, resting places, sun spots of thought to which suffering thinkers are led and seduced precisely as sufferers; one knows now where the sick body and its need drive the spirit, push it, lure it — toward sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, refreshment in some sense or other. Every philosophy that ranks peace higher than war, every ethics with a negative definition of the concept of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows a finale, an end state of some kind, every predominantly aesthetic or religious longing for a somewhere else, beyond, outside, above, permits the question whether illness was not the thing that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguising of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, the ideal, the purely spiritual goes frighteningly far, — and often enough I have asked myself whether, on a large reckoning, philosophy has so far not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments, by which the history of thought has so far been guided, lie misunderstandings of bodily constitution, whether of individuals or of classes or of whole races. One may regard all those bold follies of metaphysics, especially their answers to the question of the value of existence, first of all always as symptoms of particular bodies; and even if such world-affirmations or world-denials taken wholesale, measured scientifically, carry not a grain of significance in them, they still give the historian and psychologist hints all the more valuable, as symptoms, as I said, of the body, of its thriving and its failure, of its fullness, power, self-mastery in history, or else of its inhibitions, exhaustions, impoverishments, of its forefeeling of the end, of its will to the end. I still await the day when a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the word — one whose task it is to pursue the problem of the total health of a people, an age, a race, of humanity — will once have the courage to push my suspicion to its point and dare the proposition: in all philosophizing so far it was never a matter of “truth” at all, but of something else, let us say of health, future, growth, power, life …
3 — One guesses that I would not take leave of that time of severe sickness with ingratitude, a time whose yield is not even today exhausted for me: just as I am well enough aware of what I have ahead of all the blockheads of the spirit, in my changeable health. A philosopher who has made the circuit through many healths and keeps making it again has also passed through just as many philosophies: he simply cannot do otherwise than translate his condition each time into the most spiritual form and distance, — this art of transfiguration is precisely philosophy. It is not open to us philosophers to separate soul and body the way the people separate them, and still less open to separate soul and spirit. We are no thinking frogs, no objectifying and registering machines with coldly installed guts, — we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and mother them with everything we have in us of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, torment, conscience, fate, doom. To live — that means for us to transform constantly into light and flame everything we are, everything too that befalls us, we simply cannot do otherwise. And as for illness: would we not almost be tempted to ask whether it is dispensable to us at all? Only the great pain is the last liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of the great suspicion, which turns every U into an X, a genuine right X, that is the second-to-last letter before the last … Only the great pain, that long slow pain that takes its time, in which we are burned, so to speak, as with green wood, compels us philosophers to descend into our last depth and to strip from ourselves all trust, all good-naturedness, veiling, mildness, mediocrity, into which we may formerly have put our humanity. I doubt whether such pain “improves” —; but I know that it deepens us. Whether now we learn to oppose it with our pride, our scorn, our will-power, and do as the Indian does, who, however badly tormented, holds his own against his tormentor by the malice of his tongue; whether we withdraw before pain into that oriental nothing — people call it Nirvana —, into the mute, rigid, deaf surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-extinguishing: one comes out of such long dangerous exercises in mastery over oneself as another human being, with a few more question marks, above all with the will to question more, deeper, more strictly, harder, more wickedly, more quietly than one had questioned until then. Trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. — Let no one believe that one has thereby necessarily become a gloomy fellow! Even love of life is still possible, — only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman who makes us doubt … The charm of everything problematic, the joy in the X, is however too great in such more spiritual, more spiritualized human beings for that joy not to keep breaking out again like a bright blaze over all the distress of the problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness: …
4 Lastly, so that the most essential is not left unsaid: one comes back out of such abysses, out of such severe sickness, also out of the sickness of the severe suspicion, newborn, with a new skin, more ticklish, more malicious, with a finer taste for joy, with a more delicate tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second, more dangerous innocence in joy, at once more childlike and a hundred times more refined than one had ever been before. Oh how enjoyment now disgusts one, the coarse, dull, brown enjoyment as the enjoyers otherwise understand it, our “educated” people, our rich and ruling people! How maliciously we now listen to the great fairground tum-ta-ta with which the “educated man” and city dweller today has himself forcibly bred into “spiritual enjoyments” by art, book and music, with the help of spiritual drinks! How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how foreign to our taste the whole romantic turmoil and sensory confusion that the educated mob loves has become, together with its aspirations toward the sublime, the elevated, the twisted! No, if we convalescents still need an art at all, it is an other art — a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art, which blazes like a bright flame into an unclouded sky! Above all: an art for artists, only for artists! We understand afterwards better what is first needed for that, cheerfulness, every cheerfulness, my friends! also as artists —: I should like to prove it. We know a few things too well now, we who know: oh how we now learn to forget well, to not-know well, as artists! And as for our future: one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who make temples unsafe at night, embrace statues and want to unveil, uncover, place in bright light everything that is kept covered with good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth — has become repugnant to us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too deep … We no longer believe that truth remains truth when its veils are drawn off; we have lived enough to believe this. Today it counts with us as a matter of decency that one does not want to see everything naked, not be present at everything, not understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that the good God is everywhere present?” a little girl asked her mother: “but I find that indecent” — a hint for philosophers! One should hold in better honor the modesty with which nature has hidden itself behind riddles and variegated uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting her reasons be seen? Perhaps her name, to speak Greek, is Baubo? … Oh these Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stand bravely on the surface, the fold, the skin, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! These Greeks were superficial — out of depth! And are we not coming back to precisely that, we daredevils of the spirit, who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from there, who have looked down from there? Are we not precisely in this — Greeks? Worshipers of forms, of tones, of words? Precisely for that reason — artists?
Ruta near Genoa,in the autumn of 1886.
Plain English translation
Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made directly from the same 1887 German text, division by division and aphorism by aphorism. Same divisions and numbering; it explains what Nietzsche’s compressed German leaves implicit instead of imitating its cadence.
to the Second Edition.
1 This book may need more than one preface. And in the end a doubt would remain: can anyone who has not lived through something similar be brought closer to the experience behind this book by prefaces? It seems to be written in the language of a thawing wind. There is exuberance, restlessness, contradiction and April weather in it, so that you are constantly reminded of how close winter is, and also of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, and perhaps has already come… Gratitude keeps pouring out of it, as if the most unexpected thing had just happened. It is the gratitude of someone who is recovering, because recovery was that most unexpected thing. “Gay Science” means the Saturnalia of a mind that has patiently withstood a terrible, long pressure—patiently, sternly, coldly, without giving in, but also without hope—and that is now suddenly attacked by hope, by the hope of health, by the intoxication of recovery. No wonder that so much that is unreasonable and foolish comes to light along with it, so much playful tenderness, even spent on problems that have a prickly hide and are not made to be petted and coaxed. This whole book is nothing but a celebration after a long time of going without and being powerless. It is the rejoicing of returning strength, of a newly awakened faith in a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow, of a sudden feeling and foretaste of the future, of adventures close at hand, of seas open again, of goals allowed again and believed in again. And how much now lay behind me! There was this stretch of desert, exhaustion, unbelief and icy numbness in the middle of my youth. There was this old age inserted at the wrong place. There was this tyranny of pain, outdone by the tyranny of pride that refused the conclusions of pain—and conclusions are comforts. There was this radical loneliness as self-defense against a contempt for people that had become sickly clear-sighted. There was this strict limiting of myself to the bitter, harsh, painful side of knowledge, as the disgust ordered it, a disgust that had grown slowly out of an unwise mental diet and pampering—people call it Romanticism. Oh, if only someone could feel all this along with me! But anyone who could would surely forgive me for more than a little folly, high spirits and “gay science”—for example, the handful of songs added to the book this time, songs in which a poet makes fun of all poets in a way that is hard to forgive. —Ah, it is not only the poets and their beautiful “lyrical feelings” on whom this man who has risen again has to vent his malice. Who knows what victim he is looking for, what monster of parody material will soon tempt him? “The tragedy begins,” it says at the end of this book that is both troubling and carefree. Be on your guard! Something outrageously bad and malicious is announcing itself: the parody begins, there is no doubt…
2 —But let us leave Mr. Nietzsche aside. Why should we care that Mr. Nietzsche got well again? … A psychologist knows few questions as attractive as the one about how health and philosophy are related. If the psychologist falls ill, they bring all their scientific curiosity into the illness. After all, anyone who is a person necessarily has the philosophy of their person as well. But there is a considerable difference. In one person it is their shortcomings that do the philosophizing; in another it is their riches and strengths. The first needs a philosophy, whether as support, calming, medicine, salvation, uplift or self-estrangement. For the second it is only a beautiful luxury, at best the pleasure of a triumphant gratitude, which in the end has to write itself across the sky of concepts in cosmic capital letters. But in the other, more usual case, when need drives the philosophizing, as with all sick thinkers—and perhaps sick thinkers outnumber the others in the history of philosophy—what will become of the thought itself when it is put under the pressure of illness? This is the question that concerns the psychologist, and here an experiment is possible. Think of a traveler who resolves to wake up at a certain hour and then calmly lets themselves fall asleep. In the same way, when we philosophers fall ill, we give ourselves up for a time, body and soul, to the illness. We close our eyes to ourselves, so to speak. And just as the traveler knows that something stays awake, something counts the hours and will wake them up, we also know that the decisive moment will find us awake. Then something will leap forward and catch the mind in the act. I mean in weakness, or reversal, or resignation, or hardening, or gloom—whatever all those sick states of the mind are called, which in healthy days have the pride of the mind against them. (For the old rhyme still holds: “The proud mind, the peacock and the horse are the three proudest animals on earth.”) After questioning and tempting yourself like this, you learn to look with a finer eye at everything that has been philosophized so far. You guess better than before the involuntary detours, side streets, resting places and sunny places of thought, to which suffering thinkers are led and misled precisely because they suffer. You now know where the sick body and its needs push, shove and lure the mind without its knowing—toward sun, quiet, mildness, patience, medicine, refreshment of some kind. Every philosophy that ranks peace higher than war, every ethics with a negative definition of the idea of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows a finale, a final state of some kind, every mainly aesthetic or religious longing for a place apart, a beyond, an outside, an above, allows us to ask whether illness was what inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguising of physical needs under the cloaks of the objective, the ideal, the purely mental goes frighteningly far. And I have often asked myself whether, taken on the large scale, philosophy up to now has been nothing but an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments that have guided the history of thought until now, there lie hidden misunderstandings of the body’s condition, whether of individuals, of social classes or of whole races. We may look at all those bold follies of metaphysics, especially their answers to the question of the value of existence, first of all as symptoms of particular bodies. Even if such affirmations or denials of the world, taken as a whole, do not contain a grain of significance when measured scientifically, they still give the historian and the psychologist all the more valuable hints. They are, as I said, symptoms of the body: of how it turned out, well or badly, of its fullness, power and self-rule in history, or else of its inhibitions, tiredness and impoverishment, its foreboding of the end, its will to the end. I am still waiting for a philosophical physician, in the exceptional sense of the word—one who has to investigate the problem of the overall health of a people, an age, a race, humanity—to have the courage, one day, to push my suspicion to its extreme and to risk the statement: in all philosophizing, up to now, it was not about “truth” at all, but about something else, let us say health, future, growth, power, life…
3 —You can guess that I do not want to take leave of that time of heavy sickness without gratitude. Its gain is not used up for me even today. I am also quite aware of what I have in my ever-changing health over all the thickset minds. A philosopher who has gone through many kinds of health, and keeps going through them, has also gone through as many philosophies. They simply cannot do otherwise than turn their condition, each time, into the most intellectual form and distance. This art of transfiguration is exactly what philosophy is. We philosophers are not free to separate soul from body, as ordinary people separate them. We are even less free to separate soul from mind. We are not thinking frogs, not devices for objectifying and recording with their insides kept cold. We must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and like mothers give them everything we have in us of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, torment, conscience, fate, doom. Life—for us that means constantly turning everything we are into light and flame, and everything that happens to us too. We simply cannot do otherwise. And as for illness: would we not almost be tempted to ask whether we can do without it at all? Only great pain is the final liberator of the mind, as the teacher of the great suspicion, which makes an X out of every U, a genuine, proper X, that is, the next-to-last letter before the last… Only great pain, that long, slow pain that takes its time, in which we are burned, as it were, with green wood, forces us philosophers to go down into our last depth and to put away from us all trust, everything good-natured, veiling, mild, middling, in which we may have placed our humanity before. I doubt that such pain “improves” us—but I know that it makes us deeper. Whether we learn to set our pride, our scorn and our willpower against it, and do as the Native American does, who, however badly tormented, takes revenge on the tormentor with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from the pain into that Eastern nothingness—people call it Nirvana—into the mute, rigid, deaf giving-in, forgetting of oneself, extinguishing of oneself: one comes out of such long, dangerous exercises in mastery over oneself as a different person, with a few more question marks, above all with the will to ask from now on more, more deeply, more strictly, harder, more wickedly, more quietly than one had asked until then. Trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. —Let no one think that this necessarily makes a person gloomy! Even love of life is still possible—only one loves differently. It is like the love of a woman who makes us doubt… But the charm of everything problematic, the joy in the X, is too great in such more intellectual, more spiritualized people for this joy not to close over, again and again like a bright glow, all the distress of the problematic, all the danger of uncertainty, even the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness: …
4 Finally, so that the most essential thing does not go unsaid: one comes back from such abysses, from such heavy sickness, even from the sickness of heavy suspicion, newborn, with a new skin, more ticklish, more mischievous, with a finer taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second, more dangerous innocence in joy, at once more childlike and a hundred times more refined than one had ever been before. Oh, how repulsive pleasure has become now, the coarse, dull, brown pleasure as pleasure-seekers usually understand it, our “educated people,” our rich and our rulers! How maliciously we now listen to the great fairground boom-boom with which “educated people” and big-city dwellers today let themselves be raped into “spiritual pleasures” by art, books and music, with the help of spirits! How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears! How foreign our taste has become to the whole Romantic uproar and confusion of the senses that the educated rabble loves, along with its aspirations toward the sublime, the lofty, the warped! No: if we who are recovering need any art at all, it is a different art—a mocking, light, fleeting art, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial, that blazes like a bright flame into a cloudless sky! Above all: an art for artists, only for artists! Afterward we understand better what is needed for that first: cheerfulness, every kind of cheerfulness, my friends! Also as artists—I would like to prove it. We now know some things too well, we who know. Oh, how we now learn to forget well, to not-know well, as artists! And as for our future: you will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who make temples unsafe at night, embrace statues, and want at all costs to unveil, uncover and put into bright light everything that is kept covered for good reasons. No: this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, has been spoiled for us. We are too experienced for it, too serious, too merry, too scorched, too deep… We no longer believe that truth stays truth when its veils are pulled off. We have lived long enough to hold this belief. Today we count it a matter of decency that one should not want to see everything naked, to be present at everything, to understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that dear God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother. “But I find that indecent”—a hint for philosophers! We should honor more highly the modesty with which nature has hidden itself behind riddles and colorful uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting her reasons be seen? Perhaps her name, to speak Greek, is Baubo?… Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. For that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance; to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial—out of depth! And are we not coming back to exactly that, we daredevils of the mind, who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present-day thought and looked around from there, who have looked down from there? Are we not, in just this, Greeks? Worshipers of forms, of tones, of words? For exactly that reason, artists?
Ruta, near Genoa,in the fall of 1886.
About this section
Preface is part of The Gay Science 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 book 2 of 9 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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