Book IV

7 of 9 books in The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

Original German

Sanctus Januarius.

Der du mit dem FlammenspeereMeiner Seele Eis zertheilt,Dass sie brausend nun zum MeereIhrer höchsten Hoffnung eilt:Heller stets und stets gesunder,Frei im liebevollsten Muss: —Also preist sie deine Wunder,Schönster Januarius!

Genua im Januar 1882.

276 Zum neuen Jahre. — Noch lebe ich, noch denke ich: ich muss noch leben, denn ich muss noch denken. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Heute erlaubt sich Jedermann seinen Wunsch und liebsten Gedanken auszusprechen: nun, so will auch ich sagen, was ich mir heute von mir selber wünschte und welcher Gedanke mir dieses Jahr zuerst über das Herz lief, — welcher Gedanke mir Grund, Bürgschaft und Süssigkeit alles weiteren Lebens sein soll! Ich will immer mehr lernen, das Nothwendige an den Dingen als das Schöne sehen: — so werde ich Einer von Denen sein, welche die Dinge schön machen. Amor fati: das sei von nun an meine Liebe! Ich will keinen Krieg gegen das Hässliche führen. Ich will nicht anklagen, ich will nicht einmal die Ankläger anklagen. Wegsehen sei meine einzige Verneinung! Und, Alles in Allem und Grossen: ich will irgendwann einmal nur noch ein Ja-sagender sein!

277 Persönliche Providenz. — Es giebt einen gewissen hohen Punct des Lebens: haben wir den erreicht, so sind wir mit all unserer Freiheit, und so sehr wir dem schönen Chaos des Daseins alle fürsorgende Vernunft und Güte abgestritten haben, noch einmal in der grössten Gefahr der geistigen Unfreiheit und haben unsere schwerste Probe abzulegen. Jetzt nämlich stellt sich erst der Gedanke an eine persönliche Providenz mit der eindringlichsten Gewalt vor uns hin und hat den besten Fürsprecher, den Augenschein, für sich, jetzt wo wir mit Händen greifen, dass uns alle, alle Dinge, die uns treffen, fortwährend zum Besten gereichen. Das Leben jedes Tages und jeder Stunde scheint Nichts mehr zu wollen, als immer nur diesen Satz neu beweisen; sei es was es sei, böses wie gutes Wetter, der Verlust eines Freundes, eine Krankheit, eine Verleumdung, das Ausbleiben eines Briefes, die Verstauchung eines Fusses, ein Blick in einen Verkaufsladen, ein Gegenargument, das Aufschlagen eines Buches, ein Traum, ein Betrug: es erweist sich sofort oder sehr bald nachher als ein Ding, das „nicht fehlen durfte“, — es ist voll tiefen Sinnes und Nutzens gerade für uns! Giebt es eine gefährlichere Verführung, den Göttern Epikur’s, jenen sorglosen Unbekannten, den Glauben zu kündigen und an irgend eine sorgenvolle und kleinliche Gottheit zu glauben, welche selbst jedes Härchen auf unserem Kopfe persönlich kennt und keinen Ekel in der erbärmlichsten Dienstleistung findet? Nun — ich meine trotzalledem! wir wollen die Götter in Ruhe lassen und die dienstfertigen Genien ebenfalls und uns mit der Annahme begnügen, dass unsere eigene practische und theoretische Geschicklichkeit im Auslegen und Zurechtlegen der Ereignisse jetzt auf ihren Höhepunct gelangt sei. Wir wollen auch nicht zu hoch von dieser Fingerfertigkeit unserer Weisheit denken, wenn uns mitunter die wunderbare Harmonie allzusehr überrascht, welche beim Spiel auf unserem Instrumente entsteht: eine Harmonie, welche zu gut klingt, als dass wir es wagten, sie uns selber zuzurechnen. In der That, hier und da spielt Einer mit uns — der liebe Zufall: er führt uns gelegentlich die Hand, und die allerweiseste Providenz könnte keine schönere Musik erdenken, als dann dieser unserer thörichten Hand gelingt.

278 Der Gedanke an den Tod. — Es macht mir ein melancholisches Glück, mitten in diesem Gewirr der Gässchen, der Bedürfnisse, der Stimmen zu leben: wieviel Geniessen, Ungeduld, Begehren, wieviel durstiges Leben und Trunkenheit des Lebens kommt da jeden Augenblick an den Tag! Und doch wird es für alle diese Lärmenden, Lebenden, Lebensdurstigen bald so stille sein! Wie steht hinter Jedem sein Schatten, sein dunkler Weggefährte! Es ist immer wie im letzten Augenblicke vor der Abfahrt eines Auswandererschiffes: man hat einander mehr zu sagen als je, die Stunde drängt, der Ozean und sein ödes Schweigen wartet ungeduldig hinter alle dem Lärme — so begierig, so sicher seiner Beute. Und Alle, Alle meinen, das Bisher sei Nichts oder Wenig, die nahe Zukunft sei Alles: und daher diese Hast, diess Geschrei, dieses Sich-Uebertäuben und Sich-Uebervortheilen! Jeder will der Erste in dieser Zukunft sein, — und doch ist Tod und Todtenstille das einzig Sichere und das Allen Gemeinsame dieser Zukunft! Wie seltsam, dass diese einzige Sicherheit und Gemeinsamkeit fast gar Nichts über die Menschen vermag und dass sie am Weitesten davon entfernt sind, sich als die Brüderschaft des Todes zu fühlen! Es macht mich glücklich, zu sehen, dass die Menschen den Gedanken an den Tod durchaus nicht denken wollen! Ich möchte gern Etwas dazu thun, ihnen den Gedanken an das Leben noch hundertmal denkenswerther zu machen.

279 Sternen-Freundschaft. — Wir waren Freunde und sind uns fremd geworden. Aber das ist recht so und wir wollen’s uns nicht verhehlen und verdunkeln, als ob wir uns dessen zu schämen hätten. Wir sind zwei Schiffe, deren jedes sein Ziel und seine Bahn hat; wir können uns wohl kreuzen und ein Fest miteinander feiern, wie wir es gethan haben, — und dann lagen die braven Schiffe so ruhig in Einem Hafen und in Einer Sonne, dass es scheinen mochte, sie seien schon am Ziele und hätten Ein Ziel gehabt. Aber dann trieb uns die allmächtige Gewalt unserer Aufgabe wieder auseinander, in verschiedene Meere und Sonnenstriche und vielleicht sehen wir uns nie wieder, — vielleicht auch sehen wir uns wohl, aber erkennen uns nicht wieder: die verschiedenen Meere und Sonnen haben uns verändert! Dass wir uns fremd werden müssen, ist das Gesetz über uns: ebendadurch sollen wir uns auch ehrwürdiger werden! Ebendadurch soll der Gedanke an unsere ehemalige Freundschaft heiliger werden! Es giebt wahrscheinlich eine ungeheure unsichtbare Curve und Sternenbahn, in der unsere so verschiedenen Strassen und Ziele als kleine Wegstrecken einbegriffen sein mögen, — erheben wir uns zu diesem Gedanken! Aber unser Leben ist zu kurz und unsere Sehkraft zu gering, als dass wir mehr als Freunde im Sinne jener erhabenen Möglichkeit sein könnten. — Und so wollen wir an unsere Sternen-Freundschaft glauben, selbst wenn wir einander Erden-Feinde sein müssten.

280 Architektur der Erkennenden. — Es bedarf einmal und wahrscheinlich bald einmal der Einsicht, was vor Allem unseren grossen Städten fehlt: Stille und weite, weitgedehnte Orte zum Nachdenken, Orte mit hochräumigen langen Hallengängen für schlechtes oder allzu sonniges Wetter, wohin kein Geräusch der Wagen und der Ausrufer dringt und wo ein feinerer Anstand selbst dem Priester das laute Beten untersagen würde: Bauwerke und Anlagen, welche als Ganzes die Erhabenheit des Sich-Besinnens und Bei-Seitegehens ausdrücken. Die Zeit ist vorbei, wo die Kirche das Monopol des Nachdenkens besass, wo die vita contemplativa immer zuerst vita religiosa sein musste: und Alles, was die Kirche gebaut hat, drückt diesen Gedanken aus. Ich wüsste nicht, wie wir uns mit ihren Bauwerken, selbst wenn sie ihrer kirchlichen Bestimmung entkleidet würden, genügen lassen könnten; diese Bauwerke reden eine viel zu pathetische und befangene Sprache, als Häuser Gottes und Prunkstätten eines überweltlichen Verkehrs, als dass wir Gottlosen hier unsere Gedanken denken könnten. Wir wollen uns in Stein und Pflanze übersetzt haben, wir wollen in uns spazieren gehen, wenn wir in diesen Hallen und Gärten wandeln.

281 Das Ende zu finden wissen. — Die Meister des ersten Ranges geben sich dadurch zu erkennen, dass sie im Grossen wie im Kleinen auf eine vollkommene Weise das Ende zu finden wissen, sei es das Ende einer Melodie oder eines Gedankens, sei es der fünfte Act einer Tragödie oder Staats-Action. Die ersten der zweiten Stufe werden immer gegen das Ende hin unruhig, und fallen nicht in so stolzem ruhigem Gleichmaasse in’s Meer ab, wie zum Beispiel das Gebirge bei Porto fino — dort, wo die Bucht von Genua ihre Melodie zu Ende singt.

282 Der Gang. — Es giebt Manieren des Geistes, an denen auch grosse Geister verrathen, dass sie vom Pöbel oder Halbpöbel herkommen: — der Gang und Schritt ihrer Gedanken ist es namentlich, der den Verräther macht; sie können nicht gehen. So konnte auch Napoleon zu seinem tiefen Verdrusse nicht fürstenmässig und „legitim“ gehen, bei Gelegenheiten, wo man es eigentlich verstehen muss, wie bei grossen Krönungs-Processionen und Aehnlichem: auch da war er immer nur der Anführer einer Colonne — stolz und hastig zugleich und sich dessen sehr bewusst. — Man hat Etwas zum Lachen, diese Schriftsteller zu sehen, welche die faltigen Gewänder der Periode um sich rauschen machen: sie wollen so ihre Füsse verdecken.

283 Vorbereitende Menschen. — Ich begrüsse alle Anzeichen dafür, dass ein männlicheres, ein kriegerisches Zeitalter anhebt, das vor Allem die Tapferkeit wieder zu Ehren bringen wird! Denn es soll einem noch höheren Zeitalter den Weg bahnen und die Kraft einsammeln, welche jenes einmal nöthig haben wird, — jenes Zeitalter, das den Heroismus in die Erkenntniss trägt und Kriege führt um der Gedanken und ihrer Folgen willen. Dazu bedarf es für jetzt vieler vorbereitender tapferer Menschen, welche doch nicht aus dem Nichts entspringen können — und ebensowenig aus dem Sand und Schleim der jetzigen Civilisation und Grossstadt-Bildung: Menschen, welche es verstehen, schweigend, einsam, entschlossen, in unsichtbarer Thätigkeit zufrieden und beständig zu sein: Menschen, die mit innerlichem Hange an allen Dingen nach dem suchen, was an ihnen zu überwinden ist: Menschen, denen Heiterkeit, Geduld, Schlichtheit und Verachtung der grossen Eitelkeiten ebenso zu eigen ist, als Grossmuth im Siege und Nachsicht gegen die kleinen Eitelkeiten aller Besiegten: Menschen mit einem scharfen und freien Urtheile über alle Sieger und über den Antheil des Zufalls an jedem Siege und Ruhme: Menschen mit eigenen Festen, eigenen Werktagen, eigenen Trauerzeiten, gewohnt und sicher im Befehlen und gleich bereit, wo es gilt, zu gehorchen, im Einen wie im Anderen gleich stolz, gleich ihrer eigenen Sache dienend: gefährdetere Menschen, fruchtbarere Menschen, glücklichere Menschen! Denn, glaubt es mir! — das Geheimniss, um die grösste Fruchtbarkeit und den grössten Genuss vom Dasein einzuernten, heisst: gefährlich leben! Baut eure Städte an den Vesuv! Schickt eure Schiffe in unerforschte Meere! Lebt im Kriege mit Euresgleichen und mit euch selber! Seid Räuber und Eroberer, so lange ihr nicht Herrscher und Besitzer sein könnt, ihr Erkennenden! Die Zeit geht bald vorbei, wo es euch genug sein durfte, gleich scheuen Hirschen in Wäldern versteckt zu leben! Endlich wird die Erkenntniss die Hand nach dem ausstrecken, was ihr gebührt: — sie wird herrschen und besitzen wollen, und ihr mit ihr!

284 Der Glaube an sich. — Wenige Menschen überhaupt haben den Glauben an sich: — und von diesen Wenigen bekommen ihn die Einen mit, als eine nützliche Blindheit oder theilweise Verfinsterung ihres Geistes — (was würden sie erblicken, wenn sie sich selber auf den Grund sehen könnten!), die Anderen müssen ihn sich erst erwerben: Alles, was sie Gutes, Tüchtiges, Grosses thun, ist zunächst ein Argument gegen den Skeptiker, der in ihnen haust: es gilt, diesen zu überzeugen oder zu überreden, und dazu bedarf es beinahe des Genie’s. Es sind die grossen Selbst-Ungenügsamen.

285 Excelsior! — „Du wirst niemals mehr beten, niemals mehr anbeten, niemals mehr im endlosen Vertrauen ausruhen — du versagst es dir, vor einer letzten Weisheit, letzten Güte, letzten Macht stehen zu bleiben und deine Gedanken abzuschirren — du hast keinen fortwährenden Wächter und Freund für deine sieben Einsamkeiten — du lebst ohne den Ausblick auf ein Gebirge, das Schnee auf dem Haupte und Gluthen in seinem Herzen trägt — es giebt für dich keinen Vergelter, keinen Verbesserer letzter Hand mehr — es giebt keine Vernunft in dem mehr, was geschieht, keine Liebe in dem, was dir geschehen wird — deinem Herzen steht keine Ruhestatt mehr offen, wo es nur zu finden und nicht mehr zu suchen hat, du wehrst dich gegen irgend einen letzten Frieden, du willst die ewige Wiederkunft von Krieg und Frieden: — Mensch der Entsagung, in Alledem willst du entsagen? Wer wird dir die Kraft dazu geben? Noch hatte Niemand diese Kraft!“ — Es giebt einen See, der es sich eines Tages versagte, abzufliessen, und einen Damm dort aufwarf, wo er bisher abfloss: seitdem steigt dieser See immer höher. Vielleicht wird gerade jene Entsagung uns auch die Kraft verleihen, mit der die Entsagung selber ertragen werden kann; vielleicht wird der Mensch von da an immer höher steigen, wo er nicht mehr in einen Gott ausfliesst.

286 Zwischenrede. — Hier sind Hoffnungen; was werdet ihr aber von ihnen sehen und hören, wenn ihr nicht in euren eigenen Seelen Glanz und Gluth und Morgenröthen erlebt habt? Ich kann nur erinnern — mehr kann ich nicht! Steine bewegen, Thiere zu Menschen machen — wollt ihr das von mir? Ach, wenn ihr noch Steine und Thiere seid, so sucht euch erst euren Orpheus.

287 Lust an der Blindheit. — „Meine Gedanken, sagte der Wanderer zu seinem Schatten, sollen mir anzeigen, wo ich stehe: aber sie sollen mir nicht verrathen, wohin ich gehe. Ich liebe die Unwissenheit um die Zukunft und will nicht an der Ungeduld und dem Vorwegkosten verheissener Dinge zu Grunde gehen.“

288 Hohe Stimmungen. — Mir scheint es, dass die meisten Menschen an hohe Stimmungen überhaupt nicht glauben, es sei denn für Augenblicke, höchstens Viertelstunden, — jene Wenigen ausgenommen, welche eine längere Dauer des hohen Gefühls aus Erfahrung kennen.

Aber gar der Mensch Eines hohen Gefühls, die Verkörperung einer einzigen grossen Stimmung sein — das ist bisher nur ein Traum und eine entzückende Möglichkeit gewesen: die Geschichte giebt uns noch kein sicheres Beispiel davon. Trotzdem könnte sie einmal auch solche Menschen gebären — dann, wenn eine Menge günstige Vorbedingungen geschaffen und festgestellt worden sind, die jetzt auch der glücklichste Zufall nicht zusammenzuwürfeln vermag. Vielleicht wäre diesen zukünftigen Seelen eben Das der gewöhnliche Zustand, was bisher als die mit Schauder empfundene Ausnahme hier und da einmal in unseren Seelen eintrat: eine fortwährende Bewegung zwischen hoch und tief und das Gefühl von hoch und tief, ein beständiges Wie-auf-Treppen-steigen und zugleich Wie-auf-Wolken-ruhen.

289 Auf die Schiffe! — Erwägt man, wie auf jeden Einzelnen eine philosophische Gesammt-Rechtfertigung seiner Art, zu leben und zu denken, wirkt — nämlich gleich einer wärmenden, segnenden, befruchtenden, eigens ihm leuchtenden Sonne, wie sie unabhängig von Lob und Tadel, selbstgenugsam, reich, freigebig an Glück und Wohlwollen macht, wie sie unaufhörlich das Böse zum Guten umschafft, alle Kräfte zum Blühen und Reifwerden bringt und das kleine und grosse Unkraut des Grams und der Verdriesslichkeit gar nicht aufkommen lässt: — so ruft man zuletzt verlangend aus: oh dass doch viele solche neue Sonnen noch geschaffen würden! Auch der Böse, auch der Unglückliche, auch der Ausnahme-Mensch soll seine Philosophie, sein gutes Recht, seinen Sonnenschein haben! Nicht Mitleiden mit ihnen thut noth! — diesen Einfall des Hochmuths müssen wir verlernen, so lange auch bisher die Menschheit gerade an ihm gelernt und geübt hat — keine Beichtiger, Seelenbeschwörer und Sündenvergeber haben wir für sie aufzustellen! Sondern eine neue Gerechtigkeit thut noth! Und eine neue Losung! Und neue Philosophen! Auch die moralische Erde ist rund! Auch die moralische Erde hat ihre Antipoden! Auch die Antipoden haben ihr Recht des Daseins! Es giebt noch eine andere Welt zu entdecken — und mehr als eine! Auf die Schiffe, ihr Philosophen!

290 Eins ist Noth. — Seinem Charakter „Stil geben“ — eine grosse und seltene Kunst! Sie übt Der, welcher Alles übersieht, was seine Natur an Kräften und Schwächen bietet, und es dann einem künstlerischen Plane einfügt, bis ein Jedes als Kunst und Vernunft erscheint und auch die Schwäche noch das Auge entzückt. Hier ist eine grosse Masse zweiter Natur hinzugetragen worden, dort ein Stück erster Natur abgetragen: — beidemal mit langer Uebung und täglicher Arbeit daran. Hier ist das Hässliche, welches sich nicht abtragen liess, versteckt, dort ist es in’s Erhabene umgedeutet. Vieles Vage, der Formung Widerstrebende ist für Fernsichten aufgespart und ausgenutzt worden: — es soll in das Weite und Unermessliche hinaus winken. Zuletzt, wenn das Werk vollendet ist, offenbart sich, wie es der Zwang des selben Geschmacks war, der im Grossen und Kleinen herrschte und bildete: ob der Geschmack ein guter oder ein schlechter war, bedeutet weniger, als man denkt, — genug, dass es Ein Geschmack ist! — Es werden die starken, herrschsüchtigen Naturen sein, welche in einem solchen Zwange, in einer solchen Gebundenheit und Vollendung unter dem eigenen Gesetz ihre feinste Freude geniessen; die Leidenschaft ihres gewaltigen Wollens erleichtert sich beim Anblick aller stilisirten Natur, aller besiegten und dienenden Natur; auch wenn sie Paläste zu bauen und Gärten anzulegen haben, widerstrebt es ihnen, die Natur frei zu geben. — Umgekehrt sind es die schwachen, ihrer selber nicht mächtigen Charaktere, welche die Gebundenheit des Stils hassen: sie fühlen, dass, wenn ihnen dieser bitterböse Zwang auferlegt würde, sie unter ihm gemein werden müssten: — sie werden Sclaven, sobald sie dienen, sie hassen das Dienen. Solche Geister — es können Geister ersten Ranges sein — sind immer darauf aus, sich selber und ihre Umgebungen als freie Natur — wild, willkürlich, phantastisch, unordentlich, überraschend — zu gestalten oder auszudeuten: und sie thun wohl daran, weil sie nur so sich selber wohlthun! Denn Eins ist Noth: dass der Mensch seine Zufriedenheit mit sich erreiche — sei es nun durch diese oder jene Dichtung und Kunst: nur dann erst ist der Mensch überhaupt erträglich anzusehen! Wer mit sich unzufrieden ist, ist fortwährend bereit, sich dafür zu rächen: wir Anderen werden seine Opfer sein, und sei es auch nur darin, dass wir immer seinen hässlichen Anblick zu ertragen haben. Denn der Anblick des Hässlichen macht schlecht und düster.

291 Genua. — Ich habe mir diese Stadt, ihre Landhäuser und Lustgärten und den weiten Umkreis ihrer bewohnten Höhen und Hänge eine gute Weile angesehen; endlich muss ich sagen: ich sehe Gesichter aus vergangenen Geschlechtern, — diese Gegend ist mit den Abbildern kühner und selbstherrlicher Menschen übersäet. Sie haben gelebt und haben fortleben wollen — das sagen sie mir mit ihren Häusern, gebaut und geschmückt für Jahrhunderte und nicht für die flüchtige Stunde: sie waren dem Leben gut, so böse sie oft gegen sich gewesen sein mögen. Ich sehe immer den Bauenden, wie er mit seinen Blicken auf allem fern und nah um ihn her Gebauten ruht und ebenso auf Stadt, Meer und Gebirgslinien, wie er mit diesem Blick Gewalt und Eroberung ausübt: Alles diess will er seinem Plane einfügen und zuletzt zu seinem Eigenthum machen, dadurch dass es ein Stück desselben wird. Diese ganze Gegend ist mit dieser prachtvollen unersättlichen Selbstsucht der Besitz- und Beutelust überwachsen; und wie diese Menschen in der Ferne keine Grenze anerkannten und in ihrem Durste nach Neuem eine neue Welt neben die alte hinstellten, so empörte sich auch in der Heimat immer noch Jeder gegen Jeden und erfand eine Weise, seine Ueberlegenheit auszudrücken und zwischen sich und seinem Nachbar seine persönliche Unendlichkeit dazwischen zu legen. Jeder eroberte sich seine Heimat noch einmal für sich, indem er sie mit seinen architektonischen Gedanken überwältigte und gleichsam zur Augenweide seines Hauses umschuf. Im Norden imponirt das Gesetz und die allgemeine Lust an Gesetzlichkeit und Gehorsam, wenn man die Bauweise der Städte ansieht: man erräth dabei jenes innerliche Sich-Gleichsetzen, Sich-Einordnen, welches die Seele aller Bauenden beherrscht haben muss. Hier aber findest du, um jede Ecke biegend, einen Menschen für sich, der das Meer, das Abenteuer und den Orient kennt, einen Menschen, welcher dem Gesetze und dem Nachbar wie einer Art von Langerweile abhold ist und der alles schon Begründete, Alte mit neidischen Blicken misst: er möchte, mit einer wundervollen Verschmitztheit der Phantasie, diess Alles mindestens im Gedanken noch einmal neu gründen, seine Hand darauf-, seinen Sinn hineinlegen — sei es auch nur für den Augenblick eines sonnigen Nachmittags, wo seine unersättliche und melancholische Seele einmal Sattheit fühlt, und seinem Auge nur Eigenes und nichts Fremdes mehr sich zeigen darf.

292 An die Moral-Prediger. — Ich will keine Moral machen, aber Denen, welche es thun, gebe ich diesen Rath: wollt ihr die besten Dinge und Zustände zuletzt um alle Ehre und Werth bringen, so fahrt fort, sie in den Mund zu nehmen, wie bisher! Stellt sie an die Spitze eurer Moral und redet von früh bis Abend von dem Glück der Tugend, von der Ruhe der Seele, von der Gerechtigkeit und der immanenten Vergeltung: so wie ihr es treibt, bekommen alle diese guten Dinge dadurch endlich eine Popularität und ein Geschrei der Gasse für sich: aber dann wird auch alles Gold daran abgegriffen sein und mehr noch: alles Gold darin wird sich in Blei verwandelt haben. Wahrlich, ihr versteht euch auf die umgekehrte Kunst der Alchymie, auf die Entwerthung des Werthvollsten! Greift einmal zum Versuche nach einem andern Recepte, um nicht wie bisher das Gegentheil von dem, was ihr sucht, zu erreichen:

leugnet jene guten Dinge, entzieht ihnen den Pöbel-Beifall und den leichten Umlauf, macht sie wieder zu verborgenen Schamhaftigkeiten einsamer Seelen, sagt, Moral sei etwas Verbotenes! Vielleicht gewinnt ihr so die Art von Menschen für diese Dinge, auf welche einzig Etwas ankommt, ich meine die Heroischen. Aber dann muss Etwas zum Fürchten daran sein und nicht, wie bisher, zum Ekeln! Möchte man nicht heute in Hinsicht der Moral sagen, wie Meister Eckardt: „ich bitte Gott, dass er mich quitt mache Gottes!“

293 Unsere Luft. — Wir wissen es wohl: wer nur wie im Spazierengehen einmal einen Blick nach der Wissenschaft hin thut, nach Art der Frauen und leider auch vieler Künstler: für den hat die Strenge ihres Dienstes, diese Unerbittlichkeit im Kleinen wie im Grossen, diese Schnelligkeit im Wägen, Urtheilen, Verurtheilen etwas Schwindel- und Furchteinflössendes. Namentlich erschreckt ihn, wie hier das Schwerste gefordert, das Beste gethan wird, ohne dass dafür Lob und Auszeichnungen da sind, vielmehr, wie unter Soldaten, fast nur Tadel und scharfe Verweise laut werden, — denn das Gutmachen gilt als die Regel, das Verfehlte als die Ausnahme; die Regel aber hat hier wie überall einen schweigsamen Mund. Mit dieser „Strenge der Wissenschaft“ steht es nun wie mit der Form und Höflichkeit der allerbesten Gesellschaft: — sie erschreckt den Uneingeweihten. Wer aber an sie gewöhnt ist, mag gar nicht anderswo leben, als in dieser hellen, durchsichtigen, kräftigen, stark elektrischen Luft, in dieser männlichen Luft. Ueberall sonst ist es ihm nicht reinlich und luftig genug: er argwöhnt, dass dort seine beste Kunst Niemandem recht von Nutzen und ihm selber nicht zur Freude sein werde, dass unter Missverständnissen ihm sein halbes Leben durch die Finger schlüpfe, dass fortwährend viel Vorsicht, viel Verbergen und Ansichhalten noth thue, — lauter grosse und unnütze Einbussen an Kraft! In diesem strengen und klaren Elemente aber hat er seine Kraft ganz: hier kann er fliegen! Wozu sollte er wieder hinab in jene trüben Gewässer, wo man schwimmen und waten muss und seine Flügel missfarbig macht! — Nein! Da ist es zu schwer für uns, zu leben: was können wir dafür, dass wir für die Luft, die reine Luft geboren sind, wir Nebenbuhler des Lichtstrahls, und dass wir am liebsten auf Aetherstäubchen, gleich ihm, reiten würden und nicht von der Sonne weg, sondern zu der Sonne hin! Das aber können wir nicht: — so wollen wir denn thun, was wir einzig können: der Erde Licht bringen, „das Licht der Erde“ sein! Und dazu haben wir unsere Flügel und unsere Schnelligkeit und Strenge, um dessenthalben sind wir männlich und selbst schrecklich, gleich dem Feuer. Mögen Die uns fürchten, welche sich nicht an uns zu wärmen und zu erhellen verstehen!

294 Gegen die Verleumder der Natur. — Das sind mir unangenehme Menschen, bei denen jeder natürliche Hang sofort zur Krankheit wird, zu etwas Entstellendem oder gar Schmählichem, — diese haben uns zu der Meinung verführt, die Hänge und Triebe des Menschen seien böse; sie sind die Ursache unserer grossen Ungerechtigkeit gegen unsere Natur, gegen alle Natur!

Es giebt genug Menschen, die sich ihren Trieben mit Anmuth und Sorglosigkeit überlassen dürfen: aber sie thun es nicht, aus Angst vor jenem eingebildeten „bösen Wesen“ der Natur! Daher ist es gekommen, dass so wenig Vornehmheit unter den Menschen zu finden ist: deren Kennzeichen es immer sein wird, vor sich keine Furcht zu haben, von sich nichts Schmähliches zu erwarten, ohne Bedenken zu fliegen, wohin es uns treibt — uns freigeborene Vögel! Wohin wir auch nur kommen, immer wird es frei und sonnenlicht um uns sein.

295 Kurze Gewohnheiten. — Ich liebe die kurzen Gewohnheiten und halte sie für das unschätzbare Mittel, viele Sachen und Zustände kennen zu lernen und hinab bis auf den Grund ihrer Süssen und Bitterkeiten; meine Natur ist ganz für kurze Gewohnheiten eingerichtet, selbst in den Bedürfnissen ihrer leiblichen Gesundheit und überhaupt soweit ich nur sehen kann: vom Niedrigen bis zum Höchsten. Immer glaube ich, diess werde mich nun dauernd befriedigen — auch die kurze Gewohnheit hat jenen Glauben der Leidenschaft, den Glauben an die Ewigkeit — und ich sei zu beneiden, es gefunden und erkannt zu haben: — und nun nährt es mich am Mittage und am Abende und verbreitet eine tiefe Genügsamkeit um sich und in mich hinein, sodass mich nach Anderem nicht verlangt, ohne dass ich zu vergleichen oder zu verachten oder zu hassen hätte. Und eines Tages hat es seine Zeit gehabt: die gute Sache scheidet von mir, nicht als Etwas, das mir nun Ekel einflösst — sondern friedlich und an mir gesättigt, wie ich an ihm, und wie als ob wir einander dankbar sein müssten und uns so die Hände zum Abschied reichten. Und schon wartet das Neue an der Thüre und ebenso mein Glaube — der unverwüstliche Thor und Weise! — diess Neue werde das Rechte, das letzte Rechte sein. So geht es mir mit Speisen, Gedanken, Menschen, Städten, Gedichten, Musiken, Lehren, Tagesordnungen, Lebensweisen. — Dagegen hasse ich die dauernden Gewohnheiten und meine, dass ein Tyrann in meine Nähe kommt und dass meine Lebensluft sich verdickt, wo die Ereignisse sich so gestalten, dass dauernde Gewohnheiten daraus mit Nothwendigkeit zu wachsen scheinen: zum Beispiel durch ein Amt, durch ein beständiges Zusammensein mit den selben Menschen, durch einen festen Wohnsitz, durch eine einmalige Art Gesundheit. Ja, ich bin allem meinem Elend und Kranksein, und was nur immer unvollkommen an mir ist, — im untersten Grunde meiner Seele erkenntlich gesinnt, weil dergleichen mir hundert Hinterthüren lässt, durch die ich den dauernden Gewohnheiten entrinnen kann. — Das Unerträglichste freilich, das eigentlich Fürchterliche, wäre mir ein Leben ganz ohne Gewohnheiten, ein Leben, das fortwährend die Improvisation verlangt: — diess wäre meine Verbannung und mein Sibirien.

296 Der feste Ruf. — Der feste Ruf war ehedem eine Sache der äussersten Nützlichkeit; und wo nur immer die Gesellschaft noch vom Heerden-Instinct beherrscht wird, ist es auch jetzt noch für jeden Einzelnen am zweckmässigsten, seinen Charakter und seine Beschäftigung als unveränderlich zu geben, — selbst wenn sie es im Grunde nicht sind. „Man kann sich auf ihn verlassen, er bleibt sich gleich“: — das ist in allen gefährlichen Lagen der Gesellschaft das Lob, welches am meisten zu bedeuten hat. Die Gesellschaft fühlt mit Genugthuung, ein zuverlässiges, jederzeit bereites Werkzeug in der Tugend Dieses, in dem Ehrgeize Jenes, in dem Nachdenken und der Leidenschaft des Dritten zu haben, — sie ehrt diese Werkzeug-Natur, diess Sich-Treubleiben, diese Unwandelbarkeit in Ansichten, Bestrebungen, und selbst in Untugenden, mit ihren höchsten Ehren. Eine solche Schätzung, welche überall zugleich mit der Sittlichkeit der Sitte blüht und geblüht hat, erzieht „Charaktere“ und bringt alles Wechseln, Umlernen, Sich-Verwandeln in Verruf. Diess ist nun jedenfalls, mag sonst der Vortheil dieser Denkweise noch so gross sein, für die Erkenntniss die allerschädlichste Art des allgemeinen Urtheils: denn gerade der gute Wille des Erkennenden, unverzagt sich jederzeit gegen seine bisherige Meinung zu erklären und überhaupt in Bezug auf Alles, was in uns fest werden will, misstrauisch zu sein, — ist hier verurtheilt und in Verruf gebracht. Die Gesinnung des Erkennenden als im Widerspruch mit dem „festen Rufe“ gilt als unehrenhaft, während die Versteinerung der Ansichten alle Ehre für sich hat: — unter dem Banne solcher Geltung müssen wir heute noch leben! Wie schwer lebt es sich, wenn man das Urtheil vieler Jahrtausende gegen sich und um sich fühlt. Es ist wahrscheinlich, dass viele Jahrtausende die Erkenntniss mit dem schlechten Gewissen behaftet war, und dass viel Selbstverachtung und geheimes Elend in der Geschichte der grössten Geister gewesen sein muss.

297 Widersprechen können. — Jeder weiss jetzt, dass Widerspruch-Vertragen-können ein hohes Zeichen von Cultur ist. Einige wissen sogar, dass der höhere Mensch den Widerspruch gegen sich wünscht und hervorruft, um einen Fingerzeig über seine ihm bisher unbekannte Ungerechtigkeit zu bekommen. Aber das Widersprechen-Können, das erlangte gute Gewissen bei der Feindseligkeit gegen das Gewohnte, Ueberlieferte, Geheiligte, — das ist mehr als jenes Beides und das eigentlich Grosse, Neue, Erstaunliche unserer Cultur, der Schritt aller Schritte des befreiten Geistes: wer weiss das? —

298 Seufzer. — Ich erhaschte diese Einsicht unterwegs und nahm rasch die nächsten schlechten Worte, sie festzumachen, damit sie mir nicht wieder davonfliege. Und nun ist sie mir an diesen dürren Worten gestorben und hängt und schlottert in ihnen — und ich weiss kaum mehr, wenn ich sie ansehe, wie ich ein solches Glück haben konnte, als ich diesen Vogel fieng.

299 Was man den Künstlern ablernen soll. — Welche Mittel haben wir, uns die Dinge schön, anziehend, begehrenswerth zu machen, wenn sie es nicht sind? — und ich meine, sie sind es an sich niemals! Hier haben wir von den Aerzten Etwas zu lernen, wenn sie zum Beispiel das Bittere verdünnen oder Wein und Zucker in den Mischkrug thun; aber noch mehr von den Künstlern, welche eigentlich fortwährend darauf aus sind, solche Erfindungen und Kunststücke zu machen. Sich von den Dingen entfernen, bis man Vieles von ihnen nicht mehr sieht und Vieles hinzusehen muss, um sie noch zu sehen — oder die Dinge um die Ecke und wie in einem Ausschnitte sehen — oder sie so stellen, dass sie sich theilweise verstellen und nur perspectivische Durchblicke gestatten — oder sie durch gefärbtes Glas oder im Lichte der Abendröthe anschauen — oder ihnen eine Oberfläche und Haut geben, welche keine volle Transparenz hat: das Alles sollen wir den Künstlern ablernen und im Uebrigen weiser sein, als sie. Denn bei ihnen hört gewöhnlich diese ihre feine Kraft auf, wo die Kunst aufhört und das Leben beginnt; wir aber wollen die Dichter unseres Lebens sein, und im Kleinsten und Alltäglichsten zuerst.

300 Vorspiele der Wissenschaft. — Glaubt ihr denn, dass die Wissenschaften entstanden und gross geworden wären, wenn ihnen nicht die Zauberer, Alchymisten, Astrologen und Hexen vorangelaufen wären als Die, welche mit ihren Verheissungen und Vorspiegelungen erst Durst, Hunger und Wohlgeschmack an verborgenen und verbotenen Mächten schaffen mussten? Ja, dass unendlich mehr hat verheissen werden müssen, als je erfüllt werden kann, damit überhaupt Etwas im Reiche der Erkenntniss sich erfülle? — Vielleicht erscheint in gleicher Weise, wie uns sich hier Vorspiele und Vorübungen der Wissenschaft darstellen, die durchaus nicht als solche geübt und empfunden wurden, auch irgend einem fernen Zeitalter die gesammte Religion als Uebung und Vorspiel: vielleicht könnte sie das seltsame Mittel dazu gewesen sein, dass einmal einzelne Menschen die ganze Selbstgenügsamkeit eines Gottes und alle seine Kraft der Selbsterlösung geniessen können: Ja! — darf man fragen — würde denn der Mensch überhaupt ohne jene religiöse Schule und Vorgeschichte es gelernt haben, nach sich Hunger und Durst zu spüren und aus sich Sattheit und Fülle zu nehmen? Musste Prometheus erst wähnen, das Licht gestohlen zu haben und dafür büssen, — um endlich zu entdecken, dass er das Licht geschaffen habe, indem er nach dem Lichte begehrte, und dass nicht nur der Mensch, sondern auch der Gott das Werk seiner Hände und Thon in seinen Händen gewesen sei? Alles nur Bilder des Bildners? — ebenso wie der Wahn, der Diebstahl, der Kaukasus, der Geier und die ganze tragische Prometheia aller Erkennenden?

301 Wahn der Contemplativen. — Die hohen Menschen unterscheiden sich von den niederen dadurch, dass sie unsäglich mehr sehen und hören und denkend sehen und hören — und eben diess unterscheidet den Menschen vom Thiere und die oberen Thiere von den unteren. Die Welt wird für Den immer voller, welcher in die Höhe der Menschlichkeit hinauf wächst; es werden immer mehr Angelhaken des Interesses nach ihm ausgeworfen; die Menge seiner Reize ist beständig im Wachsen und ebenso die Menge seiner Arten von Lust und Unlust, — der höhere Mensch wird immer zugleich glücklicher und unglücklicher. Dabei aber bleibt ein Wahn sein beständiger Begleiter: er meint, als Zuschauer und Zuhörer vor das grosse Schau- und Tonspiel gestellt zu sein, welches das Leben ist: er nennt seine Natur eine contemplative und übersieht dabei, dass er selber auch der eigentliche Dichter und Fortdichter des Lebens ist, — dass er sich freilich vom Schauspieler dieses Drama’s, dem sogenannten handelnden Menschen, sehr unterscheidet, aber noch mehr von einem blossen Betrachter und Festgaste vor der Bühne. Ihm, als dem Dichter, ist gewiss vis contemplativa und der Rückblick auf sein Werk zu eigen, aber zugleich und vorerst die vis creativa, welche dem handelnden Menschen fehlt, was auch der Augenschein und der Allerweltsglaube sagen mag. Wir, die Denkend-Empfindenden, sind es, die wirklich und immerfort Etwas machen, das noch nicht da ist: die ganze ewig wachsende Welt von Schätzungen, Farben, Accenten, Perspectiven, Stufenleitern, Bejahungen und Verneinungen. Diese von uns erfundene Dichtung wird fortwährend von den sogenannten practischen Menschen (unsern Schauspielern wie gesagt) eingelernt, eingeübt, in Fleisch und Wirklichkeit, ja Alltäglichkeit übersetzt. Was nur Werth hat in der jetzigen Welt, das hat ihn nicht an sich, seiner Natur nach, — die Natur ist immer werthlos: — sondern dem hat man einen Werth einmal gegeben, geschenkt, und wir waren diese Gebenden und Schenkenden! Wir erst haben die Welt, die den Menschen Etwas angeht, geschaffen! — Gerade dies Wissen aber fehlt uns, und wenn wir es einen Augenblick einmal erhaschen, so haben wir es im nächsten wieder vergessen: wir verkennen unsere beste Kraft und schätzen uns, die Contemplativen, um einen Grad zu gering, — wir sind weder so stolz, noch so glücklich, als wir sein könnten.

302 Gefahr des Glücklichsten. — Feine Sinne und einen feinen Geschmack haben; an das Ausgesuchte und Allerbeste des Geistes wie an die rechte und nächste Kost gewöhnt sein; einer starken, kühnen, verwegenen Seele geniessen; mit ruhigem Auge und festem Schritt durch das Leben gehen, immer zum Aeussersten bereit, wie zu einem Feste und voll des Verlangens nach unentdeckten Welten und Meeren, Menschen und Göttern; auf jede heitere Musik hinhorchen, als ob dort wohl tapfere Männer, Soldaten, Seefahrer sich eine kurze Rast und Lust machen, und im tiefsten Genusse des Augenblicks überwältigt werden von Thränen und von der ganzen purpurnen Schwermuth des Glücklichen: wer möchte nicht, dass das Alles gerade sein Besitz, sein Zustand wäre! Es war das Glück Homer’s! Der Zustand Dessen, der den Griechen ihre Götter, — nein, sich selber seine Götter erfinden hat! Aber man verberge es sich nicht: mit diesem Glücke Homer’s in der Seele ist man auch das leidensfähigste Geschöpf unter der Sonne! Und nur um diesen Preis kauft man die kostbarste Muschel, welche die Wellen des Daseins bisher an’s Ufer gespült haben! Man wird als ihr Besitzer immer feiner im Schmerz und zuletzt zu fein: ein kleiner Missmuth und Ekel genügte am Ende, um Homer das Leben zu verleiden. Er hatte ein thörichtes Räthselchen, das ihm junge Fischer aufgaben, nicht zu rathen vermocht! Ja, die kleinen Räthsel sind die Gefahr der Glücklichsten! —

303 Zwei Glückliche. — Wahrlich, dieser Mensch, trotz seiner Jugend, versteht sich auf die Improvisation des Lebens und setzt auch den feinsten Beobachter in Erstaunen: — es scheint nämlich, dass er keinen Fehlgriff thut, ob er schon fortwährend das gewagteste Spiel spielt. Man wird an jene improvisirenden Meister der Tonkunst erinnert, denen auch der Zuhörer eine göttliche Unfehlbarkeit der Hand zuschreiben möchte, trotzdem, dass sie sich hier und da vergreifen, wie jeder Sterbliche sich vergreift. Aber sie sind geübt und erfinderisch, und im Augenblicke immer bereit, den zufälligsten Ton, wohin ein Wurf des Fingers, eine Laune sie treibt, sofort in das thematische Gefüge einzuordnen und dem Zufalle einen schönen Sinn und eine Seele einzuhauchen. — Hier ist ein ganz anderer Mensch: dem missräth im Grunde Alles, was er will und plant. Das, woran er gelegentlich sein Herz gehängt hat, brachte ihn schon einige Male an den Abgrund und in die nächste Nähe des Unterganges; und wenn er dem noch entwischte, so doch gewiss nicht nur „mit einem blauen Auge“. Glaubt ihr, dass er darüber unglücklich ist? Er hat längst bei sich beschlossen, eigene Wünsche und Pläne nicht so wichtig zu nehmen. „Gelingt mir Diess nicht, so redet er sich zu, dann gelingt mir vielleicht Jenes; und im Ganzen weiss ich nicht, ob ich nicht meinem Misslingen mehr zu Danke verpflichtet bin, als irgend welchem Gelingen. Bin ich dazu gemacht, eigensinnig zu sein und die Hörner des Stieres zu tragen? Das, was mir Werth und Ergebniss des Lebens ausmacht, liegt wo anders; mein Stolz und ebenso mein Elend liegt wo anders. Ich weiss mehr vom Leben, weil ich so oft daran war, es zu verlieren: und eben darum habe ich mehr vom Leben, als ihr Alle!“

304 Indem wir thun, lassen wir. — Im Grunde sind mir alle jene Moralen zuwider, welche sagen: „Thue diess nicht! Entsage! Ueberwinde dich!“ — ich bin dagegen jenen Moralen gut, welche mich antreiben, Etwas zu thun und wieder zu thun und von früh bis Abend, und Nachts davon zu träumen, und an gar Nichts zu denken als: diess gut zu thun, so gut als es eben mir allein möglich ist! Wer so lebt, von dem fällt fortwährend Eins um das Andere ab, was nicht zu einem solchen Leben gehört: ohne Hass und Widerwillen sieht er heute Diess und morgen Jenes von sich Abschied nehmen, den vergilbten Blättern gleich, welche jedes bewegtere Lüftchen dem Baume entführt: oder er sieht gar nicht, dass es Abschied nimmt, so streng blickt sein Auge nach seinem Ziele und überhaupt vorwärts, nicht seitwärts, rückwärts, abwärts. Unser Thun soll bestimmen, was wir lassen: indem wir thun, lassen wir — so gefällt es mir, so lautet mein placitum. Aber ich will nicht mit offenen Augen meine Verarmung anstreben, ich mag alle negativen Tugenden nicht, — Tugenden, deren Wesen das Verneinen und Sichversagen selber ist.

305 Selbstbeherrschung. — Jene Morallehrer, welche zuerst und zuoberst dem Menschen anbefehlen, sich in seine Gewalt zu bekommen, bringen damit eine eigenthümliche Krankheit über ihn: nämlich eine beständige Reizbarkeit bei allen natürlichen Regungen und Neigungen und gleichsam eine Art Juckens. Was auch fürderhin ihn stossen, ziehen, anlocken, antreiben mag, von innen oder von aussen her — immer scheint es diesem Reizbaren, als ob jetzt seine Selbstbeherrschung in Gefahr gerathe: er darf sich keinem Instincte, keinem freien Flügelschlage mehr anvertrauen, sondern steht beständig mit abwehrender Gebärde da, bewaffnet gegen sich selber, scharfen und misstrauischen Auges, der ewige Wächter seiner Burg, zu der er sich gemacht hat. Ja, er kann gross damit sein! Aber wie unausstehlich ist er nun für Andere geworden, wie schwer für sich selber, wie verarmt und abgeschnitten von den schönsten Zufälligkeiten der Seele! Ja auch von aller weiteren Belehrung! Denn man muss sich auf Zeiten verlieren können, wenn man den Dingen, die wir nicht selber sind, Etwas ablernen will.

306 Stoiker und Epikureer. — Der Epikureer sucht sich die Lage, die Personen und selbst die Ereignisse aus, welche zu seiner äusserst reizbaren intellectuellen Beschaffenheit passen, er verzichtet auf das Uebrige — das heisst das Allermeiste —, weil es eine zu starke und schwere Kost für ihn sein würde. Der Stoiker dagegen übt sich, Steine und Gewürm, Glassplitter und Skorpionen zu verschlucken und ohne Ekel zu sein; sein Magen soll endlich gleichgültig gegen Alles werden, was der Zufall des Daseins in ihn schüttet: — er erinnert an jene arabische Secte der Assaua, die man in Algier kennen lernt; und gleich diesen Unempfindlichen hat auch er gerne ein eingeladenes Publicum bei der Schaustellung seiner Unempfindlichkeit, dessen gerade der Epikureer gerne enträth: — der hat ja seinen „Garten“! Für Menschen, mit denen das Schicksal improvisirt, für solche, die in gewaltsamen Zeiten und abhängig von plötzlichen und veränderlichen Menschen leben, mag der Stoicismus sehr rathsam sein. Wer aber einigermassen absieht, dass das Schicksal ihm einen langen Faden zu spinnen erlaubt, thut wohl, sich epikureisch einzurichten; alle Menschen der geistigen Arbeit haben es bisher gethan! Ihnen wäre es nämlich der Verlust der Verluste, die feine Reizbarkeit einzubüssen und die stoische harte Haut mit Igelstacheln dagegen geschenkt zu bekommen.

307 Zu Gunsten der Kritik. — Jetzt erscheint dir Etwas als Irrthum, das du ehedem als eine Wahrheit oder Wahrscheinlichkeit geliebt hast: du stösst es von dir ab und wähnst, dass deine Vernunft darin einen Sieg erfochten habe. Aber vielleicht war jener Irrthum damals, als du noch ein Anderer warst — du bist immer ein Anderer —, dir ebenso nothwendig wie alle deine jetzigen „Wahrheiten“, gleichsam als eine Haut, die dir Vieles verhehlte und verhüllte, was du noch nicht sehen durftest. Dein neues Leben hat jene Meinung für dich getödtet, nicht deine Vernunft: du brauchst sie nicht mehr, und nun bricht sie in sich selbst zusammen, und die Unvernunft kriecht wie ein Gewürm aus ihr an’s Licht. Wenn wir Kritik üben, so ist es nichts Willkürliches und Unpersönliches, — es ist, wenigstens sehr oft, ein Beweis davon, dass lebendige treibende Kräfte in uns da sind, welche eine Rinde abstossen. Wir verneinen und müssen verneinen, weil Etwas in uns leben und sich bejahen will, Etwas, das wir vielleicht noch nicht kennen, noch nicht sehen! — Diess zu Gunsten der Kritik.

308 Die Geschichte jedes Tages. — Was macht bei dir die Geschichte jedes Tages? Siehe deine Gewohnheiten an, aus denen sie besteht: sind sie das Erzeugniss zahlloser kleiner Feigheiten und Faulheiten oder das deiner Tapferkeit und erfinderischen Vernunft? So verschieden beide Fälle sind, es wäre möglich, dass die Menschen dir das gleiche Lob spendeten und dass du ihnen auch wirklich so wie so den gleichen Nutzen brächtest. Aber Lob und Nutzen und Respectabilität mögen genug für Den sein, der nur ein gutes Gewissen haben will, — nicht aber für dich Nierenprüfer, der du ein Wissen um das Gewissen hast!

309 Aus der siebenten Einsamkeit. — Eines Tages warf der Wanderer eine Thür hinter sich zu, blieb stehen und weinte. Dann sagte er: „Dieser Hang und Drang zum Wahren, Wirklichen, Un-Scheinbaren, Gewissen! Wie bin ich ihm böse! Warum folgt mir gerade dieser düstere und leidenschaftliche Treiber! Ich möchte ausruhen, aber er lässt es nicht zu. Wie Vieles verführt mich nicht, zu verweilen! Es giebt überall Gärten Armidens für mich: und daher immer neue Losreissungen und neue Bitternisse des Herzens! Ich muss den Fuss weiter heben, diesen müden, verwundeten Fuss: und weil ich muss, so habe ich oft für das Schönste, das mich nicht halten konnte, einen grimmigen Rückblick, — weil es mich nicht halten konnte!“

310 Wille und Welle. — Wie gierig kommt diese Welle heran, als ob es Etwas zu erreichen gälte! Wie kriecht sie mit furchterregender Hast in die innersten Winkel des felsigen Geklüftes hinein! Es scheint, sie will Jemandem zuvorkommen; es scheint, dass dort Etwas versteckt ist, das Werth, hohen Werth hat. — Und nun kommt sie zurück, etwas langsamer, immer noch ganz weiss vor Erregung, — ist sie enttäuscht? Hat sie gefunden, was sie suchte? Stellt sie sich enttäuscht? — Aber schon naht eine andere Welle, gieriger und wilder noch als die erste, und auch ihre Seele scheint voll von Geheimnissen und dem Gelüste der Schatzgräberei zu sein. So leben die Wellen, — so leben wir, die Wollenden! — mehr sage ich nicht. — So? Ihr misstraut mir? Ihr zürnt auf mich, ihr schönen Unthiere? Fürchtet ihr, dass ich euer Geheimniss ganz verrathe? Nun! Zürnt mir nur, hebt eure grünen gefährlichen Leiber so hoch ihr könnt, macht eine Mauer zwischen mir und der Sonne — so wie jetzt! Wahrlich, schon ist Nichts mehr von der Welt übrig, als grüne Dämmerung und grüne Blitze. Treibt es wie ihr wollt, ihr Uebermüthigen, brüllt vor Lust und Bosheit — oder taucht wieder hinunter, schüttet eure Smaragden hinab in die tiefste Tiefe, werft euer unendliches weisses Gezottel von Schaum und Gischt darüber weg — es ist mir Alles recht, denn Alles steht euch so gut, und ich bin euch für Alles so gut: wie werde ich euch verrathen! Denn — hört es wohl! — ich kenne euch und euer Geheimniss, ich kenne euer Geschlecht! Ihr und ich, wir sind ja aus Einem Geschlecht! — Ihr und ich, wir haben ja Ein Geheimniss!

311 Gebrochenes Licht. — Man ist nicht immer tapfer, und wenn man müde wird, dann jammert unser Einer auch wohl einmal in dieser Weise. „Es ist so schwer, den Menschen wehe zu thun — oh, dass es nöthig ist! Was nützt es uns, verborgen zu leben, wenn wir nicht Das für uns behalten wollen, was Aergerniss giebt? Wäre es nicht räthlicher, im Gewühle zu leben und an den Einzelnen gutzumachen, was an Allen gesündigt werden soll und muss? Thöricht mit dem Thoren, eitel mit dem Eitelen, schwärmerisch mit dem Schwärmer zu sein? Wäre es nicht billig, bei einem solchen übermüthigen Grade der Abweichung im Ganzen? Wenn ich von den Bosheiten Anderer gegen mich höre, — ist nicht mein erstes Gefühl das einer Genugthuung? So ist es recht! — scheine ich mir zu ihnen zu sagen — ich stimme so wenig zu euch und habe so viel Wahrheit auf meiner Seite: macht euch immerhin einen guten Tag auf meine Kosten, so oft ihr könnt! Hier sind meine Mängel und Fehlgriffe, hier ist mein Wahn, mein Ungeschmack, meine Verwirrung, meine Thränen, meine Eitelkeit, meine Eulen-Verborgenheit, meine Widersprüche! Hier habt ihr zu lachen! So lacht denn auch und freut euch! Ich bin nicht böse auf Gesetz und Natur der Dinge, welche wollen, dass Mängel und Fehlgriffe Freude machen! — Freilich, es gab einmal „schönere“ Zeiten, wo man sich noch mit jedem einigermassen neuen Gedanken so unentbehrlich fühlen konnte, um mit ihm auf die Strasse zu treten und Jedermann zuzurufen: „Siehe! Das Himmelreich ist nahe herbeigekommen!“ — Ich würde mich nicht vermissen, wenn ich fehlte. Entbehrlich sind wir Alle!“ — Aber, wie gesagt, so denken wir nicht, wenn wir tapfer sind; wir denken nicht daran.

312 Mein Hund. — Ich habe meinem Schmerze einen Namen gegeben und rufe ihn „Hund“, — er ist ebenso treu, ebenso zudringlich und schamlos, ebenso unterhaltend, ebenso klug, wie jeder andere Hund — und ich kann ihn anherrschen und meine bösen Launen an ihm auslassen: wie es Andere mit ihren Hunden, Dienern und Frauen machen.

313 Kein Marterbild. — Ich will es machen wie Raffael und kein Marterbild mehr malen. Es giebt der erhabenen Dinge genug, als dass man die Erhabenheit dort aufzusuchen hätte, wo sie mit der Grausamkeit in Schwesterschaft lebt; und mein Ehrgeiz würde zudem kein Genügen daran finden, wenn ich mich zum sublimen Folterknecht machen wollte.

314 Neue Hausthiere. — Ich will meinen Löwen und meinen Adler um mich haben, damit ich allezeit Winke und Vorbedeutungen habe, zu wissen, wie gross oder wie gering meine Stärke ist. Muss ich heute zu ihnen hinabblicken und mich vor ihnen fürchten? Und wird die Stunde wiederkommen, wo sie zu mir hinaufblicken und in Furcht? —

315 Vom letzten Stündlein. — Stürme sind meine Gefahr: werde ich meinen Sturm haben, an dem ich zu Grunde gehe, wie Oliver Cromwell an seinem Sturme zu Grunde gieng? Oder werde ich verlöschen wie ein Licht, das nicht erst der Wind ausbläst, sondern das seiner selber müde und satt wurde, — ein ausgebranntes Licht? Oder endlich: werde ich mich ausblasen, um nicht auszubrennen? —

316 Prophetische Menschen. — Ihr habt kein Gefühl dafür, dass prophetische Menschen sehr leidende Menschen sind: ihr meint nur, es sei ihnen eine schöne „Gabe“ gegeben, und möchtet diese wohl gern selber haben, — doch ich will mich durch ein Gleichniss ausdrücken. Wie viel mögen die Thiere durch die Luft- und Wolken-Electricität leiden! Wir sehen, dass einige Arten von ihnen ein prophetisches Vermögen hinsichtlich des Wetters haben, zum Beispiel die Affen (wie man selbst noch in Europa gut beobachten kann, und nicht nur in Menagerien, nämlich auf Gibraltar). Aber wir denken nicht daran, dass ihre Schmerzen — für sie die Propheten sind! Wenn eine starke positive Electricität plötzlich unter dem Einflusse einer heranziehenden, noch lange nicht sichtbaren Wolke in negative Electricität umschlägt und eine Veränderung des Wetters sich vorbereitet, da benehmen sich diese Thiere so, als ob ein Feind herannahe, und richten sich zur Abwehr oder zur Flucht ein; meistens verkriechen sie sich, — sie verstehen das schlechte Wetter nicht als Wetter, sondern als Feind, dessen Hand sie schon fühlen!

317 Rückblick. — Wir werden uns des eigentlichen Pathos jeder Lebensperiode selten als eines solchen bewusst, so lange wir in ihr stehen, sondern meinen immer, es sei der einzig uns nunmehr mögliche und vernünftige Zustand und durchaus Ethos, nicht Pathos — mit den Griechen zu reden und zu trennen. Ein paar Töne von Musik riefen mir heute einen Winter und ein Haus und ein höchst einsiedlerisches Leben in’s Gedächtniss zurück und zugleich das Gefühl, in dem ich damals lebte: — ich meinte ewig so fortleben zu können. Aber jetzt begreife ich, dass es ganz und gar Pathos und Leidenschaft war, ein Ding, vergleichbar dieser schmerzhaft-muthigen und trostsichern Musik, — dergleichen darf man nicht auf Jahre oder gar auf Ewigkeiten haben: man würde für diesen Planeten damit zu „überirdisch“.

318 Weisheit im Schmerz. — Im Schmerz ist soviel Weisheit wie in der Lust: er gehört gleich dieser zu den arterhaltenden Kräften ersten Ranges. Wäre er diess nicht, so würde er längst zu Grunde gegangen sein; dass er weh thut, ist kein Argument gegen ihn, es ist sein Wesen. Ich höre im Schmerze den Commandoruf des Schiffscapitains: „zieht die Segel ein!“ Auf tausend Arten die Segel zu stellen, muss der kühne Schifffahrer „Mensch“ sich eingeübt haben, sonst wäre es gar zu schnell mit ihm vorbei, und der Ozean schlürfte ihn zu bald hinunter. Wir müssen auch mit verminderter Energie zu leben wissen: sobald der Schmerz sein Sicherheitssignal giebt, ist es an der Zeit, sie zu vermindern, — irgend eine grosse Gefahr, ein Sturm ist im Anzuge, und wir thun gut, uns so wenig als möglich „aufzubauschen“. — Es ist wahr, dass es Menschen giebt, welche beim Herannahen des grossen Schmerzes gerade den entgegengesetzten Commandoruf hören, und welche nie stolzer, kriegerischer und glücklicher dreinschauen, als wenn der Sturm heraufzieht; ja, der Schmerz selber giebt ihnen ihre grössten Augenblicke! Das sind die heroischen Menschen, die grossen Schmerzbringer der Menschheit: jene Wenigen oder Seltenen, die eben die selbe Apologie nöthig haben, wie der Schmerz überhaupt, — und wahrlich! man soll sie ihnen nicht versagen! Es sind arterhaltende, artfördernde Kräfte ersten Ranges: und wäre es auch nur dadurch, dass sie der Behaglichkeit widerstreben und vor dieser Art Glück ihren Ekel nicht verbergen.

319 Als Interpreten unserer Erlebnisse. — Eine Art von Redlichkeit ist allen Religionsstiftern und Ihresgleichen fremd gewesen: — sie haben nie sich aus ihren Erlebnissen eine Gewissenssache der Erkenntniss gemacht. „Was habe ich eigentlich erlebt? Was gieng damals in mir und um mich vor? War meine Vernunft hell genug? War mein Wille gegen alle Betrügereien der Sinne gewendet und tapfer in seiner Abwehr des Phantastischen?“ — so hat Keiner von ihnen gefragt, so fragen alle die lieben Religiösen auch jetzt noch nicht: sie haben vielmehr einen Durst nach Dingen, welche wider die Vernunft sind, und wollen es sich nicht zu schwer machen, ihn zu befriedigen, — so erleben sie denn „Wunder“ und „Wiedergeburten“ und hören die Stimmen der Englein! Aber wir, wir Anderen, Vernunft-Durstigen, wollen unseren Erlebnissen so streng in’s Auge sehen, wie einem wissenschaftlichen Versuche, Stunde für Stunde, Tag um Tag!

Wir selber wollen unsere Experimente und Versuchs-Thiere sein.

320 Beim Wiedersehen. — A.: Verstehe ich dich noch ganz? Du suchst? Wo ist inmitten der jetzt wirklichen Welt dein Winkel und Stern? Wo kannst du dich in die Sonne legen, sodass auch dir ein Ueberschuss von Wohl kommt und dein Dasein sich rechtfertigt? Möge das Jeder für sich selber thun — scheinst du mir zu sagen — und das Reden in’s Allgemeine, das Sorgen für den Anderen und die Gesellschaft sich aus dem Sinne schlagen! — B.: Ich will mehr, ich bin kein Suchender. Ich will für mich eine eigene Sonne schaffen.

321 Neue Vorsicht. — Lasst uns nicht mehr so viel an Strafen, Tadeln und Bessern denken! Einen Einzelnen werden wir selten verändern; und wenn es uns gelingen sollte, so ist vielleicht unbesehens auch Etwas mitgelungen: wir sind durch ihn verändert worden! Sehen wir vielmehr zu, dass unser eigener Einfluss auf alles Kommende seinen Einfluss aufwiegt und überwiegt! Ringen wir nicht im directen Kampfe! — und das ist auch alles Tadeln, Strafen und Bessernwollen. Sondern erheben wir uns selber um so höher! Geben wir unserm Vorbilde immer leuchtendere Farben! Verdunkeln wir den Andern durch unser Licht! Nein! Wir wollen nicht um seinetwillen selber dunkler werden, gleich allen Strafenden und Unzufriedenen! Gehen wir lieber bei Seite! Sehen wir weg!

322 Gleichniss. — Jene Denker, in denen alle Sterne sich in kyklischen Bahnen bewegen, sind nicht die tiefsten; wer in sich wie in einen ungeheuren Weltraum hineinsieht und Milchstrassen in sich trägt, der weiss auch, wie unregelmässig alle Milchstrassen sind; sie führen bis in’s Chaos und Labyrinth des Daseins hinein.

323 Glück im Schicksal. — Die grösste Auszeichnung erweist uns das Schicksal, wenn es uns eine Zeit lang auf der Seite unserer Gegner hat kämpfen lassen. Damit sind wir vorherbestimmt zu einem grossen Siege.

324 In media vita. — Nein! Das Leben hat mich nicht enttäuscht! Von Jahr zu Jahr finde ich es vielmehr wahrer, begehrenswerther und geheimnissvoller, — von jenem Tage an, wo der grosse Befreier über mich kam, jener Gedanke, dass das Leben ein Experiment des Erkennenden sein dürfe — und nicht eine Pflicht, nicht ein Verhängniss, nicht eine Betrügerei! — Und die Erkenntniss selber: mag sie für Andere etwas Anderes sein, zum Beispiel ein Ruhebett oder der Weg zu einem Ruhebett, oder eine Unterhaltung, oder ein Müssiggang, — für mich ist sie eine Welt der Gefahren und Siege, in der auch die heroischen Gefühle ihre Tanz- und Tummelplätze haben. „Das Leben ein Mittel der Erkenntniss“ — mit diesem Grundsatze im Herzen kann man nicht nur tapfer, sondern sogar fröhlich leben und fröhlich lachen! Und wer verstünde überhaupt gut zu lachen und zu leben, der sich nicht vorerst auf Krieg und Sieg gut verstünde?

325 Was zur Grösse gehört. — Wer wird etwas Grosses erreichen, wenn er nicht die Kraft und den Willen in sich fühlt, grosse Schmerzen zuzufügen? Das Leidenkönnen ist das Wenigste: darin bringen es schwache Frauen und selbst Sclaven oft zur Meisterschaft. Aber nicht an innerer Noth und Unsicherheit zu Grunde gehn, wenn man grosses Leid zufügt und den Schrei dieses Leides hört — das ist gross, das gehört zur Grösse.

326 Die Seelen-Aerzte und der Schmerz. — Alle Moralprediger, wie auch alle Theologen, haben eine gemeinsame Unart: alle suchen den Menschen aufzureden, sie befänden sich sehr schlecht und es thue eine harte letzte radicale Cur noth. Und weil die Menschen insgesammt jenen Lehren ihr Ohr zu eifrig und ganze Jahrhunderte lang hingehalten haben, ist zuletzt wirklich Etwas von jenem Aberglauben, dass es ihnen sehr schlecht gehe, auf sie übergegangen: sodass sie jetzt gar zu gerne einmal bereit sind, zu seufzen und Nichts mehr am Leben zu finden und miteinander betrübte Mienen zu machen, wie als ob es doch gar schwer auszuhalten sei. In Wahrheit sind sie unbändig ihres Lebens sicher und in dasselbe verliebt und voller unsäglicher Listen und Feinheiten, um das Unangenehme zu brechen und dem Schmerze und Unglücke seinen Dorn auszuziehen. Es will mir scheinen, dass vom Schmerze und Unglücke immer übertrieben geredet werde, wie als ob es eine Sache der guten Lebensart sei, hier zu übertreiben: man schweigt dagegen geflissentlich davon, dass es gegen den Schmerz eine Unzahl Linderungsmittel giebt, wie Betäubungen, oder die fieberhafte Hast der Gedanken, oder eine ruhige Lage, oder gute und schlimme Erinnerungen, Absichten, Hoffnungen, und viele Arten von Stolz und Mitgefühl, die beinahe die Wirkung von Anästheticis haben: während bei den höchsten Graden des Schmerzes schon von selber Ohnmachten eintreten. Wir verstehen uns ganz gut darauf, Süssigkeiten auf unsere Bitternisse zu träufeln, namentlich auf die Bitternisse der Seele; wir haben Hülfsmittel in unserer Tapferkeit und Erhabenheit, sowie in den edleren Delirien der Unterwerfung und der Resignation. Ein Verlust ist kaum eine Stunde ein Verlust: irgendwie ist uns damit auch ein Geschenk vom Himmel gefallen — eine neue Kraft zum Beispiel: und sei es auch nur eine neue Gelegenheit zur Kraft! Was haben die Moralprediger vom inneren „Elend“ der bösen Menschen phantasirt! Was haben sie gar vom Unglücke der leidenschaftlichen Menschen uns vorgelogen! — ja, lügen ist hier das rechte Wort: sie haben um das überreiche Glück dieser Art von Menschen recht wohl gewusst, aber es todtgeschwiegen, weil es eine Widerlegung ihrer Theorie war, nach der alles Glück erst mit der Vernichtung der Leidenschaft und dem Schweigen des Willens entsteht! Und was zuletzt das Recept aller dieser Seelen-Aerzte betrifft und ihre Anpreisung einer harten radicalen Cur: so ist es erlaubt, zu fragen: ist dieses unser Leben wirklich schmerzhaft und lästig genug, um mit Vortheil eine stoische Lebensweise und Versteinerung dagegen einzutauschen? Wir befinden uns nicht schlecht genug, um uns auf stoische Art schlecht befinden zu müssen!

327 Ernst nehmen. — Der Intellect ist bei den Allermeisten eine schwerfällige, finstere und knarrende Maschine, welche übel in Gang zu bringen ist: sie nennen es „die Sache ernst nehmen“, wenn sie mit dieser Maschine arbeiten und gut denken wollen — oh wie lästig muss ihnen das Gut-Denken sein! Die liebliche Bestie Mensch verliert jedesmal, wie es scheint, die gute Laune, wenn sie gut denkt; sie wird „ernst“! Und „wo Lachen und Fröhlichkeit ist, da taugt das Denken Nichts“: — so lautet das Vorurtheil dieser ernsten Bestie gegen alle „fröhliche Wissenschaft“. — Wohlan! Zeigen wir, dass es ein Vorurtheil ist!

328 Der Dummheit Schaden thun. — Gewiss hat der so hartnäckig und überzeugt gepredigte Glaube von der Verwerflichkeit des Egoismus im Ganzen dem Egoismus Schaden gethan (zu Gunsten, wie ich hundertmal wiederholen werde, der Heerden-Instincte!), namentlich dadurch, dass er ihm das gute Gewissen nahm und in ihm die eigentliche Quelle alles Unglücks suchen hiess. „Deine Selbstsucht ist das Unheil deines Lebens“ — so klang die Predigt Jahrtausende lang: es that, wie gesagt, der Selbstsucht Schaden und nahm ihr viel Geist, viel Heiterkeit, viel Erfindsamkeit, viel Schönheit, es verdummte und verhässlichte und vergiftete die Selbstsucht! — Das philosophische Alterthum lehrte dagegen eine andere Hauptquelle des Unheils: von Sokrates an wurden die Denker nicht müde, zu predigen: „eure Gedankenlosigkeit und Dummheit, euer Dahinleben nach der Regel, eure Unterordnung unter die Meinung des Nachbars ist der Grund, wesshalb ihr es so selten zum Glück bringt, — wir Denker sind als Denker die Glücklichsten.“ Entscheiden wir hier nicht, ob diese Predigt gegen die Dummheit bessere Gründe für sich hatte, als jene Predigt gegen die Selbstsucht; gewiss aber ist das, dass sie der Dummheit das gute Gewissen nahm: — diese Philosophen haben der Dummheit Schaden gethan.

329 Musse und Müssiggang. — Es ist eine indianerhafte, dem Indianer-Blute eigenthümliche Wildheit in der Art, wie die Amerikaner nach Gold trachten: und ihre athemlose Hast der Arbeit — das eigentliche Laster der neuen Welt — beginnt bereits durch Ansteckung das alte Europa wild zu machen und eine ganz wunderliche Geistlosigkeit darüber zu breiten. Man schämt sich jetzt schon der Ruhe; das lange Nachsinnen macht beinahe Gewissensbisse. Man denkt mit der Uhr in der Hand, wie man zu Mittag isst, das Auge auf das Börsenblatt gerichtet, — man lebt, wie Einer, der fortwährend Etwas „versäumen könnte“. „Lieber irgend Etwas thun, als Nichts“ — auch dieser Grundsatz ist eine Schnur, um aller Bildung und allem höheren Geschmack den Garaus zu machen. Und so wie sichtlich alle Formen an dieser Hast der Arbeitenden zu Grunde gehen: so geht auch das Gefühl für die Form selber, das Ohr und Auge für die Melodie der Bewegungen zu Grunde. Der Beweis dafür liegt in der jetzt überall geforderten plumpen Deutlichkeit, in allen den Lagen, wo der Mensch einmal redlich mit Menschen sein will, im Verkehre mit Freunden, Frauen, Verwandten, Kindern, Lehrern, Schülern, Führern und Fürsten, — man hat keine Zeit und keine Kraft mehr für die Ceremonien, für die Verbindlichkeit mit Umwegen, für allen Esprit der Unterhaltung und überhaupt für alles Otium. Denn das Leben auf der Jagd nach Gewinn zwingt fortwährend dazu, seinen Geist bis zur Erschöpfung auszugeben, im beständigen Sich-Verstellen oder Ueberlisten oder Zuvorkommen: die eigentliche Tugend ist jetzt, Etwas in weniger Zeit zu thun, als ein Anderer. Und so giebt es nur selten Stunden der erlaubten Redlichkeit: in diesen aber ist man müde und möchte sich nicht nur „gehen lassen“, sondern lang und breit und plump sich hinstrecken. Gemäss diesem Hange schreibt man jetzt seine Briefe; deren Stil und Geist immer das eigentliche „Zeichen der Zeit“ sein werden. Giebt es noch ein Vergnügen an Gesellschaft und an Künsten, so ist es ein Vergnügen, wie es müdegearbeitete Sclaven sich zurecht machen. Oh über diese Genügsamkeit der „Freude“ bei unsern Gebildeten und Ungebildeten! Oh über diese zunehmende Verdächtigung aller Freude! Die Arbeit bekommt immer mehr alles gute Gewissen auf ihre Seite: der Hang zur Freude nennt sich bereits „Bedürfniss der Erholung“ und fängt an, sich vor sich selber zu schämen. „Man ist es seiner Gesundheit schuldig“ — so redet man, wenn man auf einer Landpartie ertappt wird. Ja, es könnte bald so weit kommen, dass man einem Hange zur vita contemplativa (das heisst zum Spazierengehen mit Gedanken und Freunden) nicht ohne Selbstverachtung und schlechtes Gewissen nachgäbe. — Nun! Ehedem war es umgekehrt: die Arbeit hatte das schlechte Gewissen auf sich. Ein Mensch von guter Abkunft verbarg seine Arbeit, wenn die Noth ihn zum Arbeiten zwang. Der Sclave arbeitete unter dem Druck des Gefühls, dass er etwas Verächtliches thue: — das „Thun“ selber war etwas Verächtliches. „Die Vornehmheit und die Ehre sind allein bei otium und bellum“: so klang die Stimme des antiken Vorurtheils!

330 Beifall. — Der Denker bedarf des Beifalls und des Händeklatschens nicht, vorausgesetzt, dass er seines eigenen Händeklatschens sicher ist: diess aber kann er nicht entbehren. Giebt es Menschen, welche auch dessen und überhaupt jeder Gattung von Beifall entrathen könnten? Ich zweifle: und selbst in Betreff der Weisesten sagt Tacitus, der kein Verleumder der Weisen ist, quando etiam sapientibus gloriae cupido novissima exuitur — das heisst bei ihm: niemals.

331 Lieber taub, als betäubt. — Ehemals wollte man sich einen Ruf machen: das genügt jetzt nicht mehr, da der Markt zu gross geworden ist, — es muss ein Geschrei sein. Die Folge ist, dass auch gute Kehlen sich überschreien, und die besten Waaren von heiseren Stimmen ausgeboten werden; ohne Marktschreierei und Heiserkeit giebt es jetzt kein Genie mehr. — Das ist nun freilich ein böses Zeitalter für den Denker: er muss lernen, zwischen zwei Lärmen noch seine Stille zu finden, und sich so lange taub stellen, bis er es ist. So lange er diess noch nicht gelernt hat, ist er freilich in Gefahr, vor Ungeduld und Kopfschmerzen zu Grunde zu gehen.

332 Die böse Stunde. — Es hat wohl für jeden Philosophen eine böse Stunde gegeben, wo er dachte: was liegt an mir, wenn man mir nicht auch meine schlechten Argumente glaubt! — Und dann flog irgend ein schadenfrohes Vögelchen an ihm vorüber und zwitscherte: „Was liegt an dir? Was liegt an dir?“

333 Was heisst erkennen. — Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! sagt Spinoza, so schlicht und erhaben, wie es seine Art ist. Indessen: was ist diess intelligere im letzten Grunde Anderes, als die Form, in der uns eben jene Drei auf Einmal fühlbar werden? Ein Resultat aus den verschiedenen und sich widerstrebenden Trieben des Verlachen-, Beklagen-, Verwünschen-wollens? Bevor ein Erkennen möglich ist, muss jeder dieser Triebe erst seine einseitige Ansicht über das Ding oder Vorkommniss vorgebracht haben; hinterher entstand der Kampf dieser Einseitigkeiten und aus ihm bisweilen eine Mitte, eine Beruhigung, ein Rechtgeben nach allen drei Seiten, eine Art Gerechtigkeit und Vertrag: denn, vermöge der Gerechtigkeit und des Vertrags können alle diese Triebe sich im Dasein behaupten und mit einander Recht behalten. Wir, denen nur die letzten Versöhnungsscenen und Schluss-Abrechnungen dieses langen Processes zum Bewusstsein kommen, meinen demnach, intelligere sei etwas Versöhnliches, Gerechtes, Gutes, etwas wesentlich den Trieben Entgegengesetztes; während es nur ein gewisses Verhalten der Triebe zu einander ist. Die längsten Zeiten hindurch hat man bewusstes Denken als das Denken überhaupt betrachtet: jetzt erst dämmert uns die Wahrheit auf, dass der allergrösste Theil unseres geistigen Wirkens uns unbewusst, ungefühlt verläuft; ich meine aber, diese Triebe, die hier mit einander kämpfen, werden recht wohl verstehen, sich einander dabei fühlbar zu machen und wehe zu thun —: jene gewaltige plötzliche Erschöpfung, von der alle Denker heimgesucht werden, mag da ihren Ursprung haben (es ist die Erschöpfung auf dem Schlachtfelde). Ja, vielleicht giebt es in unserm kämpfenden Innern manches verborgene Heroenthum, aber gewiss nichts Göttliches, Ewig-in-sich-Ruhendes, wie Spinoza meinte. Das bewusste Denken, und namentlich das des Philosophen, ist die unkräftigste und desshalb auch die verhältnissmässig mildeste und ruhigste Art des Denkens: und so kann gerade der Philosoph am leichtesten über die Natur des Erkennens irre geführt werden.

334 Man muss lieben lernen. — So geht es uns in der Musik: erst muss man eine Figur und Weise überhaupt hören lernen, heraushören, unterscheiden, als ein Leben für sich isoliren und abgrenzen; dann braucht es Mühe und guten Willen, sie zu ertragen, trotz ihrer Fremdheit, Geduld gegen ihren Blick und Ausdruck, Mildherzigkeit gegen das Wunderliche an ihr zu üben: — endlich kommt ein Augenblick, wo wir ihrer gewohnt sind, wo wir sie erwarten, wo wir ahnen, dass sie uns fehlen würde, wenn sie fehlte; und nun wirkt sie ihren Zwang und Zauber fort und fort und endet nicht eher, als bis wir ihre demüthigen und entzückten Liebhaber geworden sind, die nichts Besseres von der Welt mehr wollen, als sie und wieder sie. — So geht es uns aber nicht nur mit der Musik: gerade so haben wir alle Dinge, die wir jetzt lieben, lieben gelernt. Wir werden schliesslich immer für unseren guten Willen, unsere Geduld, Billigkeit, Sanftmüthigkeit gegen das Fremde belohnt, indem das Fremde langsam seinen Schleier abwirft und sich als neue unsägliche Schönheit darstellt: — es ist sein Dank für unsere Gastfreundschaft. Auch wer sich selber liebt, wird es auf diesem Wege gelernt haben: es giebt keinen anderen Weg. Auch die Liebe muss man lernen.

335 Hoch die Physik! — Wie viel Menschen verstehen denn zu beobachten! Und unter den wenigen, die es verstehen, — wie viele beobachten sich selber! „Jeder ist sich selber der Fernste“ — das wissen alle Nierenprüfer, zu ihrem Unbehagen; und der Spruch „erkenne dich selbst!“ ist, im Munde eines Gottes und zu Menschen geredet, beinahe eine Bosheit. Dass es aber so verzweifelt mit der Selbstbeobachtung steht, dafür zeugt Nichts mehr, als die Art, wie über das Wesen einer moralischen Handlung fast von Jedermann gesprochen wird, diese schnelle, bereitwillige, überzeugte, redselige Art, mit ihrem Blick, ihrem Lächeln, ihrem gefälligen Eifer! Man scheint dir sagen zu wollen: „Aber, mein Lieber, das gerade ist meine Sache! Du wendest dich mit deiner Frage an Den, der antworten darf: ich bin zufällig in Nichts so weise, wie hierin. Also: wenn der Mensch urtheilt „so ist es recht“, wenn er darauf schliesst „darum muss es geschehen!“ und nun thut, was er dergestalt als recht erkannt und als nothwendig bezeichnet hat, — so ist das Wesen seiner Handlung moralisch!“ Aber, mein Freund, du sprichst mir da von drei Handlungen statt von einer: auch dein Urtheilen zum Beispiel „so ist es recht“ ist eine Handlung, — könnte nicht schon auf eine moralische und auf eine unmoralische Weise geurtheilt werden? Warum hältst du diess und gerade diess für recht? — „Weil mein Gewissen es mir sagt; das Gewissen redet nie unmoralisch, es bestimmt ja erst, was moralisch sein soll!“ — Aber warum hörst du auf die Sprache deines Gewissens? Und inwiefern hast du ein Recht, ein solches Urtheil als wahr und untrüglich anzusehen? Für diesen Glauben — giebt es da kein Gewissen mehr? Weisst du Nichts von einem intellectuellen Gewissen? Einem Gewissen hinter deinem „Gewissen“? Dein Urtheil „so ist es recht“ hat eine Vorgeschichte in deinen Trieben, Neigungen, Abneigungen, Erfahrungen und Nicht-Erfahrungen; „wie ist es da entstanden?“ musst du fragen, und hinterher noch: „was treibt mich eigentlich, ihm Gehör zu schenken?“ Du kannst seinem Befehle Gehör schenken, wie ein braver Soldat, der den Befehl seines Offiziers vernimmt. Oder wie ein Weib, das Den liebt, der befiehlt. Oder wie ein Schmeichler und Feigling, der sich vor dem Befehlenden fürchtet. Oder wie ein Dummkopf, welcher folgt, weil er Nichts dagegen zu sagen hat. Kurz, auf hundert Arten kannst du deinem Gewissen Gehör geben. Dass du aber diess und jenes Urtheil als Sprache des Gewissens hörst, also, dass du Etwas als recht empfindest, kann seine Ursache darin haben, dass du nie über dich nachgedacht hast und blindlings annahmst, was dir als recht von Kindheit an bezeichnet worden ist: oder darin, dass dir Brod und Ehren bisher mit dem zu Theil wurde, was du deine Pflicht nennst, — es gilt dir als „recht“, weil es dir deine „Existenz-Bedingung“ scheint (dass du aber ein Recht auf Existenz habest, dünkt dich unwiderleglich!). Die Festigkeit deines moralischen Urtheils könnte immer noch ein Beweis gerade von persönlicher Erbärmlichkeit, von Unpersönlichkeit sein, deine „moralische Kraft“ könnte ihre Quelle in deinem Eigensinn haben — oder in deiner Unfähigkeit, neue Ideale zu schauen! Und, kurz gesagt: wenn du feiner gedacht, besser beobachtet und mehr gelernt hättest, würdest du diese deine „Pflicht“ und diess dein „Gewissen“ unter allen Umständen nicht mehr Pflicht und Gewissen benennen: die Einsicht darüber, wie überhaupt jemals moralische Urtheile entstanden sind, würde dir diese pathetischen Worte verleiden, — so wie dir schon andere pathetische Worte, zum Beispiel „Sünde“, „Seelenheil“, „Erlösung“ verleidet sind. — Und nun rede mir nicht vom kategorischen Imperativ, mein Freund! — diess Wort kitzelt mein Ohr, und ich muss lachen, trotz deiner so ernsthaften Gegenwart: ich gedenke dabei des alten Kant, der, zur Strafe dafür, dass er „das Ding an sich“ — auch eine sehr lächerliche Sache! — sich erschlichen hatte, vom „kategorischen Imperativ“ beschlichen wurde und mit ihm im Herzen sich wieder zu „Gott“, „Seele“, „Freiheit“ und „Unsterblichkeit“ zurückverirrte, einem Fuchse gleich, der sich in seinen Käfig zurückverirrt: — und seine Kraft und Klugheit war es gewesen, welche diesen Käfig erbrochen hatte! — Wie? Du bewunderst den kategorischen Imperativ in dir? Diese „Festigkeit“ deines sogenannten moralischen Urtheils? Diese „Unbedingtheit“ des Gefühls „so wie ich, müssen hierin Alle urtheilen“? Bewundere vielmehr deine Selbstsucht darin! Und die Blindheit, Kleinlichkeit und Anspruchslosigkeit deiner Selbstsucht! Selbstsucht nämlich ist es, sein Urtheil als Allgemeingesetz zu empfinden; und eine blinde, kleinliche und anspruchslose Selbstsucht hinwiederum, weil sie verräth, dass du dich selber noch nicht entdeckt, dir selber noch kein eigenes, eigenstes Ideal geschaffen hast: — diess nämlich könnte niemals das eines Anderen sein, geschweige denn Aller, Aller! — — Wer noch urtheilt „so müsste in diesem Falle Jeder handeln“, ist noch nicht fünf Schritt weit in der Selbsterkenntniss gegangen: sonst würde er wissen, dass es weder gleiche Handlungen giebt, noch geben kann, — dass jede Handlung, die gethan worden ist, auf eine ganz einzige und unwiederbringliche Art gethan wurde, und dass es ebenso mit jeder zukünftigen Handlung stehen wird, — dass alle Vorschriften des Handelns sich nur auf die gröbliche Aussenseite beziehen (und selbst die innerlichsten und feinsten Vorschriften aller bisherigen Moralen), — dass mit ihnen wohl ein Schein der Gleichheit, aber eben nur ein Schein erreicht werden kann, — dass jede Handlung, beim Hinblick oder Rückblick auf sie, eine undurchdringliche Sache ist und bleibt, — dass unsere Meinungen von „gut“, „edel“, „gross“ durch unsere Handlungen nie bewiesen werden können, weil jede Handlung unerkennbar ist, — dass sicherlich unsere Meinungen, Werthschätzungen und Gütertafeln zu den mächtigsten Hebeln im Räderwerk unserer Handlungen gehören, dass aber für jeden einzelnen Fall das Gesetz ihrer Mechanik unnachweisbar ist. Beschränken wir uns also auf die Reinigung unserer Meinungen und Werthschätzungen und auf die Schöpfung neuer eigener Gütertafeln: — über den „moralischen Werth unserer Handlungen“ aber wollen wir nicht mehr grübeln! Ja, meine Freunde! In Hinsicht auf das ganze moralische Geschwätz der Einen über die Andern ist der Ekel an der Zeit! Moralisch zu Gericht sitzen soll uns wider den Geschmack gehen! Ueberlassen wir diess Geschwätz und diesen üblen Geschmack Denen, welche nicht mehr zu thun haben, als die Vergangenheit um ein kleines Stück weiter durch die Zeit zu schleppen und welche selber niemals Gegenwart sind, — den Vielen also, den Allermeisten! Wir aber wollen Die werden, die wir sind, — die Neuen, die Einmaligen, die Unvergleichbaren, die Sich-selber-Gesetzgebenden, die Sich-selber-Schaffenden! Und dazu müssen wir die besten Lerner und Entdecker alles Gesetzlichen und Nothwendigen in der Welt werden: wir müssen Physiker sein, um, in jenem Sinne, Schöpfer sein zu können, — während bisher alle Werthschätzungen und Ideale auf Unkenntniss der Physik oder im Widerspruch mit ihr aufgebaut waren. Und darum: Hoch die Physik! Und höher noch das, was uns zu ihr zwingt, — unsere Redlichkeit!

336 Geiz der Natur. — Warum ist die Natur so kärglich gegen den Menschen gewesen, dass sie ihn nicht leuchten liess, Diesen mehr, Jenen weniger, je nach seiner innern Lichtfülle? Warum haben grosse Menschen nicht eine so schöne Sichtbarkeit in ihrem Aufgange und Niedergange, wie die Sonne? Wie viel unzweideutiger wäre alles Leben unter Menschen!

337 Die zukünftige „Menschlichkeit“. — Wenn ich mit den Augen eines fernen Zeitalters nach diesem hinsehe, so weiss ich an dem gegenwärtigen Menschen nichts Merkwürdigeres zu finden, als seine eigenthümliche Tugend und Krankheit, genannt „der historische Sinn“. Es ist ein Ansatz zu etwas ganz Neuem und Fremdem in der Geschichte: gebe man diesem Keime einige Jahrhunderte und mehr, so könnte daraus am Ende ein wundervolles Gewächs mit einem eben so wundervollen Geruche werden, um dessentwillen unsere alte Erde angenehmer zu bewohnen wäre, als bisher. Wir Gegenwärtigen fangen eben an, die Kette eines zukünftigen sehr mächtigen Gefühls zu bilden, Glied um Glied, — wir wissen kaum, was wir thun. Fast scheint es uns, als ob es sich nicht um ein neues Gefühl, sondern um die Abnahme aller alten Gefühle handele: — der historische Sinn ist noch etwas so Armes und Kaltes, und Viele werden von ihm wie von einem Froste befallen und durch ihn noch ärmer und kälter gemacht. Anderen erscheint er als das Anzeichen des heranschleichenden Alters, und unser Planet gilt ihnen als ein schwermüthiger Kranker, der, um seine Gegenwart zu vergessen, sich seine Jugendgeschichte aufschreibt. In der That: diess ist Eine Farbe dieses neuen Gefühls: wer die Geschichte der Menschen insgesammt als eigene Geschichte zu fühlen weiss, der empfindet in einer ungeheuren Verallgemeinerung allen jenen Gram des Kranken, der an die Gesundheit, des Greises, der an den Jugendtraum denkt, des Liebenden, der der Geliebten beraubt wird, des Märtyrers, dem sein Ideal zu Grunde geht, des Helden am Abend der Schlacht, welche Nichts entschieden hat und doch ihm Wunden und den Verlust des Freundes brachte —; aber diese ungeheure Summe von Gram aller Art tragen, tragen können und nun doch noch der Held sein, der beim Anbruch eines zweiten Schlachttages die Morgenröthe und sein Glück begrüsst, als der Mensch eines Horizontes von Jahrtausenden vor sich und hinter sich, als der Erbe aller Vornehmheit alles vergangenen Geistes und der verpflichtete Erbe, als der Adeligste aller alten Edlen und zugleich der Erstling eines neuen Adels, dessen Gleichen noch keine Zeit sah und träumte: diess Alles auf seine Seele nehmen, Aeltestes, Neuestes, Verluste, Hoffnungen, Eroberungen, Siege der Menschheit: diess Alles endlich in Einer Seele haben und in Ein Gefühl zusammendrängen: — diess müsste doch ein Glück ergeben, das bisher der Mensch noch nicht kannte, — eines Gottes Glück voller Macht und Liebe, voller Thränen und voll Lachens, ein Glück, welches, wie die Sonne am Abend, fortwährend aus seinem unerschöpflichen Reichthume wegschenkt und in’s Meer schüttet und, wie sie, sich erst dann am reichsten fühlt, wenn auch der ärmste Fischer noch mit goldenem Ruder rudert! Dieses göttliche Gefühl hiesse dann — Menschlichkeit!

338 Der Wille zum Leiden und die Mitleidigen. — Ist es euch selber zuträglich, vor Allem mitleidige Menschen zu sein? Und ist es den Leidenden zuträglich, wenn ihr es seid? Doch lassen wir die erste Frage für einen Augenblick ohne Antwort. — Das, woran wir am tiefsten und persönlichsten leiden, ist fast allen Anderen unverständlich und unzugänglich: darin sind wir dem Nächsten verborgen, und wenn er mit uns aus Einem Topfe isst. Ueberall aber, wo wir als Leidende bemerkt werden, wird unser Leiden flach ausgelegt; es gehört zum Wesen der mitleidigen Affection, dass sie das fremde Leid des eigentlich Persönlichen entkleidet: — unsre „Wohlthäter“ sind mehr als unsre Feinde die Verkleinerer unsres Werthes und Willens. Bei den meisten Wohlthaten, die Unglücklichen erwiesen werden, liegt etwas Empörendes in der intellectuellen Leichtfertigkeit, mit der da der Mitleidige das Schicksal spielt: er weiss Nichts von der ganzen inneren Folge und Verflechtung, welche Unglück für mich oder für dich heisst! Die gesammte Oekonomie meiner Seele und deren Ausgleichung durch das „Unglück“, das Aufbrechen neuer Quellen und Bedürfnisse, das Zuwachsen alter Wunden, das Abstossen ganzer Vergangenheiten — das Alles, was mit dem Unglück verbunden sein kann, kümmert den lieben Mitleidigen nicht: er will helfen und denkt nicht daran, dass es eine persönliche Nothwendigkeit des Unglücks giebt, dass mir und dir Schrecken, Entbehrungen, Verarmungen, Mitternächte, Abenteuer, Wagnisse, Fehlgriffe so nöthig sind, wie ihr Gegentheil, ja dass, um mich mystisch auszudrücken, der Pfad zum eigenen Himmel immer durch die Wollust der eigenen Hölle geht. Nein, davon weiss er Nichts: die „Religion des Mitleidens“ (oder „das Herz“) gebietet, zu helfen, und man glaubt am besten geholfen zu haben, wenn man am schnellsten geholfen hat! Wenn ihr Anhänger dieser Religion die selbe Gesinnung, die ihr gegen die Mitmenschen habt, auch wirklich gegen euch selber habt, wenn ihr euer eigenes Leiden nicht eine Stunde auf euch liegen lassen wollt und immerfort allem möglichen Unglücke von ferne her schon vorbeugt, wenn ihr Leid und Unlust überhaupt als böse, hassenswerth, vernichtungswürdig, als Makel am Dasein empfindet: nun, dann habt ihr, ausser eurer Religion des Mitleidens, auch noch eine andere Religion im Herzen, und diese ist vielleicht die Mutter von jener: — die Religion der Behaglichkeit. Ach, wie wenig wisst ihr vom Glücke des Menschen, ihr Behaglichen und Gutmüthigen! — denn das Glück und das Unglück sind zwei Geschwister und Zwillinge, die mit einander gross wachsen oder, wie bei euch, mit einander — klein bleiben! Aber nun zur ersten Frage zurück. — Wie ist es nur möglich, auf seinem Wege zu bleiben! Fortwährend ruft uns irgend ein Geschrei seitwärts; unser Auge sieht da selten Etwas, wobei es nicht nöthig wird, augenblicklich unsre eigne Sache zu lassen und zuzuspringen. Ich weiss es: es giebt hundert anständige und rühmliche Arten, um mich von meinem Wege zu verlieren, und wahrlich höchst „moralische“ Arten! Ja, die Ansicht der jetzigen Mitleid-Moralprediger geht sogar dahin, das eben Diess und nur Diess allein moralisch sei: — sich dergestalt von seinem Wege zu verlieren und dem Nächsten beizuspringen. Ich weiss es ebenso gewiss: ich brauche mich nur dem Anblicke einer wirklichen Noth auszuliefern, so bin ich auch verloren! Und wenn ein leidender Freund zu mir sagte: „Siehe, ich werde bald sterben; versprich mir doch, mit mir zu sterben“ — ich verspräche es, ebenso wie mich der Anblick jenes für seine Freiheit kämpfenden Bergvölkchens dazu bringen würde, ihm meine Hand und mein Leben anzubieten: — um einmal aus guten Gründen schlechte Beispiele zu wählen. Ja, es giebt eine heimliche Verführung sogar in alle diesem Mitleid-Erweckenden und Hülfe-Rufenden: eben unser „eigener Weg“ ist eine zu harte und anspruchsvolle Sache und zu ferne von der Liebe und Dankbarkeit der Anderen, — wir entlaufen ihm gar nicht ungerne, ihm und unserm eigensten Gewissen, und flüchten uns unter das Gewissen der Anderen und hinein in den lieblichen Tempel der „Religion des Mitleidens“. Sobald jetzt irgend ein Krieg ausbricht, so bricht damit immer auch gerade in den Edelsten eines Volkes eine freilich geheim gehaltene Lust aus: sie werfen sich mit Entzücken der neuen Gefahr des Todes entgegen, weil sie in der Aufopferung für das Vaterland endlich jene lange gesuchte Erlaubniss zu haben glauben — die Erlaubniss, ihrem Ziele auszuweichen: — der Krieg ist für sie ein Umweg zum Selbstmord, aber ein Umweg mit gutem Gewissen. Und, um hier Einiges zu verschweigen: so will ich doch meine Moral nicht verschweigen, welche zu mir sagt: Lebe im Verborgenen, damit du dir leben kannst! Lebe unwissend über Das, was deinem Zeitalter das Wichtigste dünkt! Lege zwischen dich und heute wenigstens die Haut von drei Jahrhunderten! Und das Geschrei von heute, der Lärm der Kriege und Revolutionen, soll dir ein Gemurmel sein! Du wirst auch helfen wollen: aber nur Denen, deren Noth du ganz verstehst, weil sie mit dir Ein Leid und Eine Hoffnung haben — deinen Freunden: und nur auf die Weise, wie du dir selber hilfst: — ich will sie muthiger, aushaltender, einfacher, fröhlicher machen! Ich will sie Das lehren, was jetzt so Wenige verstehen und jene Prediger des Mitleidens am wenigsten: — die Mitfreude!

339 Vita femina. — Die letzten Schönheiten eines Werkes zu sehen — dazu reicht alles Wissen und aller guter Wille nicht aus; es bedarf der seltensten glücklichen Zufälle, damit einmal der Wolkenschleier von diesen Gipfeln für uns weiche und die Sonne auf ihnen glühe. Nicht nur müssen wir gerade an der rechten Stelle stehen, diess zu sehen: es muss gerade unsere Seele selber den Schleier von ihren Höhn weggezogen haben und eines äusseren Ausdruckes und Gleichnisses bedürftig sein, wie um einen Halt zu haben und ihrer selber mächtig zu bleiben. Diess Alles aber kommt so selten gleichzeitig zusammen, dass ich glauben möchte, die höchsten Höhen alles Guten, sei es Werk, That, Mensch, Natur, seien bisher für die Meisten und selbst für die Besten etwas Verborgenes und Verhülltes gewesen: — was sich aber uns enthüllt, das enthüllt sich uns Ein Mal! — Die Griechen beteten wohl: „Zwei und drei Mal alles Schöne!“ Ach, sie hatten da einen guten Grund, Götter anzurufen, denn die ungöttliche Wirklichkeit giebt uns das Schöne gar nicht oder Ein Mal! Ich will sagen, dass die Welt übervoll von schönen Dingen ist, aber trotzdem arm, sehr arm an schönen Augenblicken und Enthüllungen dieser Dinge. Aber vielleicht ist diess der stärkste Zauber des Lebens: es liegt ein golddurchwirkter Schleier von schönen Möglichkeiten über ihm, verheissend, widerstrebend, schamhaft, spöttisch, mitleidig, verführerisch. Ja, das Leben ist ein Weib!

340 Der sterbende Sokrates. — Ich bewundere die Tapferkeit und Weisheit des Sokrates in Allem, was er that, sagte — und nicht sagte. Dieser spöttische und verliebte Unhold und Rattenfänger Athens, der die übermüthigsten Jünglinge zittern und schluchzen machte, war nicht nur der weiseste Schwätzer, den es gegeben hat: er war ebenso gross im Schweigen. Ich wollte, er wäre auch im letzten Augenblicke des Lebens schweigsam gewesen, — vielleicht gehörte er dann in eine noch höhere Ordnung der Geister. War es nun der Tod oder das Gift oder die Frömmigkeit oder die Bosheit — irgend Etwas löste ihm in jenem Augenblick die Zunge und er sagte: „Oh Kriton, ich bin dem Asklepios einen Hahn schuldig“. Dieses lächerliche und furchtbare „letzte Wort“ heisst für Den, der Ohren hat: „Oh Kriton, das Leben ist eine Krankheit!“ Ist es möglich! Ein Mann, wie er, der heiter und vor Aller Augen wie ein Soldat gelebt hat, — war Pessimist! Er hatte eben nur eine gute Miene zum Leben gemacht und zeitlebens sein letztes Urtheil, sein innerstes Gefühl versteckt! Sokrates, Sokrates hat am Leben gelitten! Und er hat noch seine Rache dafür genommen — mit jenem verhüllten, schauerlichen, frommen und blasphemischen Worte! Musste ein Sokrates sich auch noch rächen? War ein Gran Grossmuth zu wenig in seiner überreichen Tugend? — Ach Freunde! Wir müssen auch die Griechen überwinden!

341 Das grösste Schwergewicht. — Wie, wenn dir eines Tages oder Nachts, ein Dämon in deine einsamste Einsamkeit nachschliche und dir sagte: „Dieses Leben, wie du es jetzt lebst und gelebt hast, wirst du noch einmal und noch unzählige Male leben müssen; und es wird nichts Neues daran sein, sondern jeder Schmerz und jede Lust und jeder Gedanke und Seufzer und alles unsäglich Kleine und Grosse deines Lebens muss dir wiederkommen, und Alles in der selben Reihe und Folge — und ebenso diese Spinne und dieses Mondlicht zwischen den Bäumen, und ebenso dieser Augenblick und ich selber. Die ewige Sanduhr des Daseins wird immer wieder umgedreht — und du mit ihr, Stäubchen vom Staube!“ — Würdest du dich nicht niederwerfen und mit den Zähnen knirschen und den Dämon verfluchen, der so redete? Oder hast du einmal einen ungeheuren Augenblick erlebt, wo du ihm antworten würdest: „du bist ein Gott und nie hörte ich Göttlicheres!“ Wenn jener Gedanke über dich Gewalt bekäme, er würde dich, wie du bist, verwandeln und vielleicht zermalmen; die Frage bei Allem und Jedem „willst du diess noch einmal und noch unzählige Male?“ würde als das grösste Schwergewicht auf deinem Handeln liegen! Oder wie müsstest du dir selber und dem Leben gut werden, um nach Nichts mehr zu verlangen, als nach dieser letzten ewigen Bestätigung und Besiegelung? —

342 Incipit tragoedia. — Als Zarathustra dreissig Jahr alt war, verliess er seine Heimath und den See Urmi und gieng in das Gebirge. Hier genoss er seines Geistes und seiner Einsamkeit und wurde dessen zehn Jahre nicht müde. Endlich aber verwandelte sich sein Herz, — und eines Morgens stand er mit der Morgenröthe auf, trat vor die Sonne hin und sprach zu ihr also: „Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück, wenn du nicht Die hättest, welchen du leuchtest! Zehn Jahre kamst du hier herauf zu meiner Höhle: du würdest deines Lichtes und dieses Weges satt geworden sein, ohne mich, meinen Adler und meine Schlange; aber wir warteten deiner an jedem Morgen, nahmen dir deinen Ueberfluss ab und segneten dich dafür. Siehe! Ich bin meiner Weisheit überdrüssig, wie die Biene, die des Honigs zu viel gesammelt hat, ich bedarf der Hände, die sich ausstrecken, ich möchte verschenken und austheilen, bis die Weisen unter den Menschen wieder einmal ihrer Thorheit und die Armen wieder einmal ihres Reichthums froh geworden sind. Dazu muss ich in die Tiefe steigen: wie du des Abends thust, wenn du hinter das Meer gehst und noch der Unterwelt Licht bringst, du überreiches Gestirn! — ich muss, gleich dir, untergehen, wie die Menschen es nennen, zu denen ich hinab will. So segne mich denn, du ruhiges Auge, das ohne Neid auch ein allzugrosses Glück sehen kann! Segne den Becher, welcher überfliessen will, dass das Wasser golden aus ihm fliesse und überallhin den Abglanz deiner Wonne trage! Siehe! Dieser Becher will wieder leer werden, und Zarathustra will wieder Mensch werden.“ — Also begann Zarathustra’s Untergang.

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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.

Sanctus Januarius.

You who with the flame-spearSplit the ice of my soul,So that now it hurries roaring to the seaOf its highest hope:Ever brighter, ever healthier,Free in the most loving necessity: —So it praises your wonders,Most beautiful Januarius!

Genoa, January 1882.

276 For the New Year. — I am still alive, I still think: I must still live, for I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito; cogito, ergo sum. Today everyone allows himself to speak his wish and his dearest thought. Very well, I too will say what I wished for myself today, and which thought first ran across my heart this year, the thought that is to be for me the reason, the pledge and the sweetness of all the life still to come! I want to learn more and more to see the necessity in things as their beauty. So I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Looking away shall be my only negation! And, all in all and in the large: I want, at some point, to be nothing but a sayer of Yes!

277 Personal Providence. — There is a certain high point in life. Once we have reached it, we are, with all our freedom, and however much we have denied the beautiful chaos of existence all caring reason and goodness, once more in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom, and we must pass our hardest test. For now the thought of a personal providence stands before us with the most insistent force, and it has the best advocate on its side, the evident fact, now that we can grasp with our hands that all things, all the things that happen to us, keep turning out for our best. The life of every day and every hour seems to want nothing more than to prove this sentence anew. Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, an illness, a slander, a letter that does not come, a sprained foot, a glance into a shop window, a counterargument, the opening of a book, a dream, a deception: it proves at once, or very soon after, to be a thing that "could not be missing," full of deep meaning and use precisely for us! Is there a more dangerous temptation than to give up the faith in Epicurus's gods, those carefree unknown beings, and to believe in some anxious and petty deity, who personally knows every hair on our heads and finds no disgust in the most wretched service? Well, I mean in spite of all that! Let us leave the gods in peace, and the obliging geniuses too, and be content with the assumption that our own practical and theoretical skill at interpreting and arranging events has now reached its peak. Let us not think too highly of this nimbleness of our wisdom, even when the wonderful harmony that arises as we play our instrument surprises us too much. It is a harmony that sounds too good for us to dare to credit it to ourselves. In fact, here and there someone plays with us: dear chance. From time to time he guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not invent a more beautiful music than the music our foolish hand then succeeds in making.

278 The Thought of Death. — In the midst of this tangle of little lanes, needs and voices, I find a melancholy happiness in living. How much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and intoxication of life comes to light every moment! And yet soon it will be so quiet for all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people! Behind each of them stands his shadow, his dark companion on the way! It is always like the last moment before an emigrant ship leaves. People have more to say to one another than ever, the hour presses, and the ocean with its empty silence waits impatiently behind all the noise, so eager, so sure of its prey. And all of them think that what has come before is nothing or little, and that the near future is everything. That is why there is this haste, this shouting, this drowning out of oneself and outdoing of oneself! Everyone wants to be first in this future, and yet death and the silence of the grave are the only certain thing about this future, and what all people share! How strange that this one certainty and common fact has almost no power over people, and that they are furthest from feeling themselves the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that people absolutely do not want to think the thought of death! I would gladly do something to make the thought of life a hundred times more worth thinking for them.

279 Star Friendship. — We were friends and have become strangers to each other. But that is quite right, and we should not hide it or darken it, as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are two ships, each with its own goal and course. We may well cross paths and celebrate a feast together, as we did. The brave ships then lay so quietly in one harbor and under one sun that it might seem they had already reached their goal, and had one goal. But then the almighty force of our task drove us apart again, into different seas and under different skies, and perhaps we will never see each other again. Perhaps we will see each other, but not recognize each other: the different seas and suns have changed us! That we must become strangers is the law over us. Precisely for that reason we should also become more worthy of respect! Precisely for that reason the thought of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably an enormous invisible curve and star path, in which our so different roads and goals may be included as small stretches of the way. Let us raise ourselves to this thought! But our life is too short and our sight too weak for us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. And so let us believe in our star friendship, even if we must be enemies on earth.

280 The Architecture of the Knowing. — We will need, and probably soon, to understand what our great cities above all lack: quiet and wide, extended places for thinking. Places with long, high-ceilinged halls for bad weather or too much sun, where no noise of carriages or street criers can reach, and where a finer decency would forbid even the priest to pray aloud. Buildings and grounds that as a whole express the sublimity of reflection and of stepping aside. The time is past when the church had the monopoly on thinking, when the vita contemplativa always had first to be a vita religiosa. And everything the church has built expresses this idea. I do not know how we could make do with its buildings, even if they were stripped of their ecclesiastical purpose. These buildings speak a far too pathetic and encumbered language, as houses of God and showplaces of a supramundane traffic, for us godless people to think our thoughts in them. We want to be translated into stone and plant. We want to walk around inside ourselves when we stroll through these halls and gardens.

281 Knowing How to Find the End. — Masters of the first rank reveal themselves by knowing how to find the end in a perfect way, in the large as well as the small. It may be the end of a melody or of a thought, the fifth act of a tragedy or of a political action. The first of the second rank always become restless toward the end, and do not drop into the sea with the proud, calm regularity of, for example, the mountains near Portofino, where the Gulf of Genoa finishes singing its melody.

282 The Gait. — There are manners of the mind through which even great minds reveal that they come from the common people, or the half-common. The gait and step of their thoughts especially is what betrays them. They cannot walk. So Napoleon too, to his deep annoyance, could not walk like a prince by right of birth, on occasions where one really has to understand it, such as great coronation processions and the like. Even there he was always only the leader of a column, proud and hasty at once, and very aware of it. One has cause to laugh when one sees those writers who make the pleated robes of their period rustle around them. They want to cover their feet this way.

283 Preparing People. — I welcome every sign that a more manly, a warlike age is beginning, one that above all will restore honor to courage! For it is to clear the way for an even higher age, and to gather the strength that the higher age will one day need: an age that carries heroism into knowledge and wages wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences. For this, for now, we need many preparing, courageous people. They cannot spring from nothing, and just as little from the sand and slime of present civilization and big-city culture. We need people who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, content and steady in invisible activity. People who, with an inner inclination, search all things for what in them is to be overcome. People who have cheerfulness, patience, simplicity and contempt for great vanities as their own, just as they have magnanimity in victory and indulgence toward the small vanities of all the defeated. People with a sharp and free judgment about all victors, and about the share chance has in every victory and every fame. People with their own festivals, their own workdays, their own times of mourning, used to and sure in giving orders, and equally ready to obey when it matters. Equally proud in one role as in the other, equally serving their own cause. More endangered people, more fruitful people, happier people! For believe me, the secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from existence is: live dangerously! Build your cities on Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live at war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you knowing ones! The time is soon going to pass when it was enough for you to live hidden in the woods, like timid deer! At last knowledge will reach out its hand for what is due to you. It will want to rule and to own, and you along with it!

284 Faith in Oneself. — Few people in general have faith in themselves. Of these few, some get it as a useful blindness or a partial darkening of their mind (what would they see if they could look down to the bottom of themselves!). Others must first earn it. Everything they do that is good, capable or great is at first an argument against the skeptic who lives in them. They must convince or persuade him, and for this they nearly need genius. These are the great self-insufficient ones.

285 Excelsior! — "You will never pray again, never worship again, never rest again in endless trust. You deny yourself the chance to stop before a final wisdom, final goodness, final power, and to unharness your thoughts. You have no constant guardian and friend for your seven solitudes. You live without the view of a mountain that carries snow on its head and fire in its heart. For you there is no more rewarder, no more improver of the last hand. There is no more reason in what happens, no more love in what will happen to you. No resting place is still open to your heart, where it has only to find and no longer to search. You resist any kind of final peace, you want the eternal return of war and peace. Man of renunciation, do you want to renounce all of this? Who will give you the strength for it? No one has had this strength yet!" There is a lake that one day refused to flow out, and threw up a dam where it had always flowed out. Since then this lake keeps rising higher. Perhaps this very renunciation will also give us the strength with which renunciation itself can be endured. Perhaps from then on the human being will keep rising higher, at the place where he no longer flows out into a god.

286 An Interlude. — Here are hopes. But what will you see and hear of them if you have not lived through shining and glow and dawns in your own souls? I can only remind you, and I cannot do more! Move stones, make animals into human beings: do you want that from me? Ah, if you are still stones and animals, first look for your Orpheus.

287 Delight in Blindness. — "My thoughts, said the wanderer to his shadow, should show me where I stand. But they should not betray to me where I am going. I love not knowing about the future, and I do not want to be ruined by impatience and by tasting promised things in advance."

288 High Moods. — It seems to me that most people do not believe in high moods at all, unless for moments, at most quarter-hours. The few exceptions are those who know from experience a longer duration of high feeling.

But that a person should be the embodiment of a single high feeling, the incarnation of one great mood, has been only a dream and an enchanting possibility so far. History does not yet give us a sure example of it. Still, it could one day give birth to such people, once a number of favorable preconditions have been created and secured, which not even the luckiest chance can now throw together. Perhaps for these future souls, that would be the ordinary state which has so far come into our souls here and there as the exception we feel with awe: a continual movement between high and low, and the feeling of high and low, a constant climbing as on stairs and at the same time resting as on clouds.

289 All Aboard! — If you consider how a philosophical justification of a person's way of living and thinking, as a whole, works upon each individual, namely like a warming, blessing, fertilizing sun shining just for him: how it makes people self-sufficient, rich and generous in happiness and goodwill, independent of praise and blame. How it constantly turns evil into good, brings all powers to flower and ripeness, and does not let the small and great weeds of grief and vexation take root at all. Then at last one cries out with longing: Oh, if only many such new suns could be created! Even the evil person, the unhappy person, the exceptional person should have his philosophy, his good right, his sunshine! We do not need pity for them! We must unlearn this notion of arrogance, though humanity has so far learned and practiced it precisely through this notion. We have no confessors, soul-conjurers or sin-forgivers to set up for them. What we need is a new justice! And a new watchword! And new philosophers! The moral earth is round too! The moral earth has its antipodes too! The antipodes too have their right to exist! There is still another world to discover, and more than one! All aboard, you philosophers!

290 One Thing Is Needful. — To "give style" to one's character is a great and rare art. It is practiced by someone who surveys everything his nature offers in strengths and weaknesses, and then fits it into an artistic plan, until every part appears as art and reason, and even the weakness delights the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added, and there a piece of first nature has been removed. In both cases there has been long practice and daily work. Here the ugly, which could not be removed, has been hidden. There it has been reinterpreted as sublime. Much that is vague and resists shaping has been saved for distant views and used: it is meant to beckon into the wide and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear that it was the compulsion of the same taste that ruled and shaped everything, large and small. Whether the taste was good or bad matters less than one thinks. It is enough that it is one taste! It is the strong, domineering natures who take their finest joy in such compulsion, in such constraint and completeness under their own law. The passion of their mighty will is relieved at the sight of all stylized nature, all defeated and serving nature. Even when they have palaces to build and gardens to lay out, they dislike giving nature its freedom. Conversely, it is the weak characters, who do not have power over themselves, who hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitterly harsh constraint were imposed on them, they would have to become common under it. They become slaves as soon as they serve, and they hate serving. Such minds, which can be minds of the first rank, are always set on shaping or interpreting themselves and their surroundings as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, surprising. And they do well to do so, because only this way do they do themselves good. For one thing is needful: that a person reach contentment with himself, whether through this or that poetry and art. Only then is a person at all tolerable to look at! Whoever is discontented with himself is always ready to take revenge for it. We others will be his victims, if only in having always to put up with the sight of his ugliness. For the sight of the ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

291 Genoa. — For quite a while I have looked at this city, its country houses and pleasure gardens, and the wide circle of its inhabited heights and slopes. In the end I have to say: I see faces from past generations. This region is strewn with the images of bold and self-ruling people. They lived and wanted to go on living. They tell me so with their houses, built and adorned for centuries and not for the fleeting hour. They were good to life, however harsh they may often have been toward themselves. I always see the builder resting his gaze on everything built around him, near and far, and likewise on the city, the sea and the lines of the mountains. With this gaze he exercises force and conquest. He wants to fit all of it into his plan and in the end make it his property, by making it a piece of himself. This whole region is overgrown with the magnificent, insatiable selfishness of the lust for possession and booty. And just as these people, far away, recognized no boundary and, in their thirst for novelty, set a new world beside the old one, so at home everyone still rebelled against everyone else, and invented a way to express his superiority and to place his personal infinity between himself and his neighbor. Each person conquered his homeland again for himself, overwhelming it with his architectural ideas and reshaping it, as it were, into a feast for the eyes of his house. In the North, the law impresses you, and the general delight in lawfulness and obedience, when you look at the way the cities are built. One guesses there that inner sense of making oneself equal and of fitting in, which must have ruled the soul of all the builders. But here, turning around every corner, you find a person who stands alone, who knows the sea, adventure and the Orient, a person who turns away from law and from the neighbor as if from a kind of boredom, and who measures everything already established and old with envious eyes. With a wonderful slyness of fantasy, he wants to found all of it anew, at least in thought: to lay his hand on it and put his sense into it. Even if this is only for the moment of a sunny afternoon, when his insatiable and melancholy soul once feels satiety, and only what is his own may show itself to his eye, and nothing foreign.

292 To the Preachers of Morality. — I do not want to make a morality. But to those who do, I give this advice: if you want to rob the best things and conditions of all honor and value in the end, go on putting them in your mouths as you have until now! Place them at the head of your morality, and talk from morning to night about the happiness of virtue, the calm of the soul, justice and immanent retribution. The way you go about it, all these good things will eventually gain a popularity and a street-corner clamor for themselves. But then all the gold will have been rubbed off them, and more than that, all the gold in them will have turned into lead. Truly, you are skilled in the reverse art of alchemy, in devaluing what is most valuable! Try, for once, a different recipe, so that you do not keep achieving the opposite of what you seek:

deny those good things, take away from them the applause of the mob and their easy circulation, make them once again hidden modesties of lonely souls, and say that morality is something forbidden! Perhaps in this way you will win over the kind of people who matter for these things, I mean the heroic ones. But then there must be something frightening about them, and not, as so far, something disgusting! Should one not say today, in regard to morality, as Master Eckhart did: "I pray God to make me quit of God!"

293 Our Air. — We know well that whoever glances at science only in passing, in the manner of women and unfortunately of many artists, finds the strictness of its service, this unrelentingness in small things as in large, this speed in weighing, judging and condemning, something dizzying and frightening. What alarms him in particular is how the hardest things are demanded here and the best things are done, without any praise or distinctions being given. On the contrary, as among soldiers, almost only blame and sharp rebukes are heard. For doing well counts as the rule, and failure as the exception. But the rule, here as everywhere, has a silent mouth. Now it is with this "strictness of science" as with the form and courtesy of the very best society: it frightens the uninitiated. But whoever is used to it does not want to live anywhere else than in this bright, transparent, strong, highly electric air, this manly air. Everywhere else it seems to him not clean and airy enough. He suspects that his best art would be of no real use to anyone there, and no joy to himself. He suspects that through misunderstandings half his life would slip through his fingers, and that constant caution, constant concealment and holding back would be needed: all of them great and useless losses of strength! But in this strict and clear element he has his strength whole. Here he can fly! Why should he go down again into those murky waters, where one has to swim and wade and makes one's wings discolored? No! It is too hard for us to live there. What can we do if we were born for the air, the pure air, we rivals of the ray of light, and would, like it, most gladly ride on little particles of ether, not away from the sun but toward the sun? But this we cannot do. So let us do what alone we can do: bring light to the earth, be "the light of the earth"! For this we have our wings, and our speed and strictness, and for that reason we are manly and even terrible, like fire. Let those fear us who do not know how to warm themselves at us and light themselves by us!

294 Against the Slanderers of Nature. — They are unpleasant people for me, those in whom every natural inclination at once becomes a sickness, something disfiguring or even shameful. They have led us to the opinion that the inclinations and drives of human beings are evil. They are the cause of our great injustice toward our nature, toward all nature!

There are enough people who could indulge their drives with grace and carelessness. But they do not do it, out of fear of that imagined "evil being" in nature! That is why so little nobility is found among human beings. Its mark will always be to have no fear before oneself, to expect nothing shameful from oneself, and to fly without hesitation wherever it drives us, we free-born birds! Wherever we come, it will always be free and full of sunlight around us.

295 Short Habits. — I love short habits and consider them the priceless means of getting to know many things and conditions, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness. My nature is entirely set up for short habits, even in the needs of my bodily health, and as far as I can see in general, from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that this will now satisfy me permanently. Even a short habit has that faith of passion, the faith in eternity, and I think I am to be envied for having found and recognized it. And now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening, and spreads a deep contentment around itself and into me, so that I do not long for anything else, without having to compare, despise or hate anything. And one day its time is over. The good thing parts from me, not as something that now fills me with disgust, but peacefully and satisfied with me, as I am with it, as if we had to thank each other and so reached out our hands in farewell. And already the new thing waits at the door, and so does my faith, the indestructible fool and sage! This new thing, I believe, will be the right one, the last right one. So it goes with me for food, thoughts, people, cities, poems, music, teachings, daily schedules, ways of life. On the other hand, I hate lasting habits. I feel that a tyrant is coming close to me, and that the air I breathe thickens, whenever events shape themselves so that lasting habits seem to grow out of them by necessity: through an office, for example, through constant togetherness with the same people, through a fixed residence, through a single fixed kind of health. Indeed, I am grateful, deep down in my soul, for all my misery and sickness, and for whatever is imperfect in me, because such things leave me a hundred back doors through which I can escape lasting habits. The unbearable thing, though, the truly frightening thing, would be for me a life with no habits at all, a life that constantly demands improvisation. That would be my banishment and my Siberia.

296 The Firm Reputation. — A firm reputation was once a matter of the greatest usefulness. And wherever society is still ruled by the herd instinct, even now it is most practical for each individual to present his character and his occupation as unchanging, even when in truth they are not. "You can rely on him, he stays the same." In all dangerous situations in society, this is the praise that means the most. Society feels with satisfaction that it has in one person's virtue, in another's ambition, and in the thinking and passion of a third, a reliable tool that is always ready. It honors this tool-nature, this staying true to oneself, this unchangeability in opinions and aims, and even in vices, with its highest honors. Such an esteem, which flourishes everywhere together with the morality of custom and has always flourished, trains "characters" and brings all changing, relearning and transforming into disrepute. Whatever else the advantage of this way of thinking may be, for knowledge it is in any case the most harmful kind of general judgment. For precisely the good will of the knower, to contradict his own previous opinion fearlessly at any time, and in general to be suspicious of everything in us that wants to become fixed, is here condemned and disgraced. The attitude of the knower, as being in conflict with the "firm reputation," counts as dishonorable, while the petrification of opinions has all the honor on its side. Under the spell of such valuation we still have to live today! How hard it is to live when you feel the judgment of many thousands of years against you and around you. It is probable that for many thousands of years knowledge was burdened with a bad conscience, and that there must have been much self-contempt and secret misery in the history of the greatest minds.

297 Being Able to Contradict. — Everyone now knows that being able to tolerate contradiction is a high sign of culture. Some even know that the higher person wishes for and provokes contradiction against himself, in order to get a hint about an injustice he had not known he committed. But being able to contradict, the good conscience gained in hostility toward what is familiar, handed down and hallowed, is more than both of these. It is the really great, new and astonishing thing in our culture, the step of all steps of the freed spirit. Who knows that?

298 Sigh. — I caught this insight on the way, and quickly took the nearest poor words to fasten it, so that it would not fly away from me again. And now it has died in these dry words, and hangs and sways in them. When I look at it, I can hardly remember how I was lucky enough to catch this bird.

299 What One Should Learn from Artists. — What means do we have for making things beautiful, attractive, worth desiring, when they are not so? I mean that they never are in themselves! Here we have something to learn from physicians, for example when they dilute the bitter, or put wine and sugar in the mixing jug. But even more we have to learn from the artists, who are in fact always out to make such inventions and tricks. To keep away from things until you no longer see much of them, and must look hard to see them at all. Or to see things around a corner, as through a cutout. Or to arrange them so that they partly hide one another and allow only perspective glimpses through. Or to look at them through colored glass or in the light of evening red. Or to give them a surface and a skin that is not fully transparent. All of this we should learn from the artists, and in other matters be wiser than they are. For their fine power usually stops where art stops and life begins. We, however, want to be the poets of our lives, and first of all in the smallest and most everyday things.

300 Preludes to Science. — Do you really believe that the sciences would have come into being and grown great if they had not been preceded by sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches, who first had to create thirst, hunger and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers, through their promises and illusions? Indeed, that infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled, in order for anything at all to be fulfilled in the realm of knowledge? Perhaps, in the same way that preludes and preliminary exercises of science show themselves to us here, which were in no way practiced or felt as such, all of religion too was a practice and prelude to some distant age. Perhaps it could have been the strange means by which, one day, single human beings could enjoy the complete self-sufficiency of a god and all his power of self-redemption. Yes! — one may ask — would humanity ever have learned, without that religious school and prehistory, to feel hunger and thirst in itself and to take satiety and fullness from within itself? Did Prometheus first have to think he had stolen the light and pay for it, before he could finally discover that he had created the light by longing for it, and that not only the human being but also the god was the work of his hands, and clay in his hands? Only images of the maker? Just like the delusion, the theft, the Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia of all knowers?

301 The Delusion of the Contemplatives. — Higher people differ from lower ones in that they see and hear incomparably more, and see and hear thinkingly. That is exactly what distinguishes the human being from the animal, and the higher animals from the lower ones. The world becomes ever fuller for the one who grows up to the height of humanity. More and more hooks of interest are cast out toward him. The number of his stimuli keeps growing, and so does the number of his kinds of pleasure and displeasure. The higher person becomes at once happier and more unhappy. Yet a delusion remains his constant companion. He thinks he has been placed before the great spectacle and concert of life as a spectator and listener. He calls his nature a contemplative one, and overlooks the fact that he is himself the real poet and continuing poet of life. Admittedly, he is very different from the actor of this drama, the so-called active person. But he is even more different from a mere observer and festival guest in front of the stage. As the poet he surely possesses the vis contemplativa and the look back at his work, but also and first of all the vis creativa, which the active person lacks, whatever appearance and common belief may say. We, the thinking-feeling ones, are the ones who truly and constantly make something that is not yet there: the whole ever-growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, ladders of rank, affirmations and negations. This poetry we have invented is constantly learned by the so-called practical people (our actors, as I said), practiced, and translated into flesh and reality, even into everyday life. What has value in the present world does not have it in itself, by its nature. Nature is always without value. Rather, value was once given to it, presented to it, and we were the ones who gave and presented! We first created the world that concerns human beings! But precisely this knowledge is what we lack. When we catch hold of it for a moment, we have forgotten it again the next. We misjudge our best strength, and we contemplatives value ourselves a degree too low. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be.

302 The Danger of the Most Fortunate. — To have fine senses and a fine taste; to be accustomed to the choicest and best of the mind as to the right and nearest food; to enjoy a strong, bold, reckless soul; to go through life with a calm eye and a steady step, always ready for the extreme, as for a festival, and full of longing for undiscovered worlds and seas, human beings and gods; to listen to every cheerful music as if brave men, soldiers and sailors, were making themselves a short rest and pleasure there; and in the deepest enjoyment of the moment to be overcome by tears and by the whole purple melancholy of the fortunate: who would not want all this to be his possession, his condition! It was the happiness of Homer! The condition of him who invented for the Greeks their gods, or rather invented his own gods for himself! But let us not deceive ourselves: with this happiness of Homer's in the soul, one is also the creature most capable of suffering under the sun! And only at this price does one buy the most precious shell that the waves of existence have so far washed up onto the shore. As its owner, one becomes ever more refined in pain, and in the end too refined. A little ill humor and disgust was enough, in the end, to make life unbearable to Homer. He had not been able to solve a silly little riddle that young fishermen set him! Yes, the little riddles are the danger of the most fortunate!

303 Two Fortunate Ones. — Truly, this man, in spite of his youth, understands the improvisation of life, and astonishes even the sharpest observer. It seems that he never makes a false move, although he keeps playing the most daring game. One is reminded of those improvising masters of the art of tones, to whom even the listener would like to ascribe a divine infallibility of hand, although here and there they make a mistake, as every mortal does. But they are practiced and inventive, and always ready in the moment to fit the most accidental tone, wherever a flick of the finger or a whim drives it, at once into the thematic structure, and to breathe a beautiful meaning and a soul into chance. Here is a quite different sort of person. At bottom, everything he wants and plans goes wrong. What he has once set his heart on has brought him several times to the edge of the abyss, and to the very brink of ruin. And if he has escaped, it was certainly not "with a black eye" alone. Do you think he is unhappy about it? He has long since decided not to take his own wishes and plans so seriously. "If this does not succeed," he tells himself, "then perhaps that will; and on the whole I do not know whether I am not more indebted to my failures than to any success. Was I made to be stubborn and to carry the horns of the bull? What makes life valuable and fruitful for me lies somewhere else. My pride, and equally my misery, lie somewhere else. I know more about life because I have so often been about to lose it. And for exactly that reason I have more of life than all of you!"

304 In Doing, We Let Go. — At bottom I dislike all those moralities that say: "Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself!" I am well disposed, on the other hand, toward those moralities that urge me to do something and do it again, from morning to evening, and to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing but doing it well, as well as is possible for me alone! Whoever lives so sees one thing after another fall away from him that does not belong to such a life. Without hatred or reluctance he sees this today and that tomorrow take leave of him, like yellowed leaves that any stronger breeze carries off the tree. Or he does not even see that it is leaving, so sternly does his eye look toward its goal, and forward in general, not to the side, backward, or down. What we do should determine what we leave undone. In doing, we let go: that is how I like it, that is my placitum. But I do not want to strive with open eyes for my own impoverishment. I do not like all the negative virtues, virtues whose very essence is denying and refusing oneself.

305 Self-Mastery. — Those teachers of morality who first and foremost command people to get themselves under control bring a peculiar sickness upon them: a constant irritability toward all natural stirrings and inclinations, and a kind of itching. Whatever may push, pull, lure or drive him from within or from without, it always seems to this irritable person that his self-mastery is now in danger. He may no longer entrust himself to any instinct or any free stroke of the wing. Instead he stands constantly with a warding gesture, armed against himself, with a sharp and suspicious eye, the eternal guard of the castle he has made of himself. Yes, he can be great in this! But how insufferable he has become to others, and how hard to himself, how impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful accidents of the soul! Even from all further instruction! For one must be able to lose oneself for a time if one wants to learn something from the things that we are not ourselves.

306 Stoics and Epicureans. — The Epicurean chooses for himself the situation, the people and even the events that suit his extremely irritable intellectual makeup. He gives up the rest, which means most of it, because it would be too strong and heavy a diet for him. The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, glass splinters and scorpions, and to be without disgust. In the end his stomach is supposed to become indifferent to everything that the chance of existence pours into it. He recalls that Arab sect of the Aissaoua, which one gets to know in Algiers. And like those insensitive people, he too likes an invited audience for the display of his insensitivity, which the Epicurean is glad to do without. The Epicurean has his "garden"! For people whose fate improvises with them, for those who live in violent times and depend on sudden and changeable people, Stoicism may be very advisable. But whoever can see, at least somewhat, that fate allows him to spin a long thread, does well to arrange his life in the Epicurean way. All people of intellectual work have done so until now! For them it would be the loss of all losses to give up their fine irritability and be given in exchange a stoic hard skin, bristling with hedgehog spines.

307 In Favor of Criticism. — Now something appears to you as an error that you once loved as a truth or a probability. You push it away from you, and you imagine that your reason has won a victory in it. But perhaps that error was as necessary to you back then, when you were still another person (you are always another person), as all your present "truths" are now, like a skin that concealed and veiled much that you were not yet allowed to see. Your new life has killed that opinion for you, not your reason. You no longer need it, and now it collapses in on itself, and out of it crawls unreason, like a worm, into the light. When we practice criticism, it is nothing arbitrary or impersonal. It is, at least very often, a proof that living, driving forces are at work in us, which are shedding a bark. We deny and we must deny, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something we perhaps do not yet know, do not yet see! This is in favor of criticism.

308 The History of Each Day. — What does the history of each day make of you? Look at the habits of which it consists: are they the product of countless little cowardices and laziness, or the product of your courage and inventive reason? These two cases are so different that it is possible people would give you the same praise, and that in fact you would bring them the same benefit. But praise and benefit and respectability may be enough for someone who only wants to have a good conscience. They are not enough for you, you kidney-tester, who have a knowledge of conscience!

309 From the Seventh Solitude. — One day the wanderer slammed a door behind him, stopped, and wept. Then he said: "This inclination and urge toward the true, the real, the unadorned, the conscientious! How I resent it! Why does this gloomy and passionate driver follow me of all people? I would like to rest, but it will not allow it. How many things tempt me to linger! There are gardens of Armida everywhere for me, and therefore always new tearings-away and new bitternesses of the heart! I must lift my foot farther, this tired, wounded foot. And because I must, I often have a fierce backward look at the most beautiful thing, which could not keep me, because it could not keep me!"

310 Will and Wave. — How greedily this wave comes on, as if something were to be reached! How it creeps with frightening haste into the innermost corners of the rocky clefts! It seems to want to get ahead of someone. It seems that something is hidden there that has worth, high worth. And now it comes back, a little more slowly, still quite white with excitement. Is it disappointed? Has it found what it was looking for? Is it pretending to be disappointed? But already another wave is coming, even greedier and wilder than the first, and its soul too seems full of secrets and the lust of treasure hunting. So the waves live, so we live, we who will! More I will not say. — So? You distrust me? You are angry with me, you beautiful monsters? Are you afraid that I will betray your secret entirely? Well! Only be angry with me. Raise your green dangerous bodies as high as you can, make a wall between me and the sun, just as you are doing now! Truly, nothing of the world is left but green twilight and green lightning. Carry on as you like, you overbold ones, roar with delight and malice! Or dive back down, pour your emeralds down into the deepest depth, and throw your endless white shaggy mane of foam and spray over them. Everything is all right with me, for everything suits you so well, and I am so well disposed toward you in everything. How could I betray you! For — listen well! — I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I, we are indeed of one kind! You and I, we have indeed one secret!

311 Broken Light. — One is not always brave, and when one grows tired, one of us will also sometimes lament in this way. "It is so hard to hurt people. Oh, that it is necessary! What good is it for us to live hidden, if we do not want to keep to ourselves what gives offense? Would it not be wiser to live in the crowd and make up to the individual for what is to be sinned against all, and must be? To be foolish with the fool, vain with the vain, enthusiastic with the enthusiast? Would it not be fair, given such an exaggerated degree of difference overall? When I hear of other people's malice toward me, is my first feeling not one of satisfaction? That is right! — I seem to be saying to them, — I agree with you so little, and I have so much truth on my side. Go ahead and have a good day at my expense as often as you can! Here are my faults and mistakes, here is my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owl-like seclusion, my contradictions! Here you have something to laugh at! So laugh and be glad! I am not angry at the law and the nature of things, which want faults and mistakes to bring joy!" Of course, there was once a "more beautiful" time, when one could feel so indispensable with any reasonably new thought as to step out into the street with it and call out to everyone: "Look! The kingdom of heaven has come near!" I would not miss myself if I were gone. All of us are dispensable! But, as I said, that is not how we think when we are brave. We do not think of it at all.

312 My Dog. — I have given my pain a name and call it "dog." It is as faithful, as pushy and shameless, as entertaining, as clever as any other dog. I can bark at it and vent my bad moods on it, as others do with their dogs, servants and wives.

313 No Martyr Pictures. — I want to do as Raphael did and paint no more pictures of martyrdom. There are enough sublime things that one need not look for sublimity where it lives in sisterhood with cruelty. And my ambition would find no satisfaction in it besides, if I made myself a sublime torturer.

314 New Household Animals. — I want to have my lion and my eagle around me, so that I always have signs and omens of how great or how small my strength is. Must I look down at them today and be afraid of them? And will the hour come again when they look up at me in fear?

315 The Last Little Hour. — Storms are my danger. Will I have my storm, in which I perish, as Oliver Cromwell perished in his storm? Or will I go out like a light that is not blown out by any wind, but that grew tired and sated of itself: a burnt-out light? Or finally: will I blow myself out in order not to burn out?

316 Prophetic People. — You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic people are very suffering people. You only think they have been given a beautiful "gift," and you would like to have it yourselves. But I want to express it by a comparison. How much do animals suffer from atmospheric and cloud electricity! We see that some species of them have a prophetic ability regarding the weather. Monkeys, for example, as one can observe well even in Europe, and not only in menageries, namely on Gibraltar. But we do not think about the fact that their pains are the prophets for them! When a strong positive electricity suddenly turns into negative electricity, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is still far from visible, and a change of weather is in preparation, these animals behave as if an enemy were approaching, and they set themselves for defense or flight. Mostly they hide away. They do not understand the bad weather as weather, but as an enemy whose hand they already feel!

317 A Look Back. — We rarely become aware of the true pathos of each period of life while we are still standing in it. We always think it is the only possible and reasonable condition for us now, and entirely ethos, not pathos, to use the Greek terms and keep them apart. A few tones of music brought back to my memory today a winter, a house, and a most solitary life, and at the same time the feeling I lived in back then. I thought I could go on living like that forever. But now I understand that it was entirely pathos and passion, a thing comparable to this painfully brave and comfort-certain music. One may not have such things for years, or even for eternities. For this planet, one would become too "superterrestrial."

318 Wisdom in Pain. — There is as much wisdom in pain as in pleasure. Like pleasure, it belongs to the species-preserving forces of the first rank. If it were not so, it would long since have perished. That it hurts is no argument against it. That is its nature. In pain I hear the command of the ship's captain: "Take in the sails!" The bold sailor "human being" must have practiced setting the sails in a thousand ways. Otherwise it would soon be all over with him, and the ocean would swallow him down too quickly. We must also know how to live with reduced energy. As soon as pain gives its safety signal, it is time to reduce it. Some great danger, a storm, is approaching, and it is wise for us to "puff ourselves up" as little as possible. It is true that some people, when great pain approaches, hear the opposite command. They never look prouder, more warlike and happier than when the storm is coming up. Pain itself gives them their greatest moments! These are the heroic people, the great bringers of pain to humanity. They are the few or rare ones who need the very same defense that pain itself needs. And truly, one should not deny it to them! They are species-preserving and species-advancing forces of the first rank, if only because they resist comfort, and do not hide their disgust for this kind of happiness.

319 As Interpreters of Our Experiences. — A certain kind of honesty has been foreign to all founders of religions and their kind. They never made a matter of conscience for knowledge out of their experiences. "What have I actually experienced? What was going on in me and around me back then? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will turned against all the deceptions of the senses, and brave in its resistance to the fantastic?" None of them asked this, and all the dear religious people still do not ask it now. They have rather a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard on themselves to satisfy it. So they experience "miracles" and "rebirths," and they hear the voices of little angels! But we others, we thirsty for reason, want to look at our experiences as strictly as at a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day!

We ourselves want to be our experiments and our test animals.

320 On Meeting Again. — A: "Do I still understand you completely? You are searching? Where, in the world that is real now, is your corner and your star? Where can you lie down in the sun, so that you too receive a surplus of well-being, and your existence is justified? Let everyone do that for himself," you seem to say to me, "and let us knock out of our heads the talk in generalities, the concern for others and for society!" — B: "I want more. I am not a seeker. I want to create my own sun for myself."

321 New Caution. — Let us no longer think so much about punishment, blame and improvement! We will rarely change an individual. And if we should succeed, perhaps something has also succeeded without our noticing: we have been changed through him! Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is to come outweighs and outdoes his influence! Let us not wrestle in direct combat! And that is all blaming, punishing and wanting to improve. Rather, let us raise ourselves all the higher! Let us give our model ever brighter colors! Let us darken the others by our light! No! We do not want to become darker ourselves for his sake, like all the punishers and the discontented! Let us rather step aside! Let us look away!

322 Parable. — Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in circular orbits are not the deepest. Whoever looks into himself as into an enormous world-space, and carries Milky Ways within himself, also knows how irregular all Milky Ways are. They lead right into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.

323 Fortune in Fate. — Fate pays us the greatest honor when it has us fight for some time on the side of our opponents. By this we are predestined to a great victory.

324 In Media Vita. — No! Life has not disappointed me! From year to year I find it, rather, truer, more desirable and more mysterious. From that day on, when the great liberator came over me, the thought that life may be an experiment of the knower, and not a duty, not a fate, not a deception! And knowledge itself: for others it may be something else, for example a resting couch or the way to one, or an amusement, or an idleness. For me it is a world of dangers and victories, in which even the heroic feelings have their dancing and playing grounds. "Life as a means of knowledge!" With this principle in the heart, one can live not only bravely, but even cheerfully, and laugh cheerfully! And who would really know how to laugh and live well, if he did not first know well how to deal with war and victory?

325 What Belongs to Greatness. — Who will achieve anything great if he does not feel in himself the strength and the will to inflict great pain? Being able to suffer is the least of it. Weak women and even slaves often attain mastery in that. But not to perish from inner distress and insecurity when you inflict great suffering and hear the cry of that suffering: that is great, that belongs to greatness.

326 The Physicians of the Soul and Pain. — All preachers of morality, and all theologians too, share a common bad habit: they all try to persuade people that they are in very bad shape, and that a harsh, final, radical cure is needed. And because people as a whole have lent their ears too eagerly to these teachings, and held them out for whole centuries, something of this superstition, that things are going very badly for them, has finally passed over into them. Now they are only too ready to sigh, to find nothing more in life, and to make sad faces together, as if it were really very hard to endure. In truth they are wildly sure of their life and in love with it, and full of unspeakable tricks and refinements for breaking what is unpleasant and drawing the thorn out of pain and misfortune. It seems to me that pain and misfortune are always talked about with exaggeration, as if exaggerating were a matter of good manners here. On the other hand people deliberately keep silent about the countless means of relief against pain: such as stupefaction, or the feverish haste of thoughts, or a calm position, or good and bad memories, intentions, hopes, and many kinds of pride and sympathy, which nearly work like anesthetics. And at the highest degrees of pain, faintings come on by themselves. We understand very well how to drip sweetness onto our bitternesses, especially the bitternesses of the soul. We have aids in our bravery and sublimity, and in the nobler delirium of submission and resignation. A loss is hardly a loss for an hour. Somehow a gift from heaven has also fallen to us along with it, a new strength, for example, or at least a new occasion for strength! What the teachers of morality have fantasized about the inner "misery" of evil people! And what they have lied to us about, concerning the misfortune of passionate people! Lying is indeed the right word here. They knew very well about the overflowing happiness of this kind of person, but they kept silent about it, because it refuted their theory, according to which all happiness only arises with the destruction of passion and the silence of the will! And finally, as for the prescription of all these physicians of the soul and their recommendation of a harsh radical cure, one may ask: is our life really painful and troublesome enough to make it worthwhile to exchange it for a stoic way of life and a petrification against it? We are not in bad enough shape to have to feel bad in a stoic way!

327 Taking Things Seriously. — For the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine, hard to set running. They call it "taking the matter seriously" when they want to work with this machine and think well. Oh, how tiresome good thinking must be for them! The lovely beast, man, always loses his good humor, it seems, when he thinks well. He becomes "serious"! And "where there is laughter and cheerfulness, thinking is worth nothing": that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all "joyful science." Well, then! Let us show that it is a prejudice!

328 Doing Harm to Stupidity. — Certainly the belief, preached so stubbornly and so convincingly, that selfishness is reprehensible as a whole, has done harm to selfishness (in favor, as I will repeat a hundred times, of the herd instincts!). In particular it took away its good conscience, and taught it to look for the real source of all misfortune within itself. "Your selfishness is the disaster of your life": that was the sermon for thousands of years. As I said, it harmed selfishness and took away a great deal of its spirit, its cheerfulness, its inventiveness and its beauty. It dulled, uglified and poisoned selfishness! Classical antiquity, on the other hand, taught another main source of misfortune. From Socrates on, the thinkers never tired of preaching: "Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, your living on by the rule, your subordination to your neighbor's opinion is the reason why you so rarely achieve happiness. We thinkers, as thinkers, are the happiest." Let us not decide here whether this sermon against stupidity had better reasons on its side than that sermon against selfishness. What is certain is that it took away from stupidity its good conscience. These philosophers did harm to stupidity.

329 Leisure and Idleness. — There is an Indian-like wildness in the way the Americans pursue gold, a wildness peculiar to Indian blood. Their breathless haste at work, the real vice of the New World, has already begun, through contagion, to make old Europe wild, and to spread a very strange lack of spirit over it. People are now ashamed of rest. Long reflection almost gives them a bad conscience. They think with the clock in their hand, even while they eat lunch, with their eye on the stock-market paper. They live like someone who might constantly "miss out" on something. "Better to do something than nothing": this principle too is a cord for strangling all culture and all higher taste. And just as obviously all forms perish in this haste of working people, so the feeling for form itself perishes, and the ear and eye for the melody of movements. The proof of this lies in the clumsy clarity now demanded everywhere, in all those situations where a person wants to be honest with people: in dealings with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, students, leaders and princes. There is no longer time or strength for ceremonies, for courtesy with detours, for all the wit of conversation, and in general for all otium. For life in the hunt for profit constantly forces one to spend one's mind until it is exhausted, in constant pretending, outwitting or getting ahead of others. The true virtue now is to do something in less time than another person. And so there are only rare hours of permitted honesty. In these hours one is tired and does not want merely to "let oneself go," but to stretch out long and broad and clumsy. In keeping with this inclination, people now write their letters, whose style and spirit will always be the real "sign of the times." If there is still any pleasure in society and in the arts, it is a pleasure of the kind that worn-out slaves put together for themselves. Oh, this contentment with "joy" among our educated and uneducated people! Oh, this growing suspicion of all joy! Work gets more and more of all good conscience on its side. The inclination toward joy already calls itself "need for recreation," and it is starting to be ashamed of itself. "One owes it to one's health," people say when they are caught on an outing. Indeed, it could soon come to the point where one could not indulge an inclination toward the vita contemplativa (that is, walking about with thoughts and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Now! Formerly it was the other way around: work had the bad conscience. A person of good birth hid his work when need forced him to work. The slave worked under the pressure of the feeling that he was doing something contemptible. The "doing" itself was something contemptible. "Nobility and honor belong only to otium and bellum": that was the voice of the ancient prejudice!

330 Applause. — The thinker does not need applause and handclapping, provided he is sure of his own handclapping. But this he cannot do without. Are there people who could do without this, and without every kind of applause at all? I doubt it. Even about the wisest, Tacitus, who is no slanderer of the wise, says: quando etiam sapientibus gloriae cupido novissima exuitur, which means in his case: never.

331 Better Deaf Than Stunned. — Formerly people wanted to make themselves a reputation. That is no longer enough now that the market has grown so large. It must be a clamor. The consequence is that even good throats have to shout themselves hoarse, and the best wares are offered by hoarse voices. Without hawking and hoarseness there is no longer any genius now. This is certainly an evil age for the thinker. He must learn to find his stillness between two noises, and to pretend to be deaf until he is. As long as he has not yet learned this, he is of course in danger of perishing from impatience and headaches.

332 The Evil Hour. — Every philosopher has probably had an evil hour when he thought: "What does it matter if people do not believe even my bad arguments!" And then some gleeful little bird flew past him and chirped: "What does it matter to you? What does it matter to you?"

333 What It Means to Know. — Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! says Spinoza, as simply and sublimely as is his way. But what is this intelligere at bottom, other than the form in which those three become palpable to us at once? A result of the different and conflicting drives to laugh, to lament, and to curse? Before any knowing is possible, each of these drives must first have put forward its one-sided view of the thing or event. Afterward a struggle arose among these one-sidednesses, and out of it sometimes a middle, a calm, a granting of rights on all three sides, a kind of justice and contract. For by justice and contract all these drives can assert themselves in existence and be proved right with one another. We, to whom only the last reconciliation scenes and final settlements of this long process come into consciousness, therefore think that intelligere is something conciliatory, just, good, something essentially opposed to the drives. But it is only a certain relation of the drives to one another. For the longest times people regarded conscious thinking as thinking in general. Only now does the truth begin to dawn on us, that by far the largest part of our mental activity runs unconsciously and unfelt. I mean, however, that these drives fighting here understand very well how to make themselves felt by one another and to hurt one another. That tremendous sudden exhaustion, with which all thinkers are visited, may have its origin here. It is the exhaustion on the battlefield. Yes, perhaps there is much hidden heroism in our inner battle, but certainly nothing divine, eternally at rest in itself, as Spinoza thought. Conscious thinking, and especially that of the philosopher, is the weakest kind of thinking and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest. And so it is precisely the philosopher who can most easily be misled about the nature of knowing.

334 One Must Learn to Love. — It is the same with music. First one must learn to hear a figure and a melody at all, to pick it out, to distinguish it, to isolate and bound it as a life of its own. Then it takes effort and good will to endure it, despite its strangeness, to practice patience toward its look and expression, and mildheartedness toward its oddness. At last comes a moment when we are used to it, when we expect it, when we sense that we would miss it if it were missing. And now it keeps working its compulsion and its spell on us, and it does not stop until we have become its humble and delighted lovers, who want nothing better in the world than it, and again it. But it is not only with music that this happens. In exactly the same way we have learned to love all the things we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, our fairness and our gentleness toward what is foreign, because the foreign slowly drops its veil and shows itself as a new, unspeakable beauty. It is its thanks for our hospitality. Even whoever loves himself will have learned it by this path. There is no other path. Love too must be learned.

335 Long Live Physics! — How many people understand how to observe! And among the few who do understand it, how many observe themselves? "Everyone is farthest from himself": all the kidney-testers know this, to their discomfort. And the saying "know yourself!" is, when spoken by a god to human beings, almost a malice. That self-observation stands so desperately, nothing testifies more than the way the nature of a moral action is talked about by almost everyone: this quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner, with its look, its smile, its obliging eagerness! One seems to want to say to you: "But my dear fellow, that is exactly my business! You have turned your question to the one who may answer: by chance I am in nothing so wise as in this. So: when a person judges 'that is right,' and concludes 'therefore it must happen!' and now does what he has recognized and named as right and necessary in this way, then the nature of his action is moral!" But my friend, you are talking to me about three actions instead of one. Your judging, for example, "that is right," is also an action. Could it not already be judged in a moral or an immoral way? Why do you hold this, and exactly this, to be right? "Because my conscience tells me so. Conscience never speaks immorally; it is what first determines what is to be moral!" But why do you listen to the language of your conscience? And to what extent do you have a right to regard such a judgment as true and infallible? Is there no longer any conscience for this belief? Do you know nothing of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your "conscience"? Your judgment "that is right" has a prehistory in your drives, inclinations, aversions, experiences and non-experiences. You have to ask "how did it come about?" and afterward, "what actually drives me to give it a hearing?" You can give its command a hearing like a brave soldier who hears his officer's order. Or like a woman who loves the one who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the one commanding. Or like a fool who follows because he has nothing to say against it. In short, you can listen to your conscience in a hundred ways. But that you hear this or that judgment as the language of conscience, that you feel something as right, may have its cause in the fact that you have never thought about yourself, and blindly accepted what has been called right for you since childhood. Or in the fact that bread and honor have so far come to you through what you call your duty. It counts as "right" for you because it seems to you your "condition of existence." (That you have a right to exist, though, seems to you indisputable!) The firmness of your moral judgment could still be proof of precisely personal wretchedness, of impersonality. Your "moral strength" could have its source in your obstinacy, or in your inability to see new ideals! And, in short: if you had thought more finely, observed better and learned more, you would under all circumstances no longer call this "duty" of yours and this "conscience" by those names. The insight into how moral judgments have ever come about at all would make these pathetic words distasteful to you, just as other pathetic words, such as "sin," "salvation of the soul," "redemption," have already become distasteful to you. And now do not talk to me about the categorical imperative, my friend! That word tickles my ear, and I have to laugh, in spite of your so serious presence. I think of old Kant, who, as punishment for having smuggled in "the thing in itself" (also a very ridiculous matter!), was ambushed by the categorical imperative. With it in his heart he strayed back to "God," "soul," "freedom" and "immortality," like a fox that strays back into its cage. And it was his strength and cleverness that had broken open this cage! What? You admire the categorical imperative in yourself? This "firmness" of your so-called moral judgment? This "unconditionality" of the feeling "all must judge this way, as I do"? Admire instead your selfishness in it! And the blindness, pettiness and modesty of your selfishness! For it is selfishness to feel one's own judgment as a universal law. And a blind, petty and modest selfishness, in turn, because it shows that you have not yet discovered yourself, that you have not yet created for yourself an ideal of your own, most personal. For such an ideal could never be another's, much less everyone's! Whoever still judges "in this case everyone would have to act this way" has not yet gone five steps in self-knowledge. Otherwise he would know that there are no and can be no equal actions. Every action that has been done was done in a completely unique and unrepeatable way, and it will be the same with every future action. All the rules of action refer only to the coarse outside, even the innermost and finest rules of all moralities so far. With them one can attain an appearance of equality, but only an appearance. Every action, whether looked at ahead or behind, is and remains an impenetrable thing. Our opinions about "good," "noble," "great" can never be proved by our actions, because every action is unknowable. Surely our opinions, valuations and tables of goods belong among the most powerful levers in the machinery of our actions, but for each single case the law of their mechanics cannot be demonstrated. So let us limit ourselves to purifying our opinions and valuations, and to creating new tables of goods of our own. But let us no longer brood over the "moral worth of our actions"! Yes, my friends! As regards all the moral chatter of some about others, disgust is in order! Moral sitting in judgment should go against our taste! Let us leave this chatter and this bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a little further through time, and who are never the present themselves: that is, to the many, the very many! But we want to become those we are: the new, the unique, the incomparable, the self-legislating, the self-creating! And for that we must become the best learners and discoverers of all the lawful and necessary things in the world. We must be physicists, in order to be able to be creators in that sense. Until now all valuations and ideals have been built on ignorance of physics, or in contradiction with it. And so: long live physics! And even higher, that which forces us toward it: our honesty!

336 The Stinginess of Nature. — Why has nature been so stingy toward human beings that it did not let them shine, one more, another less, according to the fullness of their inner light? Why do great people not have as beautiful a visibility in their rising and setting as the sun does? How much less ambiguous all life among people would be!

337 The Future "Humanity." — When I look at the present from the eyes of a distant age, I find nothing more remarkable in the present human being than his peculiar virtue and illness, called "the historical sense." It is a beginning of something entirely new and strange in history. If this seed were given a few centuries and more, something wonderful might in the end grow out of it, with an equally wonderful fragrance, for whose sake our old earth would be more pleasant to live on than it has been. We people of the present are just beginning to form the chain of a future, very powerful feeling, link by link. We hardly know what we are doing. It almost seems to us that this is not a new feeling at all, but the decline of all the old feelings. The historical sense is still something so poor and cold, and many are struck by it as by a frost, and made even poorer and colder by it. To others it appears as the sign of advancing old age, and our planet seems to them a melancholy invalid who writes down the history of its youth in order to forget its present. Indeed, this is one color of this new feeling. Whoever knows how to feel the history of human beings as a history of his own feels, in an enormous generalization, all that grief of the sick person who thinks of health, of the old man who thinks of his dream of youth, of the lover who is robbed of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal perishes, of the hero on the evening of a battle that decided nothing and yet brought him wounds and the loss of a friend. But to bear this enormous sum of grief of all kinds, to be able to bear it, and still to be the hero who at the break of a second day of battle greets the dawn and his own happiness; to be the human being of a horizon of thousands of years ahead and behind; to be the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit, and the obligated heir; to be the most noble of all old nobles and at the same time the first-born of a new nobility, the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; to take all this upon one's soul, the oldest and the newest, the losses, hopes, conquests and victories of humanity, and finally to have all this in one soul and to press it into one feeling: that would have to produce a happiness that human beings have not yet known. The happiness of a god, full of power and love, full of tears and full of laughter! A happiness that, like the sun in the evening, keeps giving away its inexhaustible wealth, pouring it into the sea, and, like the sun, feels richest only when even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with a golden oar! This divine feeling would then be called — humanity!

338 The Will to Suffering and the Compassionate. — Is it good for you yourselves to be compassionate people above all? And is it good for those who suffer if you are? But let us leave the first question unanswered for a moment. What we suffer from most deeply and most personally is almost incomprehensible and inaccessible to all others. In this we are hidden from our neighbor, even if he eats out of the same pot with us. But wherever we are noticed as sufferers, our suffering is interpreted in a flat way. It belongs to the nature of compassionate feeling that it strips the foreign suffering of what is really personal. Our "benefactors" are, more than our enemies, the belittlers of our worth and our will. In most of the kindnesses shown to unfortunate people there is something outrageous in the intellectual carelessness with which the compassionate person plays with fate. He knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and entanglement of what for me or for you is called misfortune. He does not consider the whole economy of my soul and its balancing through "misfortune," the breaking open of new springs and needs, the healing of old wounds, the casting off of whole pasts. None of all that which can be connected with misfortune troubles the dear compassionate person. He wants to help, and he does not think that there is a personal necessity in misfortune, that terror, deprivation, impoverishment, midnights, adventures, risks and mistakes are as necessary to me and to you as their opposites. Indeed, to put it mystically, the path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell. No, of this he knows nothing. The "religion of compassion" (or "the heart") commands him to help, and one believes one has helped best when one has helped fastest! If you adherents of this religion had the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow human beings, if you did not want to let your own suffering lie on you for even an hour, and if you were always guarding yourselves in advance from all sorts of misfortune from afar, if you felt suffering and displeasure in general as evil, hateful, deserving of destruction, a blemish on existence, then you would have, along with your religion of compassion, yet another religion in your heart. And this one is perhaps the mother of the first: the religion of comfort. Ah, how little you know of the happiness of human beings, you comfortable and kind-hearted ones! For happiness and misfortune are two siblings and twins, who grow up together, or, as with you, stay small together! But now back to the first question. How is it even possible to stay on one's own path! Some outcry is constantly calling us from the side. Our eye seldom sees anything where it does not become necessary at once to drop our own affair and rush over. I know: there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing myself from my path, and truly, very "moral" ways! Indeed, the view of the present moral preachers of compassion goes so far as to hold that this very thing, and this alone, is moral: to lose oneself in this way from one's own path and to rush to the aid of one's neighbor. I know just as surely: I need only give myself up to the sight of real need, and I am lost too! And if a suffering friend said to me, "Look, I will die soon; promise me that you will die with me," I would promise it, just as the sight of that little mountain people fighting for its freedom would bring me to offer them my hand and my life. To choose bad examples for good reasons, once. Yes, there is a secret temptation even in all this compassion-arousing and help-calling. Our "own path" is simply too hard and too demanding, and too far from the love and gratitude of others. We do not run away from it unwillingly at all, from it and from our most personal conscience, and we take refuge under the conscience of others, and inside the lovely temple of the "religion of compassion." As soon as a war breaks out, the most noble people of a nation are always filled with a delight, though kept secret, and they throw themselves with ecstasy toward the new danger of death. For in sacrifice for the fatherland they finally believe they have the permission they have long sought: the permission to evade their goal. For them war is a detour to suicide, but a detour with a good conscience. And so, to pass over some things in silence, I will not keep silent about my own morality, which says to me: live in hiding, so that you can live with yourself! Live in ignorance of what your age considers most important! Put between yourself and today at least the skin of three centuries! And let the outcry of today, the noise of wars and revolutions, be a mumbling to you! You too will want to help, but only those whose need you fully understand, because they have the same suffering and the same hope as you: your friends. And only in the way you help yourself: I want to make them braver, more enduring, simpler, more cheerful! I want to teach them what so few understand now, and the preachers of compassion least of all: sympathetic joy!

339 Vita femina. — To see the last beauties of a work: all knowledge and all good will are not enough for that. It takes the rarest lucky chances, so that the veil of clouds from these peaks may one day soften for us, and the sun may glow on them. Not only must we stand in just the right place to see it. Our own soul must have drawn the veil away from its heights, and must need an outer expression and likeness, as if to have a hold and to stay master of itself. And all of this comes together so rarely at the same time that I am inclined to believe the highest heights of all good things, whether work, deed, person or nature, have until now been something hidden and veiled for most people, and even for the best. But what reveals itself to us reveals itself only once! The Greeks indeed prayed: "Twice and three times all that is beautiful!" Ah, they had good reason to call on the gods, for godless reality gives us the beautiful not at all, or only once! I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things, and yet poor, very poor, in beautiful moments and revelations of these things. But perhaps this is the strongest magic of life: over it lies a veil of beautiful possibilities shot through with gold, promising, resisting, bashful, mocking, pitying, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!

340 The Dying Socrates. — I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did and said, and in everything he did not say. This mocking and amorous monster and rat-catcher of Athens, who made the most reckless young men tremble and sob, was not only the wisest chatterer there has ever been: he was just as great in silence. I wish he had been silent at the last moment of life too. Perhaps he would then belong to an even higher order of spirits. Whether it was death, or the poison, or piety, or malice, something loosened his tongue at that moment, and he said: "Oh Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius." For whoever has ears, this ridiculous and terrible "last word" means: "Oh Crito, life is a sickness!" Is it possible! A man like him, who lived cheerfully and in front of everyone's eyes like a soldier, was a pessimist! He had only put on a good face toward life, and all his life had hidden his final judgment, his innermost feeling! Socrates, Socrates suffered from life! And he took his revenge for it, with that veiled, dreadful, pious and blasphemous word! Did a Socrates also have to take revenge? Was a grain of magnanimity too little in his overrich virtue? Ah, friends! We must overcome the Greeks too!

341 The Greatest Weight. — What if, one day or night, a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness and said to you: "This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more, and countless times more. And there will be nothing new in it. Every pain and every joy, every thought and sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great things of your life must return to you, and all in the same sequence and order. And likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, dust of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and grind your teeth and curse the demon who spoke this way? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: "You are a god, and I never heard anything more divine!" If that thought gained power over you, it would transform you as you are, and perhaps crush you. The question asked of everything and everyone, "Do you want this once more, and countless times more?" would lie on your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become toward yourself and toward life, to long for nothing more than this last eternal confirmation and sealing?

342 Incipit tragoedia. — When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his homeland and the lake Urmi and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years he did not grow tired of them. But at last his heart changed. One morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun and spoke to it thus: "You great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you shine! For ten years you have climbed up here to my cave. You would have grown weary of your light and of this path, without me, my eagle and my serpent. But we waited for you every morning, took your overflow from you, and blessed you for it. Look! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey. I need hands that reach out. I want to give and to distribute, until the wise among human beings are once again glad of their folly, and the poor are once again glad of their wealth. For that I must go down into the depths, as you do in the evening when you go behind the sea and still bring light to the underworld, you overrich star! I must, like you, go under, as human beings call it, toward those to whom I want to go down. So bless me, then, you calm eye, which can look without envy even at a happiness that is too great! Bless the cup that wants to overflow, so that the water flows out of it golden and carries the reflection of your delight everywhere! Look! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become a human being again." Thus began the going-under of Zarathustra.

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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.

Sanctus Januarius.

You who with your flame-spearBreak up the ice of my soul,So that now it rushes roaring to the seaOf its highest hope:Brighter always, always healthier,Free in the most loving necessity: —So it praises your wonders,Most beautiful Januarius!

Genoa, January 1882.

276 For the New Year. — I am still alive, and I still think. I must still live, because I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito; cogito, ergo sum. Today everyone lets himself say his wish and his dearest thought. Very well, I will also say what I wished for myself today, and which thought first ran across my heart this year, the thought that is to be my reason, my guarantee and my sweetness for the rest of my life! I want to keep learning to see the necessity in things as their beauty. That way I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to fight a war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse anyone, not even the accusers. Looking away will be my only "no." And, all in all, in the big picture, I want to be nothing but a sayer of yes, someday!

277 Personal Providence. — There is a certain high point in life. Once we reach it, then, with all our freedom, and however much we have denied the beautiful chaos of existence any caring reason or goodness, we are once again in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom, and must pass our hardest test. Now the idea of a personal providence stands before us with the most insistent force. It has the best advocate on its side: the plain evidence, now that we can see with our own hands that all things, every single thing that happens to us, keeps turning out for our good. The life of each day and each hour seems to want nothing more than to prove this sentence over and over again. Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, an illness, a slander, a letter that does not come, a sprained foot, a look into a shop window, a counterargument, the opening of a book, a dream, a deception: it turns out at once, or very soon after, to be something that "could not be missing," full of deep meaning and useful precisely for us! Is there a more dangerous temptation than to give up believing in Epicurus's gods, those carefree unknown beings, and to believe instead in some anxious, petty god, who personally knows every hair on our heads and finds no disgust in the most wretched service? Well, I think in spite of everything! Let us leave the gods in peace, and the helpful spirits too, and be satisfied with the idea that our own practical and theoretical skill at interpreting and arranging events has now reached its height. Let us not think too highly of this nimbleness of our wisdom, even when the wonderful harmony that comes out as we play our instrument surprises us too much. It is a harmony that sounds too good for us to dare to take credit for it. In fact, now and then someone plays along with us: dear chance. Every so often he guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not think up better music than the music our foolish hand then manages to make.

278 The Thought of Death. — It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the middle of this tangle of little streets, needs and voices. How much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and intoxication with life comes to light every moment! And yet soon it will be so quiet for all these noisy, living, life-hungry people! Behind each of them stands his shadow, his dark companion on the road! It is always like the last moment before an emigrant ship leaves: people have more to say to each other than ever, the hour is pressing, and the ocean, with its empty silence, waits impatiently behind all the noise, so eager, so sure of its prey. And all of them think that the past is nothing or little, and that the near future is everything. That is why there is this haste, this shouting, this drowning out of oneself and outdoing oneself! Everyone wants to be first in this future, and yet death and the silence of the grave are the only certain thing about this future, the one thing everyone shares! How strange that this one certainty and shared fact has almost no power over people, and that they are farthest from feeling like a brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that people absolutely do not want to think the thought of death! I would gladly do something to make the thought of life a hundred times more worth thinking for them.

279 Star Friendship. — We were friends, and we have become strangers to each other. But that is quite all right. Let us not hide it or cloud it, as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are two ships, each with its own destination and course. We may cross paths and hold a celebration together, as we did. Then the good ships lay so quietly in one harbor, under one sun, that it seemed they had already reached their goal, and had one goal. But then the all-powerful force of our task drove us apart again, into different seas and under different skies, and perhaps we will never see each other again. Or perhaps we will see each other, and not recognize each other: the different seas and suns have changed us! That we must become strangers is the law over us. That is exactly why we should also become more worthy of respect! That is exactly why the memory of our old friendship should become more sacred! There is probably an enormous invisible curve and star path in which our very different roads and goals are included as small stretches of the way. Let us raise ourselves to this thought! But our life is too short and our sight too weak for us to be more than friends in the sense of that lofty possibility. So let us believe in our star friendship, even if we have to be enemies on earth.

280 The Architecture of Thinkers. — We will need, and probably soon, to understand what our big cities lack above all: quiet, wide, spacious places for thinking. Places with long, high halls for bad weather or too much sun, where no noise of carriages or street criers can get in, and where a finer manners would even forbid a priest to pray out loud. Buildings and grounds that together express the grandeur of reflection and of stepping aside. The time is past when the church had a monopoly on thinking, when the contemplative life always had to be first a religious life. Everything the church has built expresses that idea. I do not know how we could be content with its buildings, even if they were stripped of their church purpose. These buildings speak a language that is far too grand and stiff, as houses of God and showplaces of a traffic with the other world, for us godless people to think our thoughts in them. We want to be translated into stone and plant. We want to walk around inside ourselves when we stroll through these halls and gardens.

281 Knowing How to Finish. — Masters of the first rank show who they are by knowing how to finish well, in large things and small. It may be the end of a melody or of a thought, the fifth act of a tragedy or of a political action. The first-rate people of the second level always get restless toward the end, and they do not drop into the sea with the proud, calm regularity of, for example, the mountains near Portofino, where the Gulf of Genoa finishes singing its song.

282 The Walk. — Some habits of the mind reveal that even great minds come from common or half-common stock. The gait and step of their thoughts are especially what gives them away: they cannot walk. Napoleon too could not, to his deep annoyance, walk like a prince by birth, on the occasions when one really has to know how, such as great coronation processions and the like. Even there he was always only the leader of a column, proud and hasty at once, and very aware of it. It is funny to see those writers who make the pleated robes of their period rustle around them. They want to hide their feet this way.

283 Preparing People. — I welcome every sign that a more manly, warlike age is beginning, one that above all will bring courage back into honor! It is meant to clear the way for an even higher age, and to gather the strength that this higher age will one day need: an age that carries heroism into knowledge and wages wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences. For this, for now, we need many brave people who prepare the way. They cannot come from nothing, and just as little from the sand and slime of present civilization and big-city culture. We need people who know how to be silent, lonely, determined, content and steady in invisible work. People who, with an inner pull toward all things, look for what in them has to be overcome. People who have cheerfulness, patience, simplicity and contempt for great vanities as their own traits, just as they have generosity in victory and forgiveness toward the small vanities of everyone who loses. People with a sharp, free judgment about all winners, and about the part that luck plays in every victory and every fame. People with their own festivals, their own workdays, their own times of mourning, used to giving orders and sure of it, and just as ready to obey when it matters. Equally proud in one role as in the other, equally serving their own cause. More endangered people, more fruitful people, happier people! Believe me, the secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from existence is this: live dangerously! Build your cities on Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live at war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you people who know! The time is coming soon when it will no longer be enough for you to live hidden in the woods like shy deer! Knowledge will at last reach out its hand for what is owed to you. It will want to rule and to own, and you along with it!

284 Faith in Oneself. — Very few people have faith in themselves at all. Of those few, some get it as a useful blindness, or a partial darkening of their minds. (What would they see if they could look down to the bottom of themselves!) Others have to earn it. Everything they do that is good, capable or great is, first of all, an argument against the skeptic who lives inside them. They have to convince him or talk him around, and for that they almost need genius. These are the great ones who are never satisfied with themselves.

285 Excelsior! — "You will never pray again, never worship again, never rest again in endless trust. You refuse to stop before a final wisdom, a final goodness, a final power, and to unharness your thoughts. You have no constant guardian and friend for your seven solitudes. You live without the view of a mountain that has snow on its head and fire in its heart. For you there is no longer any rewarder, any improver with the final touch. There is no longer any reason in what happens, no love in what will happen to you. No resting place is still open to your heart, where it has only to find and no longer to search. You resist every kind of final peace; you want the eternal return of war and peace. Man of renunciation, do you want to give up all of this? Who will give you the strength for it? No one has had that strength yet!" There is a lake that one day refused to flow out, and threw up a dam where it had always flowed out before. Since then this lake keeps rising higher. Perhaps this very renunciation will also give us the strength to bear renunciation itself. Perhaps from then on the human being will keep rising, at the point where he no longer flows out into a god.

286 An Interlude. — Here are hopes. But what will you see and hear in them if you have not lived through shining, glow and dawns in your own souls? I can only remind you. I cannot do more! Move stones, make animals into human beings: is that what you want from me? Ah, if you are still stones and animals, first go and look for your Orpheus.

287 Delight in Blindness. — "My thoughts," said the wanderer to his shadow, "should show me where I stand. But they should not tell me where I am going. I love not knowing about the future, and I do not want to be ruined by impatience and by tasting promised things in advance."

288 High Moods. — It seems to me that most people do not believe in high moods at all, except for moments, at most quarter-hours. The few exceptions are those who know from experience a longer duration of high feeling.

But for a person to be the embodiment of a single high feeling, the incarnation of one great mood, has been only a dream and a tempting possibility until now. History does not yet give us a clear example of it. Still, history might one day give birth to such people, once many favorable conditions have been created and made secure, conditions that even the luckiest chance cannot put together right now. Perhaps for these future souls, what has come into our souls here and there as a rare exception, which we feel with awe, would be the normal state: a constant movement between high and low, and the feeling of high and low, a steady climbing as on stairs, and at the same time resting as on clouds.

289 All Aboard! — Think about how a philosophical justification of a person's way of living and thinking, taken as a whole, works on each individual. It is like a warm, blessing, fertilizing sun that shines just for him. Independent of praise and blame, it makes people self-sufficient, rich and generous with happiness and goodwill. It constantly turns evil into good, brings all powers to flower and ripeness, and does not let the small and great weeds of grief and annoyance take root at all. Then at last you cry out with longing: "Oh, if only many such new suns could be made!" Even the evil person, the unhappy person, the exceptional person should have his philosophy, his good right, his sunshine! We do not need pity for them! We must unlearn this idea of arrogance, even though humanity has so far learned and practiced it precisely through this idea. We have no confessors, soul-conjurers or sin-forgivers to set up for them. What we need is a new justice! And a new watchword! And new philosophers! The moral earth is round too! The moral earth has its antipodes too! The antipodes have their right to exist as well! There is still another world to discover, and more than one! All aboard, you philosophers!

290 One Thing Is Needful. — To "give style" to one's character is a great and rare art. It is practiced by someone who surveys everything his nature offers in strengths and weaknesses, and then fits it into an artistic plan, until every part looks like art and reason, and even the weakness delights the eye. Here a great deal of second nature has been added, and there a piece of first nature has been taken away. Both took long practice and daily work. Here the ugly, which could not be taken away, has been hidden. There it has been reinterpreted as sublime. Much that is vague and resists shaping has been saved for distant views and put to use. It is meant to beckon toward the wide and the immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes clear that the same taste ruled and shaped everything, large and small. Whether the taste was good or bad matters less than people think. It is enough that it is one taste! It is the strong, domineering natures who take their finest pleasure in such compulsion, in such restriction and completeness under their own law. The passion of their mighty will is relieved at the sight of all stylized nature, all defeated and serving nature. Even when they have palaces to build and gardens to lay out, they dislike letting nature go free. On the other hand, it is the weak characters, who do not have power over themselves, who hate the restriction of style. They feel that if this bitterly harsh restriction were imposed on them, they would become common under it. They turn into slaves as soon as they serve, and they hate serving. Such minds, which can be minds of the first rank, always want to shape or interpret themselves and their surroundings as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, messy, surprising. And they are right to do so, because only this way do they do themselves good. For one thing is needful: that a person reach contentment with himself, whether through this poetry or that art. Only then is a person at all bearable to look at! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to take revenge for it. We others will be his victims, if only in having always to put up with the sight of his ugliness. For the sight of the ugly makes people bad and gloomy.

291 Genoa. — I have looked at this city for quite a while now, at its country houses and pleasure gardens and the wide ring of its inhabited hills and slopes. In the end I have to say: I see faces from past generations. This region is covered with the likenesses of bold, self-ruling people. They lived, and they wanted to keep living. Their houses tell me so: built and decorated to last for centuries, not for a passing hour. They were good to life, however harsh they may often have been to themselves. I always see the builder, his eyes resting on everything built around him, near and far, and on the city, the sea and the lines of the mountains as well. With this gaze he exercises force and conquest. He wants to fit all of it into his plan and in the end make it his property by making it a piece of himself. This whole region is overgrown with the splendid, insatiable selfishness of the lust for owning and for loot. Just as these people, far away, accepted no limits, and in their thirst for the new set a new world beside the old, so at home everyone still rebelled against everyone else. Each found a way to show his superiority and to put his personal infinity between himself and his neighbor. Each conquered his own homeland again, overwhelming it with his architectural ideas and reshaping it into a feast for the eyes of his house. In the North, when you look at how the cities are built, the law impresses you, and the general love of rules and obedience. You can guess at that inner urge to make oneself equal and to fit in, which must have ruled the minds of all the builders. But here, around every corner, you find a person who stands on his own. He knows the sea, adventure and the Orient. He turns away from law and from the neighbor, as if from a kind of boredom, and he looks with envious eyes at everything already established and old. With a wonderful slyness of imagination, he wants to found all of it again, at least in his mind. He wants to lay his hand on it and put his own meaning into it, even if only for the moment of a sunny afternoon, when his restless and melancholy soul feels full for once, and only what is his own may show itself to his eye, and nothing foreign.

292 To the Preachers of Morality. — I am not trying to make a morality. But to those who do, I offer this advice. If you want to rob the best things and conditions of all honor and value in the end, keep talking about them the way you have been! Put them at the top of your morality, and talk from morning to night about the happiness of virtue, the peace of the soul, justice and the retribution that is built into things. The way you do it, all these good things will end up with popularity and a street-corner shouting all their own. But then all the gold will have been rubbed off them, and worse, all the gold inside them will have turned into lead. Truly, you are skilled in the reverse art of alchemy, the art of devaluing what is most valuable! Try a different recipe for once, so that you stop getting the opposite of what you are looking for:

deny those good things, take from them the applause of the crowd and their easy circulation, make them once again the hidden modesties of lonely souls, and say that morality is something forbidden! Perhaps in this way you will win over the kind of people for whom these things matter at all, I mean the heroic ones. But then there has to be something frightening about them, and not, as so far, something disgusting! Should we not say today, about morality, what Master Eckhart said: "I pray God to make me quit of God!"

293 Our Air. — We know that someone who glances at science only in passing, the way women do, and unfortunately many artists too, finds something dizzying and frightening in the strictness of its work. He finds the unrelenting attitude toward small things as much as large, and the speed of weighing, judging and condemning. What alarms him most is how the hardest things are asked for here, and the best things are done, with no praise or honors given. Instead, as among soldiers, you hear almost only blame and sharp reprimands. Doing things well counts as the rule, and failure as the exception. But the rule, here as everywhere, has a silent mouth. This "strictness of science" is like the form and courtesy of the very best society: it frightens those who are not initiated. But anyone who is used to it does not want to live anywhere else but in this bright, clear, strong, highly charged air, this manly air. Everywhere else it seems to him not clean and airy enough. He suspects that his best skill would be of little use to anyone there and no joy to himself. He suspects that half his life would slip through his fingers because of misunderstandings, and that constant caution, constant hiding and holding back would be needed. All of these are large and useless losses of strength! But in this strict, clear element he has all his strength. Here he can fly! Why should he go back down into those murky waters, where you have to swim and wade and your wings get dirty? No! Here it is too hard for us to live. What can we do about being born for the air, the pure air? We are rivals of the ray of light, and we would most gladly ride, like it, on tiny particles of ether, not away from the sun but toward it. But we cannot do that. So let us do the one thing we can do: bring light to the earth, be "the light of the earth." For this we have our wings, our speed and our strictness, and because of this we are manly, even frightening, like fire. Let those fear us who do not know how to warm themselves at us, or to light up by us!

294 Against the Slanderers of Nature. — There are people I find unpleasant, for whom every natural urge at once turns into a sickness, something disfiguring or even shameful. They have led us to believe that human urges and drives are evil. They are the cause of our great unfairness toward our nature, toward all nature!

There are enough people who could give in to their drives with grace and carelessness. But they do not, out of fear of that imagined "evil being" in nature! That is why so little nobility is found among people. Its mark will always be having no fear of oneself, expecting nothing shameful from oneself, and flying without hesitation wherever it drives us, we birds born free! Wherever we arrive, it will always be free and full of sunlight around us.

295 Short Habits. — I like short habits, and I think they are the priceless way to get to know many things and conditions, all the way down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness. My nature is built entirely for short habits, even in the needs of my physical health, and as far as I can see in general, from the lowest things to the highest. I always believe this one will satisfy me forever. A short habit has that faith of passion too, the faith in eternity. I think I am to be envied for having found it and recognized it. And now it feeds me at noon and in the evening, and spreads a deep contentment around itself and into me, so that I long for nothing else, without having to compare, despise or hate anything. Then one day its time is up. The good thing leaves me, not as something that now fills me with disgust, but peacefully, and satisfied with me, as I am with it. It is as if we had to thank each other, so we reach out our hands to say goodbye. And the new thing is already waiting at the door, and so is my faith, the indestructible fool and sage! This new thing, I believe, will be the right one, the last right one. That is how it goes for me with food, thoughts, people, cities, poems, music, teachings, daily schedules and ways of living. I hate lasting habits, on the other hand. I feel a tyrant coming close, and the air I breathe thickens, whenever events arrange themselves so that lasting habits seem to grow out of them by necessity: through a job, for example, or constant time with the same people, or a fixed home, or one unchanging kind of health. Indeed, deep in my soul I am grateful for all my misery and sickness, and for whatever is imperfect in me, because such things leave me a hundred back doors through which I can escape lasting habits. The most unbearable thing, though, the truly frightening thing, would be a life with no habits at all, a life that always demands improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.

296 The Firm Reputation. — A firm reputation was once a matter of the greatest usefulness. Wherever society is still ruled by the herd instinct, even now it is most practical for each individual to present his character and his work as unchanging, even if they are not really so. "You can count on him, he stays the same." In every dangerous situation in society, this is the praise that means the most. Society feels satisfied to have, in one person's virtue, in another's ambition and in a third person's thinking and passion, a reliable tool that is always ready. It honors this tool-like nature, this staying true to oneself, this unchangeability of opinions and goals, and even of vices, with its highest honors. This kind of esteem has always flourished wherever the morality of custom has flourished, and it trains "characters," and it puts all changing, relearning and transforming into disrepute. Whatever the advantages of this way of thinking may be, for knowledge it is the most harmful kind of general judgment. The good will of the knower, to contradict his own former opinion without fear at any time, and in general to be suspicious of everything in us that wants to become fixed, is condemned and disgraced here. The attitude of the knower, as being in conflict with the "firm reputation," counts as dishonorable, while the hardening of opinions has all the honor on its side. We still have to live today under the spell of such a valuation! How hard it is to live when you feel the judgment of many thousands of years against you and around you. It is likely that for many thousands of years knowledge was burdened with a bad conscience, and that there must have been much self-contempt and secret misery in the history of the greatest minds.

297 Being Able to Contradict. — Everyone now knows that being able to put up with contradiction is a high sign of culture. Some even know that the higher person wants contradiction against himself and calls it forth, to get a hint about some injustice of his that he did not know about. But being able to contradict, the good conscience gained in opposition to what is familiar, handed down and sacred, is more than both of these. It is the truly great, new and astonishing thing about our culture, the step of all steps of the freed mind. Who knows that?

298 Sigh. — I caught this insight on the way, and quickly grabbed the nearest poor words to fasten it down, so that it would not fly away again. Now it has died in these dry words, and it hangs and sways in them. When I look at it, I can hardly remember how I was lucky enough to catch this bird.

299 What to Learn from Artists. — What means do we have for making things beautiful, attractive and worth wanting when they are not? And I think they never are in themselves! Here we can learn something from doctors, for example when they dilute the bitter taste, or put wine and sugar in the mixing jug. But we can learn even more from artists, who are always looking for such inventions and tricks. You step away from things until you no longer see much of them, and must look hard just to see them at all. Or you see things around a corner, as through a cutout. Or you arrange them so that they partly hide one another and allow only glimpses in perspective. Or you look at them through colored glass or in the light of the evening red. Or you give them a surface and a skin that is not fully transparent. We should learn all of this from artists, and in other matters be wiser than they are. For their fine power usually ends where art ends and life begins. We, however, want to be the poets of our own lives, and first of all in the smallest, most everyday things.

300 Preludes to Science. — Do you really believe the sciences would have come into being and grown great if they had not been led the way by sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches? They first had to create thirst, hunger and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers, with their promises and illusions. Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be delivered, before anything at all could come true in the realm of knowledge. Perhaps, just as the preludes and preliminary exercises of science show themselves to us now, which were never practiced or felt as such, all of religion was practice and prelude for some distant age. Perhaps it was the strange means by which, one day, single human beings could enjoy the complete self-sufficiency of a god and all his power to redeem himself. Yes, one may ask: would humanity ever have learned, without that religious school and prehistory, to feel hunger and thirst within itself and to draw satisfaction and fullness from itself? Did Prometheus first have to believe he had stolen the light, and pay for it, before he could finally discover that he had created the light by longing for it, and that not only the human being but also the god was the work of his hands, the clay in his hands? Only images of the maker? And the same goes for the delusion, the theft, the Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheus story of every knower!

301 The Delusion of the Contemplatives. — Higher people differ from lower ones in that they see and hear far more, and they see and hear with thought. This is exactly what sets human beings apart from animals, and the higher animals from the lower ones. The world becomes ever fuller for the person who grows up to the height of humanity. More and more hooks of interest are cast out toward him. The number of things that move him keeps growing, and so does the number of kinds of pleasure and displeasure. The higher person becomes at once happier and more unhappy. Still, a delusion stays with him always. He thinks he has been placed in front of the great show and concert of life as a spectator and listener. He calls his nature a contemplative one, and overlooks the fact that he himself is the real poet, and the poet who keeps writing life. Of course he is very different from the actor in this drama, the so-called active person. But he is even more different from a mere observer, a festival guest sitting in front of the stage. As a poet, he surely has the vis contemplativa, and the habit of looking back at his work. But he also has, first of all, the vis creativa, which the active person lacks, whatever appearances and common belief may say. We, the thinking and feeling ones, are the ones who really and constantly make something that is not there yet: the whole ever-growing world of values, colors, accents, perspectives, ladders of rank, yeses and noes. This poetry we have invented is constantly learned, practiced, and translated into flesh and reality, even into everyday life, by the so-called practical people (our actors, as I said). What has value in the present world does not have it in itself, by its nature. Nature is always without value. Value was once given to it, presented to it, and we were the ones who did the giving and presenting! We first created the world that concerns human beings! But this is exactly the knowledge we lack. When we catch hold of it for a moment, we have forgotten it again by the next. We misjudge our best strength, and we contemplatives value ourselves a degree too low. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we could be.

302 The Danger of the Happiest. — To have fine senses and good taste. To be used to the choicest and best of the mind, the way one is used to the right and simplest food. To have a strong, bold, reckless soul. To go through life with a calm eye and a steady step, always ready for the extreme, as if for a party, and full of longing for undiscovered worlds and seas, people and gods. To listen to every cheerful music as if brave men, soldiers and sailors were taking a short rest and a little pleasure there. And in the deepest enjoyment of the moment, to be overcome by tears and by the whole purple sadness of a happy person. Who would not want all this to be his own, his condition! It was the happiness of Homer! The condition of the man who invented gods for the Greeks, or rather invented his own gods for himself! But let us not fool ourselves. With this happiness of Homer's in your soul, you are also the creature most able to suffer under the sun! And only at this price do you buy the most precious shell the waves of existence have so far washed up on the shore. As its owner, you become ever more sensitive to pain, and in the end too sensitive. A little bad mood and disgust was enough, in the end, to make life miserable for Homer. He could not solve a silly little riddle that young fishermen set him! Yes, little riddles are the danger of the happiest people!

303 Two Lucky Ones. — Truly, this man, in spite of his youth, understands the improvisation of life, and astonishes even the sharpest observer. It seems he never makes a wrong move, although he keeps playing the most daring game. He reminds one of those improvising masters of music, to whom even the listener would like to credit a divine infallibility of hand, even though here and there they slip, as every mortal does. But they are practiced and inventive, and always ready in the moment to fit the most accidental note, wherever a flick of the finger or a whim pushes it, into the theme at once, and to breathe a beautiful meaning and a soul into chance. Here is a totally different kind of person. At bottom, everything he wants and plans goes wrong. What he once set his heart on has brought him to the edge of the abyss several times, and to the very brink of ruin. And if he has escaped, it was certainly not with only a black eye. Do you think he is unhappy about this? He decided long ago not to take his own wishes and plans so seriously. "If this does not work," he tells himself, "then perhaps that will. And on the whole, I am not sure I do not owe more thanks to my failures than to any success. Was I made to be stubborn and to carry the horns of the bull? What makes life valuable and worthwhile for me lies somewhere else. My pride, and just as much my misery, lie somewhere else. I know more about life because I have so often been close to losing it. And for exactly that reason I have more of life than all of you!"

304 In Doing, We Let Go. — At bottom I dislike all those moralities that say, "Do not do this! Give it up! Overcome yourself!" I am on the side of the moralities that push me to do something, and to do it again, from morning until evening, and to dream about it at night, and to think of nothing but doing it well, as well as it is possible for me alone to do it! Whoever lives like this keeps losing one thing after another that does not belong to such a life. Without hatred or reluctance he watches this thing today and that thing tomorrow take their leave, like yellowed leaves that any stronger breeze carries off the tree. Or he does not even notice that they are leaving, because his eye looks so sternly toward his goal, and forward in general, not sideways, backward or downward. What we do should decide what we leave undone. By doing, we let go. That is how I like it, that is my rule. But I do not want to work with my eyes open toward my own impoverishment. I do not like all the negative virtues, virtues whose very essence is saying no and refusing oneself.

305 Self-Control. — Those teachers of morality who first and foremost command people to get control of themselves bring a strange sickness on them: a constant irritability toward all natural urges and inclinations, a kind of itching. Whatever pushes, pulls, tempts or drives such a person, from inside or outside, it always seems to this irritable person that his self-control is now in danger. He may not trust any instinct, or any free stroke of the wing. Instead he stands there all the time, making a warding gesture, armed against himself, with a sharp and suspicious eye, the eternal guard of the castle he has made of himself. Yes, he can be great that way! But how unbearable he has become to others, how hard on himself, how impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful accidents of the soul! Even from any further learning! For you have to be able to lose yourself for a while if you want to learn something from the things that are not you.

306 Stoics and Epicureans. — The Epicurean picks out for himself the situation, the people and even the events that suit his very irritable intellectual makeup. He gives up the rest, which is most of it, because it would be too strong and heavy a diet for him. The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, glass splinters and scorpions, and to feel no disgust. In the end his stomach is supposed to become indifferent to everything that the chance of life pours into it. He reminds one of that Arab sect of the Aissaoua, which you can get to know in Algiers. And like those insensitive people, he also likes an invited audience for showing off his insensitivity. The Epicurean does not need that, because he has his "garden"! For people whose fate improvises with them, people who live in violent times and depend on sudden and changeable people, Stoicism may be very sensible. But anyone who can see, at least a little, that fate allows him to spin a long thread does well to arrange his life the Epicurean way. All people who do intellectual work have done this so far! For them, it would be the greatest loss of all to give up their fine irritability and get a stoic hard skin in exchange, bristling with hedgehog spines.

307 In Favor of Criticism. — Now something looks like an error to you that you once loved as a truth or a probability. You push it away and imagine that your reason has won a victory. But perhaps that error was as necessary to you back then, when you were still a different person (you are always a different person), as all your present "truths" are now. It was like a skin that hid and covered much that you were not yet allowed to see. Your new life has killed that opinion for you, not your reason. You no longer need it. Now it collapses under its own weight, and out of it crawls unreason, like a worm, into the light. When we practice criticism, it is nothing arbitrary or impersonal. At least very often, it is proof that living, driving forces are at work in us, shedding a bark. We deny, and we have to deny, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself: something we perhaps do not know yet, do not see yet! This is in favor of criticism.

308 The Story of Each Day. — What does your daily story add up to? Look at the habits it is made of. Are they the product of countless small cowardices and laziness, or the product of your courage and inventive reason? These two cases are so different that people might give you the same praise anyway, and you might bring them the same benefit anyway. But praise and benefit and respectability may be enough for someone who only wants a good conscience. They are not enough for you, you kidney-tester, who have a knowledge of conscience!

309 From the Seventh Solitude. — One day the wanderer slammed a door behind him, stopped, and wept. Then he said: "This inclination and urge toward the true, the real, the unadorned, the conscientious! How I resent it! Why does this gloomy, passionate driver follow me of all things? I want to rest, but it does not allow it. How much tempts me to linger! Everywhere there are gardens of Armida for me, and so always new tearings-away and new bitternesses of the heart! I have to lift my foot and go farther, this tired, wounded foot. And because I have to, I often cast a furious look back at the most beautiful thing, which could not keep me, because it could not keep me!"

310 Will and Wave. — How greedily this wave comes rushing in, as if something had to be reached! How it crawls with frightening haste into the innermost corners of the rocky clefts! It seems to want to get ahead of someone. It seems that something valuable, very valuable, is hidden there. And now it comes back, a bit more slowly, still quite white with excitement. Is it disappointed? Did it find what it was looking for? Is it pretending to be disappointed? But already another wave is coming, even greedier and wilder than the first, and its soul too seems full of secrets and the lust of treasure hunting. That is how the waves live, and that is how we live, we who will! I will say no more. — So? You distrust me? You are angry at me, you beautiful monsters? Are you afraid I will give away your secret completely? Well! Just be angry at me. Raise your green, dangerous bodies as high as you can. Build a wall between me and the sun, just as you are doing now! Truly, there is nothing left of the world but green twilight and green flashes. Carry on as you please, you overbold ones, roar with delight and spite. Or dive back down, pour your emeralds into the deepest depth, and throw your endless white, shaggy mane of foam and spray over them. It is all fine with me, because everything suits you so well, and I am so well disposed toward you in everything. How could I betray you! For, listen well: I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I are of one kind! You and I have one secret!

311 Broken Light. — One is not always brave, and when one gets tired, one of us may also complain like this. "It is so hard to hurt people. Oh, that it is necessary! What good is it to live in hiding, if we do not want to keep to ourselves what causes offense? Would it not be wiser to live in the crowd, and to make up to the individual for what is to be sinned against everyone, and has to be? To be foolish with the fool, vain with the vain, enthusiastic with the enthusiast? Would that not be fair, given such an exaggerated degree of difference overall? When I hear of other people's malice toward me, is my first feeling not satisfaction? That is right! I seem to say to them: I agree with you so little, and I have so much truth on my side. Go ahead and have a good day at my expense, as often as you can! Here are my faults and my mistakes. Here is my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owl-like hiding, my contradictions! Here you have something to laugh at! So laugh and be glad! I am not angry at the law and the nature of things, which want faults and mistakes to bring joy!" Of course, there was once a "more beautiful" time when you could feel so indispensable with any somewhat new thought that you could step into the street with it and call out to everyone: "Look! The kingdom of heaven has come near!" I would not be missed if I were gone. All of us are dispensable! But, as I said, that is not how we think when we are brave. We do not think about it at all.

312 My Dog. — I have given my pain a name, and I call it "dog." It is as loyal, as pushy and shameless, as entertaining and as clever as any other dog. I can bark at it and take out my bad moods on it, the way others do with their dogs, their servants and their wives.

313 No Pictures of Martyrdom. — I want to do as Raphael did and paint no more pictures of martyrdom. There are plenty of sublime things, so there is no need to look for sublimity where it lives as a sister of cruelty. Besides, my ambition would find no satisfaction in it if I made myself a sublime torturer.

315 The Last Little Hour. — Storms are my danger. Will I have my own storm, in which I perish, the way Oliver Cromwell perished in his storm? Or will I go out like a light that is not blown out by any wind, but grows tired and sick of itself: a burned-out light? Or finally: will I blow myself out so that I do not burn out?

316 Prophetic People. — You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic people are people who suffer greatly. You think only that they have been given a beautiful "gift," and you would gladly have it yourselves. But let me explain with a comparison. How much animals must suffer from electricity in the air and in the clouds! We see that some kinds of animals have a prophetic power about the weather. Monkeys, for example, as you can observe well even in Europe, and not only in zoos, namely on Gibraltar. But we do not think about the fact that their pains are their prophets! When a strong positive electricity suddenly turns into negative electricity, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is still far from visible, and a change in the weather is coming, these animals behave as if an enemy were approaching. They get ready for defense or flight. Mostly they hide. They do not understand the bad weather as weather, but as an enemy whose hand they already feel!

317 A Look Back. — While we stand in a period of our lives, we seldom become aware of its real pathos. We always think it is the only possible and reasonable state for us now, and wholly ethos, not pathos, to use the Greek terms and keep them apart. A few notes of music brought back to my memory today a winter, a house, and a very solitary life, and along with it the feeling I lived in back then. I thought I could go on living like that forever. But now I understand that it was entirely pathos and passion, something comparable to this painfully brave and comfort-sure music. You should not have such things for years, or even for eternities. For this planet, you would become too "otherworldly."

318 Wisdom in Pain. — There is as much wisdom in pain as in pleasure. Like pleasure, it belongs to the first rank of forces that preserve the species. If it were not so, it would have died out long ago. That it hurts is no argument against it. Hurting is its nature. In pain I hear the captain of a ship calling out, "Take in the sails!" The bold sailor, the human being, must have practiced setting sails in a thousand ways. Otherwise it would soon be over for him, and the ocean would swallow him up too fast. We must also know how to live with less energy. As soon as pain gives its safety signal, it is time to reduce our energy. Some great danger, a storm, is on its way, and it is wise for us to puff ourselves up as little as possible. It is true that some people hear the opposite order when great pain approaches. They never look prouder, more warlike and happier than when the storm is coming up. Pain itself gives them their greatest moments! These are the heroic people, the great bringers of pain to humanity: the few, or rare ones, who need exactly the same defense that pain itself needs. And truly, one should not deny it to them! They are forces of the first rank for preserving and advancing the species, if only because they resist comfort and do not hide their disgust for that kind of happiness.

319 As Interpreters of Our Experiences. — Religious founders and people like them have never had a certain kind of honesty. They never made a matter of conscience for knowledge out of their experiences. "What did I actually experience? What was going on in me and around me back then? Was my reason clear enough? Was my will turned against all the tricks of the senses, and brave in resisting what is fantastic?" None of them asked this, and the dear religious people still do not ask it now. They have a thirst for things that go against reason, and they do not want to make it hard on themselves to satisfy it. So they experience "miracles" and "rebirths," and they hear the voices of little angels! But we others, who are thirsty for reason, want to look at our experiences as strictly as at a scientific test, hour by hour, day by day!

We ourselves want to be our own experiments and our own test animals.

320 On Meeting Again. — A: "Do I still understand you completely? You are searching? Where in the world as it is now is your corner and your star? Where can you lie down in the sun, so that a surplus of well-being comes to you too, and your existence is justified? Let everyone do that for himself," you seem to be saying to me, "and let go of talk in general terms, and of worrying about others and society!" B: "I want more. I am not a seeker. I want to create a sun of my own."

321 New Caution. — Let us stop thinking so much about punishment, blame and improvement! We will rarely change a person. And if we did succeed, perhaps something else succeeded too without our noticing: we were changed by him! Let us see instead that our own influence on everything that is to come balances out and outweighs his. Let us not struggle in direct combat! That is what all blaming, punishing and wanting to fix people comes down to. Instead, let us raise ourselves higher! Let us give our example ever brighter colors! Let us darken the others by our light! No! We do not want to become darker ourselves for his sake, like all the punishers and the discontented! Let us step aside instead! Let us look away!

322 A Comparison. — Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in circular orbits are not the deepest. Whoever looks into himself as into a huge universe, and carries Milky Ways inside him, also knows how irregular all Milky Ways are. They lead right into the chaos and maze of existence.

323 Good Fortune in Fate. — Fate gives us its greatest honor when it lets us fight for a while on the side of our enemies. By this we are destined for a great victory.

324 In Media Vita. — No! Life has not disappointed me! From year to year I find it truer, more desirable and more mysterious. Ever since the day the great liberator came over me, the thought that life may be an experiment of the knower, and not a duty, not a fate, not a deception! And knowledge itself: for others it may be something else, for example a couch to rest on, or the way to one, or entertainment, or idleness. For me it is a world of dangers and victories, where even heroic feelings have their dancing and playing grounds. "Life as a means of knowledge!" With this principle in your heart you can live not only bravely but even cheerfully, and laugh cheerfully! And who would know how to laugh and live well if he did not first know how to handle war and victory?

325 What Belongs to Greatness. — Who will ever achieve anything great if he does not feel in himself the strength and the will to inflict great pain? Being able to suffer is the least of it. Weak women and even slaves often become masters of that. But to not perish from inner distress and insecurity when you cause great suffering and hear the cry of that suffering: that is great, that belongs to greatness.

326 The Doctors of the Soul and Pain. — All moral preachers, and all theologians too, share a common bad habit: they all try to convince people that they are in very bad shape, and that a harsh, final, radical cure is needed. And since people as a whole have listened too eagerly to these teachings, and have held their ears out to them for whole centuries, something of the superstition that things are going very badly for them has finally rubbed off on them. Now they are only too ready to sigh, to find nothing more in life, and to make sad faces together, as if it were really very hard to endure. In truth they are wildly sure of their life and in love with it, and full of endless tricks and refinements for breaking what is unpleasant and pulling the thorn out of pain and misfortune. It seems to me that pain and misfortune are always talked about with exaggeration, as if exaggerating were a matter of good manners. People deliberately keep quiet about the countless means of relief against pain: stupefaction, the feverish haste of thoughts, a calm position, good and bad memories, intentions, hopes, and many kinds of pride and sympathy, which almost work like anesthetics. And at the highest degrees of pain, people faint on their own. We understand very well how to drip sweetness onto our bitternesses, especially the bitternesses of the soul. We have aids in our courage and our loftiness, and in the nobler delirium of submission and resignation. A loss is hardly a loss for an hour. Somehow a gift from heaven has fallen to us along with it, a new strength for example, or at least a new chance to be strong! What the moral preachers have fantasized about the inner "misery" of wicked people! And what they have lied to us about the misfortune of passionate people! Lying is the right word here. They knew very well about the overflowing happiness of this kind of person, but they kept quiet about it, because it refuted their theory, according to which all happiness comes only with the destruction of passion and the silence of the will! And finally, as for the prescription of all these doctors of the soul, and their praise of a harsh radical cure: one may ask, is our life really painful and troublesome enough to make it worth trading it for a stoic way of life and a hardening against it? We are not in bad enough shape to have to feel bad in the stoic way!

327 Taking Things Seriously. — For the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine that is hard to get going. They call it "taking the matter seriously" when they want to work with this machine and think well. Oh, how tiresome good thinking must be for them! The lovely beast, man, seems to lose its good mood every time it thinks well. It becomes "serious"! And "where there is laughter and cheerfulness, thinking is worth nothing": that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all "joyful science." Well then! Let us show that it is a prejudice!

328 Doing Harm to Stupidity. — The belief that selfishness is reprehensible as a whole, preached so stubbornly and so convincingly, has certainly done harm to selfishness. (It has done this in favor, as I will repeat a hundred times, of the herd instincts!) It has especially done so by taking away selfishness's good conscience and teaching it to look for the real source of all misfortune inside itself. "Your selfishness is the disaster of your life": that was the sermon for thousands of years. As I said, it harmed selfishness and took away a great deal of its spirit, its cheerfulness, its inventiveness and its beauty. It dulled, uglified and poisoned selfishness! Classical antiquity, on the other hand, taught another main source of misfortune. From Socrates on, thinkers never tired of preaching: "Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, your living by the rules, your submission to your neighbor's opinion, is why you so rarely achieve happiness. We thinkers, as thinkers, are the happiest." Let us not decide here whether this sermon against stupidity had better reasons behind it than that sermon against selfishness. But it is certain that it took away stupidity's good conscience. These philosophers did harm to stupidity.

329 Leisure and Idleness. — There is a wildness in the way Americans chase gold, an Indian-like wildness that seems to belong to Indian blood. Their breathless rush to work, the real vice of the New World, has already begun to make old Europe wild through contagion, and to spread a strange lack of spirit over it. People are already ashamed of rest. A long period of reflection almost makes them feel guilty. They think with a clock in their hand, even while they eat lunch, with their eyes on the stock-market page. They live like someone who might constantly "miss out" on something. "Better to do something than nothing": this principle too is a rope for strangling all culture and all higher taste. And just as obviously all forms perish in this rush of workers, so the feeling for form itself perishes, and the ear and eye for the melody of movements. The proof is in the clumsy clarity now demanded everywhere, in all those situations where a person wants to be honest with other people: in dealings with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, students, leaders and princes. There is no longer time or strength for ceremonies, for courtesy that goes around in a roundabout way, for all the wit of conversation, and in general for all otium. For life in the hunt for profit keeps forcing people to spend their minds until they are exhausted, through constant pretending, outwitting or getting ahead of others. The real virtue now is to do something in less time than someone else. So there are only rare hours of permitted honesty. In those hours people are tired, and they do not just want to "let themselves go," but to stretch out long and broad and clumsily. In keeping with this inclination, people now write their letters, and their style and spirit will always be the real "sign of the times." If there is any pleasure left in society and in the arts, it is the kind that tired slaves put together for themselves. Oh, this contentment with "fun" among our educated and uneducated people! Oh, this growing suspicion of all pleasure! Work keeps gaining all the good conscience for itself. The urge for enjoyment already calls itself "need for recreation," and it is beginning to be ashamed of itself. "We owe it to our health," people say when they are caught on an outing. Indeed, it could soon come to the point where you could not give in to a desire for the vita contemplativa (that is, walking about with thoughts and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Formerly it was the other way around: work had the bad conscience. A person of good birth hid his work when need forced him to work. The slave worked under the pressure of the feeling that he was doing something contemptible. The "doing" itself was something contemptible. "Nobility and honor belong only to otium and bellum": that was the voice of the ancient prejudice!

330 Applause. — A thinker does not need applause or handclapping, as long as he is sure of his own handclapping. But this he cannot do without. Are there people who could do without it, and without every kind of applause at all? I doubt it. Even about the wisest, Tacitus, who is no slanderer of the wise, says: quando etiam sapientibus gloriae cupido novissima exuitur. In his case that means: never.

331 Better Deaf Than Stunned. — Formerly people wanted to make themselves a reputation. That is no longer enough now that the market has grown so big. It has to be a clamor. As a result, even good throats have to shout themselves hoarse, and the best goods are sold by hoarse voices. Without hawking and hoarseness there is no genius anymore. This is certainly a bad age for the thinker. He has to learn to find his quiet between two noises, and to pretend to be deaf until he really is. As long as he has not learned this, he is of course in danger of perishing from impatience and headaches.

332 The Bad Hour. — Every philosopher has probably had a bad hour when he thought: "What does it matter to me if people do not believe even my bad arguments?" And then some gleeful little bird flew past him and chirped: "What does it matter to you? What does it matter to you?"

333 What Knowing Means. — Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! says Spinoza, as simply and nobly as is his way. But what is this intelligere at bottom, other than the form in which those three become felt at the same time? A result of the different and conflicting urges to mock, to mourn and to curse? Before any knowing is possible, each of these urges must first put forward its one-sided view of the thing or event. Afterward a struggle arose among these one-sided views, and out of it sometimes came a middle, a calm, a granting of rights on all three sides, a kind of justice and a settlement. Through justice and settlement all these urges can hold their ground in existence and be proved right in relation to one another. We, to whom only the last reconciliation scenes and final settlements of this long process come to consciousness, therefore think that intelligere is something conciliatory, just, good, something essentially opposed to the urges. But it is only a certain relation of the urges to one another. For the longest time people considered conscious thinking to be thinking in general. Only now does the truth begin to dawn on us, that by far the largest part of our mental work goes on unconsciously and without feeling. I mean, however, that these urges fighting here understand very well how to make themselves felt by one another, and how to hurt one another. That enormous sudden exhaustion, which all thinkers are visited by, may have its origin here. It is the exhaustion of the battlefield. Yes, perhaps there is much hidden heroism in our inner struggle, but certainly nothing divine, eternally at rest in itself, as Spinoza thought. Conscious thinking, and especially the philosopher's, is the weakest kind of thinking, and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest. So it is precisely the philosopher who can most easily be led astray about the nature of knowing.

334 One Must Learn to Love. — It is the same with music. First you must learn to hear a figure and a melody at all, to pick it out, to tell it apart, to isolate it and mark it off as a life of its own. Then it takes effort and good will to put up with it, despite its strangeness. You must practice patience with its look and expression, and kindness toward its oddness. At last there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we expect it, when we sense that we would miss it if it were gone. And now it keeps exerting its force and its spell on us, and it does not stop until we have become its humble and delighted lovers, who want nothing better in the world than it, and again it. But it is not only with music that this happens. In exactly the same way we have learned to love all the things we love now. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, our fairness and our gentleness toward what is foreign. The foreign slowly drops its veil and shows itself as a new, unspeakable beauty. This is its thanks for our hospitality. Even someone who loves himself will have learned it this way. There is no other way. Love too must be learned.

335 Long Live Physics! — How many people know how to observe? And among the few who do, how many observe themselves? "Everyone is farthest from himself." All the kidney-testers know this, and it makes them uncomfortable. And the saying "know yourself!" is, when a god says it to human beings, almost a cruel joke. Nothing shows more clearly how badly self-observation is doing than the way almost everyone talks about what makes an action moral. It is quick, eager, sure of itself, and chatty, with its look, its smile and its helpful zeal! You seem to be told: "But my dear friend, this is exactly my specialty! You have come with your question to the right person, since I happen to be no wiser about anything than this. So: when a person judges, 'That is right,' and concludes, 'Therefore it must happen,' and then does what he has recognized as right and called necessary, then the nature of his action is moral!" But my friend, you are describing three actions instead of one. Your judging, for example, "That is right," is also an action. Could it not already be judged in a moral or an immoral way? Why do you hold this, and exactly this, to be right? "Because my conscience tells me so. Conscience never speaks immorally. It is what decides first what is to be moral!" But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And how do you have the right to treat such a judgment as true and infallible? Is there no conscience left for this belief? Do you know nothing about an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your "conscience"? Your judgment "That is right" has a history behind it, in your drives, inclinations, dislikes, experiences and non-experiences. You have to ask, "How did it come about?" and afterward, "What actually drives me to listen to it?" You can listen to its command like a good soldier who hears his officer's order. Or like a woman who loves the one giving the orders. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the one in charge. Or like a fool who obeys because he has nothing to say against it. In short, you can listen to your conscience in a hundred ways. But the fact that you hear this or that judgment as the voice of conscience, that you feel something as right, may come from the fact that you have never thought about yourself, and blindly accepted what has been called right for you since childhood. Or it may come from the fact that bread and honor have so far come to you through what you call your duty. It counts as "right" for you, because it seems to be the condition of your existence. (That you have a right to exist, though, seems to you beyond dispute!) The firmness of your moral judgment could still be proof of a very personal wretchedness, a lack of a personal self. Your "moral strength" could come from your stubbornness, or from your inability to see new ideals! And in short: if you had thought more carefully, observed better and learned more, you would no longer, under any circumstances, call this "duty" of yours and this "conscience" by those names. Insight into how moral judgments came about at all would make these solemn words distasteful to you, just as other solemn words, such as "sin," "salvation of the soul" and "redemption," have already become distasteful to you. Now do not talk to me about the categorical imperative, my friend! That word tickles my ear, and I have to laugh, in spite of your very serious presence. I think of old Kant, who, as a punishment for having sneaked in "the thing in itself" (also a very ridiculous matter!), was ambushed by the categorical imperative. With it in his heart, he wandered back to "God," "soul," "freedom" and "immortality," like a fox that wanders back into its cage, even though his strength and cleverness had broken that cage open! What? You admire the categorical imperative in yourself? This "firmness" of your so-called moral judgment? This "unconditionality" of the feeling "everyone must judge this way, as I do"? Admire your selfishness in it instead! And the blindness, pettiness and modesty of that selfishness! For it is selfishness to feel your judgment as a law for everyone. And a blind, petty, modest selfishness, in turn, shows that you have not yet discovered yourself, that you have not yet created an ideal of your own, your most personal ideal. Such an ideal could never belong to another person, much less to everyone! Whoever still thinks, "In this case everyone would have to act this way," has not yet gone five steps in knowing himself. Otherwise he would know that there are no equal actions, and there cannot be any. Every action that has been done was done in a completely unique and unrepeatable way, and the same will be true of every future action. All the rules of action refer only to the rough outside, even the innermost and finest rules of all moralities so far. With them you can reach an appearance of equality, but only an appearance. Every action, whether you look at it ahead of time or afterward, is and remains an impenetrable thing. Our opinions about "good," "noble" and "great" can never be proved by our actions, because every action is unknowable. Our opinions, valuations and lists of goods surely belong among the most powerful levers in the machinery of our actions. But for each single case, the law of their working cannot be shown. So let us limit ourselves to cleaning up our opinions and valuations, and to creating new lists of goods of our own. But let us stop brooding over the "moral value of our actions"! Yes, my friends! As for all the moral chatter that some people direct at others, disgust is the right response! Sitting in moral judgment should go against our taste! Let us leave this chatter and this bad taste to those who have nothing to do but drag the past a little further through time, and who are never the present themselves: to the many, the very many! But we want to become who we are: the new, the one-of-a-kind, the incomparable, the self-legislating, the self-creating! And to do that, we must become the best learners and discoverers of all the lawful and necessary things in the world. We must be physicists, so that in that sense we can be creators. Until now all valuations and ideals have been built on ignorance of physics, or in contradiction with it. And so: long live physics! And higher still, whatever forces us toward it: our honesty!

336 Nature's Stinginess. — Why has nature been so stingy toward human beings that it did not let them shine, some more and some less, according to the fullness of their inner light? Why do great people not have as beautiful a visibility at their rising and setting as the sun does? How much clearer all life among people would be!

337 The Future "Humanity." — When I look at the present from the eyes of a distant age, I find nothing more remarkable about the human being of today than his peculiar virtue and sickness, called "the historical sense." It is the beginning of something entirely new and strange in history. If this seed were given a few centuries, or more, something wonderful might grow out of it in the end, with an equally wonderful smell, and our old earth would be more pleasant to live on because of it. We people of today are just beginning to form the chain of a future, very powerful feeling, link by link. We hardly know what we are doing. It almost seems to us that this is not a new feeling at all, but the fading of all the old feelings. The historical sense is still something so poor and cold that many people are struck by it like a frost, and made even poorer and colder by it. To others it looks like a sign of approaching old age, and our planet seems like a melancholy invalid, who writes down the story of its youth so as to forget its present. Indeed, this is one color of this new feeling. Whoever knows how to feel the history of humankind as his own history feels, in a huge generalization, all of the grief of the sick person who thinks of health, the old man who thinks of his youthful dream, the lover robbed of his beloved, the martyr whose ideal is perishing, the hero on the evening of a battle that decided nothing and still brought him wounds and the loss of a friend. But to carry this enormous sum of grief of every kind, to be able to carry it, and still to be the hero who greets the dawn and his own happiness when a second day of battle begins. To be a human being with a horizon of thousands of years in front of him and behind him, the heir to all the nobility of all past spirit, and an heir with obligations. To be the noblest of all the old nobles and at the same time the first-born of a new nobility, the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of. To take all of this on his soul, the oldest and the newest, the losses, hopes, conquests and victories of humanity. And finally to have all of it in one soul and to press it into one feeling. That would have to produce a happiness that humans have not yet known: a god's happiness, full of power and love, full of tears and full of laughter. A happiness that, like the sun in the evening, keeps giving away its inexhaustible wealth, pouring it into the sea, and, like the sun, feels richest only when even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with a golden oar! This divine feeling would then be called humanity!

338 The Will to Suffering and the Compassionate. — Is it good for you yourselves to be compassionate above all? And is it good for those who suffer if you are? Let us leave the first question unanswered for a moment. What we suffer from most deeply and most personally is almost incomprehensible and inaccessible to everyone else. In this we are hidden from our neighbor, even if he eats from the same pot as we do. But wherever we are noticed as sufferers, our suffering is explained in a flat way. It is part of the nature of compassion that it strips the other person's suffering of what is truly personal. Our "benefactors" are, more than our enemies, the ones who belittle our worth and our will. Most of the kindnesses shown to unfortunate people have something outrageous in them: the intellectual carelessness with which the compassionate person plays with fate. He knows nothing about the whole inner sequence and tangle of what is called misfortune for me or for you. He does not think about the whole balance of my soul, and how it is brought back into balance through "misfortune": the breaking open of new springs and needs, the healing of old wounds, the throwing off of whole pasts. None of what can be connected with misfortune troubles the dear compassionate person. He wants to help, and does not think that there is a personal necessity in misfortune, that terror, deprivation, poverty, midnights, adventures, risks and mistakes are as necessary to me and to you as their opposites. Indeed, to put it in mystical terms, the path to one's own heaven always goes through the pleasure of one's own hell. No, he knows nothing of this. The "religion of compassion" (or "the heart") tells him to help, and one thinks one has helped best when one has helped fastest! If you followers of this religion had the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow human beings, if you did not want to let your own suffering lie on you for even an hour, and if you were always guarding yourselves from all sorts of misfortune in advance, if you felt suffering and displeasure in general as evil, hateful, deserving of destruction, a blemish on existence, then you would have yet another religion in your heart, alongside your religion of compassion. And this one is perhaps the mother of the first: the religion of comfort. Ah, how little you know about human happiness, you comfortable and kind-hearted people! For happiness and misfortune are two siblings and twins, who grow up together, or, as with you, stay small together! But now back to the first question. How is it even possible to stay on one's own path? Some cry for help is always calling from the side. Our eye rarely sees anything without making it necessary, right away, to drop our own business and rush over. I know there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways to lose myself from my path, and very "moral" ways too! Indeed, the present moral preachers of compassion hold that this very thing, and this alone, is moral: to lose oneself from one's own path in this way, and to rush to the aid of one's neighbor. I know just as surely that all I have to do is give myself up to the sight of real need, and I am lost too! If a suffering friend said to me, "Look, I will die soon; promise me you will die with me," I would promise it. Just as the sight of that little mountain people fighting for their freedom would make me offer them my hand and my life. To choose bad examples for good reasons, just this once. Yes, there is a secret temptation even in all this compassion-stirring and cries for help. Our "own path" is simply too hard and too demanding, and too far from the love and gratitude of others. We do not run away from it unwillingly at all, from it and from our most personal conscience. We take refuge under the conscience of others, and inside the lovely temple of the "religion of compassion." As soon as a war breaks out, the most noble people of a nation are filled with a delight they keep secret. They throw themselves toward the new danger of death with ecstasy, because in sacrifice for the fatherland they finally believe they have the permission they have long sought: the permission to dodge their goal. For them, war is a detour to suicide, but a detour with a clear conscience. And so, to leave out some things, I will not keep quiet about my own morality, which tells me: live in hiding, so that you can live with yourself! Live unaware of what your age thinks most important! Put at least the skin of three centuries between yourself and today! Let the outcry of today, the noise of wars and revolutions, be a mumble to you! You will also want to help, but only those whose need you fully understand, because they share your suffering and your hope: your friends. And only in the way you help yourself: I want to make them braver, more patient, simpler, more cheerful! I want to teach them what so few understand now, and what the preachers of compassion understand least of all: sympathetic joy!

339 Vita femina. — All knowledge and all good will are not enough to see the last beauties of a work. It takes the rarest lucky chances for the cloud-veil over these peaks to soften for us one day, and for the sun to glow on them. Not only must we stand in exactly the right place to see it. Our own soul must have pulled the veil off its own heights, and it must need an outer expression and a likeness, as if to have something to hold on to, and to stay master of itself. And all of this comes together so rarely at the same time that I am inclined to believe the highest peaks of all good things, whether work, deed, person or nature, have so far been something hidden and veiled for most people, and even for the best of them. But what reveals itself to us reveals itself only once! The Greeks did pray, "Two and three times all that is beautiful!" Ah, they had good reason to call on the gods, because godless reality gives us the beautiful not at all, or only once! I mean that the world is overflowing with beautiful things, and yet poor, very poor, in beautiful moments and revelations of those things. But perhaps this is life's strongest magic: a veil of beautiful possibilities lies over it, shot through with gold, promising, resisting, bashful, mocking, pitying, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!

340 The Dying Socrates. — I admire Socrates for his courage and wisdom in everything he did and said, and in everything he did not say. This mocking, lovesick monster and rat-catcher of Athens, who made the most reckless young men tremble and sob, was not only the wisest talker there has ever been. He was just as great at keeping silent. I wish he had stayed silent at the last moment of his life too. Then perhaps he would belong to an even higher order of minds. Whether it was death, or the poison, or piety, or spite, something loosened his tongue at that moment, and he said: "Oh Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius." For anyone with ears, this ridiculous and terrible "last word" means: "Oh Crito, life is a sickness!" Is it possible? A man like him, who lived cheerfully and in front of everyone like a soldier, was a pessimist! He had only put on a brave face toward life, and had hidden his final judgment, his innermost feeling, all his life! Socrates suffered from life! And he took his revenge for it with that veiled, dreadful, pious and blasphemous word! Did even a Socrates have to take revenge? Was a grain of generosity too little in his overflowing virtue? Ah, friends! We must overcome the Greeks too!

341 The Heaviest Weight. — What if one day or night a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness and said to you: "This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live once more, and countless times more. There will be nothing new in it. Every pain and every joy, every thought and sigh, and all the unspeakably small and large things in your life, must come back to you, all in the same order and sequence. And so too this spider, and this moonlight between the trees, and so too this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and grind your teeth and curse the demon who said this? Or have you once lived through an enormous moment in which you would answer him: "You are a god, and I have never heard anything more divine!" If that thought took hold of you, it would change you as you are, and perhaps crush you. The question asked about everything and everyone, "Do you want this once more, and countless times more?" would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how kind would you have to become toward yourself and toward life, so as to want nothing more than this last eternal confirmation and seal?

342 Incipit tragoedia. — When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his homeland and the lake Urmi and went up into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years he did not get tired of them. But at last his heart changed. One morning he got up with the dawn, stepped out before the sun, and spoke to it like this: "You great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have those you shine on! For ten years you have climbed up here to my cave. You would have grown tired of your light and of this path, without me, my eagle and my snake. But we waited for you every morning, took your extra light from you, and blessed you for it. Look! I am tired of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey. I need hands that reach out. I want to give and share, until the wise among people are glad of their foolishness once again, and the poor are glad of their wealth once again. For that I must go down into the depths, the way you do in the evening when you go behind the sea and still bring light to the underworld, you overrich star! Like you, I must go under, as people call it, to those I want to go down to. So bless me, then, you calm eye, that can look without envy even at a happiness that is too great! Bless the cup that wants to overflow, so that the water pours out of it golden, and carries the reflection of your joy everywhere! Look! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become a human being again." That is how Zarathustra's going under began.

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About this section

Book IV 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 7 of 9 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.

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