Book V

8 of 9 books in The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

Original German

Wir Furchtlosen.

Carcasse, tu trembles? Tu tremblerais bien davantage, si tu savais, où je te mène.

Turenne.

343 Was es mit unserer Heiterkeit auf sich hat. — Das grösste neuere Ereigniss, — dass „Gott todt ist“, dass der Glaube an den christlichen Gott unglaubwürdig geworden ist — beginnt bereits seine ersten Schatten über Europa zu werfen. Für die Wenigen wenigstens, deren Augen, deren Argwohn in den Augen stark und fein genug für dies Schauspiel ist, scheint eben irgend eine Sonne untergegangen, irgend ein altes tiefes Vertrauen in Zweifel umgedreht: ihnen muss unsre alte Welt täglich abendlicher, misstrauischer, fremder, „älter“ scheinen. In der Hauptsache aber darf man sagen: das Ereigniss selbst ist viel zu gross, zu fern, zu abseits vom Fassungsvermögen Vieler, als dass auch nur seine Kunde schon angelangt heissen dürfte; geschweige denn, dass Viele bereits wüssten, was eigentlich sich damit begeben hat — und was Alles, nachdem dieser Glaube untergraben ist, nunmehr einfallen muss, weil es auf ihm gebaut, an ihn gelehnt, in ihn hineingewachsen war: zum Beispiel unsre ganze europäische Moral. Diese lange Fülle und Folge von Abbruch, Zerstörung, Untergang, Umsturz, die nun bevorsteht: wer erriethe heute schon genug davon, um den Lehrer und Vorausverkünder dieser ungeheuren Logik von Schrecken abgeben zu müssen, den Propheten einer Verdüsterung und Sonnenfinsterniss, deren Gleichen es wahrscheinlich noch nicht auf Erden gegeben hat?.. Selbst wir geborenen Räthselrather, die wir gleichsam auf den Bergen warten, zwischen Heute und Morgen hingestellt und in den Widerspruch zwischen Heute und Morgen hineingespannt, wir Erstlinge und Frühgeburten des kommenden Jahrhunderts, denen eigentlich die Schatten, welche Europa alsbald einwickeln müssen, jetzt schon zu Gesicht gekommen sein sollten: woran liegt es doch, dass selbst wir ohne rechte Theilnahme für diese Verdüsterung, vor Allem ohne Sorge und Furcht für uns ihrem Heraufkommen entgegensehn? Stehen wir vielleicht zu sehr noch unter den nächsten Folgen dieses Ereignisses — und diese nächsten Folgen, seine Folgen für uns sind, umgekehrt als man vielleicht erwarten könnte, durchaus nicht traurig und verdüsternd, vielmehr wie eine neue schwer zu beschreibende Art von Licht, Glück, Erleichterung, Erheiterung, Ermuthigung, Morgenröthe... In der That, wir Philosophen und „freien Geister“ fühlen uns bei der Nachricht, dass der „alte Gott todt“ ist, wie von einer neuen Morgenröthe angestrahlt; unser Herz strömt dabei über von Dankbarkeit, Erstaunen, Ahnung, Erwartung, — endlich erscheint uns der Horizont wieder frei, gesetzt selbst, dass er nicht hell ist, endlich dürfen unsre Schiffe wieder auslaufen, auf jede Gefahr hin auslaufen, jedes Wagniss des Erkennenden ist wieder erlaubt, das Meer, unser Meer liegt wieder offen da, vielleicht gab es noch niemals ein so „offnes Meer“. —

344 Inwiefern auch wir noch fromm sind. — In der Wissenschaft haben die Ueberzeugungen kein Bürgerrecht, so sagt man mit gutem Grunde: erst wenn sie sich entschliessen, zur Bescheidenheit einer Hypothese, eines vorläufigen Versuchs-Standpunktes, einer regulativen Fiktion herabzusteigen, darf ihnen der Zutritt und sogar ein gewisser Werth innerhalb des Reichs der Erkenntniss zugestanden werden, — immerhin mit der Beschränkung, unter polizeiliche Aufsicht gestellt zu bleiben, unter die Polizei des Misstrauens. — Heisst das aber nicht, genauer besehen: erst, wenn die Ueberzeugung aufhört, Ueberzeugung zu sein, darf sie Eintritt in die Wissenschaft erlangen? Fienge nicht die Zucht des wissenschaftlichen Geistes damit an, sich keine Ueberzeugungen mehr zu gestatten?... So steht es wahrscheinlich: nur bleibt übrig zu fragen, ob nicht, damit diese Zucht anfangen könne, schon eine Ueberzeugung da sein müsse, und zwar eine so gebieterische und bedingungslose, dass sie alle andren Ueberzeugungen sich zum Opfer bringt. Man sieht, auch die Wissenschaft ruht auf einem Glauben, es giebt gar keine „voraussetzungslose“ Wissenschaft. Die Frage, ob Wahrheit noth thue, muss nicht nur schon vorher bejaht, sondern in dem Grade bejaht sein, dass der Satz, der Glaube, die Ueberzeugung darin zum Ausdruck kommt, „es thut nichts mehr noth als Wahrheit, und im Verhältniss zu ihr hat alles Uebrige nur einen Werth zweiten Rangs“. — Dieser unbedingte Wille zur Wahrheit: was ist er? Ist es der Wille, sich nicht täuschen zu lassen? Ist es der Wille, nicht zu täuschen? Nämlich auch auf diese letzte Weise könnte der Wille zur Wahrheit interpretirt werden: vorausgesetzt, dass man unter der Verallgemeinerung „ich will nicht täuschen“ auch den einzelnen Fall „ich will mich nicht täuschen“ einbegreift. Aber warum nicht täuschen? Aber warum nicht sich täuschen lassen? — Man bemerke, dass die Gründe für das Erstere auf einem ganz anderen Bereiche liegen als die für das Zweite:

man will sich nicht täuschen lassen, unter der Annahme, dass es schädlich, gefährlich, verhängnissvoll ist, getäuscht zu werden, — in diesem Sinne wäre Wissenschaft eine lange Klugheit, eine Vorsicht, eine Nützlichkeit, gegen die man aber billigerweise einwenden dürfte: wie? ist wirklich das Sich-nicht-täuschen-lassen-wollen weniger schädlich, weniger gefährlich, weniger verhängnissvoll? Was wisst ihr von vornherein vom Charakter des Daseins, um entscheiden zu können, ob der grössere Vortheil auf Seiten des Unbedingt-Misstrauischen oder des Unbedingt-Zutraulichen ist? Falls aber Beides nöthig sein sollte, viel Zutrauen und viel Misstrauen: woher dürfte dann die Wissenschaft ihren unbedingten Glauben, ihre Ueberzeugung nehmen, auf dem sie ruht, dass Wahrheit wichtiger sei als irgend ein andres Ding, auch als jede andre Ueberzeugung? Eben diese Ueberzeugung könnte nicht entstanden sein, wenn Wahrheit und Unwahrheit sich beide fortwährend als nützlich bezeigten wie es der Fall ist. Also — kann der Glaube an die Wissenschaft, der nun einmal unbestreitbar da ist, nicht aus einem solchen Nützlichkeits-Calcul seinen Ursprung genommen haben, sondern vielmehr trotzdem, dass ihm die Unnützlichkeit und Gefährlichkeit des „Willens zur Wahrheit“, der „Wahrheit um jeden Preis“ fortwährend bewiesen wird. „Um jeden Preis“: oh wir verstehen das gut genug, wenn wir erst einen Glauben nach dem andern auf diesem Altare dargebracht und abgeschlachtet haben! — Folglich bedeutet „Wille zur Wahrheit“ nicht „ich will mich nicht täuschen lassen“, sondern — es bleibt keine Wahl — „ich will nicht täuschen, auch mich selbst nicht“: — und hiermit sind wir auf dem Boden der Moral. Denn man frage sich nur gründlich: „warum willst du nicht täuschen?“ namentlich wenn es den Anschein haben sollte, — und es hat den Anschein! — als wenn das Leben auf Anschein, ich meine auf Irrthum, Betrug, Verstellung, Blendung, Selbstverblendung angelegt wäre, und wenn andrerseits thatsächlich die grosse Form des Lebens sich immer auf der Seite der unbedenklichsten πολύτροποι gezeigt hat. Es könnte ein solcher Vorsatz vielleicht, mild ausgelegt, eine Don Quixoterie, ein kleiner schwärmerischer Aberwitz sein; er könnte aber auch noch etwas Schlimmeres sein, nämlich ein lebensfeindliches zerstörerisches Princip... „Wille zur Wahrheit“ — das könnte ein versteckter Wille zum Tode sein. — Dergestalt führt die Frage: warum Wissenschaft? zurück auf das moralische Problem: wozu überhaupt Moral, wenn Leben, Natur, Geschichte „unmoralisch“ sind? Es ist kein Zweifel, der Wahrhaftige, in jenem verwegenen und letzten Sinne, wie ihn der Glaube an die Wissenschaft voraussetzt, bejaht damit eine andre Welt als die des Lebens, der Natur und der Geschichte; und insofern er diese „andre Welt“ bejaht, wie? muss er nicht ebendamit ihr Gegenstück, diese Welt, unsre Welt — verneinen?... Doch man wird es begriffen haben, worauf ich hinaus will, nämlich dass es immer noch ein metaphysischer Glaube ist, auf dem unser Glaube an die Wissenschaft ruht, — dass auch wir Erkennenden von heute, wir Gottlosen und Antimetaphysiker, auch unser Feuer noch von dem Brande nehmen, den ein Jahrtausende alter Glaube entzündet hat, jener Christen-Glaube, der auch der Glaube Plato’s war, dass Gott die Wahrheit ist, dass die Wahrheit göttlich ist... Aber wie, wenn dies gerade immer mehr unglaubwürdig wird, wenn Nichts sich mehr als göttlich erweist, es sei denn der Irrthum, die Blindheit, die Lüge, — wenn Gott selbst sich als unsre längste Lüge erweist? —

345 Moral als Problem. — Der Mangel an Person rächt sich überall; eine geschwächte, dünne, ausgelöschte, sich selbst leugnende und verleugnende Persönlichkeit taugt zu keinem guten Dinge mehr, — sie taugt am wenigsten zur Philosophie. Die „Selbstlosigkeit“ hat keinen Werth im Himmel und auf Erden; die grossen Probleme verlangen alle die grosse Liebe, und dieser sind nur die starken, runden, sicheren Geister fähig, die fest auf sich selber sitzen. Es macht den erheblichsten Unterschied, ob ein Denker zu seinen Problemen persönlich steht, so dass er in ihnen sein Schicksal, seine Noth und auch sein bestes Glück hat, oder aber „unpersönlich“: nämlich sie nur mit den Fühlhörnern des kalten neugierigen Gedankens anzutasten und zu fassen versteht. Im letzteren Falle kommt nichts dabei heraus, so viel lässt sich versprechen: denn die grossen Probleme, gesetzt selbst, dass sie sich fassen lassen, lassen sich von Fröschen und Schwächlingen nicht halten, das ist ihr Geschmack seit Ewigkeit, — ein Geschmack übrigens, den sie mit allen wackern Weiblein theilen. — Wie kommt es nun, dass ich noch Niemandem begegnet bin, auch in Büchern nicht, der zur Moral in dieser Stellung als Person stünde, der die Moral als Problem und dies Problem als seine persönliche Noth, Qual, Wollust, Leidenschaft kennte? Ersichtlich war bisher die Moral gar kein Problem; vielmehr Das gerade, worin man, nach allem Misstrauen, Zwiespalt, Widerspruch, mit einander überein kam, der geheiligte Ort des Friedens, wo die Denker auch von sich selbst ausruhten, aufathmeten, auflebten. Ich sehe Niemanden, der eine Kritik der moralischen Werthurtheile gewagt hätte; ich vermisse hierfür selbst die Versuche der wissenschaftlichen Neugierde, der verwöhnten versucherischen Psychologen- und Historiker-Einbildungskraft, welche leicht ein Problem vorwegnimmt und im Fluge erhascht, ohne recht zu wissen, was da erhascht ist. Kaum dass ich einige spärliche Ansätze ausfindig gemacht habe, es zu einer Entstehungsgeschichte dieser Gefühle und Werthschätzungen zu bringen (was etwas Anderes ist als eine Kritik derselben und noch einmal etwas Anderes als die Geschichte der ethischen Systeme): in einem einzelnen Falle habe ich Alles gethan, um eine Neigung und Begabung für diese Art Historie zu ermuthigen — umsonst, wie mir heute scheinen will. Mit diesen Moral-Historikern (namentlich Engländern) hat es wenig auf sich: sie stehen gewöhnlich selbst noch arglos unter dem Kommando einer bestimmten Moral und geben, ohne es zu wissen, deren Schildträger und Gefolge ab; etwa mit jenem noch immer so treuherzig nachgeredeten Volks-Aberglauben des christlichen Europa, dass das Charakteristicum der moralischen Handlung im Selbstlosen, Selbstverleugnenden, Sich-Selbst-Opfernden, oder im Mitgefühle, im Mitleiden belegen sei. Ihr gewöhnlicher Fehler in der Voraussetzung ist, dass sie irgend einen consensus der Völker, mindestens der zahmen Völker über gewisse Sätze der Moral behaupten und daraus deren unbedingte Verbindlichkeit, auch für dich und mich, schliessen; oder dass sie umgekehrt, nachdem ihnen die Wahrheit aufgegangen ist, dass bei verschiedenen Völkern die moralischen Schätzungen nothwendig verschieden sind, einen Schluss auf Unverbindlichkeit aller Moral machen: was Beides gleich grosse Kindereien sind. Der Fehler der Feineren unter ihnen ist, dass sie die vielleicht thörichten Meinungen eines Volkes über seine Moral oder der Menschen über alle menschliche Moral aufdecken und kritisiren, also über deren Herkunft, religiöse Sanktion, den Aberglauben des freien Willens und dergleichen, und ebendamit vermeinen, diese Moral selbst kritisirt zu haben. Aber der Werth einer Vorschrift „du sollst“ ist noch gründlich verschieden und unabhängig von solcherlei Meinungen über dieselbe und von dem Unkraut des Irrthums, mit dem sie vielleicht überwachsen ist: so gewiss der Werth eines Medikaments für den Kranken noch vollkommen unabhängig davon ist, ob der Kranke wissenschaftlich oder wie ein altes Weib über Medizin denkt. Eine Moral könnte selbst aus einem Irrthum gewachsen sein: auch mit dieser Einsicht wäre das Problem ihres Werthes noch nicht einmal berührt. — Niemand also hat bisher den Werth jener berühmtesten aller Medicinen, genannt Moral, geprüft: wozu zuallererst gehört, dass man ihn einmal — in Frage stellt. Wohlan! Dies eben ist unser Werk. —

346 Unser Fragezeichen. — Aber ihr versteht das nicht? In der That, man wird Mühe haben, uns zu verstehn. Wir suchen nach Worten, wir suchen vielleicht auch nach Ohren. Wer sind wir doch? Wollten wir uns einfach mit einem älteren Ausdruck Gottlose oder Ungläubige oder auch Immoralisten nennen, wir würden uns damit noch lange nicht bezeichnet glauben: wir sind alles Dreies in einem zu späten Stadium, als dass man begriffe, als dass ihr begreifen könntet, meine Herren Neugierigen, wie es Einem dabei zu Muthe ist. Nein! nicht mehr mit der Bitterkeit und Leidenschaft des Losgerissenen, der sich aus seinem Unglauben noch einen Glauben, einen Zweck, ein Martyrium selbst zurecht machen muss! Wir sind abgesotten in der Einsicht und in ihr kalt und hart geworden, dass es in der Welt durchaus nicht göttlich zugeht, ja noch nicht einmal nach menschlichem Maasse vernünftig, barmherzig oder gerecht: wir wissen es, die Welt, in der wir leben, ist ungöttlich, unmoralisch, „unmenschlich“, — wir haben sie uns allzulange falsch und lügnerisch, aber nach Wunsch und Willen unsrer Verehrung, das heisst nach einem Bedürfnisse ausgelegt. Denn der Mensch ist ein verehrendes Thier! Aber er ist auch ein misstrauisches: und dass die Welt nicht das werth ist, was wir geglaubt haben, das ist ungefähr das Sicherste, dessen unser Misstrauen endlich habhaft geworden ist. So viel Misstrauen, so viel Philosophie. Wir hüten uns wohl zu sagen, dass sie weniger werth ist: es erscheint uns heute selbst zum Lachen, wenn der Mensch in Anspruch nehmen wollte, Werthe zu erfinden, welche den Werth der wirklichen Welt überragen sollten, — gerade davon sind wir zurückgekommen als von einer ausschweifenden Verirrung der menschlichen Eitelkeit und Unvernunft, die lange nicht als solche erkannt worden ist. Sie hat ihren letzten Ausdruck im modernen Pessimismus gehabt, einen älteren, stärkeren in der Lehre des Buddha; aber auch das Christenthum enthält sie, zweifelhafter freilich und zweideutiger, aber darum nicht weniger verführerisch. Die ganze Attitüde „Mensch gegen Welt“, der Mensch als „Welt-verneinendes“ Princip, der Mensch als Werthmaass der Dinge, als Welten-Richter, der zuletzt das Dasein selbst auf seine Wagschalen legt und zu leicht befindet — die ungeheuerliche Abgeschmacktheit dieser Attitüde ist uns als solche zum Bewusstsein gekommen und verleidet, — wir lachen schon, wenn wir „Mensch und Welt“ nebeneinander gestellt finden, getrennt durch die sublime Anmaassung des Wörtchens „und“! Wie aber? Haben wir nicht eben damit, als Lachende, nur einen Schritt weiter in der Verachtung des Menschen gemacht? Und also auch im Pessimismus, in der Verachtung des uns erkennbaren Daseins? Sind wir nicht eben damit dem Argwohne eines Gegensatzes verfallen, eines Gegensatzes der Welt, in der wir bisher mit unsren Verehrungen zu Hause waren — um deren willen wir vielleicht zu leben aushielten —, und einer andren Welt, die wir selber sind: einem unerbittlichen, gründlichen, untersten Argwohn über uns selbst, der uns Europäer immer mehr, immer schlimmer in Gewalt bekommt und leicht die kommenden Geschlechter vor das furchtbare Entweder-Oder stellen könnte: „entweder schafft eure Verehrungen ab oder — euch selbst!“ Das Letztere wäre der Nihilismus; aber wäre nicht auch das Erstere — der Nihilismus? — Dies ist unser Fragezeichen.

347 Die Gläubigen und ihr Bedürfniss nach Glauben. — Wie viel einer Glauben nöthig hat, um zu gedeihen, wie viel „Festes“, an dem er nicht gerüttelt haben will, weil er sich daran hält, — ist ein Gradmesser seiner Kraft (oder, deutlicher geredet, seiner Schwäche). Christenthum haben, wie mir scheint, im alten Europa auch heute noch die Meisten nöthig: deshalb findet es auch immer noch Glauben. Denn so ist der Mensch: ein Glaubenssatz könnte ihm tausendfach widerlegt sein, — gesetzt, er hätte ihn nöthig, so würde er ihn auch immer wieder für „wahr“ halten, — gemäss jenem berühmten „Beweise der Kraft“, von dem die Bibel redet. Metaphysik haben Einige noch nöthig; aber auch jenes ungestüme Verlangen nach Gewissheit, welches sich heute in breiten Massen wissenschaftlich-positivistisch entladet, das Verlangen, durchaus etwas fest haben zu wollen (während man es wegen der Hitze dieses Verlangens mit der Begründung der Sicherheit leichter und lässlicher nimmt): auch das ist noch das Verlangen nach Halt, Stütze, kurz, jener Instinkt der Schwäche, welcher Religionen, Metaphysiken, Ueberzeugungen aller Art zwar nicht schafft, aber — conservirt. In der That dampft um alle diese positivistischen Systeme der Qualm einer gewissen pessimistischen Verdüsterung, Etwas von Müdigkeit, Fatalismus, Enttäuschung, Furcht vor neuer Enttäuschung — oder aber zur Schau getragener Ingrimm, schlechte Laune, Entrüstungs-Anarchismus und was es alles für Symptome oder Maskeraden des Schwächegefühls giebt. Selbst die Heftigkeit, mit der sich unsre gescheidtesten Zeitgenossen in ärmliche Ecken und Engen verlieren, zum Beispiel in die Vaterländerei (so heisse ich das, was man in Frankreich chauvinisme, in Deutschland „deutsch“ nennt) oder in ästhetische Winkel-Bekenntnisse nach Art des Pariser naturalisme (der von der Natur nur den Theil hervorzieht und entblösst, welcher Ekel zugleich und Erstaunen macht — man heisst diesen Theil heute gern la vérité vraie —) oder in Nihilismus nach Petersburger Muster (das heisst in den Glauben an den Unglauben, bis zum Martyrium dafür) zeigt immer vorerst das Bedürfniss nach Glauben, Halt, Rückgrat, Rückhalt... Der Glaube ist immer dort am meisten begehrt, am dringlichsten nöthig, wo es an Willen fehlt: denn der Wille ist, als Affekt des Befehls, das entscheidende Abzeichen der Selbstherrlichkeit und Kraft. Das heisst, je weniger Einer zu befehlen weiss, um so dringlicher begehrt er nach Einem, der befiehlt, streng befiehlt, nach einem Gott, Fürsten, Stand, Arzt, Beichtvater, Dogma, Partei-Gewissen. Woraus vielleicht abzunehmen wäre, dass die beiden Weltreligionen, der Buddhismus und das Christenthum ihren Entstehungsgrund, ihr plötzliches Um-sich-greifen zumal, in einer ungeheuren Erkrankung des Willens gehabt haben möchten. Und so ist es in Wahrheit gewesen: beide Religionen fanden ein durch Willens-Erkrankung in’s Unsinnige aufgethürmtes, bis zur Verzweiflung gehendes Verlangen nach einem „du sollst“ vor, beide Religionen waren Lehrerinnen des Fanatismus in Zeiten der Willens-Erschlaffung und boten damit Unzähligen einen Halt, eine neue Möglichkeit zu wollen, einen Genuss am Wollen. Der Fanatismus ist nämlich die einzige „Willensstärke“, zu der auch die Schwachen und Unsicheren gebracht werden können, als eine Art Hypnotisirung des ganzen sinnlich-intellektuellen Systems zu Gunsten der überreichlichen Ernährung (Hypertrophie) eines einzelnen Gesichts- und Gefühlspunktes, der nunmehr dominirt — der Christ heisst ihn seinen Glauben. Wo ein Mensch zu der Grundüberzeugung kommt, dass ihm befohlen werden muss, wird er „gläubig“; umgekehrt wäre eine Lust und Kraft der Selbstbestimmung, eine Freiheit des Willens denkbar, bei der ein Geist jedem Glauben, jedem Wunsch nach Gewissheit den Abschied giebt, geübt, wie er ist, auf leichten Seilen und Möglichkeiten sich halten zu können und selbst an Abgründen noch zu tanzen. Ein solcher Geist wäre der freie Geist par excellence.

348 Von der Herkunft der Gelehrten. — Der Gelehrte wächst in Europa aus aller Art Stand und gesellschaftlicher Bedingung heraus, als eine Pflanze, die keines spezifischen Erdreichs bedarf: darum gehört er, wesentlich und unfreiwillig, zu den Trägern des demokratischen Gedankens. Aber diese Herkunft verräth sich. Hat man seinen Blick etwas dafür eingeschult, an einem gelehrten Buche, einer wissenschaftlichen Abhandlung die intellektuelle Idiosynkrasie des Gelehrten — jeder Gelehrte hat eine solche — herauszuerkennen und auf der That zu ertappen, so wird man fast immer hinter ihr die „Vorgeschichte“ des Gelehrten, seine Familie, in Sonderheit deren Berufsarten und Handwerke zu Gesicht bekommen. Wo das Gefühl zum Ausdruck kommt „das ist nunmehr bewiesen, hiermit bin ich fertig“, da ist es gemeinhin der Vorfahr im Blute und Instinkte des Gelehrten, welcher von seinem Gesichtswinkel aus die „gemachte Arbeit“ gutheisst, — der Glaube an den Beweis ist nur ein Symptom davon, was in einem arbeitsamen Geschlechte von Alters her als „gute Arbeit“ angesehn worden ist. Ein Beispiel: die Söhne von Registratoren und Büreauschreibern jeder Art, deren Hauptaufgabe immer war, ein vielfältiges Material zu ordnen, in Schubfächer zu vertheilen, überhaupt zu schematisiren, zeigen, falls sie Gelehrte werden, eine Vorneigung dafür, ein Problem beinahe damit für gelöst zu halten, dass sie es schematisirt haben. Es giebt Philosophen, welche im Grunde nur schematische Köpfe sind — ihnen ist das Formale des väterlichen Handwerks zum Inhalte geworden. Das Talent zu Classificationen, zu Kategorientafeln verräth Etwas; man ist nicht ungestraft das Kind seiner Eltern. Der Sohn eines Advokaten wird auch als Forscher ein Advokat sein müssen: er will mit seiner Sache in erster Rücksicht Recht behalten, in zweiter, vielleicht, Recht haben. Die Söhne von protestantischen Geistlichen und Schullehrern erkennt man an der naiven Sicherheit, mit der sie als Gelehrte ihre Sache schon als bewiesen nehmen, wenn sie von ihnen eben erst nur herzhaft und mit Wärme vorgebracht worden ist: sie sind eben gründlich daran gewöhnt, dass man ihnen glaubt, — das gehörte bei ihren Vätern zum „Handwerk“! Ein Jude umgekehrt ist, gemäss dem Geschäftskreis und der Vergangenheit seines Volks, gerade daran — dass man ihm glaubt — am wenigsten gewöhnt: man sehe sich darauf die jüdischen Gelehrten an, — sie Alle halten grosse Stücke auf die Logik, das heisst auf das Erzwingen der Zustimmung durch Gründe; sie wissen, dass sie mit ihr siegen müssen, selbst wo Rassen- und Classen-Widerwille gegen sie vorhanden ist, wo man ihnen ungern glaubt. Nichts nämlich ist demokratischer als die Logik: sie kennt kein Ansehn der Person und nimmt auch die krummen Nasen für gerade. (Nebenbei bemerkt: Europa ist gerade in Hinsicht auf Logisirung, auf reinlichere Kopf-Gewohnheiten den Juden nicht wenig Dank schuldig; voran die Deutschen, als eine beklagenswerth deraisonnable Rasse, der man auch heute immer noch zuerst „den Kopf zu waschen“ hat. Ueberall, wo Juden zu Einfluss gekommen sind, haben sie feiner zu scheiden, schärfer zu folgern, heller und sauberer zu schreiben gelehrt: ihre Aufgabe war es immer, ein Volk „zur Raison“ zu bringen.)

349 Noch einmal die Herkunft der Gelehrten. — Sich selbst erhalten wollen ist der Ausdruck einer Nothlage, einer Einschränkung des eigentlichen Lebens-Grundtriebes, der auf Machterweiterung hinausgeht und in diesem Willen oft genug die Selbsterhaltung in Frage stellt und opfert. Man nehme es als symptomatisch, wenn einzelne Philosophen, wie zum Beispiel der schwindsüchtige Spinoza, gerade im sogenannten Selbsterhaltungs-Trieb das Entscheidende sahen, sehen mussten: — es waren eben Menschen in Nothlagen. Dass unsre modernen Naturwissenschaften sich dermaassen mit dem Spinozistischen Dogma verwickelt haben (zuletzt noch und am gröbsten im Darwinismus mit seiner unbegreiflich einseitigen Lehre vom „Kampf um’s Dasein“ —), das liegt wahrscheinlich an der Herkunft der meisten Naturforscher: sie gehören in dieser Hinsicht zum „Volk“, ihre Vorfahren waren arme und geringe Leute, welche die Schwierigkeit, sich durchzubringen, allzusehr aus der Nähe kannten. Um den ganzen englischen Darwinismus herum haucht Etwas wie englische Uebervölkerungs-Stickluft, wie Kleiner-Leute-Geruch von Noth und Enge. Aber man sollte, als Naturforscher, aus seinem menschlichen Winkel herauskommen: und in der Natur herrscht nicht die Nothlage, sondern der Ueberfluss, die Verschwendung, sogar bis in’s Unsinnige. Der Kampf um’s Dasein ist nur eine Ausnahme, eine zeitweilige Restriktion des Lebenswillens; der grosse und kleine Kampf dreht sich allenthalben um’s Uebergewicht, um Wachsthum und Ausbreitung, um Macht, gemäss dem Willen zur Macht, der eben der Wille des Lebens ist.

350 Zu Ehren der homines religiosi. — Der Kampf gegen die Kirche ist ganz gewiss unter Anderem — denn er bedeutet Vielerlei — auch der Kampf der gemeineren vergnügteren vertraulicheren oberflächlicheren Naturen gegen die Herrschaft der schwereren tieferen beschaulicheren, das heisst böseren und argwöhnischeren Menschen, welche mit einem langen Verdachte über den Werth des Daseins, auch über den eignen Werth brüteten: — der gemeine Instinkt des Volkes, seine Sinnen-Lustigkeit, sein „gutes Herz“ empörte sich gegen sie. Die ganze römische Kirche ruht auf einem südländischen Argwohne über die Natur des Menschen, der vom Norden aus immer falsch verstanden wird: in welchem Argwohne der europäische Süden die Erbschaft des tiefen Orients, des uralten geheimnissreichen Asien und seiner Contemplation gemacht hat. Schon der Protestantismus ist ein Volksaufstand zu Gunsten der Biederen, Treuherzigen, Oberflächlichen (der Norden war immer gutmüthiger und flacher als der Süden); aber erst die französische Revolution hat dem „guten Menschen“ das Scepter vollends und feierlich in die Hand gegeben (dem Schaf, dem Esel, der Gans und Allem, was unheilbar flach und Schreihals und reif für das Narrenhaus der „modernen Ideen“ ist).

351 Zu Ehren der priesterlichen Naturen. — Ich denke, von dem, was das Volk unter Weisheit versteht (und wer ist heute nicht „Volk“? —), von jener klugen kuhmässigen Gemüthsstille, Frömmigkeit und Landpfarrer-Sanftmuth, welche auf der Wiese liegt und dem Leben ernst und wiederkäuend zuschaut, — davon haben gerade die Philosophen sich immer am fernsten gefühlt, wahrscheinlich weil sie dazu nicht „Volk“ genug, nicht Landpfarrer genug waren. Auch werden wohl sie gerade am spätesten daran glauben lernen, dass das Volk Etwas von dem verstehn dürfte, was ihm am fernsten liegt, von der grossen Leidenschaft des Erkennenden, der beständig in der Gewitterwolke der höchsten Probleme und der schwersten Verantwortlichkeiten lebt, leben muss (also ganz und gar nicht zuschauend, ausserhalb, gleichgültig, sicher, objektiv...). Das Volk verehrt eine ganz andere Art Mensch, wenn es seinerseits sich ein Ideal des „Weisen“ macht, und hat tausendfach Recht dazu, gerade dieser Art Mensch mit den besten Worten und Ehren zu huldigen: das sind die milden, ernst-einfältigen und keuschen Priester-Naturen und was ihnen verwandt ist, — denen gilt das Lob in jener Volks-Ehrfurcht vor der Weisheit. Und wem hätte das Volk auch Grund, dankbarer sich zu erweisen als diesen Männern, die zu ihm gehören und aus ihm kommen, aber wie Geweihte, Ausgelesene, seinem Wohl Geopferte — sie selber glauben sich Gott geopfert —, vor denen es ungestraft sein Herz ausschütten, an die es seine Heimlichkeiten, seine Sorgen und Schlimmeres loswerden kann (— denn der Mensch, der „sich mittheilt“, wird sich selber los; und wer „bekannt“ hat, vergisst). Hier gebietet eine grosse Nothdurft: es bedarf nämlich auch für den seelischen Unrath der Abzugsgräben und der reinlichen reinigenden Gewässer drin, es bedarf rascher Ströme der Liebe und starker demüthiger reiner Herzen, die zu einem solchen Dienste der nichtöffentlichen Gesundheitspflege sich bereit machen und opfern — denn es ist eine Opferung, ein Priester ist und bleibt ein Menschenopfer... Das Volk empfindet solche geopferte stillgewordne ernste Menschen des „Glaubens“ als weise, das heisst als Wissend-Gewordne, als „Sichere“ im Verhältniss zur eigenen Unsicherheit: wer würde ihm das Wort und diese Ehrfurcht nehmen mögen? — Aber, wie es umgekehrt billig ist, unter Philosophen gilt auch ein Priester immer noch als „Volk“ und nicht als Wissender, vor Allem, weil sie selbst nicht an „Wissende“ glauben und eben in diesem Glauben und Aberglauben schon „Volk“ riechen. Die Bescheidenheit war es, welche in Griechenland das Wort „Philosoph“ erfunden hat und den prachtvollen Uebermuth, sich weise zu nennen, den Schauspielern des Geistes überliess, — die Bescheidenheit solcher Ungethüme von Stolz und Selbstherrlichkeit, wie Pythagoras, wie Plato —.

352 Inwiefern Moral kaum entbehrlich ist. — Der nackte Mensch ist im Allgemeinen ein schändlicher Anblick — ich rede von uns Europäern (und nicht einmal von den Europäerinnen!) Angenommen, die froheste Tischgesellschaft sähe sich plötzlich durch die Tücke eines Zauberers enthüllt und ausgekleidet, ich glaube, dass nicht nur der Frohsinn dahin und der stärkste Appetit entmuthigt wäre, — es scheint, wir Europäer können jener Maskerade durchaus nicht entbehren, die Kleidung heisst. Sollte aber die Verkleidung der „moralischen Menschen“, ihre Verhüllung unter moralische Formeln und Anstandsbegriffe, das ganze wohlwollende Verstecken unserer Handlungen unter die Begriffe Pflicht, Tugend, Gemeinsinn, Ehrenhaftigkeit, Selbstverleugnung nicht seine eben so guten Gründe haben? Nicht dass ich vermeinte, hierbei sollte etwa die menschliche Bosheit und Niederträchtigkeit, kurz das schlimme wilde Thier in uns vermummt werden; mein Gedanke ist umgekehrt, dass wir gerade als zahme Thiere ein schändlicher Anblick sind und die Moral-Verkleidung brauchen, — dass der „inwendige Mensch“ in Europa eben lange nicht schlimm genug ist, um sich damit „sehen lassen“ zu können (um damit schön zu sein —). Der Europäer verkleidet sich in die Moral, weil er ein krankes, kränkliches, krüppelhaftes Thier geworden ist, das gute Gründe hat, „zahm“ zu sein, weil er beinahe eine Missgeburt, etwas Halbes, Schwaches, Linkisches ist.... Nicht die Furchtbarkeit des Raubthiers findet eine moralische Verkleidung nöthig, sondern das Heerdenthier mit seiner tiefen Mittelmässigkeit, Angst und Langenweile an sich selbst. Moral putzt den Europäer auf — gestehen wir es ein! — in’s Vornehmere, Bedeutendere, Ansehnlichere, in’s „Göttliche“ —

353 Vom Ursprung der Religionen. — Die eigentliche Erfindung der Religionsstifter ist einmal: eine bestimmte Art Leben und Alltag der Sitte anzusetzen, welche als disciplina voluntatis wirkt und zugleich die Langeweile wegschafft; sodann: gerade diesem Leben eine Interpretation zu geben, vermöge deren es vom höchsten Werthe umleuchtet scheint, so dass es nunmehr zu einem Gute wird, für das man kämpft und, unter Umständen, sein Leben lässt. In Wahrheit ist von diesen zwei Erfindungen die zweite die wesentlichere: die erste, die Lebensart, war gewöhnlich schon da, aber neben andren Lebensarten und ohne Bewusstsein davon, was für ein Werth ihr innewohne. Die Bedeutung, die Originalität des Religionsstifters kommt gewöhnlich darin zu Tage, dass er sie sieht, dass er sie auswählt, dass er zum ersten Male erräth, wozu sie gebraucht, wie sie interpretirt werden kann. Jesus (oder Paulus) zum Beispiel fand das Leben der kleinen Leute in der römischen Provinz vor, ein bescheidenes tugendhaftes gedrücktes Leben: er legte es aus, er legte den höchsten Sinn und Werth hinein — und damit den Muth, jede andre Art Leben zu verachten, den stillen Herrenhuter-Fanatismus, das heimliche unterirdische Selbstvertrauen, welches wächst und wächst und endlich bereit ist, „die Welt zu überwinden“ (das heisst Rom und die höheren Stände im ganzen Reiche). Buddha insgleichen fand jene Art Menschen vor, und zwar zerstreut unter alle Stände und gesellschaftliche Stufen seines Volks, welche aus Trägheit gut und gütig (vor Allem inoffensiv) sind, die, ebenfalls aus Trägheit, abstinent, beinahe bedürfnisslos leben: er verstand, wie eine solche Art Menschen mit Unvermeidlichkeit, mit der ganzen vis inertiae, in einen Glauben hineinrollen müsse, der die Wiederkehr der irdischen Mühsal (das heisst der Arbeit, des Handelns überhaupt) zu verhüten verspricht, — dies „Verstehen“ war sein Genie. Zum Religionsstifter gehört psychologische Unfehlbarkeit im Wissen um eine bestimmte Durchschnitts-Art von Seelen, die sich noch nicht als zusammengehörig erkannt haben. Er ist es, der sie zusammenbringt; die Gründung einer Religion wird insofern immer zu einem langen Erkennungs-Feste. —

354 Vom „Genius der Gattung“. — Das Problem des Bewusstseins (richtiger: des Sich-Bewusst-Werdens) tritt erst dann vor uns hin, wenn wir zu begreifen anfangen, inwiefern wir seiner entrathen könnten: und an diesen Anfang des Begreifens stellt uns jetzt Physiologie und Thiergeschichte (welche also zwei Jahrhunderte nöthig gehabt haben, um den vorausfliegenden Argwohn Leibnitzens einzuholen). Wir könnten nämlich denken, fühlen, wollen, uns erinnern, wir könnten ebenfalls „handeln“ in jedem Sinne des Wortes: und trotzdem brauchte das Alles nicht uns „in’s Bewusstsein zu treten“ (wie man im Bilde sagt). Das ganze Leben wäre möglich, ohne dass es sich gleichsam im Spiegel sähe: wie ja thatsächlich auch jetzt noch bei uns der bei weitem überwiegende Theil dieses Lebens sich ohne diese Spiegelung abspielt —, und zwar auch unsres denkenden, fühlenden, wollenden Lebens, so beleidigend dies einem älteren Philosophen klingen mag. Wozu überhaupt Bewusstsein, wenn es in der Hauptsache überflüssig ist? — Nun scheint mir, wenn man meiner Antwort auf diese Frage und ihrer vielleicht ausschweifenden Vermuthung Gehör geben will, die Feinheit und Stärke des Bewusstseins immer im Verhältniss zur Mittheilungs-Fähigkeit eines Menschen (oder Thiers) zu stehn, die Mittheilungs-Fähigkeit wiederum im Verhältniss zur Mittheilungs-Bedürftigkeit: letzteres nicht so verstanden, als ob gerade der einzelne Mensch selbst, welcher gerade Meister in der Mittheilung und Verständlichmachung seiner Bedürfnisse ist, zugleich auch mit seinen Bedürfnissen am meisten auf die Andern angewiesen sein müsste. Wohl aber scheint es mir so in Bezug auf ganze Rassen und Geschlechter-Ketten zu stehn: wo das Bedürfniss, die Noth die Menschen lange gezwungen hat, sich mitzutheilen, sich gegenseitig rasch und fein zu verstehn, da ist endlich ein Ueberschuss dieser Kraft und Kunst der Mittheilung da, gleichsam ein Vermögen, das sich allmählich aufgehäuft hat und nun eines Erben wartet, der es verschwenderisch ausgiebt (— die sogenannten Künstler sind diese Erben, insgleichen die Redner, Prediger, Schriftsteller, Alles Menschen, welche immer am Ende einer langen Kette kommen, „Spätgeborne“ jedes Mal, im besten Verstande des Wortes, und, wie gesagt, ihrem Wesen nach Verschwender). Gesetzt, diese Beobachtung ist richtig, so darf ich zu der Vermuthung weitergehn, dass Bewusstsein überhaupt sich nur unter dem Druck des Mittheilungs-Bedürfnisses entwickelt hat, — dass es von vornherein nur zwischen Mensch und Mensch (zwischen Befehlenden und Gehorchenden in Sonderheit) nöthig war, nützlich war, und auch nur im Verhältniss zum Grade dieser Nützlichkeit sich entwickelt hat. Bewusstsein ist eigentlich nur ein Verbindungsnetz zwischen Mensch und Mensch, — nur als solches hat es sich entwickeln müssen: der einsiedlerische und raubthierhafte Mensch hätte seiner nicht bedurft. Dass uns unsre Handlungen, Gedanken, Gefühle, Bewegungen selbst in’s Bewusstsein kommen — wenigstens ein Theil derselben —, das ist die Folge eines furchtbaren langen über dem Menschen waltenden „Muss“: er brauchte, als das gefährdetste Thier, Hülfe, Schutz, er brauchte Seines-Gleichen, er musste seine Noth auszudrücken, sich verständlich zu machen wissen — und zu dem Allen hatte er zuerst „Bewusstsein“ nöthig, also selbst zu „wissen“ was ihm fehlt, zu „wissen“, wie es ihm zu Muthe ist, zu „wissen“, was er denkt. Denn nochmals gesagt: der Mensch, wie jedes lebende Geschöpf, denkt immerfort, aber weiss es nicht; das bewusst werdende Denken ist nur der kleinste Theil davon, sagen wir: der oberflächlichste, der schlechteste Theil: — denn allein dieses bewusste Denken geschieht in Worten, das heisst in Mittheilungszeichen, womit sich die Herkunft des Bewusstseins selber aufdeckt. Kurz gesagt, die Entwicklung der Sprache und die Entwicklung des Bewusstseins (nicht der Vernunft, sondern allein des Sich-bewusst-werdens der Vernunft) gehen Hand in Hand. Man nehme hinzu, dass nicht nur die Sprache zur Brücke zwischen Mensch und Mensch dient, sondern auch der Blick, der Druck, die Gebärde; das Bewusstwerden unserer Sinneseindrücke bei uns selbst, die Kraft, sie fixiren zu können und gleichsam ausser uns zu stellen, hat in dem Maasse zugenommen, als die Nöthigung wuchs, sie Andern durch Zeichen zu übermitteln. Der Zeichen-erfindende Mensch ist zugleich der immer schärfer seiner selbst bewusste Mensch; erst als sociales Thier lernte der Mensch seiner selbst bewusst werden, — er thut es noch, er thut es immer mehr. — Mein Gedanke ist, wie man sieht: dass das Bewusstsein nicht eigentlich zur Individual-Existenz des Menschen gehört, vielmehr zu dem, was an ihm Gemeinschafts- und Heerden-Natur ist; dass es, wie daraus folgt, auch nur in Bezug auf Gemeinschafts- und Heerden-Nützlichkeit fein entwickelt ist, und dass folglich Jeder von uns, beim besten Willen, sich selbst so individuell wie möglich zu verstehen, „sich selbst zu kennen“, doch immer nur gerade das Nicht-Individuelle an sich zum Bewusstsein bringen wird, sein „Durchschnittliches“, — dass unser Gedanke selbst fortwährend durch den Charakter des Bewusstseins — durch den in ihm gebietenden „Genius der Gattung“ — gleichsam majorisirt und in die Heerden-Perspektive zurück-übersetzt wird. Unsre Handlungen sind im Grunde allesammt auf eine unvergleichliche Weise persönlich, einzig, unbegrenzt-individuell, es ist kein Zweifel; aber sobald wir sie in’s Bewusstsein übersetzen, scheinen sie es nicht mehr... Dies ist der eigentliche Phänomenalismus und Perspektivismus, wie ich ihn verstehe: die Natur des thierischen Bewusstseins bringt es mit sich, dass die Welt, deren wir bewusst werden können, nur eine Oberflächen- und Zeichenwelt ist, eine verallgemeinerte, eine vergemeinerte Welt, — dass Alles, was bewusst wird, ebendamit flach, dünn, relativ-dumm, generell, Zeichen, Heerden-Merkzeichen wird, dass mit allem Bewusstwerden eine grosse gründliche Verderbniss, Fälschung, Veroberflächlichung und Generalisation verbunden ist. Zuletzt ist das wachsende Bewusstsein eine Gefahr; und wer unter den bewusstesten Europäern lebt, weiss sogar, dass es eine Krankheit ist. Es ist, wie man erräth, nicht der Gegensatz von Subjekt und Objekt, der mich hier angeht: diese Unterscheidung überlasse ich den Erkenntnisstheoretikern, welche in den Schlingen der Grammatik (der Volks-Metaphysik) hängen geblieben sind. Es ist erst recht nicht der Gegensatz von „Ding an sich“ und Erscheinung: denn wir „erkennen“ bei weitem nicht genug, um auch nur so scheiden zu dürfen. Wir haben eben gar kein Organ für das Erkennen, für die „Wahrheit“: wir „wissen“ (oder glauben oder bilden uns ein) gerade so viel als es im Interesse der Menschen-Heerde, der Gattung, nützlich sein mag: und selbst, was hier „Nützlichkeit“ genannt wird, ist zuletzt auch nur ein Glaube, eine Einbildung und vielleicht gerade jene verhängnissvollste Dummheit, an der wir einst zu Grunde gehn.

355 Der Ursprung unsres Begriffs „Erkenntniss“. — Ich nehme diese Erklärung von der Gasse; ich hörte Jemanden aus dem Volke sagen „er hat mich erkannt“ —: dabei fragte ich mich: was versteht eigentlich das Volk unter Erkenntniss? was will es, wenn es „Erkenntniss“ will? Nichts weiter als dies: etwas Fremdes soll auf etwas Bekanntes zurückgeführt werden. Und wir Philosophen — haben wir unter Erkenntniss eigentlich mehr verstanden? Das Bekannte, das heisst: das woran wir gewöhnt sind, so dass wir uns nicht mehr darüber wundern, unser Alltag, irgend eine Regel, in der wir stecken, Alles und Jedes, in dem wir uns zu Hause wissen: — wie? ist unser Bedürfniss nach Erkennen nicht eben dies Bedürfniss nach Bekanntem, der Wille, unter allem Fremden, Ungewöhnlichen, Fragwürdigen Etwas aufzudecken, das uns nicht mehr beunruhigt? Sollte es nicht der Instinkt der Furcht sein, der uns erkennen heisst? Sollte das Frohlocken des Erkennenden nicht eben das Frohlocken des wieder erlangten Sicherheitsgefühls sein?... Dieser Philosoph wähnte die Welt „erkannt“, als er sie auf die „Idee“ zurückgeführt hatte: ach, war es nicht deshalb, weil ihm die „Idee“ so bekannt, so gewohnt war? weil er sich so wenig mehr vor der „Idee“ fürchtete? — Oh über diese Genügsamkeit der Erkennenden! man sehe sich doch ihre Principien und Welträthsel-Lösungen darauf an! Wenn sie Etwas an den Dingen, unter den Dingen, hinter den Dingen wiederfinden, das uns leider sehr bekannt ist, zum Beispiel unser Einmaleins oder unsre Logik oder unser Wollen und Begehren, wie glücklich sind sie sofort! Denn „was bekannt ist, ist erkannt“: darin stimmen sie überein. Auch die Vorsichtigsten unter ihnen meinen, zum Mindesten sei das Bekannte leichter erkennbar als das Fremde; es sei zum Beispiel methodisch geboten, von der „inneren Welt“, von den „Thatsachen des Bewusstseins“ auszugehen, weil sie die uns bekanntere Welt sei! Irrthum der Irrthümer! Das Bekannte ist das Gewohnte; und das Gewohnte ist am schwersten zu „erkennen“, das heisst als Problem zu sehen, das heisst als fremd, als fern, als „ausser uns“ zu sehn... Die grosse Sicherheit der natürlichen Wissenschaften im Verhältniss zur Psychologie und Kritik der Bewusstseins-Elemente — unnatürlichen Wissenschaften, wie man beinahe sagen dürfte — ruht gerade darauf, dass sie das Fremde als Objekt nehmen: während es fast etwas Widerspruchsvolles und Widersinniges ist, das Nicht-Fremde überhaupt als Objekt nehmen zu wollen...

356 Inwiefern es in Europa immer „künstlerischer“ zugehn wird. — Die Lebens-Fürsorge zwingt auch heute noch — in unsrer Uebergangszeit, wo so Vieles aufhört zu zwingen — fast allen männlichen Europäern eine bestimmte Rolle auf, ihren sogenannten Beruf; Einigen bleibt dabei die Freiheit, eine anscheinende Freiheit, diese Rolle selbst zu wählen, den Meisten wird sie gewählt. Das Ergebniss ist seltsam genug: fast alle Europäer verwechseln sich in einem vorgerückteren Alter mit ihrer Rolle, sie selbst sind die Opfer ihres „guten Spiels“, sie selbst haben vergessen, wie sehr Zufall, Laune, Willkür damals über sie verfügt haben, als sich ihr „Beruf“ entschied — und wie viele andre Rollen sie vielleicht hätten spielen können: denn es ist nunmehr zu spät! Tiefer angesehn, ist aus der Rolle wirklich Charakter geworden, aus der Kunst Natur. Es gab Zeitalter, in denen man mit steifer Zuversichtlichkeit, ja mit Frömmigkeit an seine Vorherbestimmung für gerade dies Geschäft, gerade diesen Broderwerb glaubte und den Zufall darin, die Rolle, das Willkürliche schlechterdings nicht anerkennen wollte: Stände, Zünfte, erbliche Gewerbs-Vorrechte haben mit Hülfe dieses Glaubens es zu Stande gebracht, jene Ungeheuer von breiten Gesellschafts-Thürmen aufzurichten, welche das Mittelalter auszeichnen und denen jedenfalls Eins nachzurühmen bleibt: Dauerfähigkeit (— und Dauer ist auf Erden ein Werth ersten Ranges!). Aber es giebt umgekehrte Zeitalter, die eigentlich demokratischen, wo man diesen Glauben mehr und mehr verlernt und ein gewisser kecker Glaube und Gesichtspunkt des Gegentheils in den Vordergrund tritt, jener Athener-Glaube, der in der Epoche des Perikles zuerst bemerkt wird, jener Amerikaner-Glaube von heute, der immer mehr auch Europäer-Glaube werden will: wo der Einzelne überzeugt ist, ungefähr Alles zu können, ungefähr jeder Rolle gewachsen zu sein, wo Jeder mit sich versucht, improvisirt, neu versucht, mit Lust versucht, wo alle Natur aufhört und Kunst wird... Die Griechen, erst in diesen Rollen-Glauben — einen Artisten-Glauben, wenn man will — eingetreten, machten, wie bekannt, Schritt für Schritt eine wunderliche und nicht in jedem Betracht nachahmenswerthe Verwandlung durch: sie wurden wirklich Schauspieler; als solche bezauberten sie, überwanden sie alle Welt und zuletzt selbst die „Weltüberwinderin“ (denn der Graeculus histrio hat Rom besiegt, und nicht, wie die Unschuldigen zu sagen pflegen, die griechische Cultur...). Aber was ich fürchte, was man heute schon mit Händen greift, falls man Lust hätte, darnach zu greifen, wir modernen Menschen sind ganz schon auf dem gleichen Wege; und jedes Mal, wenn der Mensch anfängt zu entdecken, inwiefern er eine Rolle spielt und inwieweit er Schauspieler sein kann, wird er Schauspieler... Damit kommt dann eine neue Flora und Fauna von Menschen herauf, die in festeren, beschränkteren Zeitaltern nicht wachsen können — oder „unten“ gelassen werden, unter dem Banne und Verdachte der Ehrlosigkeit —, es kommen damit jedes Mal die interessantesten und tollsten Zeitalter der Geschichte herauf, in denen die „Schauspieler“, alle Arten Schauspieler, die eigentlichen Herren sind. Eben dadurch wird eine andre Gattung Mensch immer tiefer benachtheiligt, endlich unmöglich gemacht, vor Allem die grossen „Baumeister“; jetzt erlahmt die bauende Kraft; der Muth, auf lange Fernen hin Pläne zu machen, wird entmuthigt; die organisatorischen Genies fangen an zu fehlen: — wer wagt es nunmehr noch, Werke zu unternehmen, zu deren Vollendung man auf Jahrtausende rechnen müsste? Es stirbt eben jener Grundglaube aus, auf welchen hin Einer dergestalt rechnen, versprechen, die Zukunft im Plane vorwegnehmen, seinem Plane zum Opfer bringen kann, dass nämlich der Mensch nur insofern Werth hat, Sinn hat, als er ein Stein in einem grossen Baue ist: wozu er zuallererst fest sein muss, „Stein“ sein muss... Vor Allem nicht — Schauspieler! Kurz gesagt — ach, es wird lang genug noch verschwiegen werden! — was von nun an nicht mehr gebaut wird, nicht mehr gebaut werden kann, das ist — eine Gesellschaft im alten Verstande des Wortes; um diesen Bau zu bauen, fehlt Alles, voran das Material. Wir Alle sind kein Material mehr für eine Gesellschaft: das ist eine Wahrheit, die an der Zeit ist! Es dünkt mich gleichgültig, dass einstweilen noch die kurzsichtigste, vielleicht ehrlichste, jedenfalls lärmendste Art Mensch, die es heute giebt, unsre Herrn Socialisten, ungefähr das Gegentheil glaubt, hofft, träumt, vor Allem schreit und schreibt; man liest ja ihr Zukunftswort „freie Gesellschaft“ bereits auf allen Tischen und Wänden. Freie Gesellschaft? Ja! Ja! Aber ihr wisst doch, ihr Herren, woraus man die baut? Aus hölzernem Eisen! Aus dem berühmten hölzernen Eisen! Und noch nicht einmal aus hölzernem...

357 Zum alten Probleme: „was ist deutsch?“ — Man rechne bei sich die eigentlichen Errungenschaften des philosophischen Gedankens nach, welche deutschen Köpfen verdankt werden: sind sie in irgend einem erlaubten Sinne auch noch der ganzen Rasse zu Gute zu rechnen? Dürfen wir sagen: sie sind zugleich das Werk der „deutschen Seele“, mindestens deren Symptom, in dem Sinne, in welchem wir etwa Plato’s Ideomanie, seinen fast religiösen Formen-Wahnsinn zugleich als ein Ereigniss und Zeugniss der „griechischen Seele“ zu nehmen gewohnt sind? Oder wäre das Umgekehrte wahr? wären sie gerade so individuell, so sehr Ausnahme vom Geiste der Rasse, wie es zum Beispiel Goethe’s Heidenthum mit gutem Gewissen war? Oder wie es Bismarck’s Macchiavellismus mit gutem Gewissen, seine sogenannte „Realpolitik“, unter Deutschen ist? Widersprachen unsre Philosophen vielleicht sogar dem Bedürfnisse der „deutschen Seele“? Kurz, waren die deutschen Philosophen wirklich — philosophische Deutsche? — Ich erinnere an drei Fälle. Zuerst an Leibnitzens unvergleichliche Einsicht, mit der er nicht nur gegen Descartes, sondern gegen Alles, was bis zu ihm philosophirt hatte, Recht bekam, — dass die Bewusstheit nur ein Accidens der Vorstellung ist, nicht deren nothwendiges und wesentliches Attribut, dass also das, was wir Bewusstsein nennen, nur einen Zustand unsrer geistigen und seelischen Welt ausmacht (vielleicht einen krankhaften Zustand) und bei weitem nicht sie selbst: — ist an diesem Gedanken, dessen Tiefe auch heute noch nicht ausgeschöpft ist, etwas Deutsches? Giebt es einen Grund zu muthmaassen, dass nicht leicht ein Lateiner auf diese Umdrehung des Augenscheins verfallen sein würde? — denn es ist eine Umdrehung. Erinnern wir uns zweitens an Kant’s ungeheures Fragezeichen, welches er an den Begriff „Causalität“ schrieb, — nicht dass er wie Hume dessen Recht überhaupt bezweifelt hätte: er begann vielmehr vorsichtig das Reich abzugrenzen, innerhalb dessen dieser Begriff überhaupt Sinn hat (man ist auch jetzt noch nicht mit dieser Grenzabsteckung fertig geworden). Nehmen wir drittens den erstaunlichen Griff Hegel’s, der damit durch alle logischen Gewohnheiten und Verwöhnungen durchgriff, als er zu lehren wagte, dass die Artbegriffe sich aus einander entwickeln: mit welchem Satze die Geister in Europa zur letzten grossen wissenschaftlichen Bewegung präformirt wurden, zum Darwinismus — denn ohne Hegel kein Darwin. Ist an dieser Hegelschen Neuerung, die erst den entscheidenden Begriff „Entwicklung“ in die Wissenschaft gebracht hat, etwas Deutsches? — Ja, ohne allen Zweifel: in allen drei Fällen fühlen wir Etwas von uns selbst „aufgedeckt“ und errathen und sind dankbar dafür und überrascht zugleich, jeder dieser drei Sätze ist ein nachdenkliches Stück deutscher Selbsterkenntniss, Selbsterfahrung, Selbsterfassung. „Unsre innre Welt ist viel reicher, umfänglicher, verborgener“, so empfinden wir mit Leibnitz; als Deutsche zweifeln wir mit Kant an der Letztgültigkeit naturwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse und überhaupt an Allem, was sich causaliter erkennen lässt: das Erkennbare scheint uns als solches schon geringeren Werthes. Wir Deutsche sind Hegelianer, auch wenn es nie einen Hegel gegeben hätte, insofern wir (im Gegensatz zu allen Lateinern) dem Werden, der Entwicklung instinktiv einen tieferen Sinn und reicheren Werth zumessen als dem, was „ist“ — wir glauben kaum an die Berechtigung des Begriffs „Sein“ —; ebenfalls insofern wir unsrer menschlichen Logik nicht geneigt sind einzuräumen, dass sie die Logik an sich, die einzige Art Logik sei (wir möchten vielmehr uns überreden, dass sie nur ein Spezialfall sei, und vielleicht einer der wunderlichsten und dümmsten —). Eine vierte Frage wäre, ob auch Schopenhauer mit seinem Pessimismus, das heisst dem Problem vom Werth des Daseins, gerade ein Deutscher gewesen sein müsste. Ich glaube nicht. Das Ereigniss, nach welchem dies Problem mit Sicherheit zu erwarten stand, so dass ein Astronom der Seele Tag und Stunde dafür hätte ausrechnen können, der Niedergang des Glaubens an den christlichen Gott, der Sieg des wissenschaftlichen Atheismus, ist ein gesammt-europäisches Ereigniss, an dem alle Rassen ihren Antheil von Verdienst und Ehre haben sollen. Umgekehrt wäre gerade den Deutschen zuzurechnen — jenen Deutschen, mit welchen Schopenhauer gleichzeitig lebte —, diesen Sieg des Atheismus am längsten und gefährlichsten verzögert zu haben; Hegel namentlich war sein Verzögerer par excellence, gemäss dem grandiosen Versuche, den er machte, uns zur Göttlichkeit des Daseins zu allerletzt noch mit Hülfe unsres sechsten Sinnes, des „historischen Sinnes“ zu überreden. Schopenhauer war als Philosoph der erste eingeständliche und unbeugsame Atheist, den wir Deutschen gehabt haben: seine Feindschaft gegen Hegel hatte hier ihren Hintergrund. Die Ungöttlichkeit des Daseins galt ihm als etwas Gegebenes, Greifliches, Undiskutirbares; er verlor jedes Mal seine Philosophen-Besonnenheit und gerieth in Entrüstung, wenn er Jemanden hier zögern und Umschweife machen sah. An dieser Stelle liegt seine ganze Rechtschaffenheit: der unbedingte redliche Atheismus ist eben die Voraussetzung seiner Problemstellung, als ein endlich und schwer errungener Sieg des europäischen Gewissens, als der folgenreichste Akt einer zweitausendjährigen Zucht zur Wahrheit, welche am Schlusse sich die Lüge im Glauben an Gott verbietet... Man sieht, was eigentlich über den christlichen Gott gesiegt hat: die christliche Moralität selbst, der immer strenger genommene Begriff der Wahrhaftigkeit, die Beichtväter-Feinheit des christlichen Gewissens, übersetzt und sublimirt zum wissenschaftlichen Gewissen, zur intellektuellen Sauberkeit um jeden Preis. Die Natur ansehn, als ob sie ein Beweis für die Güte und Obhut eines Gottes sei; die Geschichte interpretiren zu Ehren einer göttlichen Vernunft, als beständiges Zeugniss einer sittlichen Weltordnung und sittlicher Schlussabsichten; die eigenen Erlebnisse auslegen, wie sie fromme Menschen lange genug ausgelegt haben, wie als ob Alles Fügung, Alles Wink, Alles dem Heil der Seele zu Liebe ausgedacht und geschickt sei: das ist nunmehr vorbei, das hat das Gewissen gegen sich, das gilt allen feineren Gewissen als unanständig, unehrlich, als Lügnerei, Feminismus, Schwachheit, Feigheit, — mit dieser Strenge, wenn irgend womit, sind wir eben gute Europäer und Erben von Europa’s längster und tapferster Selbstüberwindung. Indem wir die christliche Interpretation dergestalt von uns stossen und ihren „Sinn“ wie eine Falschmünzerei verurtheilen, kommt nun sofort auf eine furchtbare Weise die Schopenhauerische Frage zu uns: hat denn das Dasein überhaupt einen Sinn? — jene Frage, die ein paar Jahrhunderte brauchen wird, um auch nur vollständig und in alle ihre Tiefe hinein gehört zu werden. Was Schopenhauer selbst auf diese Frage geantwortet hat, war — man vergebe es mir — etwas Voreiliges, Jugendliches, nur eine Abfindung, ein Stehen- und Steckenbleiben in eben den christlich-asketischen Moral-Perspektiven, welchen, mit dem Glauben an Gott, der Glaube gekündigt war... Aber er hat die Frage gestellt — als ein guter Europäer, wie gesagt, und nicht als Deutscher. — Oder hätten etwa die Deutschen, wenigstens mit der Art, in welcher sie sich der Schopenhauerischen Frage bemächtigten, ihre innere Zugehörigkeit und Verwandtschaft, ihre Vorbereitung, ihr Bedürfniss nach seinem Problem bewiesen? Dass nach Schopenhauer auch in Deutschland — übrigens spät genug! — über das von ihm aufgestellte Problem gedacht und gedruckt worden ist, reicht gewiss nicht aus, zu Gunsten dieser engeren Zugehörigkeit zu entscheiden; man könnte selbst die eigenthümliche Ungeschicktheit dieses Nach-Schopenhauerischen Pessimismus dagegen geltend machen, — die Deutschen benahmen sich ersichtlich nicht dabei wie in ihrem Elemente. Hiermit spiele ich ganz und gar nicht auf Eduard von Hartmann an; im Gegentheil, mein alter Verdacht ist auch heute noch nicht gehoben, dass er für uns zu geschickt ist, ich will sagen, dass er als arger Schalk von Anbeginn sich vielleicht nicht nur über den deutschen Pessimismus lustig gemacht hat, — dass er am Ende etwa gar es den Deutschen testamentarisch „vermachen“ könnte, wie weit man sie selbst, im Zeitalter der Gründungen, hat zum Narren haben können. Aber ich frage: soll man vielleicht den alten Brummkreisel Bahnsen den Deutschen zu Ehren rechnen, der sich mit Wollust sein Leben lang um sein realdialektisches Elend und „persönliches Pech“ gedreht hat, — wäre etwa das gerade deutsch? (ich empfehle anbei seine Schriften, wozu ich sie selbst gebraucht habe, als antipessimistische Kost, namentlich um seiner elegantiae psychologicae willen, mit denen, wie mich dünkt, auch dem verstopftesten Leibe und Gemüthe beizukommen ist). Oder dürfte man solche Dilettanten und alte Jungfern, wie den süsslichen Virginitäts-Apostel Mainländer unter die rechten Deutschen zählen? Zuletzt wird es ein Jude gewesen sein (— alle Juden werden süsslich, wenn sie moralisiren). Weder Bahnsen, noch Mainländer, noch gar Eduard von Hartmann geben eine sichere Handhabe für die Frage ab, ob der Pessimismus Schopenhauer’s, sein entsetzter Blick in eine entgöttlichte, dumm, blind, verrückt und fragwürdig gewordene Welt, sein ehrliches Entsetzen... nicht nur ein Ausnahme-Fall unter Deutschen, sondern ein deutsches Ereigniss gewesen ist: während Alles, was sonst im Vordergrunde steht, unsre tapfre Politik, unsre fröhliche Vaterländerei, welche entschlossen genug alle Dinge auf ein wenig philosophisches Princip hin („Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles“) betrachtet, also sub specie speciei, nämlich der deutschen species, mit grosser Deutlichkeit das Gegentheil bezeugt. Nein! die Deutschen von heute sind keine Pessimisten! Und Schopenhauer war Pessimist, nochmals gesagt, als guter Europäer und nicht als Deutscher. —

358 Der Bauernaufstand des Geistes. — Wir Europäer befinden uns im Anblick einer ungeheuren Trümmerwelt, wo Einiges noch hoch ragt, wo Vieles morsch und unheimlich dasteht, das Meiste aber schon am Boden liegt, malerisch genug — wo gab es je schönere Ruinen? — und überwachsen mit grossem und kleinem Unkraute. Die Kirche ist diese Stadt des Untergangs: wir sehen die religiöse Gesellschaft des Christenthums bis in die untersten Fundamente erschüttert, — der Glaube an Gott ist umgestürzt, der Glaube an das christlich-asketische Ideal kämpft eben noch seinen letzten Kampf. Ein solches lang und gründlich gebautes Werk wie das Christenthum — es war der letzte Römerbau! — konnte freilich nicht mit Einem Male zerstört werden; alle Art Erdbeben hat da rütteln, alle Art Geist, die anbohrt, gräbt, nagt, feuchtet, hat da helfen müssen. Aber was das Wunderlichste ist: Die, welche sich am meisten darum bemüht haben, das Christenthum zu halten, zu erhalten, sind gerade seine besten Zerstörer geworden, — die Deutschen. Es scheint, die Deutschen verstehen das Wesen einer Kirche nicht. Sind sie dazu nicht geistig genug? nicht misstrauisch genug? Der Bau der Kirche ruht jedenfalls auf einer südländischen Freiheit und Freisinnigkeit des Geistes und ebenso auf einem südländischen Verdachte gegen Natur, Mensch und Geist, — er ruht auf einer ganz andren Kenntniss des Menschen, Erfahrung vom Menschen, als der Norden gehabt hat. Die Lutherische Reformation war in ihrer ganzen Breite die Entrüstung der Einfalt gegen etwas „Vielfältiges“, um vorsichtig zu reden, ein grobes biederes Missverständniss, an dem Viel zu verzeihen ist, — man begriff den Ausdruck einer siegreichen Kirche nicht und sah nur Corruption, man missverstand die vornehme Skepsis, jenen Luxus von Skepsis und Toleranz, welchen sich jede siegreiche selbstgewisse Macht gestattet... Man übersieht heute gut genug, wie Luther in allen kardinalen Fragen der Macht verhängnissvoll kurz, oberflächlich, unvorsichtig angelegt war, vor Allem als Mann aus dem Volke, dem alle Erbschaft einer herrschenden Kaste, aller Instinkt für Macht abgieng: so dass sein Werk, sein Wille zur Wiederherstellung jenes Römer-Werks, ohne dass er es wollte und wusste, nur der Anfang eines Zerstörungswerks wurde. Er dröselte auf, er riss zusammen, mit ehrlichem Ingrimme, wo die alte Spinne am sorgsamsten und längsten gewoben hatte. Er lieferte die heiligen Bücher an Jedermann aus, — damit geriethen sie endlich in die Hände der Philologen, das heisst der Vernichter jeden Glaubens, der auf Büchern ruht. Er zerstörte den Begriff „Kirche“, indem er den Glauben an die Inspiration der Concilien wegwarf: denn nur unter der Voraussetzung, dass der inspirirende Geist, der die Kirche gegründet hat, in ihr noch lebe, noch baue, noch fortfahre, sein Haus zu bauen, behält der Begriff „Kirche“ Kraft. Er gab dem Priester den Geschlechtsverkehr mit dem Weibe zurück: aber drei Viertel der Ehrfurcht, deren das Volk, vor Allem das Weib aus dem Volke fähig ist, ruht auf dem Glauben, dass ein Ausnahme-Mensch in diesem Punkte auch in andren Punkten eine Ausnahme sein wird, — hier gerade hat der Volksglaube an etwas Uebermenschliches im Menschen, an das Wunder, an den erlösenden Gott im Menschen, seinen feinsten und verfänglichsten Anwalt. Luther musste dem Priester, nachdem er ihm das Weib gegeben hatte, die Ohrenbeichte nehmen, das war psychologisch richtig: aber damit war im Grunde der christliche Priester selbst abgeschafft, dessen tiefste Nützlichkeit immer die gewesen ist, ein heiliges Ohr, ein verschwiegener Brunnen, ein Grab für Geheimnisse zu sein. „Jedermann sein eigner Priester“ — hinter solchen Formeln und ihrer bäurischen Verschlagenheit versteckte sich bei Luther der abgründliche Hass auf den „höheren Menschen“ und die Herrschaft des „höheren Menschen“, wie ihn die Kirche concipirt hatte: — er zerschlug ein Ideal, das er nicht zu erreichen wusste, während er die Entartung dieses Ideals zu bekämpfen und zu verabscheuen schien. Thatsächlich stiess er, der unmögliche Mönch, die Herrschaft der homines religiosi von sich; er machte also gerade Das selber innerhalb der kirchlichen Gesellschafts-Ordnung, was er in Hinsicht auf die bürgerliche Ordnung so unduldsam bekämpfte, — einen „Bauernaufstand“. — Was hinterdrein Alles aus seiner Reformation gewachsen ist, Gutes und Schlimmes, und heute ungefähr überrechnet werden kann, — wer wäre wohl naiv genug, Luthern um dieser Folgen willen einfach zu loben oder zu tadeln? Er ist an Allem unschuldig, er wusste nicht was er that. Die Verflachung des europäischen Geistes, namentlich im Norden, seine Vergutmüthigung, wenn man’s lieber mit einem moralischen Worte bezeichnet hört, that mit der Lutherischen Reformation einen tüchtigen Schritt vorwärts, es ist kein Zweifel; und ebenso wuchs durch sie die Beweglichkeit und Unruhe des Geistes, sein Durst nach Unabhängigkeit, sein Glaube an ein Recht auf Freiheit, seine „Natürlichkeit“. Will man ihr in letzterer Hinsicht den Werth zugestehn, Das vorbereitet und begünstigt zu haben, was wir heute als „moderne Wissenschaft“ verehren, so muss man freilich hinzufügen, dass sie auch an der Entartung des modernen Gelehrten mitschuldig ist, an seinem Mangel an Ehrfurcht, Scham und Tiefe, an der ganzen naiven Treuherzigkeit und Biedermännerei in Dingen der Erkenntniss, kurz an jenem Plebejismus des Geistes, der den letzten beiden Jahrhunderten eigenthümlich ist und von dem uns auch der bisherige Pessimismus noch keineswegs erlöst hat, — auch die „modernen Ideen“ gehören noch zu diesem Bauernaufstand des Nordens gegen den kälteren, zweideutigeren, misstrauischeren Geist des Südens, der sich in der christlichen Kirche sein grösstes Denkmal gebaut hat. Vergessen wir es zuletzt nicht, was eine Kirche ist, und zwar im Gegensatz zu jedem „Staate“: eine Kirche ist vor Allem ein Herrschafts-Gebilde, das den geistigeren Menschen den obersten Rang sichert und an die Macht der Geistigkeit soweit glaubt, um sich alle gröberen Gewaltmittel zu verbieten, — damit allein ist die Kirche unter allen Umständen eine vornehmere Institution als der Staat. —

359 Die Rache am Geist und andere Hintergründe der Moral. — Die Moral — wo glaubt ihr wohl, dass sie ihre gefährlichsten und tückischsten Anwälte hat?... Da ist ein missrathener Mensch, der nicht genug Geist besitzt, um sich dessen freuen zu können, und gerade Bildung genug, um das zu wissen; gelangweilt, überdrüssig, ein Selbstverächter; durch etwas ererbtes Vermögen leider noch um den letzten Trost betrogen, den „Segen der Arbeit“, die Selbstvergessenheit im „Tagewerk“; ein Solcher, der sich seines Daseins im Grunde schämt — vielleicht herbergt er dazu ein paar kleine Laster — und andrerseits nicht umhin kann, durch Bücher, auf die er kein Recht hat, oder geistigere Gesellschaft als er verdauen kann, sich immer schlimmer zu verwöhnen und eitel-reizbar zu machen: ein solcher durch und durch vergifteter Mensch — denn Geist wird Gift, Bildung wird Gift, Besitz wird Gift, Einsamkeit wird Gift bei dergestalt Missrathenen — geräth schliesslich in einen habituellen Zustand der Rache, des Willens zur Rache.... was glaubt ihr wohl, dass er nöthig, unbedingt nöthig hat, um sich bei sich selbst den Anschein von Ueberlegenheit über geistigere Menschen, um sich die Lust der vollzogenen Rache, wenigstens für seine Einbildung, zu schaffen? Immer die Moralität, darauf darf man wetten, immer die grossen Moral-Worte, immer das Bumbum von Gerechtigkeit, Weisheit, Heiligkeit, Tugend, immer den Stoicismus der Gebärde (— wie gut versteckt der Stoicismus was Einer nicht hat!..), immer den Mantel des klugen Schweigens, der Leutseligkeit, der Milde, und wie alle die Idealisten-Mäntel heissen, unter denen die unheilbaren Selbstverächter, auch die unheilbar Eiteln, herum gehn. Man verstehe mich nicht falsch: aus solchen geborenen Feinden des Geistes entsteht mitunter jenes seltene Stück Menschthum, das vom Volke unter dem Namen des Heiligen, des Weisen verehrt wird; aus solchen Menschen kommen jene Unthiere der Moral her, welche Lärm machen, Geschichte machen, — der heilige Augustin gehört zu ihnen. Die Furcht vor dem Geist, die Rache am Geist — oh wie oft wurden diese triebkräftigen Laster schon zur Wurzel von Tugenden! Ja zur Tugend! — Und, unter uns gefragt, selbst jener Philosophen-Anspruch auf Weisheit, der hier und da einmal auf Erden gemacht worden ist, der tollste und unbescheidenste aller Ansprüche, — war er nicht immer bisher, in Indien, wie in Griechenland, vor Allem ein Versteck? Mitunter vielleicht im Gesichtspunkte der Erziehung, der so viele Lügen heiligt, als zarte Rücksicht auf Werdende, Wachsende, auf Jünger, welche oft durch den Glauben an die Person (durch einen Irrthum) gegen sich selbst vertheidigt werden müssen... In den häufigeren Fällen aber ein Versteck des Philosophen, hinter welches er sich aus Ermüdung, Alter, Erkaltung, Verhärtung rettet, als Gefühl vom nahen Ende, als Klugheit jenes Instinkts, den die Thiere vor dem Tode haben, — sie gehen bei Seite, werden still, wählen die Einsamkeit, verkriechen sich in Höhlen, werden weise... Wie? Weisheit ein Versteck des Philosophen vor — dem Geiste? —

360 Zwei Arten Ursache, die man verwechselt. — Das erscheint mir als einer meiner wesentlichsten Schritte und Fortschritte: ich lernte die Ursache des Handelns unterscheiden von der Ursache des So- und So-Handelns, des In-dieser Richtung, Auf-dieses Ziel hin-Handelns. Die erste Art Ursache ist ein Quantum von aufgestauter Kraft, welches darauf wartet, irgend wie, irgend wozu verbraucht zu werden; die zweite Art ist dagegen Etwas an dieser Kraft gemessen ganz Unbedeutendes, ein kleiner Zufall zumeist, gemäss dem jenes Quantum sich nunmehr auf Eine und bestimmte Weise „auslöst“: das Streichholz im Verhältniss zur Pulvertonne. Unter diese kleinen Zufälle und Streichhölzer rechne ich alle sogenannten „Zwecke“, ebenso die noch viel sogenannteren „Lebensberufe“: sie sind relativ beliebig, willkürlich, fast gleichgültig im Verhältniss zu dem ungeheuren Quantum Kraft, welches darnach drängt, wie gesagt, irgendwie aufgebraucht zu werden. Man sieht es gemeinhin anders an: man ist gewohnt, gerade in dem Ziele (Zwecke, Berufe u. s. w.) die treibende Kraft zu sehn, gemäss einem uralten Irrthume, — aber er ist nur die dirigirende Kraft, man hat dabei den Steuermann und den Dampf verwechselt. Und noch nicht einmal immer den Steuermann, die dirigirende Kraft... Ist das „Ziel“, der „Zweck“ nicht oft genug nur ein beschönigender Vorwand, eine nachträgliche Selbstverblendung der Eitelkeit, die es nicht Wort haben will, dass das Schiff der Strömung folgt, in die es zufällig gerathen ist? Dass es dorthin „will“, weil es dorthin — muss? Dass es wohl eine Richtung hat, aber ganz und gar — keinen Steuermann? — Man bedarf noch einer Kritik des Begriffs „Zweck“.

361 Vom Probleme des Schauspielers. — Das Problem des Schauspielers hat mich am längsten beunruhigt; ich war im Ungewissen darüber (und bin es mitunter jetzt noch), ob man nicht erst von da aus dem gefährlichen Begriff „Künstler“ — einem mit unverzeihlicher Gutmüthigkeit bisher behandelten Begriff — beikommen wird. Die Falschheit mit gutem Gewissen; die Lust an der Verstellung als Macht herausbrechend, den sogenannten „Charakter“ bei Seite schiebend, überfluthend, mitunter auslöschend; das innere Verlangen in eine Rolle und Maske, in einen Schein hinein; ein Ueberschuss von Anpassungs-Fähigkeiten aller Art, welche sich nicht mehr im Dienste des nächsten engsten Nutzens zu befriedigen wissen: Alles das ist vielleicht nicht nur der Schauspieler an sich?.. Ein solcher Instinkt wird sich am leichtesten bei Familien des niederen Volkes ausgebildet haben, die unter wechselndem Druck und Zwang, in tiefer Abhängigkeit ihr Leben durchsetzen mussten, welche sich geschmeidig nach ihrer Decke zu strecken, auf neue Umstände immer neu einzurichten, immer wieder anders zu geben und zu stellen hatten, befähigt allmählich, den Mantel nach jedem Winde zu hängen und dadurch fast zum Mantel werdend, als Meister jener einverleibten und eingefleischten Kunst des ewigen Verstecken-Spielens, das man bei Thieren mimicry nennt: bis zum Schluss dieses ganze von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht aufgespeicherte Vermögen herrisch, unvernünftig, unbändig wird, als Instinkt andre Instinkte kommandiren lernt und den Schauspieler, den „Künstler“ erzeugt (den Possenreisser, Lügenerzähler, Hanswurst, Narren, Clown zunächst, auch den klassischen Bedienten, den Gil Blas: denn in solchen Typen hat man die Vorgeschichte des Künstlers und oft genug sogar des „Genies“). Auch in höheren gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen erwächst unter ähnlichem Drucke eine ähnliche Art Mensch: nur wird dann meistens der schauspielerische Instinkt durch einen andren Instinkt gerade noch im Zaume gehalten, zum Beispiel bei dem „Diplomaten“, — ich würde übrigens glauben, dass es einem guten Diplomaten jeder Zeit noch freistünde, auch einen guten Bühnen-Schauspieler abzugeben, gesetzt, dass es ihm eben „freistünde“. Was aber die Juden betrifft, jenes Volk der Anpassungskunst par excellence, so möchte man in ihnen, diesem Gedankengange nach, von vornherein gleichsam eine welthistorische Veranstaltung zur Züchtung von Schauspielern sehn, eine eigentliche Schauspieler-Brutstätte; und in der That ist die Frage reichlich an der Zeit: welcher gute Schauspieler ist heute nicht — Jude? Auch der Jude als geborener Literat, als der thatsächliche Beherrscher der europäischen Presse übt diese seine Macht auf Grund seiner schauspielerischen Fähigkeit aus: denn der Literat ist wesentlich Schauspieler, — er spielt nämlich den „Sachkundigen“, den „Fachmann“. — Endlich die Frauen: man denke über die ganze Geschichte der Frauen nach, — müssen sie nicht zu allererst und -oberst Schauspielerinnen sein? Man höre die Aerzte, welche Frauenzimmer hypnotisirt haben; zuletzt, man liebe sie, — man lasse sich von ihnen „hypnotisiren“! Was kommt immer dabei heraus? Dass sie „sich geben“, selbst noch, wenn sie — sich geben.... Das Weib ist so artistisch...

362 Unser Glaube an eine Vermännlichung Europa’s. — Napoleon verdankt man’s (und ganz und gar nicht der französischen Revolution, welche auf „Brüderlichkeit“ von Volk zu Volk und allgemeinen blumichten Herzens-Austausch ausgewesen ist), dass sich jetzt ein paar kriegerische Jahrhunderte auf einander folgen dürfen, die in der Geschichte nicht ihres Gleichen haben, kurz dass wir in’s klassische Zeitalter des Kriegs getreten sind, des gelehrten und zugleich volksthümlichen Kriegs im grössten Maassstabe (der Mittel, der Begabungen, der Disciplin), auf den alle kommenden Jahrtausende als auf ein Stück Vollkommenheit mit Neid und Ehrfurcht zurückblicken werden: — denn die nationale Bewegung, aus der diese Kriegs-Glorie herauswächst, ist nur der Gegen-choc gegen Napoleon und wäre ohne Napoleon nicht vorhanden. Ihm also wird man einmal es zurechnen dürfen, dass der Mann in Europa wieder Herr über den Kaufmann und Philister geworden ist; vielleicht sogar über „das Weib“, das durch das Christenthum und den schwärmerischen Geist des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, noch mehr durch die „modernen Ideen“, verhätschelt worden ist. Napoleon, der in den modernen Ideen und geradewegs in der Civilisation Etwas wie eine persönliche Feindin sah, hat mit dieser Feindschaft sich als einer der grössten Fortsetzer der Renaissance bewährt: er hat ein ganzes Stück antiken Wesens, das entscheidende vielleicht, das Stück Granit, wieder heraufgebracht. Und wer weiss, ob nicht dies Stück antiken Wesens auch endlich wieder über die nationale Bewegung Herr werden wird und sich im bejahenden Sinne zum Erben und Fortsetzer Napoleon’s machen muss: — der das Eine Europa wollte, wie man weiss, und dies als Herrin der Erde. —

363 Wie jedes Geschlecht über die Liebe sein Vorurtheil hat. — Bei allem Zugeständnisse, welches ich dem monogamischen Vorurtheile zu machen Willens bin, werde ich doch niemals zulassen, dass man bei Mann und Weib von gleichen Rechten in der Liebe rede: diese giebt es nicht. Das macht, Mann und Weib verstehen unter Liebe Jeder etwas Anderes, — und es gehört mit unter die Bedingungen der Liebe bei beiden Geschlechtern, dass das eine Geschlecht beim andren Geschlechte nicht das gleiche Gefühl, den gleichen Begriff „Liebe“ voraussetzt. Was das Weib unter Liebe versteht, ist klar genug: vollkommene Hingabe (nicht nur Hingebung) mit Seele und Leib, ohne jede Rücksicht, jeden Vorbehalt, mit Scham und Schrecken vielmehr vor dem Gedanken einer verklausulirten, an Bedingungen geknüpften Hingabe. In dieser Abwesenheit von Bedingungen ist eben seine Liebe ein Glaube: das Weib hat keinen anderen. — Der Mann, wenn er ein Weib liebt, will von ihm eben diese Liebe, ist folglich für seine Person selbst am entferntesten von der Voraussetzung der weiblichen Liebe; gesetzt aber, dass es auch Männer geben sollte, denen ihrerseits das Verlangen nach vollkommener Hingebung nicht fremd ist, nun, so sind das eben — keine Männer. Ein Mann, der liebt wie ein Weib, wird damit Sklave; ein Weib aber, das liebt wie ein Weib, wird damit ein vollkommeneres Weib... Die Leidenschaft des Weibes, in ihrem unbedingten Verzichtleisten auf eigne Rechte, hat gerade zur Voraussetzung, dass auf der andren Seite nicht ein gleiches Pathos, ein gleiches Verzichtleisten-Wollen besteht: denn wenn Beide aus Liebe auf sich selbst verzichteten, so entstünde daraus — nun, ich weiss nicht was, vielleicht ein leerer Raum? — Das Weib will genommen, angenommen werden als Besitz, will aufgehn in den Begriff „Besitz“, „besessen“; folglich will es Einen, der nimmt, der sich nicht selbst giebt und weggiebt, der umgekehrt vielmehr gerade reicher an „sich“ gemacht werden soll — durch den Zuwachs an Kraft, Glück, Glaube, als welchen ihm das Weib sich selbst giebt. Das Weib giebt sich weg, der Mann nimmt hinzu — ich denke, über diesen Natur-Gegensatz wird man durch keine socialen Verträge, auch nicht durch den allerbesten Willen zur Gerechtigkeit hinwegkommen: so wünschenswerth es sein mag, dass man das Harte, Schreckliche, Räthselhafte, Unmoralische dieses Antagonismus sich nicht beständig vor Augen stellt. Denn die Liebe, ganz, gross, voll gedacht, ist Natur und als Natur in alle Ewigkeit etwas „Unmoralisches“. — Die Treue ist demgemäss in die Liebe des Weibes eingeschlossen, sie folgt aus deren Definition; bei dem Manne kann sie leicht im Gefolge seiner Liebe entstehn, etwa als Dankbarkeit oder als Idiosynkrasie des Geschmacks und sogenannte Wahlverwandtschaft, aber sie gehört nicht in’s Wesen seiner Liebe, — und zwar so wenig, dass man beinahe mit einigem Recht von einem natürlichen Widerspiel zwischen Liebe und Treue beim Mann reden dürfte: welche Liebe eben ein Haben-Wollen ist und nicht ein Verzichtleisten und Weggeben; das Haben-Wollen geht aber jedes Mal mit dem Haben zu Ende... Thatsächlich ist es der feinere und argwöhnischere Besitzdurst des Mannes, der dies „Haben“ sich selten und spät eingesteht, was seine Liebe fortbestehn macht; insofern ist es selbst möglich, dass sie noch nach der Hingebung wächst, — er giebt nicht leicht zu, dass ein Weib für ihn Nichts mehr „hinzugeben“ hätte. —

364 Der Einsiedler redet. — Die Kunst, mit Menschen umzugehn, beruht wesentlich auf der Geschicklichkeit (die eine lange Uebung voraussetzt), eine Mahlzeit anzunehmen, einzunehmen, zu deren Küche man kein Vertrauen hat. Gesetzt, dass man mit einem Wolfshunger zu Tisch kommt, geht Alles leicht („die schlechteste Gesellschaft lässt sich fühlen —“, wie Mephistopheles sagt); aber man hat ihn nicht, diesen Wolfshunger, wenn man ihn braucht! Ah, wie schwer sind die Mitmenschen zu verdauen! Erstes Princip: wie bei einem Unglücke seinen Muth einsetzen, tapfer zugreifen, sich selbst dabei bewundern, seinen Widerwillen zwischen die Zähne nehmen, seinen Ekel hinunter stopfen. Zweites Princip: seinen Mitmenschen „verbessern“, zum Beispiel durch ein Lob, so dass er sein Glück über sich selbst auszuschwitzen beginnt; oder einen Zipfel von seinen guten oder „interessanten“ Eigenschaften fassen und daran ziehn, bis man die ganze Tugend heraus hat und den Mitmenschen in deren Falten unterstecken kann. Drittes Princip: Selbsthypnotisirung. Sein Verkehrs-Objekt wie einen gläsernen Knopf fixiren, bis man aufhört, Lust und Unlust dabei zu empfinden, und unbemerkt einschläft, starr wird, Haltung bekommt: ein Hausmittel aus der Ehe und Freundschaft, reichlich erprobt, als unentbehrlich gepriesen, aber wissenschaftlich noch nicht formulirt. Sein populärer Name ist — Geduld. —

365 Der Einsiedler spricht noch einmal. — Auch wir gehn mit „Menschen“ um, auch wir ziehn bescheiden das Kleid an, in dem (als das) man uns kennt, achtet, sucht, und begeben uns damit in Gesellschaft, das heisst unter Verkleidete, die es nicht heissen wollen; auch wir machen es wie alle klugen Masken und setzen jeder Neugierde, die nicht unser „Kleid“ betrifft, auf eine höfliche Weise den Stuhl vor die Thüre. Es giebt aber auch andre Arten und Kunststücke, um unter Menschen, mit Menschen „umzugehn“: zum Beispiel als Gespenst, — was sehr rathsam ist, wenn man sie bald los sein und fürchten machen will. Probe: man greift nach uns und bekommt uns nicht zu fassen. Das erschreckt. Oder: wir kommen durch eine geschlossne Thür. Oder: wenn alle Lichter ausgelöscht sind. Oder: nachdem wir bereits gestorben sind. Letzteres ist das Kunststück der posthumen Menschen par excellence. („Was denkt ihr auch?“ sagte ein Solcher einmal ungeduldig, „würden wir diese Fremde, Kälte, Grabesstille um uns auszuhalten Lust haben, diese ganze unterirdische verborgne stumme unentdeckte Einsamkeit, die bei uns Leben heisst und ebensogut Tod heissen könnte, wenn wir nicht wüssten, was aus uns wird, — und dass wir nach dem Tode erst zu unserm Leben kommen und lebendig werden, ah! sehr lebendig! wir posthumen Menschen!“ —)

366 Angesichts eines gelehrten Buches. — Wir gehören nicht zu Denen, die erst zwischen Büchern, auf den Anstoss von Büchern zu Gedanken kommen — unsre Gewohnheit ist, im Freien zu denken, gehend, springend, steigend, tanzend, am liebsten auf einsamen Bergen oder dicht am Meere, da, wo selbst die Wege nachdenklich werden. Unsre ersten Werthfragen, in Bezug auf Buch, Mensch und Musik, lauten: „kann er gehen? mehr noch, kann er tanzen?.... Wir lesen selten, wir lesen darum nicht schlechter — oh wie rasch errathen wir’s, wie Einer auf seine Gedanken gekommen ist, ob sitzend, vor dem Tintenfass, mit zusammengedrücktem Bauche, den Kopf über das Papier gebeugt: oh wie rasch sind wir auch mit seinem Buche fertig! Das geklemmte Eingeweide verräth sich, darauf darf man wetten, ebenso wie sich Stubenluft, Stubendecke, Stubenenge verräth. — Das waren meine Gefühle, als ich eben ein rechtschaffnes gelehrtes Buch zuschlug, dankbar, sehr dankbar, aber auch erleichtert... An dem Buche eines Gelehrten ist fast immer auch etwas Drückendes, Gedrücktes: der „Specialist“ kommt irgendwo zum Vorschein, sein Eifer, sein Ernst, sein Ingrimm, seine Ueberschätzung des Winkels, in dem er sitzt und spinnt, sein Buckel, — jeder Specialist hat seinen Buckel. Ein Gelehrten-Buch spiegelt immer auch eine krummgezogene Seele: jedes Handwerk zieht krumm. Man sehe seine Freunde wieder, mit denen man jung war, nachdem sie Besitz von ihrer Wissenschaft ergriffen haben: ach, wie auch immer das Umgekehrte geschehn ist! Ach, wie sie selbst auf immer nunmehr von ihr besetzt und besessen sind! In ihre Ecke eingewachsen, verdrückt bis zur Unkenntlichkeit, unfrei, um ihr Gleichgewicht gebracht, abgemagert und eckig überall, nur an Einer Stelle ausbündig rund, — man ist bewegt und schweigt, wenn man sie so wiederfindet. Jedes Handwerk, gesetzt selbst, dass es einen goldenen Boden hat, hat über sich auch eine bleierne Decke, die auf die Seele drückt und drückt, bis sie wunderlich und krumm gedrückt ist. Daran ist Nichts zu ändern. Man glaube ja nicht, dass es möglich sei, um diese Verunstaltung durch irgend welche Künste der Erziehung herumzukommen. Jede Art Meisterschaft zahlt sich theuer auf Erden, wo vielleicht Alles sich zu theuer zahlt; man ist Mann seines Fachs um den Preis, auch das Opfer seines Fachs zu sein. Aber ihr wollt es anders haben — „billiger“, vor Allem bequemer — nicht wahr, meine Herren Zeitgenossen? Nun wohlan! Aber da bekommt ihr sofort auch etwas Anderes, nämlich statt des Handwerkers und Meisters den Litteraten, den gewandten „vielgewendeten“ Litteraten, dem freilich der Buckel fehlt — jenen abgerechnet, den er vor euch macht, als der Ladendiener des Geistes und „Träger“ der Bildung —, den Litteraten, der eigentlich Nichts ist, aber fast Alles „repräsentirt“, der den Sachkenner spielt und „vertritt“, der es auch in aller Bescheidenheit auf sich nimmt, sich an dessen Stelle bezahlt, geehrt, gefeiert zu machen. — Nein, meine gelehrten Freunde! Ich segne euch auch noch um eures Buckels willen! Und dafür, dass ihr gleich mir die Litteraten und Bildungs-Schmarotzer verachtet! Und dass ihr nicht mit dem Geiste Handel zu treiben wisst! Und lauter Meinungen habt, die nicht in Geldeswerth auszudrücken sind! Und dass ihr Nichts vertretet, was ihr nicht seid! Dass euer einziger Wille ist, Meister eures Handwerks zu werden, in Ehrfurcht vor jeder Art Meisterschaft und Tüchtigkeit und mit rücksichtslosester Ablehnung alles Scheinbaren, Halbächten, Aufgeputzten, Virtuosenhaften, Demagogischen, Schauspielerischen in litteris et artibus — alles dessen, was in Hinsicht auf unbedingte Probität von Zucht und Vorschulung sich nicht vor euch ausweisen kann! (Selbst Genie hilft über einen solchen Mangel nicht hinweg, so sehr es auch über ihn hinwegzutäuschen versteht: das begreift man, wenn man einmal unsern begabtesten Malern und Musikern aus der Nähe zugesehn hat, — als welche Alle, fast ausnahmslos, sich durch eine listige Erfindsamkeit von Manieren, von Nothbehelfen, selbst von Principien künstlich und nachträglich den Anschein jener Probität, jener Solidität von Schulung und Cultur anzueignen wissen, freilich ohne damit sich selbst zu betrügen, ohne damit ihr eignes schlechtes Gewissen dauernd mundtodt zu machen. Denn, ihr wisst es doch? alle grossen modernen Künstler leiden am schlechten Gewissen...)

367 Wie man zuerst bei Kunstwerken zu unterscheiden hat. — Alles, was gedacht, gedichtet, gemalt, componirt, selbst gebaut und gebildet wird, gehört entweder zur monologischen Kunst oder zur Kunst vor Zeugen. Unter letztere ist auch noch jene scheinbare Monolog-Kunst einzurechnen, welche den Glauben an Gott in sich schliesst, die ganze Lyrik des Gebets: denn für einen Frommen giebt es noch keine Einsamkeit, — diese Erfindung haben erst wir gemacht, wir Gottlosen. Ich kenne keinen tieferen Unterschied der gesammten Optik eines Künstlers als diesen: ob er vom Auge des Zeugen aus nach seinem werdenden Kunstwerke (nach „sich“ —) hinblickt oder aber „die Welt vergessen hat“: wie es das Wesentliche jeder monologischen Kunst ist, — sie ruht auf dem Vergessen, sie ist die Musik des Vergessens.

368 Der Cyniker redet. — Meine Einwände gegen die Musik Wagner’s sind physiologische Einwände: wozu dieselben erst noch unter ästhetische Formeln verkleiden? Meine „Thatsache“ ist, dass ich nicht mehr leicht athme, wenn diese Musik erst auf mich wirkt; dass alsbald mein Fuss gegen sie böse wird und revoltirt — er hat das Bedürfniss nach Takt, Tanz, Marsch, er verlangt von der Musik vorerst die Entzückungen, welche in gutem Gehen, Schreiten, Springen, Tanzen liegen —. Protestirt aber nicht auch mein Magen? mein Herz? mein Blutlauf? mein Eingeweide? Werde ich nicht unvermerkt heiser dabei? — Und so frage ich mich: was will eigentlich mein ganzer Leib von der Musik überhaupt? Ich glaube, seine Erleichterung: wie als ob alle animalischen Funktionen durch leichte kühne ausgelassne selbstgewisse Rhythmen beschleunigt werden sollten; wie als ob das eherne, das bleierne Leben durch goldene gute zärtliche Harmonien vergoldet werden sollte. Meine Schwermuth will in den Verstecken und Abgründen der Vollkommenheit ausruhn: dazu brauche ich Musik. Was geht mich das Drama an! Was die Krämpfe seiner sittlichen Ekstasen, an denen das „Volk“ seine Genugthuung hat! Was der ganze Gebärden-Hokuspokus des Schauspielers!... Man erräth, ich bin wesentlich antitheatralisch geartet, — aber Wagner war umgekehrt wesentlich Theatermensch und Schauspieler, der begeistertste Mimomane, den es gegeben hat, auch noch als Musiker!.. Und, beiläufig gesagt: wenn es Wagner’s Theorie gewesen ist „das Drama ist der Zweck, die Musik ist immer nur dessen Mittel“, — seine Praxis dagegen war, von Anfang bis zu Ende, „die Attitüde ist der Zweck, das Drama, auch die Musik ist immer nur ihr Mittel“. Die Musik als Mittel zur Verdeutlichung, Verstärkung, Verinnerlichung der dramatischen Gebärde und Schauspieler-Sinnenfälligkeit; und das Wagnerische Drama nur eine Gelegenheit zu vielen dramatischen Attitüden! Er hatte, neben allen anderen Instinkten, die kommandirenden Instinkte eines grossen Schauspielers, in Allem und Jedem: und, wie gesagt, auch als Musiker. — Dies machte ich einstmals einem rechtschaffenen Wagnerianer klar, mit einiger Mühe; und ich hatte Gründe, noch hinzuzufügen „seien Sie doch ein wenig ehrlicher gegen sich selbst: wir sind ja nicht im Theater! Im Theater ist man nur als Masse ehrlich; als Einzelner lügt man, belügt man sich. Man lässt sich selbst zu Hause, wenn man in’s Theater geht, man verzichtet auf das Recht der eignen Zunge und Wahl, auf seinen Geschmack, selbst auf seine Tapferkeit, wie man sie zwischen den eignen vier Wänden gegen Gott und Mensch hat und übt. In das Theater bringt Niemand die feinsten Sinne seiner Kunst mit, auch der Künstler nicht, der für das Theater arbeitet: da ist man Volk, Publikum, Heerde, Weib, Pharisäer, Stimmvieh, Demokrat, Nächster, Mitmensch, da unterliegt noch das persönlichste Gewissen dem nivellirenden Zauber der „grössten Zahl“, da wirkt die Dummheit als Lüsternheit und Contagion, da regiert der „Nachbar“, da wird man Nachbar...“ (Ich vergass zu erzählen, was mir mein aufgeklärter Wagnerianer auf die physiologischen Einwände entgegnete: „Sie sind also eigentlich nur nicht gesund genug für unsere Musik?“ —)

369 Unser Nebeneinander. — Müssen wir es uns nicht eingestehn, wir Künstler, dass es eine unheimliche Verschiedenheit in uns giebt, dass unser Geschmack und andrerseits unsre schöpferische Kraft auf eine wunderliche Weise für sich stehn, für sich stehn bleiben und ein Wachsthum für sich haben, — ich will sagen ganz verschiedne Grade und tempi von Alt, Jung, Reif, Mürbe, Faul? So dass zum Beispiel ein Musiker zeitlebens Dinge schaffen könnte, die dem, was sein verwöhntes Zuhörer-Ohr, Zuhörer-Herz schätzt, schmeckt, vorzieht, widersprechen: — er brauchte noch nicht einmal um diesen Widerspruch zu wissen! Man kann, wie eine fast peinlich-regelmässige Erfahrung zeigt, leicht mit seinem Geschmack über den Geschmack seiner Kraft hinauswachsen, selbst ohne dass letztere dadurch gelähmt und am Hervorbringen gehindert würde; es kann aber auch etwas Umgekehrtes geschehn, — und dies gerade ist es, worauf ich die Aufmerksamkeit der Künstler lenken möchte. Ein Beständig-Schaffender, eine „Mutter“ von Mensch, im grossen Sinne des Wortes, ein Solcher, der von Nichts als von Schwangerschaften und Kindsbetten seines Geistes mehr weiss und hört, der gar keine Zeit hat, sich und sein Werk zu bedenken, zu vergleichen, der auch nicht mehr Willens ist, seinen Geschmack noch zu üben, und ihn einfach vergisst, nämlich stehn, liegen oder fallen lässt, — vielleicht bringt ein Solcher endlich Werke hervor, denen er mit seinem Urtheile längst nicht mehr gewachsen ist: so dass er über sie und sich Dummheiten sagt, — sagt und denkt. Dies scheint mir bei fruchtbaren Künstlern beinahe das normale Verhältniss, — Niemand kennt ein Kind schlechter als seine Eltern — und es gilt sogar, um ein ungeheueres Beispiel zu nehmen, in Bezug auf die ganze griechische Dichter- und Künstler-Welt: sie hat niemals „gewusst“, was sie gethan hat...

370 Was ist Romantik? — Man erinnert sich vielleicht, zum Mindesten unter meinen Freunden, dass ich Anfangs mit einigen dicken Irrthümern und Ueberschätzungen und jedenfalls als Hoffender auf diese moderne Welt losgegangen bin. Ich verstand — wer weiss, auf welche persönlichen Erfahrungen hin? — den philosophischen Pessimismus des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, wie als ob er das Symptom von höherer Kraft des Gedankens, von verwegenerer Tapferkeit, von siegreicherer Fülle des Lebens sei, als diese dem achtzehnten Jahrhundert, dem Zeitalter Hume’s, Kant’s, Condillac’s und der Sensualisten, zu eigen gewesen sind: so dass mir die tragische Erkenntniss wie der eigentliche Luxus unsrer Cultur erschien, als deren kostbarste, vornehmste, gefährlichste Art Verschwendung, aber immerhin, auf Grund ihres Ueberreichthums, als ihr erlaubter Luxus. Desgleichen deutete ich mir die deutsche Musik zurecht zum Ausdruck einer dionysischen Mächtigkeit der deutschen Seele: in ihr glaubte ich das Erdbeben zu hören, mit dem eine von Alters her aufgestaute Urkraft sich endlich Luft macht — gleichgültig dagegen, ob Alles, was sonst Cultur heisst, dabei in’s Zittern geräth. Man sieht, ich verkannte damals, sowohl am philosophischen Pessimismus, wie an der deutschen Musik, das was ihren eigentlichen Charakter ausmacht — ihre Romantik. Was ist Romantik? Jede Kunst, jede Philosophie darf als Heil- und Hülfsmittel im Dienste des wachsenden, kämpfenden Lebens angesehn werden: sie setzen immer Leiden und Leidende voraus. Aber es giebt zweierlei Leidende, einmal die an der Ueberfülle des Lebens Leidenden, welche eine dionysische Kunst wollen und ebenso eine tragische Ansicht und Einsicht in das Leben, — und sodann die an der Verarmung des Lebens Leidenden, die Ruhe, Stille, glattes Meer, Erlösung von sich durch die Kunst und Erkenntniss suchen, oder aber den Rausch, den Krampf, die Betäubung, den Wahnsinn. Dem Doppel-Bedürfnisse der Letzteren entspricht alle Romantik in Künsten und Erkenntnissen, ihnen entsprach (und entspricht) ebenso Schopenhauer als Richard Wagner, um jene berühmtesten und ausdrücklichsten Romantiker zu nennen, welche damals von mir missverstanden wurden — übrigens nicht zu ihrem Nachtheile, wie man mir in aller Billigkeit zugestehn darf. Der Reichste an Lebensfülle, der dionysische Gott und Mensch, kann sich nicht nur den Anblick des Fürchterlichen und Fragwürdigen gönnen, sondern selbst die fürchterliche That und jeden Luxus von Zerstörung, Zersetzung, Verneinung; bei ihm erscheint das Böse, Unsinnige und Hässliche gleichsam erlaubt, in Folge eines Ueberschusses von zeugenden, befruchtenden Kräften, welcher aus jeder Wüste noch ein üppiges Fruchtland zu schaffen im Stande ist. Umgekehrt würde der Leidendste, Lebensärmste am meisten die Milde, Friedlichkeit, Güte nöthig haben, im Denken und im Handeln, womöglich einen Gott, der ganz eigentlich ein Gott für Kranke, ein „Heiland“ wäre; ebenso auch die Logik, die begriffliche Verständlichkeit des Daseins — denn die Logik beruhigt, giebt Vertrauen —, kurz eine gewisse warme furchtabwehrende Enge und Einschliessung in optimistische Horizonte. Dergestalt lernte ich allmählich Epikur begreifen, den Gegensatz eines dionysischen Pessimisten, ebenfalls den „Christen“, der in der That nur eine Art Epikureer und, gleich jenem, wesentlich Romantiker ist, — und mein Blick schärfte sich immer mehr für jene schwierigste und verfänglichste Form des Rückschlusses, in der die meisten Fehler gemacht werden — des Rückschlusses vom Werk auf den Urheber, von der That auf den Thäter, vom Ideal auf Den, der es nöthig hat, von jeder Denk- und Werthungsweise auf das dahinter kommandirende Bedürfniss. — In Hinsicht auf alle ästhetischen Werthe bediene ich mich jetzt dieser Hauptunterscheidung: ich frage, in jedem einzelnen Falle, „ist hier der Hunger oder der Ueberfluss schöpferisch geworden?“ Von vornherein möchte sich eine andre Unterscheidung mehr zu empfehlen scheinen — sie ist bei weitem augenscheinlicher — nämlich das Augenmerk darauf, ob das Verlangen nach Starrmachen, Verewigen, nach Sein die Ursache des Schaffens ist oder aber das Verlangen nach Zerstörung, nach Wechsel, nach Neuem, nach Zukunft, nach Werden. Aber beide Arten des Verlangens erweisen sich, tiefer angesehn, noch als zweideutig, und zwar deutbar eben nach jenem vorangestellten und mit Recht, wie mich dünkt, vorgezogenen Schema. Das Verlangen nach Zerstörung, Wechsel, Werden kann der Ausdruck der übervollen, zukunftsschwangeren Kraft sein (mein terminus ist dafür, wie man weiss, das Wort „dionysisch“), aber es kann auch der Hass des Missrathenen, Entbehrenden, Schlechtweggekommenen sein, der zerstört, zerstören muss, weil ihn das Bestehende, ja alles Bestehn, alles Sein selbst empört und aufreizt — man sehe sich, um diesen Affekt zu verstehn, unsre Anarchisten aus der Nähe an. Der Wille zum Verewigen bedarf gleichfalls einer zwiefachen Interpretation. Er kann einmal aus Dankbarkeit und Liebe kommen: — eine Kunst dieses Ursprungs wird immer eine Apotheosenkunst sein, dithyrambisch vielleicht mit Rubens, selig-spöttisch mit Hafis, hell und gütig mit Goethe, und einen homerischen Licht- und Glorienschein über alle Dinge breitend. Er kann aber auch jener tyrannische Wille eines Schwerleidenden, Kämpfenden, Torturirten sein, welcher das Persönlichste, Einzelnste, Engste, die eigentliche Idiosynkrasie seines Leidens noch zum verbindlichen Gesetz und Zwang stempeln möchte und der an allen Dingen gleichsam Rache nimmt, dadurch, dass er ihnen sein Bild, das Bild seiner Tortur, aufdrückt, einzwängt, einbrennt. Letzteres ist der romantische Pessimismus in seiner ausdrucksvollsten Form, sei es als Schopenhauer’sche Willens-Philosophie, sei es als Wagner’sche Musik: — der romantische Pessimismus, das letzte grosse Ereigniss im Schicksal unsrer Cultur. (Dass es noch einen ganz anderen Pessimismus geben könne, einen klassischen — diese Ahnung und Vision gehört zu mir, als unablöslich von mir, als mein proprium und ipsissimum: nur dass meinen Ohren das Wort „klassisch“ widersteht, es ist bei weitem zu abgebraucht, zu rund und unkenntlich geworden. Ich nenne jenen Pessimismus der Zukunft — denn er kommt! ich sehe ihn kommen! — den dionysischen Pessimismus.)

371 Wir Unverständlichen. — Haben wir uns je darüber beklagt, missverstanden, verkannt, verwechselt, verleumdet, verhört und überhört zu werden? Eben das ist unser Loos — oh für lange noch! sagen wir, um bescheiden zu sein, bis 1901 —, es ist auch unsre Auszeichnung; wir würden uns selbst nicht genug in Ehren halten, wenn wir’s anders wünschten. Man verwechselt uns — das macht, wir selbst wachsen, wir wechseln fortwährend, wir stossen alte Rinden ab, wir häuten uns mit jedem Frühjahre noch, wir werden immer jünger, zukünftiger, höher, stärker, wir treiben unsre Wurzeln immer mächtiger in die Tiefe — in’s Böse —, während wir zugleich den Himmel immer liebevoller, immer breiter umarmen und sein Licht immer durstiger mit allen unsren Zweigen und Blättern in uns hineinsaugen. Wir wachsen wie Bäume — das ist schwer zu verstehn, wie alles Leben! — nicht an Einer Stelle, sondern überall, nicht in Einer Richtung, sondern ebenso hinauf, hinaus wie hinein und hinunter, — unsre Kraft treibt zugleich in Stamm, Aesten und Wurzeln, es steht uns gar nicht mehr frei, irgend Etwas einzeln zu thun, irgend etwas Einzelnes noch zu sein... So ist es unser Loos, wie gesagt; wir wachsen in die Höhe; und gesetzt, es wäre selbst unser Verhängniss — denn wir wohnen den Blitzen immer näher! — wohlan, wir halten es darum nicht weniger in Ehren, es bleibt Das, was wir nicht theilen, nicht mittheilen wollen, das Verhängniss der Höhe, unser Verhängniss...

372 Warum wir keine Idealisten sind. — Ehemals hatten die Philosophen Furcht vor den Sinnen: haben wir — diese Furcht vielleicht allzusehr verlernt? Wir sind heute allesammt Sensualisten, wir Gegenwärtigen und Zukünftigen in der Philosophie, nicht der Theorie nach, aber der Praxis, der Praktik... Jene hingegen meinten, durch die Sinne aus ihrer Welt, dem kalten Reiche der „Ideen“, auf ein gefährliches südlicheres Eiland weggelockt zu werden: woselbst, wie sie fürchteten, ihre Philosophen-Tugenden wie Schnee in der Sonne wegschmelzen würden. „Wachs in den Ohren“ war damals beinahe Bedingung des Philosophirens; ein ächter Philosoph hörte das Leben nicht mehr, insofern Leben Musik ist, er leugnete die Musik des Lebens, — es ist ein alter Philosophen-Aberglaube, dass alle Musik Sirenen-Musik ist. — Nun möchten wir heute geneigt sein, gerade umgekehrt zu urtheilen (was an sich noch eben so falsch sein könnte): nämlich dass die Ideen schlimmere Verführerinnen seien als die Sinne, mit allem ihrem kalten anämischen Anscheine und nicht einmal trotz diesem Anscheine, — sie lebten immer vom „Blute“ des Philosophen, sie zehrten immer seine Sinne aus, ja, wenn man uns glauben will, auch sein „Herz“. Diese alten Philosophen waren herzlos: Philosophiren war immer eine Art Vampyrismus. Fühlt ihr nicht an solchen Gestalten, wie noch der Spinoza’s, etwas tief Änigmatisches und Unheimliches? Seht ihr das Schauspiel nicht, das sich hier abspielt, das beständige Blässer-werden —, die immer idealischer ausgelegte Entsinnlichung? Ahnt ihr nicht im Hintergrunde irgend eine lange verborgene Blutaussaugerin, welche mit den Sinnen ihren Anfang macht und zuletzt Knochen und Geklapper übrig behält, übrig lässt? — ich meine Kategorien, Formeln, Worte (denn, man vergebe mir, das was von Spinoza übrig blieb, amor intellectualis dei, ist ein Geklapper, nichts mehr! was ist amor, was deus, wenn ihnen jeder Tropfen Blut fehlt?...) In summa: aller philosophische Idealismus war bisher Etwas wie Krankheit, wo er nicht, wie im Falle Plato’s, die Vorsicht einer überreichen und gefährlichen Gesundheit, die Furcht vor übermächtigen Sinnen, die Klugheit eines klugen Sokratikers war. — Vielleicht sind wir Modernen nur nicht gesund genug, um Plato’s Idealismus nöthig zu haben? Und wir fürchten die Sinne nicht, weil — —

373 „Wissenschaft“ als Vorurtheil. — Es folgt aus den Gesetzen der Rangordnung, dass Gelehrte, insofern sie dem geistigen Mittelstande zugehören, die eigentlichen grossen Probleme und Fragezeichen gar nicht in Sicht bekommen dürfen: zudem reicht ihr Muth und ebenso ihr Blick nicht bis dahin, — vor Allem, ihr Bedürfniss, das sie zu Forschern macht, ihr inneres Vorausnehmen und Wünschen, es möchte so und so beschaffen sein, ihr Fürchten und Hoffen kommt zu bald schon zur Ruhe, zur Befriedigung. Was zum Beispiel den pedantischen Engländer Herbert Spencer auf seine Weise schwärmen macht und einen Hoffnungs-Strich, eine Horizont-Linie der Wünschbarkeit ziehen heisst, jene endliche Versöhnung von „Egoismus und Altruismus“, von der er fabelt, das macht Unsereinem beinahe Ekel: — eine Menschheit mit solchen Spencer’schen Perspektiven als letzten Perspektiven schiene uns der Verachtung, der Vernichtung werth! Aber schon dass Etwas als höchste Hoffnung von ihm empfunden werden muss, was Anderen bloss als widerliche Möglichkeit gilt und gelten darf, ist ein Fragezeichen, welches Spencer nicht vorauszusehn vermocht hätte... Ebenso steht es mit jenem Glauben, mit dem sich jetzt so viele materialistische Naturforscher zufrieden geben, dem Glauben an eine Welt, welche im menschlichen Denken, in menschlichen Werthbegriffen ihr Äquivalent und Maass haben soll, an eine „Welt der Wahrheit“, der man mit Hülfe unsrer viereckigen kleinen Menschenvernunft letztgültig beizukommen vermöchte — wie? wollen wir uns wirklich dergestalt das Dasein zu einer Rechenknechts-Uebung und Stubenhockerei für Mathematiker herabwürdigen lassen? Man soll es vor Allem nicht seines vieldeutigen Charakters entkleiden wollen: das fordert der gute Geschmack, meine Herren, der Geschmack der Ehrfurcht vor Allem, was über euren Horizont geht! Dass allein eine Welt-Interpretation im Rechte sei, bei der ihr zu Rechte besteht, bei der wissenschaftlich in eurem Sinne (— ihr meint eigentlich mechanistisch?) geforscht und fortgearbeitet werden kann, eine solche, die Zählen, Rechnen, Wägen, Sehn und Greifen und nichts weiter zulässt, das ist eine Plumpheit und Naivetät, gesetzt, dass es keine Geisteskrankheit, kein Idiotismus ist. Wäre es umgekehrt nicht recht wahrscheinlich, dass sich gerade das Oberflächlichste und Aeusserlichste vom Dasein — sein Scheinbarstes, seine Haut und Versinnlichung — am Ersten fassen liesse? vielleicht sogar allein fassen liesse? Eine „wissenschaftliche“ Welt-Interpretation, wie ihr sie versteht, könnte folglich immer noch eine der dümmsten, das heisst sinnärmsten aller möglichen Welt-Interpretationen sein: dies den Herrn Mechanikern in’s Ohr und Gewissen gesagt, die heute gern unter die Philosophen laufen und durchaus vermeinen, Mechanik sei die Lehre von den ersten und letzten Gesetzen, auf denen wie auf einem Grundstocke alles Dasein aufgebaut sein müsse. Aber eine essentiell mechanische Welt wäre eine essentiell sinnlose Welt! Gesetzt, man schätzte den Werth einer Musik darnach ab, wie viel von ihr gezählt, berechnet, in Formeln gebracht werden könne — wie absurd wäre eine solche „wissenschaftliche“ Abschätzung der Musik! Was hätte man von ihr begriffen, verstanden, erkannt! Nichts, geradezu Nichts von dem, was eigentlich an ihr „Musik“ ist!...

374 Unser neues „Unendliches“. — Wie weit der perspektivische Charakter des Daseins reicht oder gar ob es irgend einen andren Charakter noch hat, ob nicht ein Dasein ohne Auslegung, ohne „Sinn“ eben zum „Unsinn“ wird, ob, andrerseits, nicht alles Dasein essentiell ein auslegendes Dasein ist — das kann, wie billig, auch durch die fleissigste und peinlich-gewissenhafteste Analysis und Selbstprüfung des Intellekts nicht ausgemacht werden: da der menschliche Intellekt bei dieser Analysis nicht umhin kann, sich selbst unter seinen perspektivischen Formen zu sehn und nur in ihnen zu sehn. Wir können nicht um unsre Ecke sehn: es ist eine hoffnungslose Neugierde, wissen zu wollen, was es noch für andre Arten Intellekt und Perspektive geben könnte: zum Beispiel, ob irgend welche Wesen die Zeit zurück oder abwechselnd vorwärts und rückwärts empfinden können (womit eine andre Richtung des Lebens und ein andrer Begriff von Ursache und Wirkung gegeben wäre). Aber ich denke, wir sind heute zum Mindesten ferne von der lächerlichen Unbescheidenheit, von unsrer Ecke aus zu dekretiren, dass man nur von dieser Ecke aus Perspektiven haben dürfe. Die Welt ist uns vielmehr noch einmal „unendlich“ geworden: insofern wir die Möglichkeit nicht abweisen können, dass sie unendliche Interpretationen in sich schliesst. Noch einmal fasst uns der grosse Schauder — aber wer hätte wohl Lust, dieses Ungeheure von unbekannter Welt nach alter Weise sofort wieder zu vergöttlichen? Und etwa das Unbekannte fürderhin als „den Unbekannten“ anzubeten? Ach, es sind zu viele ungöttliche Möglichkeiten der Interpretation mit in dieses Unbekannte eingerechnet, zu viel Teufelei, Dummheit, Narrheit der Interpretation, — unsre eigne menschliche, allzumenschliche selbst, die wir kennen...

375 Warum wir Epikureer scheinen. — Wir sind vorsichtig, wir modernen Menschen, gegen letzte Ueberzeugungen; unser Misstrauen liegt auf der Lauer gegen die Bezauberungen und Gewissens-Ueberlistungen, welche in jedem starken Glauben, jedem unbedingten Ja und Nein liegen: wie erklärt sich das? Vielleicht, dass man darin zu einem guten Theil die Behutsamkeit des „gebrannten Kindes“, des enttäuschten Idealisten sehn darf, zu einem andern und bessern Theile aber auch die frohlockende Neugierde eines ehemaligen Eckenstehers, der durch seine Ecke in Verzweiflung gebracht worden ist und nunmehr im Gegensatz der Ecke schwelgt und schwärmt, im Unbegrenzten, im „Freien an sich“. Damit bildet sich ein nahezu epikurischer Erkenntniss-Hang aus, welcher den Fragezeichen-Charakter der Dinge nicht leichten Kaufs fahren lassen will; insgleichen ein Widerwille gegen die grossen Moral-Worte und -Gebärden, ein Geschmack, der alle plumpen vierschrötigen Gegensätze ablehnt und sich seiner Uebung in Vorbehalten mit Stolz bewusst ist. Denn Das macht unsern Stolz aus, dieses leichte Zügel-Straffziehn bei unsrem vorwärts stürmenden Drange nach Gewissheit, diese Selbstbeherrschung des Reiters auf seinen wildesten Ritten: nach wie vor nämlich haben wir tolle feurige Thiere unter uns, und wenn wir zögern, so ist es am wenigsten wohl die Gefahr, die uns zögern macht...

376 Unsre langsamen Zeiten. — So empfinden alle Künstler und Menschen der „Werke“, die mütterliche Art Mensch: immer glauben sie, bei jedem Abschnitte ihres Lebens — den ein Werk jedes Mal abschneidet —, schon am Ziele selbst zu sein, immer würden sie den Tod geduldig entgegen nehmen, mit dem Gefühl: „dazu sind wir reif.“ Dies ist nicht der Ausdruck der Ermüdung, — vielmehr der einer gewissen herbstlichen Sonnigkeit und Milde, welche jedes Mal das Werk selbst, das Reifgewordensein eines Werks, bei seinem Urheber hinterlässt. Da verlangsamt sich das tempo des Lebens und wird dick und honigflüssig — bis zu langen Fermaten, bis zum Glauben an die lange Fermate...

377 Wir Heimatlosen. — Es fehlt unter den Europäern von Heute nicht an solchen, die ein Recht haben, sich in einem abhebenden und ehrenden Sinne Heimatlose zu nennen, ihnen gerade sei meine geheime Weisheit und gaya scienza ausdrücklich an’s Herz gelegt! Denn ihr Loos ist hart, ihre Hoffnung ungewiss, es ist ein Kunststück, ihnen einen Trost zu erfinden — aber was hilft es! Wir Kinder der Zukunft, wie vermöchten wir in diesem Heute zu Hause zu sein! Wir sind allen Idealen abgünstig, auf welche hin Einer sich sogar in dieser zerbrechlichen zerbrochnen Uebergangszeit noch heimisch fühlen könnte; was aber deren „Realitäten“ betrifft, so glauben wir nicht daran, dass sie Dauer haben. Das Eis, das heute noch trägt, ist schon sehr dünn geworden: der Thauwind weht, wir selbst, wir Heimatlosen, sind Etwas, das Eis und andre allzudünne „Realitäten“ aufbricht... Wir „conserviren“ Nichts, wir wollen auch in keine Vergangenheit zurück, wir sind durchaus nicht „liberal“, wir arbeiten nicht für den „Fortschritt“, wir brauchen unser Ohr nicht erst gegen die Zukunfts-Sirenen des Marktes zu verstopfen — das, was sie singen, „gleiche Rechte“, „freie Gesellschaft“, „keine Herrn mehr und keine Knechte“, das lockt uns nicht! — wir halten es schlechterdings nicht für wünschenswerth, dass das Reich der Gerechtigkeit und Eintracht auf Erden gegründet werde (weil es unter allen Umständen das Reich der tiefsten Vermittelmässigung und Chineserei sein würde), wir freuen uns an Allen, die gleich uns die Gefahr, den Krieg, das Abenteuer lieben, die sich nicht abfinden, einfangen, versöhnen und verschneiden lassen, wir rechnen uns selbst unter die Eroberer, wir denken über die Nothwendigkeit neuer Ordnungen nach, auch einer neuen Sklaverei — denn zu jeder Verstärkung und Erhöhung des Typus „Mensch“ gehört auch eine neue Art Versklavung hinzu — nicht wahr? mit Alle dem müssen wir schlecht in einem Zeitalter zu Hause sein, welches die Ehre in Anspruch zu nehmen liebt, das menschlichste, mildeste, rechtlichste Zeitalter zu heissen, das die Sonne bisher gesehen hat? Schlimm genug, dass wir gerade bei diesen schönen Worten um so hässlichere Hintergedanken haben! Dass wir darin nur den Ausdruck — auch die Maskerade — der tiefen Schwächung, der Ermüdung, des Alters, der absinkenden Kraft sehen! Was kann uns daran gelegen sein, mit was für Flittern ein Kranker seine Schwäche aufputzt! Mag er sie als seine Tugend zur Schau tragen — es unterliegt ja keinem Zweifel, dass die Schwäche mild, ach so mild, so rechtlich, so unoffensiv, so „menschlich“ macht! — Die „Religion des Mitleidens“, zu der man uns überreden möchte — oh wir kennen die hysterischen Männlein und Weiblein genug, welche heute gerade diese Religion zum Schleier und Aufputz nöthig haben! Wir sind keine Humanitarier; wir würden uns nie zu erlauben wagen, von unsrer „Liebe zur Menschheit“ zu reden — dazu ist Unsereins nicht Schauspieler genug! Oder nicht Saint-Simonist genug, nicht Franzose genug. Man muss schon mit einem gallischen Uebermaass erotischer Reizbarkeit und verliebter Ungeduld behaftet sein, um sich in ehrlicher Weise sogar noch der Menschheit mit seiner Brunst zu nähern... Der Menschheit! Gab es je noch ein scheusslicheres altes Weib unter allen alten Weibern? (— es müsste denn etwa „die Wahrheit“ sein: eine Frage für Philosophen). Nein, wir lieben die Menschheit nicht; andererseits sind wir aber auch lange nicht „deutsch“ genug, wie heute das Wort „deutsch“ gang und gäbe ist, um dem Nationalismus und dem Rassenhass das Wort zu reden, um an der nationalen Herzenskrätze und Blutvergiftung Freude haben zu können, derenthalben sich jetzt in Europa Volk gegen Volk wie mit Quarantänen abgrenzt, absperrt. Dazu sind wir zu unbefangen, zu boshaft, zu verwöhnt, auch zu gut unterrichtet, zu „gereist“: wir ziehen es bei Weitem vor, auf Bergen zu leben, abseits, „unzeitgemäss“, in vergangnen oder kommenden Jahrhunderten, nur damit wir uns die stille Wuth ersparen, zu der wir uns verurtheilt wüssten als Augenzeugen einer Politik, die den deutschen Geist öde macht, indem sie ihn eitel macht, und kleine Politik ausserdem ist: — hat sie nicht nöthig, damit ihre eigne Schöpfung nicht sofort wieder auseinanderfällt, sie zwischen zwei Todhasse zu pflanzen? muss sie nicht die Verewigung der Kleinstaaterei Europa’s wollen?... Wir Heimatlosen, wir sind der Rasse und Abkunft nach zu vielfach und gemischt, als „moderne Menschen“, und folglich wenig versucht, an jener verlognen Rassen-Selbstbewunderung und Unzucht theilzunehmen, welche sich heute in Deutschland als Zeichen deutscher Gesinnung zur Schau trägt und die bei dem Volke des „historischen Sinns“ zwiefach falsch und unanständig anmuthet. Wir sind, mit Einem Worte — und es soll unser Ehrenwort sein! — gute Europäer, die Erben Europa’s, die reichen, überhäuften, aber auch überreich verpflichteten Erben von Jahrtausenden des europäischen Geistes: als solche auch dem Christenthum entwachsen und abhold, und gerade, weil wir aus ihm gewachsen sind, weil unsre Vorfahren Christen von rücksichtsloser Rechtschaffenheit des Christenthums waren, die ihrem Glauben willig Gut und Blut, Stand und Vaterland zum Opfer gebracht haben. Wir — thun desgleichen. Wofür doch? Für unsern Unglauben? Für jede Art Unglauben? Nein, das wisst ihr besser, meine Freunde! Das verborgne Ja in euch ist stärker als alle Neins und Vielleichts, an denen ihr mit eurer Zeit krank seid; und wenn ihr auf’s Meer müsst, ihr Auswanderer, so zwingt dazu auch euch — ein Glaube!..

378 „Und werden wieder hell“. — Wir Freigebigen und Reichen des Geistes, die wir gleich offnen Brunnen an der Strasse stehn und es Niemandem wehren mögen, dass er aus uns schöpft: wir wissen uns leider nicht zu wehren, wo wir es möchten, wir können durch Nichts verhindern, dass man uns trübt, finster macht, — dass die Zeit, in der wir leben, ihr „Zeitlichstes“, dass deren schmutzige Vögel ihren Unrath, die Knaben ihren Krimskrams und erschöpfte, an uns ausruhende Wandrer ihr kleines und grosses Elend in uns werfen. Aber wir werden es machen, wie wir es immer gemacht haben: wir nehmen, was man auch in uns wirft, hinab in unsre Tiefe — denn wir sind tief, wir vergessen nicht — und werden wieder hell...

379 Zwischenrede des Narren. — Das ist kein Misanthrop, der dies Buch geschrieben hat: der Menschenhass bezahlt sich heute zu theuer. Um zu hassen, wie man ehemals den Menschen gehasst hat, timonisch, im Ganzen, ohne Abzug, aus vollem Herzen, aus der ganzen Liebe des Hasses — dazu müsste man auf’s Verachten Verzicht leisten: — und wie viel feine Freude, wie viel Geduld, wie viel Gütigkeit selbst verdanken wir gerade unsrem Verachten! Zudem sind wir damit die „Auserwählten Gottes“: das feine Verachten ist unser Geschmack und Vorrecht, unsre Kunst, unsre Tugend vielleicht, wir Modernsten unter den Modernen!... Der Hass dagegen stellt gleich, stellt gegenüber, im Hass ist Ehre, endlich: im Hass ist Furcht, ein grosser guter Theil Furcht. Wir Furchtlosen aber, wir geistigeren Menschen dieses Zeitalters, wir kennen unsern Vortheil gut genug, um gerade als die Geistigeren in Hinsicht auf diese Zeit ohne Furcht zu leben. Man wird uns schwerlich köpfen, einsperren, verbannen; man wird nicht einmal unsre Bücher verbieten und verbrennen. Das Zeitalter liebt den Geist, es liebt uns und hat uns nöthig, selbst wenn wir es ihm zu verstehn geben müssten, dass wir in der Verachtung Künstler sind; dass uns jeder Umgang mit Menschen einen leichten Schauder macht; dass wir mit aller unsrer Milde, Geduld, Menschenfreundlichkeit, Höflichkeit unsre Nase nicht überreden können, von ihrem Vorurtheile abzustehn, welches sie gegen die Nähe eines Menschen hat; dass wir die Natur lieben, je weniger menschlich es in ihr zugeht, und die Kunst, wenn sie die Flucht des Künstlers vor dem Menschen oder der Spott des Künstlers über den Menschen oder der Spott des Künstlers über sich selber ist...

380 „Der Wanderer“ redet. — Um unsrer europäischen Moralität einmal aus der Ferne ansichtig zu werden, um sie an anderen, früheren oder kommenden, Moralitäten zu messen, dazu muss man es machen, wie es ein Wanderer macht, der wissen will, wie hoch die Thürme einer Stadt sind: dazu verlässt er die Stadt. „Gedanken über moralische Vorurtheile“, falls sie nicht Vorurtheile über Vorurtheile sein sollen, setzen eine Stellung ausserhalb der Moral voraus, irgend ein Jenseits von Gut und Böse, zu dem man steigen, klettern, fliegen muss, — und, im gegebenen Falle, jedenfalls ein Jenseits von unsrem Gut und Böse, eine Freiheit von allem „Europa“, letzteres als eine Summe von kommandirenden Werthurtheilen verstanden, welche uns in Fleisch und Blut übergegangen sind. Dass man gerade dorthinaus, dorthinauf will, ist vielleicht eine kleine Tollheit, ein absonderliches unvernünftiges „du musst“ — denn auch wir Erkennenden haben unsre Idiosynkrasien des „unfreien Willens“ —: die Frage ist, ob man wirklich dorthinauf kann. Dies mag an vielfachen Bedingungen hängen, in der Hauptsache ist es die Frage darnach, wie leicht oder wie schwer wir sind, das Problem unsrer „spezifischen Schwere“. Man muss sehr leicht sein, um seinen Willen zur Erkenntniss bis in eine solche Ferne und gleichsam über seine Zeit hinaus zu treiben, um sich zum Ueberblick über Jahrtausende Augen zu schaffen und noch dazu reinen Himmel in diesen Augen! Man muss sich von Vielem losgebunden haben, was gerade uns Europäer von Heute drückt, hemmt, niederhält, schwer macht. Der Mensch eines solchen Jenseits, der die obersten Werthmaasse seiner Zeit selbst in Sicht bekommen will, hat dazu vorerst nöthig, diese Zeit in sich selbst zu „überwinden“ — es ist die Probe seiner Kraft — und folglich nicht nur seine Zeit, sondern auch seinen bisherigen Widerwillen und Widerspruch gegen diese Zeit, sein Leiden an dieser Zeit, seine Zeit-Ungemässheit, seine Romantik...

381 Zur Frage der Verständlichkeit. — Man will nicht nur verstanden werden, wenn man schreibt, sondern ebenso gewiss auch nicht verstanden werden. Es ist noch ganz und gar kein Einwand gegen ein Buch, wenn irgend Jemand es unverständlich findet: vielleicht gehörte eben dies zur Absicht seines Schreibers, — er wollte nicht von „irgend Jemand“ verstanden werden. Jeder vornehmere Geist und Geschmack wählt sich, wenn er sich mittheilen will, auch seine Zuhörer; indem er sie wählt, zieht er zugleich gegen „die Anderen“ seine Schranken. Alle feineren Gesetze eines Stils haben da ihren Ursprung: sie halten zugleich ferne, sie schaffen Distanz, sie verbieten „den Eingang“, das Verständniss, wie gesagt, — während sie Denen die Ohren aufmachen, die uns mit den Ohren verwandt sind. Und dass ich es unter uns sage und in meinem Falle, — ich will mich weder durch meine Unwissenheit, noch durch die Munterkeit meines Temperaments verhindern lassen, euch verständlich zu sein, meine Freunde: durch die Munterkeit nicht, wie sehr sie auch mich zwingt, einer Sache geschwind beizukommen, um ihr überhaupt beizukommen. Denn ich halte es mit tiefen Problemen, wie mit einem kalten Bade — schnell hinein, schnell hinaus. Dass man damit nicht in die Tiefe, nicht tief genug hinunter komme, ist der Aberglaube der Wasserscheuen, der Feinde des kalten Wassers; sie reden ohne Erfahrung. Oh! Die grosse Kälte macht geschwind! — Und nebenbei gefragt: bleibt wirklich eine Sache dadurch allein schon unverstanden und unerkannt, dass sie nur im Fluge berührt, angeblickt, angeblitzt wird? Muss man durchaus erst auf ihr fest sitzen? auf ihr wie auf einem Ei gebrütet haben? Diu noctuque incubando, wie Newton von sich selbst sagte? Zum Mindesten giebt es Wahrheiten von einer besonderen Scheu und Kitzlichkeit, deren man nicht anders habhaft wird, als plötzlich, — die man überraschen oder lassen muss... Endlich hat meine Kürze noch einen andern Werth: innerhalb solcher Fragen, wie sie mich beschäftigen, muss ich Vieles kurz sagen, damit es noch kürzer gehört wird. Man hat nämlich als Immoralist zu verhüten, dass man die Unschuld verdirbt, ich meine die Esel und die alten Jungfern beiderlei Geschlechts, die Nichts vom Leben haben als ihre Unschuld; mehr noch, meine Schriften sollen sie begeistern, erheben, zur Tugend ermuthigen. Ich wüsste Nichts auf Erden, was lustiger wäre als begeisterte alte Esel zu sehn und Jungfern, welche durch die süssen Gefühle der Tugend erregt werden: und „das habe ich gesehn“ — also sprach Zarathustra. So viel in Absicht der Kürze; schlimmer steht es mit meiner Unwissenheit, deren ich selbst vor mir selber kein Hehl habe. Es giebt Stunden, wo ich mich ihrer schäme; freilich ebenfalls Stunden, wo ich mich dieser Scham schäme. Vielleicht sind wir Philosophen allesammt heute zum Wissen schlimm gestellt: die Wissenschaft wächst, die Gelehrtesten von uns sind nahe daran zu entdecken, dass sie zu wenig wissen. Aber schlimmer wäre es immer noch, wenn es anders stünde, — wenn wir zu viel wüssten; unsre Aufgabe ist und bleibt zuerst, uns nicht selber zu verwechseln. Wir sind etwas Anderes als Gelehrte: obwohl es nicht zu umgehn ist, dass wir auch, unter Anderem, gelehrt sind. Wir haben andre Bedürfnisse, ein andres Wachsthum, eine andre Verdauung: wir brauchen mehr, wir brauchen auch weniger. Wie viel ein Geist zu seiner Ernährung nöthig hat, dafür giebt es keine Formel; ist aber sein Geschmack auf Unabhängigkeit gerichtet, auf schnelles Kommen und Gehn, auf Wanderung, auf Abenteuer vielleicht, denen nur die Geschwindesten gewachsen sind, so lebt er lieber frei mit schmaler Kost, als unfrei und gestopft. Nicht Fett, sondern die grösste Geschmeidigkeit und Kraft ist das, was ein guter Tänzer von seiner Nahrung will, — und ich wüsste nicht, was der Geist eines Philosophen mehr zu sein wünschte, als ein guter Tänzer. Der Tanz nämlich ist sein Ideal, auch seine Kunst, zuletzt auch seine einzige Frömmigkeit, sein „Gottesdienst“...

382 Die grosse Gesundheit. — Wir Neuen, Namenlosen, Schlechtverständlichen, wir Frühgeburten einer noch unbewiesenen Zukunft — wir bedürfen zu einem neuen Zwecke auch eines neuen Mittels, nämlich einer neuen Gesundheit, einer stärkeren gewitzteren zäheren verwegneren lustigeren, als alle Gesundheiten bisher waren. Wessen Seele darnach dürstet, den ganzen Umfang der bisherigen Werthe und Wünschbarkeiten erlebt und alle Küsten dieses idealischen „Mittelmeers“ umschifft zu haben, wer aus den Abenteuern der eigensten Erfahrung wissen will, wie es einem Eroberer und Entdecker des Ideals zu Muthe ist, insgleichen einem Künstler, einem Heiligen, einem Gesetzgeber, einem Weisen, einem Gelehrten, einem Frommen, einem Wahrsager, einem Göttlich-Abseitigen alten Stils: der hat dazu zuallererst Eins nöthig, die grosse Gesundheit — eine solche, welche man nicht nur hat, sondern auch beständig noch erwirbt und erwerben muss, weil man sie immer wieder preisgiebt, preisgeben muss!... Und nun, nachdem wir lange dergestalt unterwegs waren, wir Argonauten des Ideals, muthiger vielleicht, als klug ist, und oft genug schiffbrüchig und zu Schaden gekommen, aber, wie gesagt, gesünder als man es uns erlauben möchte, gefährlich-gesund, immer wieder gesund, — will es uns scheinen, als ob wir, zum Lohn dafür, ein noch unentdecktes Land vor uns haben, dessen Grenzen noch Niemand abgesehn hat, ein Jenseits aller bisherigen Länder und Winkel des Ideals, eine Welt so überreich an Schönem, Fremdem, Fragwürdigem, Furchtbarem und Göttlichem, dass unsre Neugierde ebensowohl wie unser Besitzdurst ausser sich gerathen sind — ach, dass wir nunmehr durch Nichts mehr zu ersättigen sind! Wie könnten wir uns, nach solchen Ausblicken und mit einem solchen Heisshunger in Gewissen und Wissen, noch am gegenwärtigen Menschen genügen lassen? Schlimm genug: aber es ist unvermeidlich, dass wir seinen würdigsten Zielen und Hoffnungen nur mit einem übel aufrecht erhaltenen Ernste zusehn und vielleicht nicht einmal mehr zusehn. Ein andres Ideal läuft vor uns her, ein wunderliches, versucherisches, gefahrenreiches Ideal, zu dem wir Niemanden überreden möchten, weil wir Niemandem so leicht das Recht darauf zugestehn: das Ideal eines Geistes, der naiv, das heisst ungewollt und aus überströmender Fülle und Mächtigkeit mit Allem spielt, was bisher heilig, gut, unberührbar, göttlich hiess; für den das Höchste, woran das Volk billigerweise sein Werthmaass hat, bereits so viel wie Gefahr, Verfall, Erniedrigung oder, mindestens, wie Erholung, Blindheit, zeitweiliges Selbstvergessen bedeuten würde; das Ideal eines menschlich-übermenschlichen Wohlseins und Wohlwollens, das oft genug unmenschlich erscheinen wird, zum Beispiel, wenn es sich neben den ganzen bisherigen Erden-Ernst, neben alle Art Feierlichkeit in Gebärde, Wort, Klang, Blick, Moral und Aufgabe wie deren leibhafteste unfreiwillige Parodie hinstellt — und mit dem, trotzalledem, vielleicht der grosse Ernst erst anhebt, das eigentliche Fragezeichen erst gesetzt wird, das Schicksal der Seele sich wendet, der Zeiger rückt, die Tragödie beginnt...

383 Epilog. — Aber indem ich zum Schluss dieses düstere Fragezeichen langsam, langsam hinmale und eben noch Willens bin, meinen Lesern die Tugenden des rechten Lesers — oh was für vergessene und unbekannte Tugenden! — in’s Gedächtniss zu rufen, begegnet mir’s, dass um mich das boshafteste, munterste, koboldigste Lachen laut wird: die Geister meines Buches selber fallen über mich her, ziehn mich an den Ohren und rufen mich zur Ordnung. „Wir halten es nicht mehr aus — rufen sie mir zu —; fort, fort mit dieser rabenschwarzen Musik Ist es nicht rings heller Vormittag um uns? Und grüner weicher Grund und Rasen, das Königreich des Tanzes? Gab es je eine bessere Stunde, um fröhlich zu sein? Wer singt uns ein Lied, ein Vormittagslied, so sonnig, so leicht, so flügge, dass es die Grillen nicht verscheucht, — dass es die Grillen vielmehr einlädt, mit zu singen, mit zu tanzen? Und lieber noch einen einfältigen bäurischen Dudelsack als solche geheimnissvolle Laute, solche Unkenrufe, Grabesstimmen und Murmelthierpfiffe, mit denen Sie uns in Ihrer Wildniss bisher regalirt haben, mein Herr Einsiedler und Zukunftsmusikant! Nein! Nicht solche Töne! Sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen und freudenvollere!“ — Gefällt es euch so, meine ungeduldigen Freunde? Wohlan! Wer wäre euch nicht gern zu Willen?

Mein Dudelsack wartet schon, meine Kehle auch — sie mag ein wenig rauh klingen, nehmt fürlieb! dafür sind wir im Gebirge. Aber was ihr zu hören bekommt, ist wenigstens neu; und wenn ihr’s nicht versteht, wenn ihr den Sänger missversteht, was liegt daran! Das ist nun einmal „des Sängers Fluch“. Um so deutlicher könnt ihr seine Musik und Weise hören, um so besser auch nach seiner Pfeife — tanzen. Wollt ihr das?...

* * *

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.

We Fearless Ones.

Carcass, you tremble? You would tremble far more if you knew where I am taking you.

Turenne.

343 What Our Cheerfulness Is About. — The greatest recent event, that "God is dead," that faith in the Christian God has become unbelievable, is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. At least for the few whose eyes, whose suspicion, are strong and fine enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have gone down, some old profound trust has been turned into doubt. For them our old world must seem to grow more evening-like every day, more mistrustful, stranger, "older." On the whole, however, one may say that the event itself is far too great, too distant, too far outside the grasp of most people, for even its news to be said to have arrived. Much less do many people yet know what has actually happened here, and everything that must now collapse, since it was built on this faith, leaned against it, and grew into it: for example, our whole European morality. This long abundance and sequence of breaking down, destruction, ruin and overturning that is now ahead: who today guesses enough of it to be the teacher and forerunner of this enormous logic of terror, the prophet of a darkening and an eclipse of the sun, the like of which has probably never been on earth?... Even we, born riddle-solvers, who wait as it were on the mountains, placed between today and tomorrow and stretched into the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstborn and premature children of the coming century, for whom the shadows that must soon wrap Europe should already have come into view: why is it that even we, without any real participation in this darkening, and above all without any care or fear for ourselves, look toward its approach? Perhaps we are still too much under the immediate consequences of this event. And these immediate consequences, its consequences for us, are, contrary to what one might perhaps expect, by no means sad and darkening. They are rather like a new kind of light, hard to describe: happiness, relief, cheerfulness, encouragement, dawn... Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, at the news that "the old god is dead," as if lit up by a new dawn. Our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, foreboding and expectation. At last the horizon seems free to us again, even if it is not bright. At last our ships may set out again, may set out in the face of any danger. Every venture of the knower is allowed again. The sea, our sea, lies open again before us, perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea." —

344 In What Respects We Too Are Still Pious. — In science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, and people say this with good reason. Only when they agree to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, a provisional standpoint for experiment, a regulative fiction, may they be admitted, and even granted a certain value within the realm of knowledge. Even so, with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. — But does this not mean, looked at more closely: only when a conviction stops being a conviction may it gain admission to science? Would the discipline of the scientific spirit not begin by permitting itself no more convictions?... It probably stands that way. The only question left is whether, in order for this discipline to begin, there must not already be a conviction, and indeed one so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself. One sees that science too rests on a faith, and that there is no science "without presuppositions" at all. The question whether truth is necessary must not only be answered yes already beforehand, but answered yes to such a degree that the proposition, the faith, the conviction expressed in it reads: "Nothing is more necessary than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only a second-rank value." — This unconditional will to truth: what is it? Is it the will not to let oneself be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in this last way as well: provided that under the generalization "I will not deceive" one also includes the particular case "I will not deceive myself." But why not deceive? But why not let oneself be deceived? — Note that the reasons for the first lie on an entirely different ground from the reasons for the second:

one does not want to be deceived, on the assumption that being deceived is harmful, dangerous, fateful. In this sense science would be a long prudence, a caution, a usefulness, against which one may fairly object: really? Is wanting not to let oneself be deceived less harmful, less dangerous, less fateful? What do you know in advance about the character of existence, so that you can decide whether the greater advantage lies with the unconditionally mistrustful or the unconditionally trusting? And if both should be necessary, much trust and much mistrust, where then would science take its unconditional faith, the conviction it rests on, that truth is more important than any other thing, even than every other conviction? This very conviction could not have arisen if truth and untruth had both continually proved useful, as is the case. So — the faith in science, which is undeniably there, cannot have originated in such a calculation of usefulness. It must have arisen rather despite the constant proof that the will to truth, the "truth at any price," is useless and dangerous. "At any price": oh, we understand this well enough, once we have first offered one faith after another on this altar and butchered it! Consequently, "will to truth" does not mean "I will not let myself be deceived," but, there is no choice, "I will not deceive, not even myself." — and with this we are on the ground of morality. For you need only ask yourself thoroughly: "Why do you not want to deceive?" Especially if it looks, and it does look so, as if life were built on appearance, I mean on error, fraud, pretense, dazzling, self-dazzling. And if, on the other hand, the great forms of life have actually always sided with the most unscrupulous polytropoi. Such a resolve might, read generously, be a Quixoterie, a small enthusiastic madness. But it might also be something worse: an anti-life, destructive principle.... "Will to truth": that could be a hidden will to death. — In this way the question why science? leads back to the moral problem: what is morality for at all, if life, nature and history are "immoral"? There is no doubt that the truthful person, in that daring and final sense which the faith in science presupposes, affirms thereby another world than that of life, nature and history. And insofar as he affirms this "other world," must he not, by that very act, deny its counterpart, this world, our world?... But one will have understood what I am getting at: that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests. That even we knowers of today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire from the blaze lit by a faith thousands of years old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But what if this is becoming more and more unbelievable, if nothing proves itself divine any more except error, blindness and lying, if God himself proves to be our longest lie?

345 Morality as a Problem. — The lack of a personality takes its revenge everywhere. A weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies and disowns itself is no longer good for anything worthwhile, and least of all for philosophy. "Selflessness" has no value in heaven or on earth. The great problems all demand great love, and only strong, round, secure minds are capable of this, minds that sit firmly on themselves. It makes the most important difference whether a thinker stands personally toward his problems, so that in them he has his fate, his distress, and also his best happiness, or whether he stands "impersonally," meaning that he knows how to touch and grasp them only with the feelers of cold, curious thought. In the second case nothing comes of it. That much can be promised, for the great problems, even if they can be grasped at all, cannot be held by frogs and weaklings. That has been their taste since eternity. It is a taste, by the way, that they share with all the worthy little women. — How is it, then, that I have not yet met anyone, even in books, who stood in this position as a person toward morality, who knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his own personal distress, torment, delight, passion? It is evident that until now morality has not been a problem at all. It has rather been the very thing on which people agreed, after all their mistrust, division and contradiction: the sacred place of peace where thinkers rest even from themselves, breathe freely and come back to life. I see no one who has dared a critique of moral value judgments. I miss even the attempts of scientific curiosity, of the spoiled, tempting imagination of psychologists and historians, which easily anticipates a problem and snatches it in passing, without really knowing what has been snatched. I have hardly found a few sparse beginnings toward an origin story of these feelings and valuations (which is something different from a critique of them, and once more something different from the history of ethical systems). In one case I have done everything to encourage an inclination and talent for this kind of history. In vain, it seems to me today. These historians of morality (particularly the English) are not much use. They usually stand, without suspecting it, still innocently under the command of a particular morality, and without knowing it they serve as shield-bearers and retinue for it. Take, for example, that old popular superstition of Christian Europe, still repeated so trustingly, that the mark of a moral action lies in the selfless, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing, or in sympathy and compassion. Their usual mistake in their assumptions is that they claim some consensus of peoples, at least of the tame peoples, about certain propositions of morality, and from this infer their unconditional obligation, also for you and me. Or else, conversely, once it has dawned on them that the moral valuations of different peoples are necessarily different, they draw the conclusion that all morality is not binding. Both of these are equally big childishness. The mistake of the finer among them is that they uncover and criticize the perhaps foolish opinions of a people about its morality, or of human beings about all human morality, namely their origin, religious sanction, the superstition of free will and such things. And by this they believe they have criticized morality itself. But the value of a precept "you shall" is still thoroughly different from, and independent of, opinions of this kind about it, and of the weeds of error with which it may be overgrown. Just as surely, the value of a medicine for a sick person is still completely independent of whether the sick person thinks about medicine scientifically or like an old woman. A morality might even have grown out of an error. Even with this insight the problem of its value would not yet have been touched. — So no one has yet examined the value of that most famous of all medicines, called morality. The first thing that this requires is to call it into question. Well then! This is exactly what our work is.

346 Our Question Mark. — But do you not understand this? Truly, people will have trouble understanding us. We search for words, and perhaps also for ears. Who are we, after all? If we simply called ourselves godless, or unbelievers, or even immoralists, using older expressions, we would not believe ourselves described by it at all. We are all three together, and at too late a stage for it to be understood, for you to understand, gentlemen of curiosity, what it feels like to be us. No! No longer with the bitterness and passion of the one who has broken loose, who must still make for himself out of his unbelief a faith, a goal, a martyrdom of his own! We have hardened and cooled in the insight that the world does not go on divinely at all. Not even reasonably, mercifully or justly, by human measure. We know that the world we live in is ungodly, immoral, "inhuman." For too long we have interpreted it falsely and lyingly, according to the wish and will of our reverence, that is, according to a need. For the human being is a reverencing animal! But he is also a mistrustful one. And that the world is not worth what we have believed is probably the most certain thing that our mistrust has at last gotten hold of. So much mistrust, so much philosophy. We take care not to say that the world is less worth it. Today it even seems laughable to us when a human being wants to claim the right to invent values that were meant to outdo the value of the real world. Precisely that is what we have come back from, as from a wanton aberration of human vanity and unreason that was for a long time not recognized as such. It found its last expression in modern pessimism, an older and stronger one in the teaching of the Buddha. But Christianity contains it too, though more doubtfully and ambiguously, and therefore no less seductively. The whole attitude of "human being against world," the human being as a principle that negates the world, the human being as the measure of things, as the judge of the world, who finally puts existence itself on his scales and finds it too light: the monstrous absurdity of this attitude has become conscious to us as such, and it has grown distasteful. We laugh already when we find "human being and world" set side by side, separated by the sublime presumption of the little word "and"! But how? Have we not, with this laughing, only taken one step further in contempt for the human being? And so also in pessimism, in contempt for existence as we can know it? Have we not thereby fallen into the suspicion of an opposition, an opposition of the world in which we have so far been at home with our reverences, for whose sake we perhaps endured living, and of another world, which we ourselves are: an implacable, thorough, lowest suspicion about ourselves, which takes ever more and more hold of us Europeans, and could easily place the coming generations before the terrible either-or: "either abolish your reverences or — yourselves!" The latter would be nihilism. But would not the former also be nihilism? This is our question mark.

347 The Believers and Their Need for Belief. — How much a person needs to believe in order to thrive, how much that is "fixed," that he will not have shaken, because he holds to it, is a measure of his strength (or, to put it more plainly, of his weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today, and that is why it still finds belief. For that is how human beings are. A proposition of faith could have been refuted a thousand times over. If he needed it, he would still hold it to be "true" again and again, in accordance with that famous "proof of power" of which the Bible speaks. Some still need metaphysics. But also that headlong longing for certainty, which today discharges itself among broad masses in scientific-positivist form, the longing to want something firm absolutely, while, because of the heat of this longing, people take the justification of security more lightly and leniently: this too is still the longing for a hold, a support, in short, that instinct of weakness which does not create religions, metaphysics or convictions of every kind, but does preserve them. Indeed, around all these positivist systems hangs the smoke of a certain pessimistic gloom, something of weariness, fatalism, disappointment, fear of new disappointment, or else displayed indignation, bad temper, anarchism of outrage, and whatever other symptoms or masks there are of the feeling of weakness. Even the violence with which our cleverest contemporaries lose themselves in cramped corners and narrow places, for example in patriotism (this is what I call what the French call chauvinisme and the Germans call "German"), or in aesthetic confessions of faith in the manner of the Parisian naturalisme (which pulls out and lays bare only that part of nature which causes disgust and astonishment at once, and which people now like to call la vérité vraie), or in nihilism of the Petersburg pattern (that is, in faith in unbelief, to the point of martyrdom for it), shows first of all the need for belief, for a hold, a backbone, a support. Belief is always most desired, most urgently needed, where will is lacking. For will, as the affect of command, is the decisive mark of sovereignty and strength. That means that the less someone knows how to command, the more urgently he longs for someone who commands, who commands strictly: for a god, a prince, an estate, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience. From this it might perhaps be inferred that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, had their origin, and especially their sudden spread, in an enormous sickness of the will. And that is in fact how it was. Both religions found a longing for a "you shall," piled up into the absurd by a sickness of the will and reaching the point of despair. Both religions were teachers of fanaticism in times of the slackening of will, and by this they offered countless people a hold, a new possibility of willing, a pleasure in willing. Fanaticism is in fact the only "strength of will" to which even the weak and uncertain can be brought, as a kind of hypnotizing of the whole sensory-intellectual system in favor of the excessive feeding (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling, which then dominates. The Christian calls it his faith. Where a human being comes to the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "believing." Conversely, one could imagine a delight and power of self-determination, a freedom of the will, in which a mind bids farewell to every faith, to every wish for certainty, practiced as it is in holding itself on light ropes and possibilities, and dancing even above abysses. Such a mind would be the free spirit par excellence.

348 On the Origin of Scholars. — In Europe the scholar grows out of every kind of estate and social condition, like a plant that needs no specific soil. Therefore, essentially and involuntarily, he belongs to the bearers of the democratic idea. But this origin betrays itself. If you have trained your eye a little to recognize, in a learned book or a scientific treatise, the intellectual idiosyncrasy of the scholar (every scholar has one), and to catch it in the act, you will almost always see behind it the "prehistory" of the scholar, his family, particularly their professions and crafts. Where the feeling is expressed, "that is now proved, I am finished with it," it is usually the ancestor in the scholar's blood and instincts who approves the "finished work" from his point of view. Belief in proof is only a symptom of what was regarded from of old, in a working lineage, as "good work." An example: the sons of registrars and clerks of every kind, whose main task was always to order a varied material, to sort it into drawers, and in general to schematize, show, if they become scholars, a predilection for considering a problem almost solved once they have schematized it. There are philosophers who are at bottom only schematic minds. For them the formal side of their father's craft has become the content. The talent for classifications and tables of categories reveals something. You do not get off scot-free for being your parents' child. The son of a lawyer will also have to be a lawyer as a researcher. First of all he wants to be right with his case, and perhaps secondarily, to be correct. The sons of Protestant clergymen and schoolteachers can be recognized by the naive certainty with which, as scholars, they take their matter as already proved as soon as it has been put forward with courage and warmth. They are thoroughly used to people believing them. That was part of the "craft" of their fathers! A Jew, on the other hand, given the business sphere and the past of his people, is least used to just this: being believed. Look at Jewish scholars: they all set great store by logic, that is, by forcing agreement through reasons. They know that they must win through it, even where there is racial and class aversion against them, and where people are reluctant to believe them. For nothing is more democratic than logic. It recognizes no personal prestige, and it takes crooked noses for straight ones. (Incidentally, Europe owes the Jews no little thanks for logic, and for cleaner habits of the head. The Germans, first of all, as a deplorably unreasonable race, still need to have their head washed first of all. Wherever Jews have come into influence they have taught people to distinguish more finely, to infer more sharply, and to write more brightly and cleanly. Their task has always been to bring a people "to reason.")

349 Once More on the Origin of Scholars. — Wanting to preserve oneself is the expression of a state of need, a restriction of the true basic drive of life, which aims at extension of power, and which often enough, in that will, puts self-preservation at risk and sacrifices it. It is symptomatic that some philosophers, like the consumptive Spinoza for example, saw the decisive thing in the so-called drive of self-preservation. They had to see it, because they were people in a state of need. That our modern natural sciences have become so entangled with the Spinozist dogma (most recently and most crudely in Darwinism, with its incomprehensibly one-sided doctrine of the "struggle for existence") is probably due to the origin of most natural scientists. In this respect they belong to "the people." Their ancestors were poor and humble folk, who knew the difficulty of getting by all too well at close range. There is something like the stifling air of English overpopulation around all English Darwinism, a smell of the small folk, of need and narrowness. But as natural scientists, one should get out of one's human corner. And in nature the rule is not need but abundance, waste, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to live. The great and the small struggle everywhere turns on superiority, on growth and spreading, on power, in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will of life.

350 In Honor of the Homines Religiosi. — The struggle against the church is certainly, among other things (for it means many things), also the struggle of the coarser, more cheerful, more familiar, more superficial natures against the rule of the heavier, deeper, more contemplative people, that is, the more evil and suspicious people, who brooded over the value of existence, and over their own value too, with a long suspicion. The common instinct of the people, its sensual cheerfulness, its "good heart," rebelled against them. The whole Roman church rests on a southern suspicion about the nature of human beings, which is always misunderstood from the North. In this suspicion the European South inherited the legacy of the deep Orient, of ancient, mysterious Asia and its contemplation. Even Protestantism is a popular uprising in favor of the honest, the simple-hearted, the superficial. (The North was always kinder and shallower than the South.) But only the French Revolution finally and solemnly placed the scepter in the hand of the "good human being." (The sheep, the donkey, the goose, and everything that is incurably flat and a screamer, and ripe for the madhouse of the "modern ideas.")

351 In Honor of the Priestly Natures. — I think that what the people understand by wisdom (and who today is not "people"?), that clever, cowlike calm of mind, piety and village-parson gentleness, which lies in the meadow and watches life seriously and while chewing its cud, is exactly what philosophers have always felt farthest from themselves. Probably because they were not "people" enough, not village parsons enough. And they will perhaps be the last to learn to believe that the people could understand something of what lies farthest from it: the great passion of the knower, who constantly lives, and must live, in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities (so not at all as a spectator, standing outside, indifferent, safe, objective...). When the people make an ideal of "the wise," they revere a quite different kind of human being, and they are right a thousand times over to pay homage, with the best words and honors, to precisely this kind of human being: the gentle, earnestly simple and chaste priestly natures, and what is related to them. To these goes the praise in the people's reverence for wisdom. And to whom would the people have more reason to show gratitude than to these men, who belong to it and come out of it, but who, like the consecrated, the chosen, sacrificed to its welfare (they themselves believe they are sacrificed to God), and before whom it can unburden its heart with impunity, rid itself of its secrets, its cares, and worse? (For the person who "confides" frees himself from himself, and whoever has "confessed" forgets.) Here a great necessity rules. For the spiritual filth too, there is need of drainage ditches and clean purifying waters. There is need of swift streams of love, and of strong, humble, pure hearts, who prepare themselves and sacrifice themselves for such a service of non-public hygiene. For it is a sacrifice, and a priest is and remains a human sacrifice... The people feel such sacrificed, quieted, serious people of "faith" as wise, that is, as people who have come to know, as "certain" ones compared with their own uncertainty. Who would want to take from them the word and this reverence? — But, as is only fair, among philosophers a priest still counts as "people" and not as one who knows, above all because they themselves do not believe in "those who know," and in this belief and superstition they already smell "the people." Modesty was what invented the word "philosopher" in Greece, and left to the actors of the spirit the magnificent arrogance of calling oneself wise. It was the modesty of such monsters of pride and self-rule as Pythagoras and Plato.

352 How Far Morality Is Hardly Dispensable. — Naked human beings are generally a shameful sight. I am speaking of us Europeans (and not even of the European women!). Suppose the most cheerful dinner party were suddenly revealed and stripped by the treachery of a magician. I believe not only the good cheer would be gone, but the strongest appetite would be discouraged. It seems we Europeans cannot do without that masquerade called clothing at all. But does the disguise of "moral human beings," their concealment under moral formulas and ideas of decency, the whole benevolent hiding of our actions under the concepts of duty, virtue, public spirit, honorableness and self-denial, not have its equally good reasons? I do not mean by this that human malice and baseness, in short the bad wild beast in us, should be masked. My thought is the opposite: that precisely as tame animals we are a shameful sight, and need the moral disguise. The inner human being in Europe is by no means bad enough to be able to "show himself" with it (to be beautiful with it). The European dresses himself in morality because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal that has good reasons for being "tame," because he is almost a monstrosity, something half, weak, clumsy... It is not the terribleness of the beast of prey that needs a moral disguise, but the herd animal with its deep mediocrity, fear and boredom with itself. Morality dresses up the European, let us admit it! In the direction of the more distinguished, the more significant, the more impressive, into the "divine" —

353 On the Origin of Religions. — The real invention of the founders of religions is, first, to establish a certain kind of life and everyday routine of custom, which works as a disciplina voluntatis and at the same time removes boredom. And second, to give this very life an interpretation, by virtue of which it seems to shine with the highest value, so that it now becomes a good for which one fights and, under some circumstances, gives one's life. In truth, of these two inventions the second is the more essential. The first, the way of life, was usually already there, but alongside other ways of life, and without consciousness of what value was inherent in it. The significance and originality of the founder of a religion usually comes to light in his seeing it, his choosing it, his being the first to guess what it is for and how it can be interpreted. Jesus (or Paul), for example, found the life of the little people in the Roman province already there: a modest, virtuous, oppressed life. He interpreted it, he put into it the highest meaning and value, and with that the courage to despise every other way of life, the quiet fanaticism of the Moravian brethren, the secret underground self-confidence that grows and grows and at last is ready to "conquer the world" (that is, Rome and the higher estates in the whole empire). Buddha, likewise, found such people, scattered through all the estates and social levels of his people, who out of laziness are good and kind (above all inoffensive), and who, also out of laziness, live abstemiously, almost without needs. He understood how such a kind of human being must inevitably roll, with the whole vis inertiae, into a faith that promises to prevent the return of earthly toil (that is, of work and of action in general). This "understanding" was his genius. For a founder of religion, psychological infallibility is needed, in knowing a certain average kind of souls that have not yet recognized themselves as belonging together. He is the one who brings them together. The founding of a religion therefore always becomes a long festival of recognition.

354 On the "Genius of the Species." — The problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious) only presents itself to us once we begin to grasp how far we could do without it. And physiology and the history of animals now set us at this beginning of understanding. (It has taken two centuries for them to catch up with the suspicion Leibniz flew ahead with.) We could think, feel, will, remember, we could even "act" in every sense of the word, and yet all of this would not need to "come into consciousness," as one says in figures of speech. Whole life would be possible without its seeing itself, as it were, in a mirror. Indeed, even now the far greater part of our life still unfolds without this reflection, including our thinking, feeling and willing life, however offensive this may sound to an older philosopher. Why consciousness at all, if it is in the main superfluous? — Now, if one is willing to hear my answer to this question, and my perhaps extravagant conjecture, it seems to me that the refinement and strength of consciousness always stand in relation to the capacity for communication of a human being (or an animal), and that the capacity for communication in turn stands in relation to the need for communication. I do not mean the latter in the sense that the individual person who is a master at communicating and making his needs understood must also be the one most dependent on others for his needs. But it seems to me to be so in regard to whole races and chains of generations. Where need and distress have long forced people to communicate, to understand one another quickly and finely, there at last is a surplus of this power and art of communication, a kind of wealth that has gradually piled up and now waits for an heir who spends it lavishly. (So-called artists are these heirs, and so are the orators, preachers and writers: all people who always come at the end of a long chain, "late-born" each time, in the best sense of the word, and, as I said, spendthrifts by nature.) Supposing this observation is correct, I may go on to the conjecture that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication. From the start it was needed and useful only between human beings, especially between those who give orders and those who obey, and it has developed only in proportion to the degree of this usefulness. Consciousness is really only a network of connections between one human being and another, and only as such has it had to develop. The solitary, predatory human being would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings and movements come into consciousness, at least some of them, is the result of a terrible, long-lasting "must" that rules over human beings. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection. He needed his own kind, he had to be able to express his distress and make himself understood. And for all this he first needed "consciousness": that is, he had to know for himself what he lacked, to "know" how he felt, to "know" what he was thinking. For once more: the human being, like every living creature, thinks constantly, but does not know it. The thinking that becomes conscious is only the smallest part of it, let us say the most superficial and worst part. For only this conscious thinking happens in words, that is, in signs of communication, and that reveals the origin of consciousness itself. In short, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but only of reason's becoming conscious of itself) go hand in hand. Add to this that not only language serves as a bridge between one human being and another, but also the look, the pressure, the gesture. Our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, the power to hold them fixed and, as it were, set them outside ourselves, has grown in proportion to the pressure to convey them to others by signs. The human being who invents signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more sharply conscious of himself. Only as a social animal did human beings learn to become conscious of themselves. They are still doing it, and they do it more and more. My idea, as one can see, is this: that consciousness does not really belong to the individual existence of a human being, but to what is in him a community and herd nature. It follows that it is developed finely only in relation to the usefulness for the community and the herd. So each of us, however good his will to understand himself as individually as possible, "to know himself," will still only bring to consciousness precisely what is not individual in him: his "average." Our thinking itself is constantly outvoted and translated back into the herd perspective by the character of consciousness, by the "genius of the species" that rules in it. Our actions are basically all personal in an incomparable way, unique, boundlessly individual. There is no doubt about that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be so. This is the real phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it. The nature of animal consciousness means that the world we can become conscious of is only a surface world and a world of signs: a generalized world, a world made common. Whatever becomes conscious thereby becomes flat, thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a herd mark. With all becoming conscious there is connected a great and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization and generalization. In the end, growing consciousness is a danger. And whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows that it is even a sickness. It is not, as you may guess, the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here. I leave that distinction to the epistemologists, who have gotten caught in the snares of grammar (the folk metaphysics). It is even less the opposition of "thing in itself" and appearance, for we "know" far too little to be allowed even to separate them in that way. We simply have no organ for knowing, for "truth." We "know" (or believe, or imagine) just as much as may be useful to the human herd, to the species. And even what is called "usefulness" here is in the end only a belief, an imagining, and perhaps exactly that most fateful stupidity by which we will one day perish.

355 The Origin of Our Concept of "Knowledge." — I take this explanation from the street. I heard someone from the people say, "He has recognized me": and I asked myself, what does the people actually mean by knowledge? What does it want when it wants "knowledge"? Nothing more than this: something foreign is to be traced back to something familiar. And we philosophers, have we understood anything more by knowledge? The familiar, that is: what we are used to, so that we no longer wonder at it, our everyday life, some rule we are caught in, everything and anything in which we know ourselves to be at home. Now, is our need for knowledge not exactly this need for the familiar? The will to uncover, among all that is foreign, unusual, questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Should it not be the instinct of fear that makes us want to know? Should the exultation of the knower not be exactly the exultation of a regained feeling of security?... This philosopher believed he had "known" the world when he had traced it back to the "idea." Oh, was it not for that reason, because the "idea" was so familiar to him, so habitual? Because he was so much less afraid of the "idea"? — Oh, this contentment of the knowers! Just look at their principles and their solutions to the riddle of the world! When they find in things, under things, or behind things something that is unfortunately very familiar to us, for example our multiplication table, or our logic, or our willing and desiring, how happy they are at once! For "what is familiar is known": in this they all agree. Even the most cautious among them think that at least the familiar is easier to know than the foreign. It is methodically necessary, for example, to start from the "inner world," from the "facts of consciousness," because that is the world we know better! Error of errors! What is familiar is what we are used to, and what we are used to is hardest to "know," that is, to see as a problem, that is, to see as strange, as distant, as "outside us"... The great certainty of the natural sciences, compared with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness (what one might almost call the unnatural sciences), rests precisely on their taking the foreign as object. Whereas it is almost something self-contradictory and senseless to want to take the non-foreign as object at all...

356 How Things Will Become More "Artistic" in Europe. — Concern for life still forces almost all European men today, in our transitional period, where so much has ceased to force us, into a certain role, their so-called profession. A few keep the freedom, an apparent freedom, to choose this role for themselves. For most it is chosen. The result is strange enough. At a more advanced age almost all Europeans confuse themselves with their role. They themselves are the victims of their "good acting." They themselves have forgotten how much chance, whim and arbitrariness ruled over them back when their "profession" was decided, and how many other roles they might have played, for it is now too late! Looked at more deeply, the role has really become character, and art has become nature. There were ages in which people believed, with stiff confidence, even with piety, in their predestination for just this business and just this livelihood, and absolutely refused to acknowledge chance in it, or the role, or the arbitrary. With the help of this belief, estates, guilds and hereditary trade privileges managed to erect those monstrous towers of society that distinguish the Middle Ages. Of these at least one thing deserves praise: they lasted (and lasting is a value of the first rank on earth!). But there are opposite ages, the properly democratic ones, where this belief is more and more unlearned, and a certain bold belief and point of view of the opposite comes to the fore: that Athenian belief first noticed in the age of Pericles, and the American belief of today, which more and more wants to become the European belief too. Here each individual is convinced that he can do almost anything, that he is almost equal to any role. Here everyone tries things with himself, improvises, tries again, tries with delight. Here all nature ceases and becomes art... The Greeks, once they had entered this faith in roles, a faith in artists if you like, went through, as is well known, a strange transformation, step by step, one not in every respect to be imitated. They really became actors. As actors they enchanted, they overcame the whole world, and in the end even the "world-conqueress" herself (for the Graeculus histrio conquered Rome, and not, as the innocent are fond of saying, Greek culture...). But what I fear, what can already be grasped with the hands today, if one is inclined to grasp for it, is that we modern human beings are already quite far along the same road. And every time a human being begins to discover how far he plays a role, and how far he can be an actor, he becomes an actor... With that, a new flora and fauna of human beings rises up, which cannot grow in firmer, more restricted ages, or is left "below," under the spell and suspicion of dishonor. With that rise, every time, the most interesting and wildest periods of history, in which the "actors," all kinds of actors, are the true masters. Precisely by this, another kind of human being is more and more disadvantaged and finally made impossible, above all the great "builders." Now the building power is growing lame. The courage to make plans far into the distance is discouraged. The organizing geniuses begin to be lacking. Who would dare now to undertake works whose completion would have to be reckoned in millennia? The basic faith is dying out on which someone could reckon this way, promise, anticipate the future in his plan, and sacrifice himself to his plan: the faith that the human being has value and meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great building, for which he must first of all be firm, must be "stone."... Above all, not an actor! In short, and — ah, it will still be kept quiet long enough! — what can no longer be built from now on, and cannot be built any more, is — a society in the old sense of the word. For this building everything is lacking, above all the material. We are all no longer material for a society. That is a truth whose time has come! It seems to me of no importance that, for the time being, the most short-sighted, perhaps the most honest, and certainly the noisiest kind of human being alive today, our gentlemen socialists, believes, hopes, dreams, and above all shouts and writes something roughly the opposite. One already reads their word for the future, "free society," on all the tables and walls. Free society? Yes! Yes! But you know, gentlemen, what it is built out of? Out of wooden iron! Out of the famous wooden iron! And not even out of wood...

357 On the Old Question, "What Is German?" — Let us reckon up the real achievements of philosophical thought that we owe to German minds. Can they, in any permissible sense, still be credited to the whole race? May we say that they are at the same time the work of the "German soul," at least its symptom, in the same sense in which we are accustomed to take Plato's ideomania, his almost religious madness of forms, as an event and testimony of the "Greek soul"? Or would the opposite be true? Would these achievements be just as individual, just as much an exception to the spirit of the race, as Goethe's paganism was, which he held with a good conscience? Or as Bismarck's Machiavellianism is among Germans, with a good conscience, his so-called "realpolitik"? Did our philosophers perhaps even contradict the need of the "German soul"? In short, were the German philosophers really — philosophical Germans? I will recall three cases. First, Leibniz's incomparable insight, by which he was right not only against Descartes but against everything that had been philosophized up to his time: that consciousness is only an accident of representation, not its necessary and essential attribute, so that what we call consciousness makes up only one state of our spiritual and psychic world (perhaps a sick state), and is by no means that world itself. Is there anything German about this thought, whose depth has still not been exhausted today? Is there any reason to suppose that a Latin would hardly have stumbled on this reversal of appearance? For it is a reversal. Second, let us recall Kant's enormous question mark, which he put beside the concept of "causality." Not that, like Hume, he doubted its right altogether. He rather began cautiously to mark off the realm inside which this concept has any meaning at all. (Even now people have not finished this work of marking the boundary.) Third, let us take the astonishing grasp of Hegel, who, going through all the logical habits and pampered assumptions, dared to teach that the concepts of species develop out of one another. With this proposition the minds of Europe were prepared for the last great scientific movement, Darwinism. For without Hegel, no Darwin. Is there anything German about this Hegelian innovation, which first brought the decisive concept of "development" into science? — Yes, beyond all doubt. In all three cases we feel something of ourselves "uncovered," guessed at, and we are grateful for it and surprised at once. Each of these three propositions is a thoughtful piece of German self-knowledge, self-experience, self-understanding. "Our inner world is much richer, more extensive, more hidden," so we feel with Leibniz. As Germans we doubt with Kant the final validity of scientific knowledge, and of everything at all that can be known causally. What is knowable seems to us, simply as such, of lesser value. We Germans are Hegelians even if there had never been a Hegel, in that (unlike all Latins) we instinctively attach a deeper meaning and richer value to becoming and development than to what "is." We hardly believe in the right of the concept "being." And likewise, in that we are not inclined to concede that our human logic is logic in itself, the only kind of logic. We would rather persuade ourselves that it is only a special case, and perhaps one of the strangest and stupidest. A fourth question would be whether Schopenhauer, with his pessimism, that is, with the problem of the value of existence, must have been precisely a German. I do not think so. The event for which this problem was to be expected with certainty, so that an astronomer of the soul could have calculated day and hour for it, namely the decline of belief in the Christian God and the victory of scientific atheism, is a common European event, in which all races are to share the merit and the honor. Conversely, it is precisely the Germans, those Germans among whom Schopenhauer lived at the same time, who must be credited with having delayed this victory of atheism longest and most dangerously. Hegel in particular was its delayer par excellence, in keeping with the grandiose attempt he made to persuade us, at the very last, of the divinity of existence, with the help of our sixth sense, the "historical sense." Schopenhauer was the first avowed and unbending atheist we Germans have had, as a philosopher. His enmity toward Hegel had its background here. The ungodliness of existence counted for him as something given, graspable, not open to discussion. He lost his philosophical composure every time, and fell into indignation, when he saw anyone hesitate here and make detours. In this point lies his whole uprightness. The unconditional honest atheism is precisely the presupposition of his way of posing the problem. It is a victory of European conscience, finally and hard won, the most consequential act of a two-thousand-year discipline toward truth, which at the end forbids itself the lie of belief in God.... One sees what has really won out over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the ever more strictly taken concept of truthfulness, the confessor's subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To look at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god. To interpret history in honor of a divine reason, as constant testimony to a moral order of the world and to moral final purposes. To explain one's own experiences as pious people have explained them for long enough, as if everything were providence, every event a hint, everything thought out and arranged for the salvation of the soul. That is now over. It goes against the conscience, it counts as indecent, dishonest, as lying, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice to every finer conscience. With this strictness, if with anything, we are indeed good Europeans, and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-overcoming. In rejecting the Christian interpretation in this way, and condemning its "meaning" like counterfeit coinage, the Schopenhauerian question comes to us at once, in a terrible form: does existence have any meaning at all? That question will take a few centuries before it is even fully heard, in all its depth. What Schopenhauer himself answered to this question was, if you will forgive me, something hasty and youthful. It was only a settlement, a standing and getting stuck in the very Christian-ascetic perspectives of morality, from which the belief had been canceled along with belief in God.... But he posed the question, as a good European, as I said, and not as a German. — Or might the Germans, at least in the way they took hold of Schopenhauer's question, have proved their inner belonging and kinship, their preparation, their need for his problem? That after Schopenhauer, in Germany too (late enough, by the way!), people thought and wrote about the problem he had set up, is certainly not enough to decide in favor of this closer belonging. One could even argue against it the peculiar clumsiness of this post-Schopenhauerian pessimism. The Germans clearly did not behave as if they were in their element. I am by no means alluding to Eduard von Hartmann here. On the contrary, my old suspicion is still not lifted, that he is much too clever for us. I mean that, as a sly rogue from the very start, he may have made fun not only of German pessimism, but may in the end even "bequeath" it to the Germans, as a testament. He would show how far they could be made fools of, even in the age of the founding of the Empire. But I ask: should we perhaps count old buzzing top Bahnsen to the credit of the Germans, the man who spun his whole life, with delight, around his real-dialectical misery and his "personal bad luck"? Would that be anything especially German? (I recommend his writings, which I myself used as an antipessimistic diet, particularly for the sake of their elegantiae psychologicae, with which, it seems to me, even the most constipated body and mind can be reached.) Or should we count such dilettantes and old maids as the sugary apostle of virginity, Mainländer, among the real Germans? In the end he too will have been a Jew (all Jews turn sugary when they moralize). Neither Bahnsen, nor Mainländer, nor much less Eduard von Hartmann provides a reliable handle for the question whether the pessimism of Schopenhauer, his horrified glance into a world made godless, stupid, blind, mad and questionable, his honest horror... was not only an exceptional case among Germans, but a German event. Everything else that stands in the foreground, our brave politics, our cheerful patriotism, which quite resolutely regards all things from a little philosophical principle ("Germany, Germany above all"), and so sub specie speciei, that is, from the point of view of the German species, bears very clear witness to the opposite. No! The Germans of today are not pessimists! And Schopenhauer was a pessimist, I repeat, as a good European, and not as a German. —

358 The Peasants' Revolt of the Spirit. — We Europeans stand before an enormous world of ruins, where some things still rise high, where much stands rotten and uncanny, and most of it already lies on the ground, picturesquely enough. Where have there ever been more beautiful ruins? And overgrown with great and small weeds. The church is this city of ruin. We see the religious society of Christianity shaken down to its lowest foundations. Belief in God has been overturned, and belief in the Christian-ascetic ideal is just fighting its last battle. A work built as long and as thoroughly as Christianity (it was the last Roman building!) could not, of course, be destroyed all at once. Every kind of earthquake had to shake it, and every kind of spirit that bores into it, digs, gnaws, moistens it, had to help. But what is strangest is this: those who have taken the most trouble to hold on to Christianity, to preserve it, have become precisely its best destroyers, namely the Germans. It seems the Germans do not understand the nature of a church. Are they not spiritual enough? Not mistrustful enough? The building of the church rests, in any case, on a southern freedom and open-mindedness of the spirit, and likewise on a southern suspicion toward nature, human beings and the mind. It rests on a quite different knowledge of human beings, and experience of human beings, than the North has had. The Lutheran Reformation, in its whole breadth, was the indignation of simplicity against something "many-layered," to put it cautiously. It was a coarse, honest misunderstanding, for which much can be forgiven. People did not understand the expression of a victorious church, and saw only corruption. They misunderstood the noble skepticism, that luxury of skepticism and tolerance which every victorious, self-assured power permits itself. Today one sees well enough how Luther, in all the cardinal questions of power, was fatefully brief, superficial and imprudent, above all as a man from the people, to whom all inheritance from a ruling caste, all instinct for power, was lacking. So his work, his will to restore that Roman work, without his wanting or knowing it, became only the beginning of a work of destruction. He unravelled, he tore apart, with honest indignation, where the old spider had woven most carefully and longest. He handed the holy books over to everyone. So they finally came into the hands of the philologists, that is, of the destroyers of every faith that rests on books. He destroyed the concept of "church" by throwing away belief in the inspiration of councils. For only on the presupposition that the inspiring spirit which founded the church still lives in it, still builds, still goes on building its house, does the concept "church" keep its force. He gave the priest back sexual intercourse with a woman. But three quarters of the reverence the people, and above all the peasant woman, is capable of rests on the belief that an exceptional human being will also be exceptional in other respects. Here precisely the popular belief in something superhuman in a human being, in the miracle, in the redeeming god in a human being, had its finest and most dangerous advocate. After giving the priest the woman, Luther had to take the priest's confession, and this was psychologically right. But with it, in truth, the Christian priest himself was abolished, whose deepest usefulness has always been to be a holy ear, a discreet well, a grave for secrets. "Everyone his own priest": behind such formulas, and their peasant cunning, Luther hid an abysmal hatred of the "higher human being," and of the rule of the "higher human being" as the church had conceived it. He smashed an ideal that he could not reach, while he seemed to fight against and abhor the degeneration of this ideal. In fact he, the impossible monk, rejected the rule of the homines religiosi. So within the church order he did precisely what he fought so intolerantly in the civil order: a "peasants' revolt." — What grew out of his Reformation afterward, good and bad, and can be roughly reckoned up today, who would be naive enough to simply praise or blame Luther for these consequences? He is innocent of everything. He did not know what he was doing. The flattening of the European spirit, especially in the North, its making kinder, if one prefers to hear it said in a moral word, took a strong step forward with the Lutheran Reformation. There is no doubt about that. And likewise through it grew the mobility and restlessness of the spirit, its thirst for independence, its belief in a right to freedom, its "naturalness." If one wants to grant the Reformation this value in the latter respect, for having prepared and favored what we now revere as "modern science," one must of course add that it is also partly guilty for the degeneration of the modern scholar, for his lack of reverence, shame and depth, for all the naive candor and honest-fellow manners in matters of knowledge. In short, for that plebeianism of the spirit which is peculiar to the last two centuries, and from which even the pessimism so far has by no means freed us. The "modern ideas" too still belong to this peasants' revolt of the North against the colder, more ambiguous, more mistrustful spirit of the South, which built its greatest monument in the Christian church. Finally, let us not forget what a church is, in contrast to every "state." A church is above all a structure of rule that secures the highest rank for the more spiritual human beings, and that believes so much in the power of spirituality that it forbids itself all cruder means of force. With this alone the church is, under all circumstances, a more distinguished institution than the state. —

359 Revenge on the Spirit, and Other Backgrounds of Morality. — Morality: where do you think it has its most dangerous and insidious advocates?... There is a failed human being who does not have enough spirit to enjoy himself, and just enough education to know that. Bored, weary, a self-despiser. Through some inherited wealth he has unfortunately been cheated even of the last consolation, "the blessing of work," the self-forgetfulness of the "daily labor." Such a person, who is basically ashamed of his existence (perhaps he harbors a few small vices for it), and who on the other hand cannot help spoiling himself more and more through books, to which he has no right, or through more spiritual company than he can digest, and making himself vain and touchy. Such a thoroughly poisoned person (for spirit becomes poison, education becomes poison, property becomes poison, solitude becomes poison for those who have turned out this way) finally falls into a habitual state of revenge, of the will to revenge.... What do you think he needs, absolutely needs, in order to create for himself, in his own eyes, the look of superiority over more spiritual people, and to create for himself, at least in his imagination, the pleasure of revenge carried out? Always morality, you can bet on that. Always the great moral words, always the boom-boom of justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue. Always the stoicism of gesture (how well stoicism hides what one does not have!). Always the cloak of clever silence, of affability, of gentleness, and whatever the idealists' cloaks are called, under which the incurable self-despisers walk around, and the incurably vain as well. Do not misunderstand me: from such born enemies of the spirit, that rare piece of humanity sometimes arises which the people revere under the name of the holy or the wise. From such people come those monsters of morality who make noise and make history. Saint Augustine belongs among them. The fear of the spirit, the revenge on the spirit: oh, how often have these powerful vices already become the root of virtues! Yes, of virtue! And, between us, is not even that claim of philosophers to wisdom, which has now and then been made on earth, the wildest and most immodest of all claims, always above all a hiding place until now, in India as in Greece? Sometimes perhaps from the point of view of education, which sanctifies so many lies, as tender consideration for beings in the making, growing ones, for disciples who often have to be defended against themselves through faith in the person (through an error)... In the more frequent cases, though, it is a hiding place of the philosopher, behind which he saves himself out of weariness, age, cooling, hardening. As a feeling of the approaching end, as the wisdom of that instinct animals have before death: they step aside, become quiet, choose solitude, creep into caves, become wise.... How? Is wisdom a hiding place of the philosopher from — the spirit?

360 Two Kinds of Cause, Mistaken for One Another. — This seems to me one of my most essential steps and advances: I learned to distinguish the cause of an action from the cause of this or that particular action, of acting in this direction, toward this goal. The first kind of cause is a quantity of accumulated force, which waits to be used up somehow, for something. The second kind, by contrast, is something quite insignificant measured against that force, mostly a small accident, according to which that quantity now "discharges" itself in one definite way: the match in relation to the powder keg. Among these small accidents and matches I count all so-called "purposes," and even the still more so-called "callings in life." They are relatively arbitrary, capricious, almost indifferent compared with the enormous quantity of force which, as I said, presses to be used up somehow. People commonly see it differently. They are used to seeing the driving force precisely in the goal (purposes, callings and so on), in keeping with an ancient error. But the goal is only the directing force. Here the helmsman has been mistaken for the steam. And not even always the helmsman, the directing force.... Is the "goal," the "purpose," often enough not only a whitewashing pretext, a later self-deception of vanity, which does not want to hear that the ship follows the current it happened to get into? That it "wants" to go there because it must go there? That it has a direction indeed, but altogether — no helmsman? — We still need a critique of the concept "purpose."

361 On the Problem of the Actor. — The problem of the actor has disturbed me longest. I was unsure (and sometimes am still) whether we will not first get at the dangerous concept "artist," a concept that has so far been treated with unforgivable good nature, from this direction. Falseness with a good conscience. The pleasure in pretense, breaking out as power, pushing aside, flooding over, sometimes extinguishing the so-called "character." The inner longing to go into a role and mask, into an appearance. A surplus of adaptive abilities of every kind, which no longer know how to satisfy themselves in the service of the nearest and narrowest use. Is all of this perhaps not only the actor in himself?... Such an instinct will most easily have developed in families of the lower people, who had to get through life under changing pressure and compulsion, in deep dependence. They had to stretch themselves supply to their blanket, adjust themselves anew to new circumstances, keep giving and presenting themselves differently. Gradually they became capable of hanging the cloak according to every wind, and so, becoming almost a cloak, they became masters of that incorporated and ingrained art of the eternal game of hiding, which in animals is called mimicry. Until at last this whole capacity, stored up from generation to generation, becomes domineering, unreasonable, unruly, learns as instinct to command other instincts, and produces the actor, the "artist" (first of all the buffoon, the teller of lies, the Hanswurst, the fool, the clown, also the classical servant, Gil Blas. For in such types one has the prehistory of the artist, and often enough even of the "genius"). Under similar pressure, a similar kind of person also grows up under higher social conditions. Only then the actor's instinct is usually held in check by some other instinct, for example in the "diplomat." I would in fact believe that a good diplomat, in every age, would still be free to become a good stage actor as well, provided that he were really "free." As for the Jews, that people of the art of adaptation par excellence, one might, following this line of thought, see in them from the start something like a world-historical arrangement for breeding actors, an actual hotbed of actors. And in fact the question is quite overdue: which good actor today is not a Jew? The Jew, too, as the born literary man, the real ruler of the European press, exercises his power on the strength of his acting ability. For the literary man is essentially an actor. He plays the "expert," the "specialist." Finally, women: think about the whole history of women. Must they not first and foremost be actresses? Listen to the doctors who have hypnotized women. Finally, love them, and let yourself be "hypnotized" by them! What always comes out of it? That they "give themselves," even when they are — giving themselves... Woman is so artistic....

362 Our Belief in a Masculinization of Europe. — One owes it to Napoleon (and not at all to the French Revolution, which aimed at "brotherhood" from people to people and a general flowery exchange of hearts) that a few warlike centuries may now follow one another, which have no equal in history. In short, we have entered the classical age of war, of learned and at the same time popular war, on the largest scale (of means, talents and discipline), which all coming millennia will look back on with envy and reverence as a piece of perfection. For the national movement, out of which this war glory grows, is only the counter-shock against Napoleon, and would not exist without him. To him one may someday credit the fact that the man in Europe has become master again over the merchant and the philistine, and perhaps even over "woman," who has been pampered by Christianity and the enthusiastic spirit of the eighteenth century, and even more by the "modern ideas." Napoleon, who saw in the modern ideas, and quite directly in civilization, something like a personal enemy, proved himself, through this enmity, one of the greatest continuators of the Renaissance. He brought back a whole piece of antique being, perhaps the decisive piece, the piece of granite. And who knows whether this piece of antique being will not also, in the end, become master again over the national movement, and have to make itself, in an affirmative sense, the heir and continuator of Napoleon, who, as is known, wanted one Europe, and this as the mistress of the earth. —

363 How Every Age Has Its Prejudice About Love. — With all the concession I am willing to make to the monogamous prejudice, I will never allow anyone to speak of equal rights in love for man and woman. There are none. The reason is that man and woman each understand something different by love. And it belongs among the conditions of love for both sexes that one sex does not presuppose in the other the same feeling, the same concept of "love." What the woman understands by love is clear enough: complete surrender (not merely devotion) with soul and body, without any consideration or reservation. Indeed, she feels shame and horror at the thought of a surrender that is hedged in and tied to conditions. In this absence of conditions, her love is precisely a faith. The woman has no other. The man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her, and so for his own part he is himself the furthest from the presupposition of woman's love. But suppose there were men who in turn did not find the wish for complete surrender foreign to them: well, then these are precisely not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes a slave by it. But a woman who loves like a woman becomes by it a more perfect woman.... The passion of the woman, in its unconditional renunciation of her own rights, presupposes precisely that on the other side there is not an equal pathos, an equal will to renounce. For if both renounced themselves out of love, something would come of it, but what I do not know, perhaps an empty space? The woman wants to be taken, accepted as a possession, to dissolve into the concept "possession," to be "possessed." So she wants someone who takes, who does not give himself and give himself away, but who on the contrary is supposed to be made richer in "himself" through the increase in strength, happiness and faith that the woman gives him by giving herself. The woman gives herself away, the man takes more. I think no social contracts, not even the best will toward justice, can get past this natural opposition. However desirable it may be, one should not keep the harsh, terrible, puzzling, immoral side of this antagonism constantly before one's eyes. For love, thought out whole, great and full, is nature, and as nature it is eternally something "immoral." — Fidelity is accordingly included in the woman's love; it follows from its definition. In the man it can easily arise in the wake of his love, perhaps as gratitude or as an idiosyncrasy of taste and so-called elective affinity. But it does not belong in the essence of his love, and so little that one might almost say, with some right, that in the man there is a natural conflict between love and fidelity. Love is in fact a wanting-to-have, and not a renouncing and giving away. But wanting-to-have always ends with the having.... In fact it is the subtler and more suspicious thirst for possession in the man, one that rarely and late admits to "having," that keeps his love alive. In this way it is even possible that his love still grows after surrender. He does not readily admit that a woman has nothing more to "give" to him.

364 The Hermit Speaks. — The art of getting along with people rests essentially on the skill (which presupposes long practice) of accepting and eating a meal whose kitchen one does not trust. Supposing one comes to the table with a wolf's hunger, everything goes easily ("the worst company can be felt," as Mephistopheles says). But one does not have this wolf's hunger when one needs it! Ah, how hard fellow human beings are to digest! First principle: as with a misfortune, put in your courage, take hold bravely, admire yourself for it, take your disgust between your teeth, stuff your nausea down. Second principle: "improve" your fellow human being, for example by praise, so that he begins to sweat out his happiness over himself. Or take hold of a corner of his good or "interesting" qualities and pull at it until you have the whole virtue out, and can tuck the human being into its folds. Third principle: self-hypnotizing. Fix your social object like a glass button, until you stop feeling pleasure or displeasure in it, and fall asleep unnoticed, stiffen, acquire a bearing. A household remedy from marriage and friendship, richly tested, praised as indispensable, but not yet formulated scientifically. Its popular name is — patience.

365 The Hermit Speaks Once More. — We too deal with "people." We too modestly put on the dress in which we are known, respected and sought, and in that way we enter society, that is, among masked people who do not want to be called that. We too do as all clever masks do, and courteously put a chair outside the door for any curiosity that does not concern our "dress." But there are also other kinds of tricks for "dealing" with people, among people. For example, appearing as a ghost, which is very advisable if you want to be rid of them soon and make them afraid. Test: they reach for us and cannot grasp us. That frightens them. Or: we come through a closed door. Or: when all the lights have been put out. Or: after we have already died. This last is the trick of the posthumous people par excellence. ("What do you think, anyway?" one of them once said impatiently, "would we have any desire to endure this strangeness, this coldness, this silence of the grave around us, all this underground, hidden, mute, undiscovered loneliness that we call life and that could just as well be called death, if we did not know what becomes of us? And that only after death do we come to our life and become alive, ah! very alive! We posthumous people!")

366 Facing a Learned Book. — We do not belong to those who come to thoughts only between books, at the prompting of books. Our habit is to think outdoors, walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or close by the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first questions of value about a book, a person or music are: "Can he walk? Better still, can he dance?..." We rarely read, and so we do not read any worse. Oh how quickly we guess how someone came to his thoughts: sitting, in front of the inkwell, with his belly squeezed, his head bent over the paper! Oh how quickly we are finished with his book, too! A cramped inner organ betrays itself, you can bet on that, just as room air, a room ceiling, and room narrowness betray themselves. These were my feelings when I just closed an honest learned book, grateful, very grateful, but also relieved. There is almost always something oppressive, oppressed, in a scholar's book. The "specialist" appears somewhere. His zeal, his seriousness, his indignation, his overestimation of the corner he sits in and spins in, his hump: every specialist has his hump. A scholarly book always reflects a crookedly drawn soul, too. Every trade draws crooked. Look up your old friends, the ones you were young with, once they have taken possession of their science. Oh, however the reverse may have happened! Oh, how they are now occupied and possessed by it, forever! Grown into their corner, crushed beyond recognition, unfree, thrown off balance, thin and angular everywhere, round only in one place: one is moved, and silent, when one finds them again like this. Every trade, even if it has a golden floor, also has a leaden ceiling above it, which presses on the soul until it is strangely and crookedly pressed. Nothing can be done about this. Do not believe for a moment that it is possible to get around this deformation by any artifice of education. Every kind of mastery costs dearly on earth, where perhaps everything costs too much. You become a master of your trade at the price of also becoming the sacrifice of your trade. But you want it differently: "cheaper," above all more comfortable. Is that not so, gentlemen, my contemporaries? Very well! But then you immediately get something else, namely, instead of the craftsman and master, the literary man, the nimble "much-turned" man of letters, who lacks the hump, of course, except for the bow he makes before you as the shop assistant of the spirit and "bearer" of culture. The man of letters, who is actually nothing, but represents almost everything. Who plays the expert and "stands in" for him. Who, with the greatest modesty, takes it upon himself to get himself paid, honored and celebrated in the expert's place. — No, my learned friends! I bless you even for your hump! And for the fact that, like me, you despise the men of letters and the parasites of culture! And that you do not know how to trade in spirit! And that you hold opinions that cannot be expressed in money! And that you represent nothing you are not! That your one will is to become masters of your craft, in reverence for every kind of mastery and capability, and with the most uncompromising rejection of everything apparent, half-genuine, dolled-up, virtuoso-like, demagogic, theatrical in litteris et artibus: everything that cannot show itself to you as unconditionally upright in discipline and preparation. (Even genius does not help over such a lack, however well it knows how to disguise it. One understands this once one has observed closely our most gifted painters and musicians, who almost all, almost without exception, know how to acquire artificially and afterward, through cunning inventiveness of manners, makeshifts, and even principles, the appearance of that uprightness, that solidity of training and culture, though without deceiving themselves by it, without permanently silencing their own bad conscience. For you know this, don't you? All great modern artists suffer from a bad conscience....)

367 How to Distinguish Works of Art, First. — Everything that is thought, composed, painted, set to music, even built and shaped, belongs either to monological art or to art before witnesses. Among the latter must also be counted that apparently monological art which contains faith in God, the whole lyric of prayer. For to a pious person there is still no solitude. We invented that, we godless ones. I know of no deeper difference in the whole optics of an artist than this: whether he looks at his developing work from the eye of a witness (at "himself," so to speak), or whether he has "forgotten the world," which is the essence of all monological art. It rests on forgetting. It is the music of forgetting.

368 The Cynic Speaks. — My objections to Wagner's music are physiological objections. Why first disguise them in aesthetic formulas? My "fact" is that I no longer breathe easily once this music begins to work on me. At once my foot turns against it and revolts. It has a need for beat, dance, march, and it demands from music first of all the delights that lie in good walking, striding, leaping, dancing. But does my stomach not protest as well? My heart? My blood circulation? My bowels? Do I not, without noticing, become hoarse? And so I ask myself: what does my whole body actually want from music at all? I believe its relief: as if all animal functions were to be accelerated by light, bold, carefree, self-assured rhythms, as if the brazen, leaden life were to be gilded with golden, good, tender harmonies. My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection. For that I need music. What is the drama to me! What are the convulsions of its moral ecstasies, in which the "people" find their satisfaction! What is all the gesture-hocus-pocus of the actor!... One can guess that I am essentially antitheatrical in temperament, but Wagner was, conversely, essentially a man of the theater and an actor, the most inspired mimomaniac there has ever been, even as a musician!... And, by the way: if Wagner's theory was "the drama is the purpose, music is always only its means," his practice, on the other hand, was from beginning to end: "the attitude is the purpose, the drama, and music too, is always only its means." Music as a means of clarifying, intensifying and internalizing the dramatic gesture and the actor's sensuous presence. And the Wagnerian drama only an occasion for many dramatic attitudes! Alongside all his other instincts, he had the commanding instincts of a great actor, in everything and in every part, and, as I said, as a musician too. I once made this clear to an honest Wagnerian, with some effort. And I had reason to add: "Do be a little more honest with yourself. We are not in the theater! In the theater one is honest only as a mass. As an individual one lies, one lies to oneself. When you go to the theater, you leave yourself at home. You give up the right of your own tongue and choice, your own taste, even your own courage, the courage you have and practice between your own four walls against God and man. Nobody brings the finest senses of his art into the theater, not even the artist who works for the theater. There one is folk, audience, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbor, fellow human being. There even the most personal conscience yields to the leveling charm of the 'greatest number.' There stupidity works as lust and contagion. There the 'neighbor' rules, and there one becomes a neighbor..." (I forgot to report what my enlightened Wagnerian answered my physiological objections: "So you are simply not healthy enough for our music?")

369 Our Side-by-Side. — Must we not admit, we artists, that there is an uncanny diversity in us, that our taste and, on the other hand, our creative power stand apart in a strange way, stand apart and keep their own growth, I mean quite different degrees and tempi of old, young, ripe, mellow, rotten? So that, for example, a musician could create, all his life, things that contradict what his spoiled listener's ear and listener's heart value, relish and prefer. He need not even know about this contradiction! As a nearly embarrassingly regular experience shows, one can easily grow beyond the taste of one's power, even without this power being paralyzed or prevented from bringing forth. But the reverse can also happen, and this is exactly what I want to draw the attention of artists to. A constantly creating person, a "mother" of a human being in the great sense of the word, one who knows and hears nothing but the pregnancies and childbeds of his spirit, who has no time left to consider and compare himself and his work, who no longer has the will to exercise his taste, and simply forgets it, that is, lets it stand, lie or fall: perhaps such a person finally produces works which he has long since ceased to be able to judge, so that he says foolish things about them and himself. He says them and thinks them. This seems to me almost the normal relation in fruitful artists. No one knows a child worse than its parents. And to take an enormous example, it holds even for the whole world of Greek poets and artists: they never "knew" what they were doing....

370 What Is Romanticism? — Perhaps you remember, at least my friends do, that at first I set out toward this modern world with some thick errors and overestimations, and certainly as one who hoped. I understood, I wonder on what personal experiences, the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as if it were a symptom of higher strength of thought, of more daring bravery, of a more victorious fullness of life, than the eighteenth century had, the age of Hume, Kant, Condillac and the sensualists. So the tragic insight appeared to me as the real luxury of our culture, its most precious, most distinguished, most dangerous kind of wastefulness, but still, on the basis of its superabundance, permitted luxury. In the same way I interpreted German music to suit myself, as the expression of a Dionysian power of the German soul. In it I believed I heard the earthquake with which an ancient, long-accumulated primal force at last makes room for itself, no matter whether everything else that is called culture starts to tremble with it. You see, at that time I misjudged both philosophical pessimism and German music, and misjudged what makes up their real character: their romanticism. What is romanticism? Every art, every philosophy may be regarded as a remedy and aid in the service of a growing, struggling life. They always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the overfullness of life, who want a Dionysian art, and likewise a tragic view and insight into life. And second, those who suffer from the impoverishment of life, who seek rest, quiet, a smooth sea, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or else intoxication, cramp, numbness, madness. All romanticism in arts and in knowledge answers to the double need of the latter. Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner answered to it, and so did (and does) Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, to name the most famous and most explicit romantics, whom I misunderstood at that time. But not, by the way, to their disadvantage, as one may fairly grant me. The richest in fullness of life, the Dionysian god and human being, can allow himself not only the sight of the terrible and questionable, but even the terrible deed, and every luxury of destruction, decomposition, negation. In him evil, senseless and ugly things appear as permitted, as the result of a surplus of procreative, fertilizing powers, which can make a lush fruit-land out of any desert. Conversely, the most suffering and life-poor person would most need gentleness, peacefulness, kindness, in thinking and acting, if possible a god who would be a god for the sick, a "savior." And the same goes for logic, for the conceptual comprehensibility of existence, for logic soothes and gives confidence. In short, he needs a certain warm, fear-warding narrowness and enclosure in optimistic horizons. In this way I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist, and also the "Christian," who is in truth only a kind of Epicurean, and, like him, essentially a romantic. And my eye grew sharper and sharper for that most difficult and treacherous form of inference in which the most mistakes are made: the inference from the work to its author, from the deed to its doer, from the ideal to the one who needs it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the need that commands behind it. In regard to all aesthetic values I now use this main distinction. I ask, in every single case, "Has hunger or abundance become creative here?" At first another distinction may seem more recommended, and it is much more obvious: whether the longing for hardening, for making eternal, for being is the cause of creating, or whether the longing for destruction, for change, for novelty, for the future, for becoming is. But both kinds of longing turn out, looked at more deeply, to be ambiguous, and interpretable precisely by that previously placed scheme, which I think is rightly preferred. The longing for destruction, for change, for becoming, can be the expression of an overfull, future-pregnant power (my term for that, as is known, is the word "Dionysian"). But it can also be the hatred of the failed, the deprived, the badly off, who destroys and must destroy, because the existing order, indeed all existence, all being itself, outrages and provokes him. To understand this feeling, one only has to look at our anarchists from close up. The will to eternalize also needs a double interpretation. It may come from gratitude and love. An art of this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, dithyrambic perhaps with Rubens, blissfully mocking with Hafiz, bright and kind with Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and halo of glory over all things. But it may also be the tyrannical will of someone who suffers heavily, who fights, who is tortured. Such a person wants to stamp even the most personal, most singular, narrowest thing, the very idiosyncrasy of his suffering, as a binding law and compulsion. He takes a kind of revenge on all things by pressing and branding his image, the image of his torture, onto them. The latter is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether as Schopenhauer's philosophy of will or as Wagner's music: romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture. (That there could be quite another pessimism, a classical one, this idea and vision belongs to me, as inseparable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum. Only my ear resists the word "classical," it has become far too worn out, too round and unrecognizable. I call that pessimism of the future, for it is coming! I see it coming! — the Dionysian pessimism.)

371 We Unintelligible Ones. — Have we ever complained about being misunderstood, mistaken, confused, slandered, misheard and not heard? That is our lot, and will be for a long time yet. Let us say, to be modest, until 1901. It is also our distinction. We would not hold ourselves in sufficient honor if we wished it otherwise. We are mistaken for others, because we ourselves are growing. We keep changing. We shed old bark. We molt again with every spring. We keep growing younger, more future-oriented, higher, stronger. We drive our roots ever more powerfully into the depths, into evil, while at the same time we embrace the sky ever more lovingly and more broadly, and suck its light with all our branches and leaves ever more thirstily into ourselves. We grow like trees (it is hard to understand, like all life!), not in one place, but everywhere, not in one direction, but upward and outward as well as inward and downward. Our strength drives at once into trunk, branches and roots. It is no longer open to us to do anything singly, or even to be anything singly. So it is our lot, as I said. We grow upward. And even if it were our fate (for we live ever closer to the lightning!), well then, we honor it no less. It remains what we do not share, do not want to communicate: the fate of height, our fate....

372 Why We Are Not Idealists. — Once the philosophers were afraid of the senses. Have we perhaps unlearned this fear too much? We are today all sensualists, we present and future ones in philosophy, not in theory, but in practice, in practicality. Those earlier ones, by contrast, thought that through the senses they would be lured out of their world, the cold realm of "ideas," onto a dangerous, sunnier island, where, as they feared, their philosopher's virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. "Wax in the ears" was almost a condition of philosophizing at that time. A true philosopher no longer heard life, insofar as life is music. He denied the music of life. It is an old philosophers' superstition that all music is siren music. Now we might be inclined to judge exactly the reverse (which in itself could still be just as false): namely that the ideas are worse seducers than the senses, with all their cold, anemic appearance, and not even despite this appearance. They always lived on the "blood" of the philosopher. They always drained his senses, and, if we are to believe us, his "heart" too. Those old philosophers were heartless. Philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism. Do you not feel something deeply enigmatic and uncanny in such figures, even in Spinoza's? Do you not see the spectacle that plays out here, the constant growing pale, the ever more idealistically interpreted de-sensualization? Do you not sense, in the background, some long-hidden bloodsucker, who begins with the senses and at last leaves behind only bones and rattling, leaves them behind? I mean categories, formulas, words. (For, forgive me, what was left over from Spinoza, the amor intellectualis dei, is a rattling, nothing more! What is love, what is god, when they lack every drop of blood?...) In sum: all philosophical idealism has so far been something like sickness, except where, as in the case of Plato, it was the caution of an overrich and dangerous health, the fear of overpowering senses, the cleverness of a clever Socratic. Perhaps we moderns are simply not healthy enough to need Plato's idealism? And we do not fear the senses, because...

373 "Science" as Prejudice. — It follows from the laws of rank that scholars, insofar as they belong to the intellectual middle class, are not allowed to catch sight of the real great problems and question marks at all. Moreover, their courage and their vision do not reach that far. Above all, their need, which makes them researchers, their inner anticipation and wish that things should be so and so, their fear and hope, come too soon to rest, to satisfaction. Take, for example, the pedantic Englishman Herbert Spencer, who gets himself worked up in his own way, and who draws a hopeful line, a horizon-line of desirability: that final reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" which he fables about. That almost makes people like us sick. A humanity with such Spencerian perspectives as its final perspectives would seem worthy of contempt and destruction! But already the fact that something must be felt by him as the highest hope, which to others counts, and may count, only as a repellent possibility, is a question mark that Spencer could not have foreseen... The same goes for that belief with which so many materialist natural scientists now content themselves, the belief in a world that should have its equivalent and measure in human thinking and human concepts of value, a "world of truth" that could finally be mastered with the help of our square little human reason. What? Do we really want to reduce existence in this way to an exercise for calculating servants and a stay-at-home occupation for mathematicians? Above all, one should not want to strip it of its many-sided character. Good taste demands this, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that goes beyond your horizon! That only a world-interpretation should be right in which you can be right, in which scientific research and work can go on in your sense (you mean, in fact, mechanistic?): one that allows only counting, calculating, weighing, seeing and grasping and nothing more, is a clumsiness and naivety, provided it is not a sickness of the mind, or idiocy. Would it not, conversely, be quite probable that exactly the most superficial and most external part of existence, its most apparent part, its skin and sensuous appearance, could be grasped first, perhaps even grasped alone? A "scientific" world-interpretation, as you understand it, could therefore still be one of the stupidest, that is, the poorest in meaning, of all possible world-interpretations. This I say to the gentlemen mechanists, whose ears and conscience I want to reach, who nowadays like to pass themselves off as philosophers and quite believe that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be built like a foundation. But a world that was essentially mechanical would be an essentially meaningless world! Suppose one measured the value of a piece of music by how much of it could be counted, calculated, reduced to formulas. How absurd such a "scientific" assessment of music would be! What would one have grasped, understood, recognized of it! Nothing, absolutely nothing of what is really "music" in it!...

374 Our New "Infinite." — How far the perspectival character of existence reaches, or whether it has any other character at all, whether an existence without interpretation, without "sense," does not simply become "nonsense," and whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially an interpreting existence: none of this can be settled, however diligent and conscientiously painstaking the analysis and self-examination of the intellect may be. For in this analysis the human intellect cannot help seeing itself under its perspectival forms, and seeing only in them. We cannot look around our own corner. It is a hopeless curiosity to want to know what other kinds of intellect and perspective there could be. For example, whether some beings can experience time running backward, or alternately forward and backward (which would give another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). But I think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty of decreeing, from our own corner, that one may have perspectives only from this corner. Rather, the world has once again become "infinite" for us, insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations. Once again the great shudder seizes us. But who would feel like deifying this monstrous unknown world again, in the old way, right away? Or worshiping the unknown from now on as "the Unknown One"? Ah, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are counted into this unknown, too much devilry, stupidity and folly of interpretation, including our own human, all-too-human interpretation, which we do know....

375 Why We Seem to Be Epicureans. — We modern people are cautious about final convictions. Our mistrust lies in wait for the enchantments and conscience-tricks that lie in every strong faith, every unconditional yes and no. How is this explained? Perhaps one may see in it, for a good part, the wariness of "the child who was burned," of the disappointed idealist. But for another and better part, also the gleeful curiosity of a former corner-stander who was driven to despair by his corner, and who now revels and rhapsodizes in the opposite of the corner, in the unbounded, in "freedom as such." Out of this a nearly Epicurean inclination to knowledge develops, one that does not want to let go of the question-mark character of things without a fight. Likewise a dislike of the great moral words and gestures, a taste that rejects all the clumsy, square oppositions, and is proud of its practice in reservations. For that is what makes up our pride: this light tightening of the reins while our drive toward certainty charges forward, this self-control of the rider on his wildest rides. For still, we have wild fiery animals under us, and when we hesitate, it is least of all the danger that makes us hesitate....

376 Our Slow Times. — This is how all artists and people of "works" feel, the motherly kind of human being. They always believe that at each stage of their life, which a work each time cuts off, they are already at the goal itself. They would always accept death patiently, with the feeling: "We are ripe for it." This is not an expression of weariness, but rather of a certain autumnal sunniness and mildness, which the finished work itself, the ripening of a work, leaves in its maker every time. The tempo of life then slows and becomes thick and honey-flowing, to the point of long fermatas, to the point of believing in the long fermata....

377 We Homeless Ones. — Among the Europeans of today there is no shortage of people who have a right to call themselves homeless, in a distinguished and honorable sense. To them in particular, my secret wisdom and gaya scienza are expressly commended! For their lot is hard, their hope uncertain. It is a trick to invent a consolation for them, but what good is that! We children of the future, how could we feel at home in this today? We are unfavorable to all ideals on which someone might still feel at home, even in this fragile, broken transitional age. As for its "realities," we do not believe they have duration. The ice that still bears today has already become very thin. The thaw wind is blowing. We ourselves, we homeless ones, are something that breaks open the ice and other all-too-thin "realities."... We do not "conserve" anything, nor do we want to return to any past. We are not "liberal" at all. We do not work for "progress." We do not need first to stop our ears against the future sirens of the market. What they sing, "equal rights," "free society," "no more masters and no more slaves," does not attract us! We simply do not think it desirable that the kingdom of justice and harmony should be founded on earth. (For under all circumstances it would be the kingdom of the deepest mediocrity and Chineseness.) We take pleasure in all those who, like us, love danger, war and adventure, who do not let themselves be reconciled, captured, smoothed over and castrated. We count ourselves among the conquerors. We think about the necessity of new orders, including a new slavery. For to every strengthening and elevation of the type "human being" there belongs also a new kind of enslavement. Is it not so? With all this, must we be ill at home in an age that loves to claim honor for being called the most humane, mildest and most just age the sun has yet seen? It is bad enough that we have uglier secret thoughts behind these beautiful words! That in them we see only the expression, even the masquerade, of deep weakening, weariness, age, declining strength! What is it to us what finery a sick man dresses his weakness up in? Let him display it as his virtue. There is no doubt that weakness makes people mild, oh so mild, so just, so harmless, so "human"! The "religion of compassion" that they would like to talk us into: oh, we know well enough the hysterical little men and women who have exactly this religion today as their veil and decoration! We are not humanitarians. We would never dare to speak of our "love for humanity." We are not actors enough for that. Or not Saint-Simonian enough, not French enough. You must be afflicted with a Gallic excess of erotic irritability and loving impatience to approach even humanity honestly with your lust. Humanity! Was there ever a more hideous old woman among all old women? (Unless it is "truth": a question for philosophers.) No, we do not love humanity. On the other hand, we are also far from being "German" enough, in the sense in which the word "German" is current today, to speak for nationalism and racial hatred, or to take pleasure in the national heart-rash and blood poisoning, which is why people in Europe are now fencing themselves off from one another, as with quarantines. We are too unprejudiced for that, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well informed, too "well traveled." We much prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or coming centuries, simply to spare ourselves the silent fury to which we would be condemned as eyewitnesses of a politics that makes the German spirit barren by making it vain, and that is small politics besides. Does it not need to plant its own creation between two deadly hatreds, so that it does not fall apart at once? Must it not want the perpetuation of Europe's petty statehood?... We homeless ones are by race and descent too many-sided and mixed, as "modern people," and consequently little tempted to join in that false self-admiration of race and debauchery, which today displays itself in Germany as the sign of a German attitude, and which seems doubly false and indecent in the people of "historical sense." We are, in one word (and let it be our word of honor!), good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, overloaded, but also overrichly obligated heirs of thousands of years of the European spirit. As such we have also grown out of Christianity, and turned away from it. And precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians of the ruthless uprightness of Christianity, who willingly sacrificed goods and blood, rank and fatherland to their faith. We do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, my friends! The hidden yes in you is stronger than all the noes and maybes that your age makes you sick with. And if you have to go out on the sea, you emigrants, then a faith too must compel you!

378 "And Become Bright Again." — We generous and rich ones of the spirit, who stand like open wells beside the road and do not mind if anyone draws from us, we unfortunately do not know how to defend ourselves where we would like to. We cannot prevent ourselves from being clouded and made dark. The time we live in, its "most temporal" side, its dirty birds drop their filth, the boys throw their junk, and exhausted wanderers who rest beside us throw their little and great misery into us. But we will do what we have always done. We take what is thrown into us, down into our depths, for we are deep, we do not forget, and we become bright again...

379 The Fool's Interlude. — The author of this book is no misanthrope. Hatred of human beings costs too much today. To hate as people once hated the human being, Timonian, as a whole, without deduction, from full heart, out of the whole love of hatred, one would have to give up despising. And how much fine joy, how much patience, how much kindness do we owe precisely to our despising! Besides, in this we are the "chosen of God." Fine despising is our taste and privilege, our art, perhaps our virtue, we most modern of the moderns!... Hatred, on the other hand, puts people on the same level, facing each other. In hatred there is honor, and finally: in hatred there is fear, a large, good portion of fear. But we fearless ones, we more spiritual people of this age, know our advantage well enough to live without fear, precisely as the more spiritual ones, in relation to this time. People will hardly behead us, imprison us or banish us. They will not even forbid and burn our books. This age loves the spirit. It loves us and needs us, even if we had to make it understand that in contempt we are artists. That every contact with people gives us a slight shudder. That with all our mildness, patience, friendliness and politeness, we cannot persuade our nose to give up its prejudice against the nearness of a human being. That we love nature, the less human it is. And art, when it is the artist's flight from the human being, or the artist's mockery of the human being, or the artist's mockery of himself...

380 "The Wanderer" Speaks. — To catch sight of our European morality from a distance, to measure it against other moralities, earlier or coming ones, one must do as a wanderer does who wants to know how high the towers of a city are: he leaves the city. "Thoughts on moral prejudices," if they are not to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside morality, some beyond good and evil to which one must climb, scramble or fly. And in the case at hand, at least a beyond our good and evil, a freedom from everything "European," understood as a sum of commanding value judgments that have passed into our flesh and blood. That one wants to go out there, up there, is perhaps a small madness, a peculiar unreasonable "you must." For we who know also have our idiosyncrasies of "unfree will." The question is whether one can really go up there. This may depend on many conditions. Mainly it is the question of how light or how heavy we are, the problem of our "specific gravity." One must be very light to drive one's will to knowledge so far, and so to speak beyond one's time, to make eyes for oneself that can survey millennia, and moreover to have clear sky in those eyes! One must have loosened oneself from much that presses, hampers, holds down and weighs heavy on us Europeans of today. The human being of such a beyond, who wants to catch sight of even the supreme standards of value of his time, must first "overcome" this time within himself. That is the test of his strength. And consequently he must overcome not only his time, but also his previous aversion and contradiction against this time, his suffering from this time, his untimeliness, his romanticism...

381 On the Question of Comprehensibility. — When one writes, one wants not only to be understood, but just as surely not to be understood. It is no objection at all to a book that somebody finds it incomprehensible. Perhaps this was exactly what its writer intended. He did not want to be understood by just "anybody." Every nobler mind and taste, when it wants to communicate, also chooses its listeners. In choosing them it also draws its barriers against "the others" at the same time. All the finer laws of style have their origin here. They keep at a distance, they create distance, they forbid "entrance," understanding, as I said, while they open the ears of those who are related to us in hearing. And, to say it between ourselves, and in my case: I do not want to let myself be prevented, either by my ignorance or by the liveliness of my temperament, from being understandable to you, my friends. Not by the liveliness, however much it forces me to get to a matter quickly, just to get to it at all. For I treat deep problems as one treats a cold bath: quickly in, quickly out. That one does not get down into the depth, not deep enough, by doing this is the superstition of the water-shy, the enemies of cold water. They speak without experience. Oh! Great cold works quickly! And, by the way: does a matter really remain not understood and not recognized simply because it is touched on only in passing, looked at, flashed at? Must one absolutely first sit firmly on it? Brood on it like an egg? Diu noctuque incubando, as Newton said of himself? At least there are truths of a special shyness and ticklishness, which one can get hold of only suddenly. One must surprise them, or let them be. Finally, my brevity has another value too. Within questions like the ones that occupy me, I have to say many things briefly, so that they are heard even more briefly. As an immoralist one has to take care not to corrupt innocence. I mean donkeys and old maids of both sexes, who have nothing in life except their innocence. Even more: my writings should inspire them, elevate them, encourage them to virtue. I know of nothing on earth more amusing than to see inspired old donkeys, and maidens who are stirred by the sweet feelings of virtue. "That is what I have seen," thus spoke Zarathustra. So much regarding brevity. It is worse with my ignorance, which I do not hide from myself. There are hours when I am ashamed of it. Of course there are also hours when I am ashamed of this shame. Perhaps all of us philosophers are badly off today in regard to knowledge. Science is growing, and the most learned among us are close to discovering that they know too little. But it would still be worse if it were otherwise, if we knew too much. Our task is and remains first of all not to confuse ourselves with others. We are something other than scholars, although it cannot be avoided that, among other things, we are scholarly too. We have different needs, a different growth, a different digestion. We need more, and we also need less. For how much a mind needs to nourish itself there is no formula. But if its taste is directed toward independence, toward quick coming and going, toward wandering, toward adventures perhaps, for which only the quickest are fit, then it prefers to live freely on thin fare than unfree and stuffed. Not fat, but the greatest suppleness and strength is what a good dancer wants from his food. And I do not know what the mind of a philosopher could wish to be more than a good dancer. For dance is his ideal, and also his art, and finally his only piety, his "divine service"...

382 The Great Health. — We new ones, the nameless, the badly understood, we premature births of a future not yet proven, need for a new purpose also a new means, namely a new health, a stronger, shrewder, tougher, bolder, merrier health than any that has existed before. Whoever has a soul thirsting for this, who has lived through the whole range of values and desirabilities so far and sailed around all the coasts of this ideal "Mediterranean," who wants to know from the adventures of his own most personal experience how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal, or likewise an artist, a saint, a lawgiver, a sage, a scholar, a pious person, a soothsayer, a divinely off-center figure of the old style: such a person needs first of all one thing, the great health. A health that one not only has, but also keeps acquiring and must keep acquiring, because one keeps giving it up, and must give it up!... And now, after we have long been on the way like this, we Argonauts of the ideal, perhaps more courageous than is wise, and often enough shipwrecked and damaged, but, as I said, healthier than we would be allowed to be, dangerously healthy, always healthy again, it seems to us that, as a reward for this, we have a land still undiscovered before us. Its borders have not yet been glimpsed by anyone, a beyond of all the lands and corners of the ideal so far. A world so overrich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the terrible and the divine that our curiosity as well as our lust for possession has gone beside itself. Ah, now nothing can satisfy us any more! How could we be content with the present human being, after such prospects, and with such a hunger in conscience and knowledge? It is bad enough, but it is unavoidable that we look upon his most worthy goals and hopes only with a seriousness poorly kept up, and perhaps no longer even look on at all. Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal, to which we would not want to persuade anyone, because we do not so easily grant anyone the right to it. It is the ideal of a spirit that plays, naively, that is, unwillingly and out of overflowing fullness and power, with everything that has so far been called holy, good, untouchable, divine. For which the highest thing, by which the people reasonably measure its values, would already mean as much as danger, decline, degradation, or at least recreation, blindness, temporary self-forgetting. The ideal of a human-superhuman well-being and goodwill, which will often enough appear inhuman, for example when it sets itself beside all the earthly seriousness so far, beside every kind of solemnity in gesture, word, sound, look, morality and task, like their most bodily and involuntary parody. And with which, in spite of all this, perhaps the great seriousness only begins, the real question mark is only set, the fate of the soul turns, the hand moves, the tragedy begins...

383 Epilogue. — But as I slowly, very slowly, paint this somber question mark at the end, and am still willing to call to my readers' memory the virtues of the proper reader (oh, what forgotten and unknown virtues!), it happens that around me the most malicious, most lively, most goblin-like laughter breaks out. The spirits of my book itself fall upon me, pull me by the ears, and call me to order. "We cannot stand it any longer," they call out to me. "Away, away with this raven-black music! Is it not bright morning all around us? And a green soft ground and lawn, the kingdom of the dance? Was there ever a better hour for being merry? Who will sing us a song, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so winged, that it does not drive off the crickets, but rather invites the crickets to sing along and dance? And even a simple rustic bagpipe would be preferable to those mysterious tones, those croakings, grave-voices and marmot whistles with which you have regaled us so far in your wilderness, my hermit and music of the future! No! Not such tones! Let us strike up more pleasant ones, more joyful ones!" Do you like it this way, my impatient friends? Very well! Who would not gladly oblige you?

My bagpipe is already waiting, and so is my throat. It may sound a little rough, take it as it is! We are in the mountains, after all. But what you are going to hear is at least new. And if you do not understand it, if you misunderstand the singer, what does it matter! That is simply "the singer's curse." All the more clearly can you hear his music and tune, and all the better then can you dance to his pipe. Do you want that?...

* * *

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.

We Fearless Ones.

Carcass, you tremble? You would tremble much more if you knew where I am taking you.

Turenne.

343 What Our Cheerfulness Means. — The greatest recent event, that "God is dead," that belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, is already starting to throw its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes, whose suspicion, are strong and sharp enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set, some old and deep trust has turned into doubt. To them our old world must seem to get more evening-like every day, more suspicious, stranger, "older." But on the whole it must be said that the event itself is far too big, too distant, and too far outside the understanding of most people for even the news of it to have arrived. Much less do many people yet know what has actually happened, and everything that must now fall apart, since it was built on this belief, leaned on it, and grew into it. Our whole European morality, for example. This long run of breaking, destruction, ruin, overturning and collapse that now lies ahead: who today understands enough of it to be the teacher and the forecaster of this enormous logic of terror? Who can be the prophet of a darkness and an eclipse of the sun, the like of which has probably never been on earth before?... Even we, the born riddle-solvers, who wait as it were on the mountains, placed between today and tomorrow and stretched across the contradiction between them, we firstborn and premature children of the coming century, for whom the shadows that must soon wrap Europe should already have come into view. Why is it that even we, without any real concern about this darkening, and above all without any worry or fear for ourselves, look forward to its coming? Perhaps we are still too much under the immediate effects of this event. And these immediate effects, its effects on us, are, contrary to what one might expect, by no means sad or darkening. They are more like a new kind of light, hard to describe: happiness, relief, cheerfulness, encouragement, dawn... Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, on hearing that "the old god is dead," as if we were lit up by a new dawn. Our hearts overflow with gratitude, amazement, foreboding and expectation. At last the horizon seems open to us again, even if it is not bright. At last our ships may set out again, may sail out in the face of any danger. Every risk taken by the knower is allowed again. The sea, our sea, lies open before us again, and perhaps there has never been such an "open sea." —

344 How We Are Still Religious in Some Ways. — In science, convictions have no right of citizenship, and people say this with good reason. Only when they agree to come down to the modesty of a hypothesis, a provisional position for an experiment, a regulating fiction, may they be let in, and even granted a certain value inside the realm of knowledge. Even then, they stay under police watch, the police of mistrust. — But if you look at this more closely, does it not mean that a conviction may enter science only once it stops being a conviction? Would the discipline of the scientific mind not begin by allowing itself no more convictions?... That is probably how it stands. The only question left is whether, in order for this discipline to begin, there must not already be a conviction, and one so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself. You can see that science too rests on a faith, and that there is no science "without presuppositions" at all. The question whether truth is needed must not only be answered yes beforehand, but answered yes to such a degree that the statement, the faith, the conviction expressed in it reads: "Nothing is needed more than truth, and compared with it everything else has only second-rank value." — What is this unconditional will to truth? Is it the will not to let yourself be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? The will to truth could be understood in this last way too, if under the general rule "I will not deceive" you also include the particular case "I will not deceive myself." But why not deceive? And why not let yourself be deceived? — Notice that the reasons for the first lie on a completely different ground from the reasons for the second.

One does not want to be deceived, on the assumption that being deceived is harmful, dangerous, fateful. In this sense science would be a long prudence, a caution, a usefulness, against which one may fairly object: is it really true that wanting not to be deceived is less harmful, less dangerous, less fateful? What do you know in advance about the character of existence, so that you can decide whether the greater advantage lies with the person who is completely mistrustful or with the one who is completely trusting? And if both were necessary, a lot of trust and a lot of mistrust, then where would science get its unconditional faith, the conviction it rests on, that truth is more important than any other thing, even more than every other conviction? This very conviction could not have arisen if truth and untruth had both kept proving useful, as they do. So the faith in science, which is undeniably there, cannot have come from such a calculation of usefulness. It must have arisen rather in spite of the constant proof that the will to truth, "truth at any price," is useless and dangerous. "At any price": oh, we understand that well enough, once we have offered one faith after another on this altar and slaughtered it! So "will to truth" does not mean "I will not let myself be deceived," but, since there is no other choice, "I will not deceive, not even myself." — and with this we stand on the ground of morality. For you need only ask yourself carefully, "Why do you not want to deceive?" especially if it seems, and it does seem, as if life were built on appearance, I mean on error, fraud, pretense, dazzling, self-dazzling. And if, on the other hand, the great forms of life have actually always sided with the most unscrupulous polytropoi. Such a resolve might, read generously, be a bit of Don Quixote, a small enthusiastic madness. But it might also be something worse: a principle hostile to life, a destructive one.... "Will to truth" could be a hidden will to death. — In this way the question "why science?" leads back to the moral problem: what is morality for at all, if life, nature and history are "immoral"? There is no doubt that the truthful person, in that bold and final sense that the faith in science assumes, affirms another world than the world of life, nature and history. And insofar as he affirms this "other world," must he not, by that very fact, deny its counterpart, this world, our world?... But you will have understood what I am getting at: our faith in science still rests on a metaphysical faith. We knowers of today, we godless ones and opponents of metaphysics, still take our fire from the blaze that a faith thousands of years old lit, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But what if this is becoming more and more unbelievable, if nothing proves itself divine anymore except error, blindness and lying, if God himself turns out to be our longest lie?

345 Morality as a Problem. — The lack of a real personality takes revenge everywhere. A weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies and disowns itself is no good for anything worthwhile anymore, least of all for philosophy. "Selflessness" has no value in heaven or on earth. The great problems all require great love, and only strong, rounded, secure minds are capable of it, minds that sit firmly on themselves. It makes a big difference whether a thinker stands personally toward his problems, so that his fate, his distress and also his greatest happiness are in them, or whether he is "impersonal," that is, knows how to touch and grasp them only with the feelers of cold, curious thought. In the second case nothing comes of it. That much can be promised. The great problems, even if they can be grasped at all, cannot be held by frogs and weaklings. That has been their taste forever, a taste they share with all the worthy little women. — How is it, then, that I have not yet met anyone, even in books, who stood as a person in this position toward morality, who knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his own personal distress, torment, delight and passion? Clearly, morality has not been a problem at all until now. It has been the very thing on which people agreed, after all their mistrust, division and contradiction: the sacred place of peace where thinkers rest even from themselves, catch their breath, and come back to life. I see no one who has dared a critique of moral value judgments. I even miss the attempts of scientific curiosity, of the spoiled, tempting imagination of psychologists and historians, which easily anticipates a problem and grabs it in passing, without really knowing what it has grabbed. I have found barely a few sparse beginnings toward a story of the origin of these feelings and valuations (which is something different from a critique of them, and once more something different from the history of ethical systems). In one case I did everything I could to encourage an inclination and a talent for this kind of history. In vain, it seems to me today. These historians of morality, especially the English, are not of much use. They usually still stand, without suspecting it, innocently under the command of some particular morality, and without knowing it they serve as shield-bearers and retinue for it. Take that old popular superstition of Christian Europe, still repeated so trustingly, that the mark of a moral action lies in the selfless, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing, or in sympathy and compassion. Their usual mistake in assumptions is that they claim some agreement among peoples, at least among the tame peoples, about certain propositions of morality, and from this they infer their unconditional binding force, also for you and me. Or else, conversely, once it has dawned on them that the moral valuations of different peoples are necessarily different, they conclude that all morality is not binding. Both are equally big childishness. The mistake of the finer ones among them is that they uncover and criticize the perhaps foolish opinions a people has about its morality, or people have about all human morality: their origin, religious sanction, the superstition of free will and such things. And by this they believe they have criticized morality itself. But the value of a precept "you shall" is still thoroughly different from, and independent of, opinions of this kind about it, and of the weeds of error it may be overgrown with. Just as surely, the value of a medicine for a sick person is completely independent of whether the sick person thinks about medicine scientifically or like an old woman. A morality might even have grown out of an error. Even with that insight, the problem of its value would not have been touched. — So no one has yet tested the value of that most famous of all medicines, called morality. What this first requires is that we call it into question. Well, then! That is exactly what our work is.

346 Our Question Mark. — But you do not understand this? Truly, people will have trouble understanding us. We look for words, and perhaps for ears too. Who are we, anyway? If we simply called ourselves godless, or unbelievers, or even immoralists, using the older terms, we would not believe we had been described at all. We are all three together, at too late a stage for it to be understood, for you to understand, gentlemen of curiosity, what it feels like to be us. No! Not any more with the bitterness and passion of the one who has broken loose, who must still make for himself a faith, a goal, a martyrdom of his own out of his unbelief! We have hardened and cooled in the insight that the world does not go on divinely at all, not even reasonably, mercifully or justly by human measure. We know that the world we live in is ungodly, immoral, "inhuman." For far too long we have interpreted it falsely and deceptively, according to the wish and will of our reverence, that is, according to a need. For the human being is a worshipping animal! But he is also a mistrustful one. And that the world is not worth what we have believed is probably the most certain thing our mistrust has finally gotten hold of. So much mistrust, so much philosophy. We take care not to say that it is less worth it. Today it even seems laughable to us when a human being claims the right to invent values meant to outdo the value of the real world. That is exactly what we have come back from, as from a wild aberration of human vanity and unreason that was for a long time not recognized as such. It found its last expression in modern pessimism, and an older, stronger one in the teaching of the Buddha. Christianity contains it too, though more doubtfully and ambiguously, and therefore no less seductively. The whole attitude of "human being against world," the human being as a principle that negates the world, the human being as the measure of things, as the judge of the world, who finally puts existence itself on his scales and finds it too light: we have become aware of the monstrous absurdity of this attitude, and it has grown distasteful to us. We laugh already when we find "human being and world" side by side, separated by the sublime presumption of the little word "and"! But how? By laughing, have we not only taken one more step in contempt for the human being? And so also in pessimism, in contempt for existence as we can know it? Have we not thereby fallen into the suspicion of an opposition, an opposition between the world in which we have so far been at home with our reverences, for whose sake we perhaps endured living, and another world, which we ourselves are: a merciless, thorough, lowest suspicion about ourselves, which takes ever more hold of us Europeans, and could easily put the coming generations before the terrible either-or: "either abolish your reverences or — yourselves!" The latter would be nihilism. But would the former not also be nihilism? This is our question mark.

347 Believers and Their Need for Belief. — How much a person needs to believe in order to thrive, how much "firmness" he needs, something he will not let anyone shake because he holds on to it, is a measure of his strength (or, to put it more bluntly, of his weakness). Most people in old Europe still need Christianity today, I think. That is why it still finds believers. People are like this: a belief could have been disproved a thousand times, but if they needed it, they would keep holding it to be "true," following that famous "proof of power" the Bible talks about. Some people still need metaphysics. But so does that headstrong craving for certainty, which today spills out among broad masses in a scientific-positivist form: the wish to have something firm, no matter what. Because the heat of this craving is so strong, people take the justification of their certainty more lightly and easily. This too is still the craving for a hold, a support, in short, that instinct of weakness which does not create religions, metaphysics or convictions of every kind, but does keep them alive. In fact, a haze of pessimistic gloom hangs around all these positivist systems. There is something of weariness, fatalism, disappointment, fear of new disappointment. Or else there is displayed anger, bad temper, an anarchism of indignation, and whatever other symptoms or masks there are of the feeling of weakness. Even the violence with which our cleverest contemporaries lose themselves in cramped corners and narrow places, for example in patriotism (what the French call chauvinisme and the Germans call "German"), or in aesthetic creeds in the style of Parisian naturalisme (which pulls out and exposes only the part of nature that causes both disgust and astonishment, and which people now like to call la vérité vraie), or in nihilism of the Petersburg kind (that is, in faith in unbelief, even to the point of martyrdom for it), always shows first of all the need for belief, for a hold, a backbone, a support. Belief is always most wanted, most urgently needed, where will is lacking. For will, as the feeling of command, is the decisive mark of self-rule and strength. That means the less someone knows how to command, the more urgently he longs for someone who commands, and commands strictly: a god, a prince, a social class, a doctor, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience. From this one might perhaps conclude that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, had their origin, and especially their sudden spread, in a huge sickness of the will. And that is how it really was. Both religions found a demand for a "you must," piled up to absurdity by a sickness of the will and pushed to the point of despair. Both religions taught fanaticism in times when the will had gone slack, and so they offered a hold to countless people, a new way to want, a pleasure in wanting. Fanaticism is the only "strength of will" that even the weak and uncertain can be brought to. It is a kind of hypnotizing of the whole sensual and intellectual system, in favor of overfeeding (hypertrophy) one single point of view and feeling, which then dominates. The Christian calls it his faith. When a person reaches the basic conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "believing." Conversely, one can imagine a joy and power of self-determination, a freedom of the will, in which a mind says goodbye to every belief and every wish for certainty, practiced as it is at holding itself on light ropes and possibilities, and even dancing at the edge of abysses. Such a mind would be the free spirit par excellence.

348 Where Scholars Come From. — In Europe the scholar grows out of every kind of class and social background, like a plant that needs no special soil. That is why he belongs, by nature and without choosing it, to the bearers of the democratic idea. But his origin shows itself. If you have trained your eye a little to see, in a scholarly book or a scientific paper, the intellectual quirk of the scholar (every scholar has one), and to catch it in the act, you will almost always see behind it the scholar's "prehistory": his family, especially their jobs and trades. Where the feeling comes out, "that is now proved, I am done with it," it is usually the ancestor in the scholar's blood and instincts who approves of the "finished work" from his own point of view. Belief in proof is just a symptom of what, in a hardworking line of ancestors, was long considered "good work." For example, the sons of registrars and clerks of every sort, whose main job was always to put a mass of material in order, sort it into drawers, and generally make it into a system, show a tendency, if they become scholars, to think a problem almost solved once they have systematized it. There are philosophers who are at bottom only systematic minds. For them the formal side of their father's trade has become the content. A talent for classifying and making tables of categories tells you something. You cannot escape being your parents' child. The son of a lawyer will have to be a lawyer as a researcher too. First of all he wants to win his case, and perhaps only second, to be right. You can recognize the sons of Protestant ministers and schoolteachers by the naive certainty with which, as scholars, they treat their point as proved as soon as they have stated it boldly and warmly. They are thoroughly used to people believing them. That was part of their fathers' "trade"! A Jew, on the other hand, given the business background and the history of his people, is least used to exactly this: being believed. Look at Jewish scholars. They all think very highly of logic, that is, of forcing agreement through reasons. They know they have to win that way, even where there is racial and class dislike of them, where people are unwilling to believe them. For nothing is more democratic than logic. It recognizes no personal prestige, and it takes crooked noses for straight ones. (By the way, Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for logic, and for cleaner habits of thinking. The Germans, in particular, a sadly unreasonable race, still have to have their heads washed first. Wherever Jews have gained influence, they have taught people to make finer distinctions, to draw sharper conclusions, and to write more brightly and cleanly. Their task has always been to bring a people "to reason.")

349 Once More on Where Scholars Come From. — Wanting to preserve oneself is the sign of a state of need, a restriction of the true basic drive of life, which aims at increasing power, and which often enough, in that very will, puts self-preservation at risk and sacrifices it. It is telling that some philosophers, like the consumptive Spinoza, saw the decisive thing, had to see it, in the so-called drive for self-preservation. They were people living in need. That our modern natural sciences have become so tangled up with Spinoza's dogma (most recently, and most crudely, in Darwinism, with its incomprehensibly one-sided teaching about the "struggle for existence") is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists. In this respect they belong to "the people." Their ancestors were poor and humble folk who knew all too well, up close, how hard it is to get by. There is something like the stale air of English overpopulation around all English Darwinism, a smell of little people, of need and cramped quarters. But as natural scientists we should step out of our human corner. And in nature the rule is not need but plenty, waste, even to the point of nonsense. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary limit on the will to live. The great and the small struggles everywhere turn on superiority, on growth and spreading, on power, in keeping with the will to power, which is simply the will of life.

350 In Honor of the Homines Religiosi. — The struggle against the church is certainly, among other things (for it means many things), also the struggle of the coarser, more cheerful, more familiar and more superficial natures against the rule of the heavier, deeper, more contemplative people. That is, the more evil and suspicious people, who brooded with a long suspicion over the value of existence, and over their own value too. The common instinct of the people, its sensual cheerfulness, its "good heart," rebelled against them. The whole Roman church rests on a southern suspicion about human nature, which is always misunderstood from the North. In this suspicion the European South inherited the legacy of the deep Orient, of ancient, mysterious Asia and its contemplation. Even Protestantism was a popular uprising in favor of the honest, the simple-hearted and the superficial. The North was always kinder and shallower than the South. But it was only the French Revolution that finally and solemnly put the scepter into the hands of the "good human being." (The sheep, the donkey, the goose, and everything that is hopelessly flat, a screamer, and ripe for the madhouse of the "modern ideas.")

351 In Honor of Priestly Natures. — I think that what the people understand by wisdom (and who today is not "the people"?), that clever, cowlike calm of mind, piety and village-pastor gentleness, which lies in the meadow and watches life seriously while chewing its cud, is exactly what philosophers have always felt most distant from. Probably because they were not "the people" enough, not village pastors enough. And they will perhaps be the last to learn to believe that the people could understand something of what is farthest from it: the great passion of the knower, who lives constantly, and must live, in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities (so not at all as a spectator, standing outside, indifferent, safe, objective...). When the people form an ideal of "the wise," they honor a quite different kind of person. And they are right a thousand times over to pay homage, with the best words and honors, to exactly this kind of person: the gentle, seriously simple and chaste priestly natures, and those related to them. Praise in the people's reverence for wisdom goes to them. And to whom would the people have more reason to be grateful than to these men, who belong to it and come out of it, but who, like the consecrated and chosen, have been sacrificed for its welfare (they believe they are sacrificed to God), and before whom it can pour out its heart without fear of punishment, and get rid of its secrets, its worries, and worse? (For a person who "opens up" frees himself, and whoever has "confessed" forgets.) Here a great need rules. Even spiritual filth requires drainage ditches and clean, purifying waters. There is a need for swift streams of love, and for strong, humble, pure hearts who prepare themselves and sacrifice themselves for such a service of non-public hygiene. For it is a sacrifice, and a priest is and remains a human sacrifice... The people feel such sacrificed, quieted, serious people of "faith" as wise: that is, as people who have come to know, as "certain" ones, in contrast to their own uncertainty. Who would want to take from them the word and this reverence? — But, as is only fair in the eyes of philosophers, a priest still counts as "the people" and not as someone who knows. Above all, because philosophers themselves do not believe in "those who know," and in this belief and superstition they already smell "the people." It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece, and left to the actors of the spirit the magnificent arrogance of calling oneself wise. It was the modesty of monsters of pride and self-rule such as Pythagoras and Plato.

352 How Far Morality Is Hardly Dispensable. — The naked human being is generally a shameful sight. I am talking about us Europeans (and not even about the European women!). Suppose the merriest dinner party were suddenly exposed and stripped by a magician's trick. I believe not only the cheerfulness would be gone, but the strongest appetite would be discouraged. It seems we Europeans simply cannot do without that masquerade we call clothing. But does the disguise of "moral human beings," their covering under moral formulas and notions of decency, the whole kindly hiding of our actions under the concepts of duty, virtue, public spirit, honorableness and self-denial, not have equally good reasons behind it? I do not mean that human malice and baseness, in short the bad, wild beast in us, is supposed to be disguised. My thought is the opposite: that precisely as tame animals we are a shameful sight, and need the moral disguise. The inner human being in Europe is by no means bad enough to "show himself" with it (to be beautiful with it). The European dresses himself in morality because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal, with good reasons for being "tame," because he is almost a freak of nature, something half, weak, awkward... It is not the terrifying quality of the predator that needs a moral disguise, but the herd animal, with its deep mediocrity, its fear and its boredom with itself. Morality dresses the European up, let us admit it! Toward the more distinguished, the more significant, the more impressive, toward the "divine" —

353 On the Origin of Religions. — The real invention of the founders of religions is, first, to set up a certain kind of life and everyday routine of custom, which works as a disciplina voluntatis and at the same time gets rid of boredom. And second, to give this very life an interpretation, by which it seems to shine with the highest value, so that it now becomes a good worth fighting for, and under some circumstances worth giving one's life for. In truth, of these two inventions the second is the more essential. The first, the way of life, was usually already there, but beside other ways of life, and without any awareness of what value was inherent in it. The significance and originality of a founder of religion usually shows in his seeing it, his choosing it, his being the first to guess what it is for and how it can be interpreted. Jesus (or Paul), for example, found the life of the little people in the Roman province already there: a modest, virtuous, oppressed life. He interpreted it. He put the highest meaning and value into it. And with that came the courage to despise every other way of life, the quiet fanaticism of the Moravian Brethren, the secret, underground self-confidence that grows and grows until at last it is ready to "overcome the world" (that is, Rome and the upper classes of the whole empire). Buddha too found such people, scattered through all the classes and levels of his people, who out of laziness are good and kind (above all harmless), and who, also out of laziness, live abstemiously and almost without needs. He understood that such people must inevitably roll, with all their vis inertiae, into a faith that promises to prevent the return of earthly toil (that is, of work and of action in general). This "understanding" was his genius. A founder of religion needs psychological infallibility, a knowledge of a certain average kind of souls that have not yet recognized that they belong together. He is the one who brings them together. So the founding of a religion always becomes a long festival of recognition.

354 On the “genius of the species.”—The problem of consciousness (more exactly: of becoming conscious) comes up for us only when we begin to see how far we could do without it. And physiology and the history of animals now put us at the start of that insight (they needed two centuries, then, to catch up with the suspicion Leibniz had raised long before them). For we could think, feel, will, and remember; we could also “act” in every sense of the word. And yet none of this would need to “enter our consciousness” (as the usual image has it). All of life would be possible without its seeing itself, so to speak, in a mirror—just as, in fact, by far the greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring, even our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however insulting that may sound to an older philosopher. What for do we have consciousness at all, if it is superfluous in the main?—Now it seems to me, if anyone is willing to hear my answer to this question and its perhaps extravagant guess, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness always stand in proportion to a person’s (or an animal’s) ability to communicate, and that this ability stands in turn in proportion to the need to communicate. I do not mean this to say that the very individual who is a master at communicating and making their needs understood must also, because of those needs, depend most on others. But that is how it seems to me to be with whole races and chains of generations: where need, necessity, has long forced people to communicate, to understand one another quickly and finely, there is in the end a surplus of this power and art of communication, a kind of fortune that has gradually piled up and now waits for an heir to spend it lavishly (—the so-called artists are these heirs, and so are the orators, preachers, and writers, all of them people who always come at the end of a long chain, “late-born” every time, in the best sense of the word, and, as I said, spenders by their very nature). Suppose this observation is right; then I may go on to the guess that consciousness in general has developed only under the pressure of the need to communicate—that from the start it was necessary and useful only between one person and another (between those who command and those who obey, in particular), and that it developed only in proportion to the degree of this usefulness. Consciousness is really only a network of connections between people—only as such did it have to develop: a person living alone, like a beast of prey, would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements come into our consciousness at all—at least a part of them—is the result of a terrible, long “must” that ruled over human beings: as the most endangered animal, they needed help and protection, they needed their own kind, they had to know how to express their distress and make themselves understood—and for all of this they first needed “consciousness,” that is, to “know” for themselves what they lacked, to “know” how they felt, to “know” what they thought. For, to say it again: a human being, like every living creature, thinks all the time but does not know it; the thinking that becomes conscious is only the smallest part of it, let us say the most superficial, the worst part:—for this conscious thinking alone happens in words, that is, in signs for communication, and with that the origin of consciousness itself is laid bare. In short, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but only of reason’s becoming conscious of itself) go hand in hand. Add to this that not only language serves as a bridge between one person and another, but also the look, the touch, the gesture; our becoming conscious of our own sense impressions, our power to hold them fixed and set them, as it were, outside ourselves, has grown to the same degree that the need grew to pass them on to others by signs. The sign-inventing human being is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more sharply aware of themselves; only as a social animal did human beings learn to become conscious of themselves—they are still doing it, and more and more.—My thought is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to a person’s individual existence, but rather to what in them is community and herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed finely only in relation to what is useful to the community and the herd; and that consequently each of us, with the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, to “know ourselves,” will still bring to consciousness only what is not individual in us, our “average”—that our thought itself is constantly, as it were, outvoted by the character of consciousness—by the “genius of the species” that commands in it—and translated back into the herd perspective. At bottom, our actions are all personal in an incomparable way, unique, without limit individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem so… This is the real phenomenalism and perspectivism, as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness means that the world of which we can become conscious is only a world of surfaces and signs, a world made general, a world made common—that everything which becomes conscious, for that very reason becomes shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a herd marker; that with all becoming conscious there goes a great, thorough corruption, falsification, flattening to the surface, and generalization. In the end, growing consciousness is a danger; and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease. As you can guess, it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: I leave that distinction to the theorists of knowledge who have got caught in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the common people). Still less is it the opposition of “thing in itself” and appearance: for we “know” nowhere near enough to be allowed even to separate them like that. We simply have no organ for knowing, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species. And even what is called “usefulness” here is in the end only a belief, an imagination, and perhaps exactly that most fateful stupidity by which we will one day perish.

355 The origin of our concept “knowledge.”—I take this explanation from the street; I heard someone from the common people say “he recognized me,” and it made me ask myself: what do the people really mean by knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: something strange is to be traced back to something familiar. And we philosophers—have we really meant anything more by knowledge? The familiar, that is: what we are used to, so that we no longer wonder at it, our everyday life, some rule we are stuck in, anything at all in which we know ourselves to be at home:—what? Is our need to know not exactly this need for the familiar, the will to uncover, among everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer unsettles us? Should it not be the instinct of fear that bids us know? Should the rejoicing of the one who knows not be exactly the rejoicing at a regained feeling of security?… This philosopher fancied that the world was “known” once he had traced it back to the “idea”: ah, was it not because the “idea” was so familiar to him, so customary? because he was so little afraid of the “idea” any more?—Oh, how easily satisfied those who know are! Just look at their principles and their solutions to the riddles of the world with that in mind! When they find again in things, among things, behind things something that is, unfortunately, all too familiar to us, for example our multiplication table, or our logic, or our willing and desiring, how happy they are at once! For “what is familiar is known”: on this they agree. Even the most cautious among them think that the familiar is at the very least easier to know than the strange; that it is, for example, a rule of method to start from the “inner world,” from the “facts of consciousness,” because it is the world more familiar to us! Error of errors! The familiar is the customary; and the customary is the hardest thing to “know,” that is, to see as a problem, that is, to see as strange, as distant, as “outside us”… The great certainty of the natural sciences, compared with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness—unnatural sciences, as one might almost say—rests precisely on their taking the strange as their object, whereas it is almost something self-contradictory and absurd to want to take what is not strange as an object at all…

356 How far things in Europe will become ever more “artistic.”—The care for making a living still forces on almost every European man—even today, in our age of transition, when so much is ceasing to compel—a definite role, their so-called profession. A few keep the freedom, an apparent freedom, to choose this role themselves; for most, it is chosen. The result is strange enough: almost all Europeans, at a more advanced age, mistake themselves for their role; they themselves are the victims of their “good acting,” they themselves have forgotten how much chance, mood, and arbitrariness had them at their disposal at the time when their “profession” was decided—and how many other roles they might perhaps have been able to play: for now it is too late! Seen more deeply, the role has really become character, art has become nature. There were ages when people believed, with stiff confidence, even with piety, that they were predestined for precisely this business, precisely this way of earning their bread, and flatly refused to admit the chance in it, the role, the arbitrary: social ranks, guilds, and inherited trade privileges, with the help of this belief, managed to put up those monsters of broad social towers that mark the Middle Ages and of which at least one thing remains to be praised: the ability to last (—and lasting is a value of the first rank on earth!). But there are opposite ages, the truly democratic ones, in which people unlearn this belief more and more, and a certain bold belief and viewpoint of the opposite comes to the front, that Athenian belief first noticed in the age of Pericles, that American belief of today which increasingly wants to become the European belief too: where the individual is convinced they can do just about everything, is up to just about any role, where everyone experiments with themselves, improvises, tries anew, tries with delight, where all nature ceases and becomes art… The Greeks, having once entered into this belief in roles—an artist’s belief, if you like—went through, as is well known, step by step, a strange transformation that is not in every respect worth imitating: they really became actors; as such they bewitched and overcame the whole world and finally even the “world conqueror” (for the little Greek actor conquered Rome, and not, as the innocent are accustomed to say, Greek culture…). But what I fear, what one can already grasp with one’s hands today, if one had a mind to reach for it: we modern people are already quite on the same road; and every time a person begins to discover how far they play a role and how far they can be an actor, they become an actor… With that, a new flora and fauna of human beings comes up, which cannot grow in firmer, more limited ages—or are left “down below,” under the ban and suspicion of dishonor—; with it there come up every time the most interesting and maddest ages of history, in which the “actors,” all kinds of actors, are the real masters. Just by this, another kind of human being is put at an ever deeper disadvantage and finally made impossible, above all the great “builders”; now the power to build is paralyzed; the courage to make plans far ahead is discouraged; the organizing geniuses begin to be lacking:—who still dares now to undertake works whose completion would require one to count on thousands of years? That basic belief is dying out, on the strength of which a person could count in this way, make promises, anticipate the future in a plan, sacrifice it to their plan—namely, that a human being has worth and meaning only insofar as they are a stone in a great building: for which they must above all be firm, must be “stone”… Above all not—an actor! To put it briefly—ah, it will be kept quiet long enough yet!—what from now on is no longer built, can no longer be built, is a society in the old sense of the word; to build this building everything is lacking, above all the material. None of us is material for a society any more: that is a truth whose time has come! It seems to me a matter of indifference that for the time being the most shortsighted, perhaps most honest, and at any rate loudest kind of human being there is today, our gentlemen the Socialists, believe, hope, dream, and above all shout and write roughly the opposite; one reads their future word “free society” already on all tables and walls. Free society? Yes! Yes! But you know, gentlemen, what it is built from? From wooden iron! From the famous wooden iron! And not even from wooden…

357 On the old problem: “What is German?”—Count up for yourself the real achievements of philosophical thought that we owe to German minds: can they, in any permissible sense, also be credited to the whole race? May we say that they are at the same time the work of the “German soul,” or at least a symptom of it, in the sense in which we are used to taking Plato’s idea-mania, his almost religious madness for forms, as an event and a testimony of the “Greek soul” at the same time? Or would the opposite be true? Would they be just as individual, just as much an exception to the spirit of the race, as Goethe’s paganism was, with a good conscience? Or as Bismarck’s Machiavellianism, his so-called “realpolitik,” is among Germans, with a good conscience? Did our philosophers perhaps even contradict the need of the “German soul”? In short, were the German philosophers really—philosophical Germans?—I recall three cases. First, Leibniz’s incomparable insight, in which he was proved right not only against Descartes but against everything that had philosophized before him,—that consciousness is only an accident of the mental image, not its necessary and essential attribute; that what we call consciousness therefore makes up only one state of our mental and spiritual world (perhaps a diseased state) and by no means that world itself:—is there anything German in this thought, whose depth is not exhausted even today? Is there any reason to suppose that a Latin would not easily have come upon this reversal of how things appear?—for it is a reversal. Let us recall, second, Kant’s enormous question mark, which he wrote beside the concept of “causality,”—not that he doubted its right to exist at all, as Hume did: rather, he began carefully to mark off the realm within which this concept has any meaning (people have not finished fixing this boundary even now). Let us take, third, Hegel’s astonishing stroke, which reached right through all logical habits and indulgences when he dared to teach that the species-concepts develop out of one another: by this proposition the minds of Europe were shaped in advance for the last great scientific movement, Darwinism—for without Hegel, no Darwin. Is there anything German in this Hegelian novelty, which first brought the decisive concept of “development” into science?—Yes, without any doubt: in all three cases we feel that something of ourselves has been “uncovered” and guessed, and we are grateful for it and surprised at the same time; each of these three propositions is a thought-provoking piece of German self-knowledge, self-experience, self-grasping. “Our inner world is much richer, wider, more hidden,” so we feel with Leibniz; as Germans we doubt with Kant the final validity of the findings of natural science and of everything that can be known by cause and effect: the knowable, as such, already seems to us to be of lesser value. We Germans are Hegelians even if there had never been a Hegel, insofar as we (in contrast to all Latins) instinctively ascribe a deeper meaning and richer value to becoming, to development, than to what “is”—we hardly believe in the justification of the concept “being”—; and likewise insofar as we are not inclined to concede that our human logic is logic in itself, the only kind of logic (we would rather persuade ourselves that it is only a special case, and perhaps one of the strangest and stupidest—). A fourth question would be whether Schopenhauer too, with his pessimism, that is, the problem of the value of existence, had to be a German. I think not. The event after which this problem could be expected with certainty, so that an astronomer of the soul could have calculated the day and hour for it—the decline of belief in the Christian God, the victory of scientific atheism—is an event for all of Europe, in which all races are supposed to have their share of merit and honor. Conversely, it should be charged to the Germans—those Germans with whom Schopenhauer lived at the same time—that they delayed this victory of atheism longest and most dangerously; Hegel in particular was its delayer par excellence, in keeping with the grandiose attempt he made to persuade us, at the very last, of the divinity of existence, with the help of our sixth sense, the “historical sense.” As a philosopher, Schopenhauer was the first avowed and unbending atheist that we Germans have had: his enmity toward Hegel had its background here. That existence is not divine counted for him as something given, tangible, beyond discussion; he lost his philosopher’s composure every time and fell into indignation when he saw anyone hesitate and make detours on this point. Here lies all his integrity: unconditional, honest atheism is precisely the presupposition of the way he poses his problem, as a victory of the European conscience, won at last and with difficulty, as the most consequential act of a two-thousand-year discipline toward truth, which in the end forbids itself the lie in the belief in God… One sees what actually won out over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the ever more strictly taken concept of truthfulness, the confessor’s subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To look at nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and care of a god; to interpret history in honor of a divine reason, as constant testimony to a moral world order and moral final purposes; to explain one’s own experiences as pious people have long enough explained them, as if everything were providence, everything a hint, everything thought up and sent for the sake of the soul’s salvation: that is now over, it has the conscience against it, it counts with every finer conscience as indecent, dishonest, as lying, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice—with this severity, if with anything, we are good Europeans and heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest self-overcoming. As we thrust the Christian interpretation from us in this way and condemn its “meaning” as counterfeiting, Schopenhauer’s question comes at us at once in a terrible way: does existence have a meaning at all?—that question which will need a few centuries to be heard even fully and in all its depth. What Schopenhauer himself answered to this question was—forgive me—something hasty, youthful, only a settlement, a stopping and getting stuck in exactly those Christian-ascetic moral outlooks from which, together with the belief in God, belief had been withdrawn… But he posed the question—as a good European, as I said, and not as a German.—Or might the Germans, at least by the way in which they took hold of Schopenhauer’s question, have shown their inner belonging and kinship, their preparation, their need for his problem? That after Schopenhauer there was thinking and printing about the problem he set up in Germany too—late enough, by the way!—is certainly not enough to decide in favor of this closer belonging; one could even bring the peculiar clumsiness of this post-Schopenhauerian pessimism to bear against it—the Germans plainly did not behave in it as in their element. I am not alluding here at all to Eduard von Hartmann; on the contrary, my old suspicion has not been lifted even today that he is too clever for us, I mean, that as a wicked rogue he may from the beginning have been making fun of more than German pessimism—that in the end he might even “bequeath” to the Germans, in his will, how far they themselves could be made fools of in the founding era. But I ask: should one perhaps count old Bahnsen, that humming top, to the Germans’ credit, who all his life spun with delight around his real-dialectical misery and his “personal bad luck”—would that be especially German? (I recommend his writings, by the way, for the very use I have made of them myself, as anti-pessimistic fare, namely for the sake of his psychological elegances, with which, it seems to me, even the most constipated body and mind can be reached.) Or might one count such dilettantes and old maids as the sugary apostle of virginity, Mainländer, among the real Germans? In the end he will have been a Jew (—all Jews turn sugary when they moralize). Neither Bahnsen, nor Mainländer, nor certainly Eduard von Hartmann gives us a sure handle on the question whether Schopenhauer’s pessimism—his horrified gaze into a world that had been stripped of the divine and had become stupid, blind, mad, and questionable, his honest horror…—was not only an exceptional case among Germans but a German event: whereas everything else that stands in the foreground, our brave politics, our cheerful flag-waving, which resolutely enough looks at all things from a not very philosophical principle (“Germany, Germany above all”), that is, under the aspect of the species, namely the German species, testifies with great clarity to the opposite. No! The Germans of today are not pessimists! And Schopenhauer was a pessimist, to say it once more, as a good European and not as a German.—

358 The peasants’ revolt of the spirit.—We Europeans stand in view of an enormous world of ruins, where some things still tower high, where much stands rotten and uncanny, but most already lies on the ground, picturesque enough—where were there ever more beautiful ruins?—and overgrown with big and little weeds. The Church is this city of ruin: we see the religious society of Christianity shaken down to its lowest foundations,—belief in God is overturned, belief in the Christian-ascetic ideal is just now fighting its last fight. A work built so long and so thoroughly as Christianity—it was the last Roman building!—could not, of course, be destroyed all at once; every kind of earthquake had to shake it, and every kind of spirit that bores, digs, gnaws, and soaks had to help. But what is strangest: those who have taken the most trouble to hold and preserve Christianity have become its best destroyers,—the Germans. It seems that the Germans do not understand the nature of a church. Are they not spiritual enough for it? Not suspicious enough? The building of the Church rests, at any rate, on a southern freedom and free-mindedness of spirit, and equally on a southern suspicion of nature, human beings, and spirit,—it rests on a completely different knowledge of human beings, a different experience of them, than the north has had. The Lutheran Reformation was, in its whole breadth, the indignation of simplicity against something “manifold”—to speak cautiously, a coarse, honest misunderstanding, of which much is to be forgiven,—people did not grasp the expression of a victorious Church and saw only corruption; they misunderstood the noble skepticism, that luxury of skepticism and tolerance which every victorious, self-assured power allows itself… Today we can see well enough how Luther was fatefully shortsighted, shallow, and incautious in all cardinal questions of power, above all as a man of the people, who lacked any inheritance from a ruling caste, any instinct for power: so that his work, his will to restore that Roman work, became—without his wanting or knowing it—only the beginning of a work of destruction. He unpicked and tore apart, with honest fury, where the old spider had woven most carefully and longest. He handed the holy books over to everyone,—and so they finally fell into the hands of the philologists, that is, of the destroyers of every faith that rests on books. He destroyed the concept “Church” by throwing away belief in the inspiration of the councils: for only on the presupposition that the inspiring spirit who founded the Church still lives in it, still builds, still goes on building his house, does the concept “Church” keep its force. He gave the priest back sexual relations with woman: but three quarters of the reverence of which the people, above all the woman of the people, are capable rests on the belief that a person who is an exception on this point will be an exception on other points too,—here precisely the popular belief in something superhuman in man, in the miracle, in the redeeming god in man, has its subtlest and most insidious advocate. Luther had to take away private confession from the priest after he had given him woman; that was psychologically right: but with that the Christian priest himself was at bottom abolished, whose deepest usefulness has always been to be a holy ear, a silent well, a grave for secrets. “Everyone his own priest”—behind such formulas and their peasant cunning, Luther’s bottomless hatred of the “higher man” and the rule of the “higher man,” as the Church had conceived him, hid itself:—he smashed an ideal that he did not know how to reach, while he seemed to fight and detest the degeneration of that ideal. In fact he, the impossible monk, pushed away from himself the rule of the religious men; so he did himself, within the church order of society, exactly what he fought so intolerantly with regard to the civil order—a “peasants’ revolt.”—Everything that grew afterward out of his Reformation, good and bad, and that today can be roughly reckoned up,—who would be naive enough to simply praise or blame Luther for these consequences? He is innocent of all of it; he did not know what he was doing. The flattening of the European spirit, especially in the north, its turning good-natured, if one prefers to hear it called by a moral word, took a solid step forward with the Lutheran Reformation, there is no doubt; and likewise through it grew the mobility and restlessness of the spirit, its thirst for independence, its belief in a right to freedom, its “naturalness.” If one wants to grant it, in this latter respect, the merit of having prepared and favored what we revere today as “modern science,” one must of course add that it is also partly guilty of the degeneration of the modern scholar, of their lack of reverence, shame, and depth, of all the naive trustfulness and solid-citizen manner in matters of knowledge, in short of that plebeianism of the spirit which is peculiar to the last two centuries and from which even pessimism so far has by no means redeemed us,—the “modern ideas” too still belong to this peasants’ revolt of the north against the colder, more ambiguous, more suspicious spirit of the south, which built itself its greatest monument in the Christian Church. Finally, let us not forget what a church is, in contrast to every “state”: a church is above all a structure of rule that secures the highest rank for the more spiritual human beings and believes so far in the power of spirituality that it forbids itself all the coarser means of force,—by that alone the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the state.—

359 Revenge on the spirit, and other backgrounds of morality.—Morality—where do you think it has its most dangerous and treacherous advocates?… Here is a human being who has turned out badly, who does not have enough spirit to be able to enjoy it, and just enough education to know that; bored, weary, a despiser of themselves; unfortunately cheated, through some inherited wealth, even of the last consolation, the “blessing of work,” the self-forgetting in “daily labor”; a person who at bottom is ashamed of their existence—perhaps they also harbor a few small vices—and who, on the other hand, cannot help spoiling themselves ever worse and making themselves vain and touchy through books to which they have no right, or through more spiritual company than they can digest: such a thoroughly poisoned person—for spirit becomes poison, education becomes poison, possessions become poison, solitude becomes poison in people who have turned out so badly—ends up in a habitual state of revenge, of the will to revenge… What do you think they need, need absolutely, to create for themselves, in their own eyes, the appearance of superiority over more spiritual people, to create for themselves the pleasure of revenge carried out, at least in their imagination? Always morality, you can bet on it, always the big moral words, always the boom-boom of justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue, always the stoicism of gesture (—how well stoicism hides what one does not have!…), always the cloak of wise silence, of affability, of mildness, and whatever else the idealists’ cloaks are called, under which the incurable self-despisers, and the incurably vain too, walk about. Do not misunderstand me: out of such born enemies of the spirit there arises at times that rare piece of humanity which the people honor under the name of the saint, the sage; out of such people come those monsters of morality who make noise, who make history,—Saint Augustine belongs among them. The fear of the spirit, the revenge on the spirit—oh how often have these driving vices already become the root of virtues! Yes, of virtue!—And, between ourselves, even that philosophers’ claim to wisdom which has been made here and there on earth, the maddest and most immodest of all claims,—was it not always so far, in India as in Greece, above all a hiding place? Sometimes perhaps from the viewpoint of education, which sanctifies so many lies, as tender consideration for those who are becoming, growing, for disciples who often have to be defended against themselves by belief in the person (by an error)… In the more frequent cases, though, a hiding place of the philosopher, behind which they save themselves out of weariness, age, cooling, hardening, as a feeling of the nearness of the end, as the cleverness of that instinct which animals have before death,—they go aside, grow quiet, choose solitude, creep into caves, become wise… What? Wisdom a hiding place of the philosopher from—the spirit?—

360 Two kinds of cause that people mix up.—This seems to me one of my most essential steps and advances: I learned to tell the cause of acting apart from the cause of acting in such-and-such a way, in this direction, toward this goal. The first kind of cause is a quantum of dammed-up force that is waiting to be used up somehow, for something; the second kind, by contrast, is something quite insignificant when measured against this force, mostly a small accident, by which that quantum now “discharges” itself in one definite way: the match in relation to the powder keg. Among these small accidents and matches I count all the so-called “purposes,” and likewise the even more so-called “callings in life”: they are relatively arbitrary, willful, almost indifferent in relation to the enormous quantum of force that presses, as I said, to be used up somehow. People commonly look at it differently: they are used to seeing the driving force precisely in the goal (purpose, calling, and so on), by a very ancient error,—but the goal is only the steering force; the helmsman and the steam have been mixed up. And not even always the helmsman, the steering force… Is the “goal,” the “purpose,” not often enough only a flattering pretext, an after-the-fact self-deception of vanity, which does not want to admit that the ship follows the current into which it has happened to fall? That it “wants” to go there because it—must? That it has a direction, to be sure, but quite and entirely—no helmsman?—We still need a critique of the concept “purpose.”

361 On the problem of the actor.—The problem of the actor has troubled me longest; I was uncertain about it (and sometimes still am) whether only from there will one get at the dangerous concept “artist”—a concept treated until now with unforgivable good nature. Falseness with a good conscience; the delight in disguise breaking out as a power, pushing aside, flooding over, sometimes extinguishing the so-called “character”; the inner craving to get into a role and a mask, into an appearance; a surplus of abilities to adapt of every kind, which no longer know how to satisfy themselves in the service of the nearest, narrowest advantage: is all that perhaps not only the actor as such?… Such an instinct will have developed most easily in families of the lower people, who had to carry through their lives under changing pressure and compulsion, in deep dependence, who had to stretch themselves supply to fit their blanket, to arrange themselves anew for each new circumstance, to give and present themselves ever differently, becoming gradually able to turn their cloak to every wind and thereby almost becoming the cloak, masters of that incorporated, fleshed-in art of the eternal game of hide-and-seek that is called mimicry in animals: until at last this whole capacity, stored up from generation to generation, becomes domineering, unreasonable, unruly, learns as an instinct to command other instincts, and produces the actor, the “artist” (the prankster, liar, buffoon, fool, and clown first, also the classic servant, Gil Blas: for in such types one has the prehistory of the artist and often enough even of the “genius”). In higher social conditions, too, under similar pressure, a similar kind of person grows up: only then the actor’s instinct is mostly just barely held in check by another instinct, for example in the “diplomat,”—I would believe, by the way, that a good diplomat would always still be free to turn out a good stage actor too, provided it were “open” to them. But as for the Jews, that people of the art of adaptation par excellence, one would like to see in them, following this line of thought, from the start something like a world-historical arrangement for breeding actors, a real breeding ground of actors; and indeed the question is quite timely: what good actor today is not—a Jew? The Jew too, as a born man of letters, as the actual ruler of the European press, exercises this power of his on the basis of his acting ability: for the man of letters is essentially an actor,—he plays, that is, the “expert,” the “specialist.”—Finally the women: think over the whole history of women,—must they not be, first and foremost, actresses? Listen to the doctors who have hypnotized women; finally, love them,—let them “hypnotize” you! What always comes of it? That they “present themselves,” even when they—give themselves… Woman is so artistic…

362 Our belief in a masculinization of Europe.—We owe it to Napoleon (and not at all to the French Revolution, which aimed at “brotherhood” between peoples and a general flowery exchange of hearts) that a few warlike centuries may now follow one another, which have no equal in history; in short, that we have entered the classical age of war, of learned and at the same time popular war on the grandest scale (of means, of talents, of discipline), on which all the coming millennia will look back with envy and reverence as on a piece of perfection:—for the national movement out of which this glory of war grows is only the counter-shock against Napoleon and would not exist without Napoleon. To him, then, one will someday be allowed to credit that the man in Europe has again become master over the merchant and the philistine; perhaps even over “woman,” who has been coddled by Christianity and the enthusiastic spirit of the eighteenth century, and even more by the “modern ideas.” Napoleon, who saw in the modern ideas and, directly, in civilization something like a personal enemy, proved himself by this enmity one of the greatest continuers of the Renaissance: he brought up again a whole piece of ancient character, the decisive piece perhaps, the piece of granite. And who knows whether this piece of ancient character will not in the end become master again over the national movement too, and must make itself, in an affirmative sense, the heir and continuer of Napoleon:—who wanted the one Europe, as is well known, and this as mistress of the earth.—

363 How each sex has its prejudice about love.—For all the concessions I am willing to make to the monogamous prejudice, I will never admit that one can speak of equal rights in love for man and woman: there are none. The reason is that man and woman each understand something different by love,—and it is among the conditions of love in both sexes that one sex does not presuppose in the other sex the same feeling, the same concept of “love.” What woman understands by love is clear enough: total surrender (not merely devotion) with soul and body, without any regard, any reservation, with shame and horror rather at the thought of a surrender hedged with clauses, tied to conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is precisely a faith: woman has no other.—Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her, and is consequently, for his own person, furthest from the presupposition of feminine love; but supposing that there should also be men to whom, for their part, the desire for total surrender is not foreign, well, then they are simply—not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes a slave by it; but a woman who loves like a woman becomes by it a more perfect woman… The passion of woman, in its unconditional renunciation of her own rights, has precisely as its presupposition that on the other side there is not an equal pathos, an equal wish to renounce: for if both renounced themselves out of love, there would arise from it—well, I do not know what, perhaps an empty space?—Woman wants to be taken, accepted as a possession, wants to be absorbed into the concept “possession,” “possessed”; consequently she wants one who takes, who does not give himself and give himself away, who on the contrary is precisely to be made richer in “himself”—by the gain in strength, happiness, and faith which woman gives him by giving herself. Woman gives herself away, man takes more for himself—I think that no social contracts, not even the very best will to justice, will get us past this natural opposition: desirable as it may be that one not keep the hard, terrible, enigmatic, immoral side of this antagonism constantly before one’s eyes. For love, thought of whole, great, full, is nature, and as nature is something “immoral” for all eternity.—Fidelity is accordingly included in woman’s love, it follows from its definition; in man it can easily arise in the train of his love, perhaps as gratitude or as an idiosyncrasy of taste and so-called elective affinity, but it does not belong to the essence of his love,—and so little that one might almost with some right speak of a natural opposition between love and fidelity in man: his love being precisely a wanting-to-have and not a renouncing and giving away; the wanting-to-have, though, comes to an end every time with the having… In fact it is the subtler and more suspicious thirst for possession in man, which rarely and late admits this “having” to itself, that keeps his love going; so far it is even possible that it grows after the surrender,—he does not readily concede that a woman could have nothing more to “surrender” to him.—

364 The hermit speaks.—The art of dealing with people rests essentially on the skill (which presupposes long practice) of accepting, taking in, a meal whose kitchen one has no confidence in. Suppose one comes to the table with a wolf’s hunger, everything is easy (“the worst company makes itself felt—,” as Mephistopheles says); but one does not have it, this wolf’s hunger, when one needs it! Ah, how hard fellow human beings are to digest! First principle: as in a misfortune, put in your courage, reach out bravely, admire yourself in doing it, clench your aversion between your teeth, stuff your disgust down. Second principle: “improve” your fellow human being, for example by a praise, so that they begin to sweat out their happiness at themselves; or grab a corner of their good or “interesting” qualities and pull on it until you have the whole virtue out and can tuck your fellow human being away in its folds. Third principle: self-hypnosis. Fix your object of dealing like a glass button, until you cease to feel pleasure and displeasure in it and unnoticed fall asleep, go rigid, gain a bearing: a household remedy from marriage and friendship, amply tested, praised as indispensable, but not yet formulated scientifically. Its popular name is—patience.—

365 The hermit speaks once more.—We too deal with “people,” we too modestly put on the clothing in which (as which) people know, respect, and seek us, and so go into society, that is, among the disguised who do not want to be called that; we too do as all clever masks do and politely show the door to any curiosity that does not concern our “clothing.” But there are also other ways and tricks to “deal” with people, among people: for example as a ghost,—which is very advisable if you want to be rid of them soon and make them afraid. Test it: someone reaches for us and cannot get hold of us. That frightens. Or: we come through a closed door. Or: when all the lights are put out. Or: after we have already died. The last is the trick of posthumous people par excellence. (“What do you think?” one such person once said impatiently, “would we have any desire to endure this strangeness, cold, grave-like stillness around us, this whole underground, hidden, mute, undiscovered solitude, which with us is called life and could just as well be called death, if we did not know what will become of us,—and that only after death do we come to our life and become alive, ah! very alive! we posthumous people!”—)

366 Before a scholarly book.—We do not belong to those who come to thoughts only among books, at the prompting of books—our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, most of all on lonely mountains or close by the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first questions of value, concerning book, person, and music, are: “can he walk? even more, can he dance?…” We seldom read, and we do not read worse for it—oh how quickly we guess how someone arrived at their thoughts: whether sitting before the inkwell, with squeezed-in belly, head bent over the paper: oh how quickly we are finished with their book too! The cramped bowels betray themselves, you can bet on it, just as room air, room ceiling, room narrowness betray themselves.—Those were my feelings as I was just closing an upright scholarly book, thankful, very thankful, but also relieved… In a scholar’s book there is almost always something pressing, something pressed: the “specialist” shows up somewhere, with their zeal, their seriousness, their fury, their overestimation of the corner in which they sit and spin, their hump,—every specialist has a hump. A scholar’s book always mirrors a crooked-drawn soul too: every trade draws crooked. Meet again the friends with whom you were young, after they have taken possession of their science: ah, but the reverse has happened all the same! Ah, how they themselves are now forever occupied and possessed by it! Grown into their corner, squeezed out of recognition, unfree, thrown off their balance, lean and angular all over, only at one spot superbly round,—one is moved and says nothing when one finds them again like that. Every trade, even supposing it has a golden floor, has above it also a leaden ceiling, which presses and presses on the soul until it is pressed strange and crooked. There is nothing to be done about it. Do not think it possible to get around this disfigurement by any arts of education. Every kind of mastery is paid for dearly on earth, where perhaps everything is paid for too dearly; one is a master of one’s field at the price of being also the victim of one’s field. But you want it otherwise—“cheaper,” above all more comfortable—isn’t that so, my dear contemporaries? Well then! But then you get something else at once, namely, instead of the craftsman and master, the man of letters, the adroit, “many-turning” man of letters, who of course lacks the hump—except the one he makes when he bows before you, as the shop clerk of the spirit and “bearer” of culture—the man of letters, who really is nothing, but “represents” almost everything, who plays and “stands in for” the expert, who even takes it on himself, in all modesty, to have himself paid, honored, celebrated in the expert’s place.—No, my scholarly friends! I bless you even for your hump! And for despising, like me, the men of letters and parasites of culture! And for not knowing how to trade in spirit! And for having nothing but opinions that cannot be expressed in money value! And for representing nothing that you are not! That your only will is to become masters of your trade, in reverence for every kind of mastery and proficiency and with the most uncompromising rejection of everything that is mere show, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuoso-like, demagogic, theatrical in letters and the arts—of everything that, in regard to unconditional integrity of discipline and preparatory schooling, cannot prove itself before you! (Even genius does not help one over such a lack, however well it understands how to deceive about it: one grasps this when one has once watched our most gifted painters and musicians from close up,—all of whom, almost without exception, know how to acquire artificially and after the fact, by a cunning inventiveness of manners, of makeshifts, even of principles, the appearance of that integrity, of that solidity of schooling and culture, though without deceiving themselves by it, without silencing their own bad conscience permanently by it. For, you know it, don’t you? all great modern artists suffer from a bad conscience…)

367 What one first has to tell apart in works of art.—Everything that is thought, poetized, painted, composed, even built and shaped belongs either to monological art or to art before witnesses. Under the latter must also be counted that seeming monologue art which includes belief in God, the whole lyric of prayer: for to a pious person there is as yet no solitude,—this invention was first made by us, the godless. I know no deeper difference in the whole optics of an artist than this: whether they look from the eye of the witness at their work of art as it comes to be (at “themselves”—) or else have “forgotten the world”: as is the essence of all monological art,—it rests on forgetting, it is the music of forgetting.

368 The cynic speaks.—My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections: why first dress them up in aesthetic formulas? My “fact” is that I no longer breathe easily when this music begins to work on me; that soon my foot turns angry at it and revolts—it needs beat, dance, march; it demands of music first of all the raptures that lie in good walking, striding, leaping, dancing—. But does my stomach not protest too? My heart? My circulation? My bowels? Do I not grow hoarse without noticing?—And so I ask myself: what does my whole body actually want from music at all? I believe, its relief: as if all the animal functions should be quickened by light, bold, unrestrained, self-assured rhythms; as if brazen, leaden life should be gilded by golden, good, tender harmonies. My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection: for that I need music. What is the drama to me! What are the convulsions of its moral ecstasies, in which the “people” find their satisfaction! What is the whole hocus-pocus of gestures of the actor!… One guesses, I am by nature essentially anti-theatrical,—but Wagner was, conversely, essentially a man of the theater and an actor, the most enthusiastic mime-maniac there has ever been, even as a musician!… And, by the way: if Wagner’s theory was “the drama is the end, the music is always only its means,”—his practice, on the other hand, was from beginning to end, “the attitude is the end, the drama, and the music too, is always only its means.” Music as a means for making the dramatic gesture clearer, stronger, more inward, and for the actor’s appeal to the senses; and the Wagnerian drama only an occasion for many dramatic attitudes! He had, along with all his other instincts, the commanding instincts of a great actor, in everything and anything: and, as I said, as a musician too.—I once made this clear, with some trouble, to an upright Wagnerian; and I had reason to add: “do be a little more honest with yourself: we are not in the theater, after all! In the theater one is honest only as a mass; as an individual one lies, one lies to oneself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes into the theater, one gives up the right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s taste, even to one’s bravery, as one has and exercises it within one’s own four walls against God and man. Nobody brings the finest senses of their art into the theater, not even the artist who works for the theater: there one is people, public, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbor, fellow human being; there even the most personal conscience succumbs to the leveling magic of the ‘greatest number’; there stupidity works as lustfulness and contagion; there the ‘neighbor’ rules; there one becomes a neighbor…” (I forgot to tell what my enlightened Wagnerian replied to the physiological objections: “So you are really just not healthy enough for our music?”—)

369 Our side by side.—Must we not admit to ourselves, we artists, that there is an uncanny difference in us, that our taste and, on the other hand, our creative power stand by themselves in a strange way, remain standing by themselves, and have a growth of their own,—I mean, quite different degrees and tempi of old, young, ripe, mellow, rotten? So that, for example, a musician could create all their life things that contradict what their spoiled listener’s ear and listener’s heart value, taste, and prefer:—they need not even know about this contradiction! One can, as an almost painfully regular experience shows, easily outgrow with one’s taste the taste of one’s power, even without the latter being thereby crippled and hindered from producing; but something reverse can also happen,—and this is exactly what I would like to draw artists’ attention to. A constant creator, a “mother” among people, in the great sense of the word, one who knows and hears of nothing but the pregnancies and childbirths of their spirit, who has no time at all to reflect on themselves and their work, to compare, who is also no longer willing to practice their taste, and simply forgets it, that is, lets it stand, lie, or fall,—perhaps such a person finally produces works which they with their judgment are long since no longer equal to: so that they say foolish things about them and about themselves,—say them and think them. This seems to me, in fruitful artists, almost the normal relationship,—nobody knows a child worse than its parents—and it holds even, to take a huge example, of the whole Greek world of poets and artists: it never “knew” what it had done…

370 What is romanticism?—Perhaps one remembers, at least among my friends, that at the start I went at this modern world with some thick errors and overestimations and in any case as one who hoped. I understood—who knows on the basis of what personal experiences?—the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as if it were the symptom of a higher power of thought, of a bolder bravery, of a more victorious fullness of life than had been proper to the eighteenth century, the age of Hume, Kant, Condillac, and the sensualists: so that tragic knowledge appeared to me as the real luxury of our culture, as its most precious, noblest, most dangerous kind of squandering, but still, on the basis of its superabundance, as its permitted luxury. Likewise I interpreted German music for myself as the expression of a Dionysian power of the German soul: in it I believed I heard the earthquake by which a primal force dammed up from of old at last gives itself air—indifferent to whether everything else that is called culture is shaken to trembling by it. One sees, I mistook at that time, in philosophical pessimism as in German music, what makes up their real character—their romanticism. What is romanticism? Every art, every philosophy may be regarded as a remedy and aid in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and those who suffer. But there are two kinds of those who suffer: first, those who suffer from the overfullness of life, who want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view and insight into life,—and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life, who seek rest, stillness, a smooth sea, release from themselves through art and knowledge, or else frenzy, spasm, stupor, madness. To the double need of the latter corresponds all romanticism in the arts and in knowledge, and to them corresponded (and corresponds) both Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, to name those most famous and most explicit romantics, whom I misunderstood at that time—not, incidentally, to their disadvantage, as I may in all fairness be granted. The one richest in fullness of life, the Dionysian god and human being, can afford not only the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and every luxury of destruction, decomposition, negation; in such a one evil, senseless, and ugly seem as it were permitted, as a result of a surplus of begetting, fertilizing forces, which is able to make a lush fruit land out of every desert. Conversely, the one who suffers most, the poorest in life, would need most of all mildness, peacefulness, goodness, in thinking and in acting, if possible a god who would be quite properly a god for the sick, a “savior”; likewise also logic, the conceptual intelligibility of existence—for logic calms, gives confidence—in short a certain warm, fear-averting narrowness and enclosure in optimistic horizons. In this way I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist, likewise the “Christian,” who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean and, like him, essentially a romantic,—and my eye grew ever sharper for that most difficult and most treacherous form of inference backward, in which most errors are made—the inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to the one who needs it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the need commanding behind it.—With regard to all aesthetic values I now make use of this main distinction: I ask, in every single case, “has hunger or superabundance become creative here?” At first another distinction might seem more recommendable—it is far more obvious—namely, to look at whether the longing for making rigid, for making eternal, for being is the cause of the creating, or else the longing for destruction, for change, for the new, for the future, for becoming. But both kinds of longing prove, seen more deeply, still ambiguous, and indeed interpretable precisely according to that scheme put first and, as it seems to me, rightly preferred. The longing for destruction, change, becoming can be the expression of overfull, future-pregnant power (my term for it, as is known, is the word “Dionysian”), but it can also be the hatred of the one who has turned out badly, who lacks, who has come off badly, who destroys, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existing, all being itself, outrages and provokes them—to understand this affect, look at our anarchists up close. The will to make eternal likewise needs a twofold interpretation. It can come, on the one hand, from gratitude and love:—an art of this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, dithyrambic perhaps with Rubens, blissfully mocking with Hafiz, bright and kind with Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and halo over all things. But it can also be that tyrannical will of one who suffers heavily, struggles, is tortured, who would like to stamp the most personal, most individual, narrowest thing, the real idiosyncrasy of their suffering, as binding law and compulsion, and who as it were takes revenge on all things by pressing, forcing, branding their image, the image of their torture, onto them. The latter is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether as Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or as Wagner’s music:—romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture. (That there could still be an entirely different pessimism, a classical one—this foreboding and vision belongs to me, as inseparable from me, as my own, my very own: only that my ears resist the word “classical,” it has become far too worn out, too round and unrecognizable. I call that pessimism of the future—for it is coming! I see it coming!—Dionysian pessimism.)

371 We who are not understood.—Have we ever complained about being misunderstood, misjudged, mistaken for others, slandered, misheard, and not heard at all? That is precisely our lot—oh for a long time yet! let us say, to be modest, until 1901—, it is also our distinction; we would not hold ourselves in enough honor if we wished it otherwise. People mix us up with others—the reason is that we ourselves grow, we change continually, we shed old bark, we still molt every spring, we become ever younger, more future, higher, stronger, we drive our roots ever more powerfully into the depths—into evil—while at the same time we embrace the heavens ever more lovingly, ever more broadly, and suck their light ever more thirstily into ourselves with all our branches and leaves. We grow like trees—that is hard to understand, like all life!—not at one place, but everywhere, not in one direction, but just as much up and out as in and down,—our power drives at once in trunk, branches, and roots, it is no longer free to us to do anything singly, to still be anything single… That is our lot, as I said; we grow in height; and supposing it were even our doom—for we live ever nearer to the lightning!—well then, we hold it in no less honor; it remains what we do not want to share, do not want to impart, the doom of height, our doom…

372 Why we are not idealists.—Formerly philosophers were afraid of the senses: have we—perhaps unlearned this fear too much? We are all sensualists today, we who belong to the present and the future in philosophy, not in theory, but in practice, in procedure… Those others, by contrast, thought they would be lured by the senses away from their world, the cold realm of “ideas,” to a dangerous more southern island: where, they feared, their philosopher-virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. “Wax in the ears” was then almost a condition of philosophizing; a genuine philosopher no longer heard life, insofar as life is music, they denied the music of life,—it is an old philosophers’ superstition that all music is siren music.—Now we today might be inclined to judge exactly the reverse (which might in itself be just as false): namely, that ideas are worse seducers than the senses, with all their cold anemic appearance and not even in spite of this appearance,—they always lived on the philosopher’s “blood,” they always drained the philosopher’s senses, indeed, if one will believe us, their “heart” too. These old philosophers were heartless: philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism. Do you not feel, in such figures as even Spinoza’s, something deeply enigmatic and uncanny? Do you not see the spectacle that plays out here, the constant growing paler—the ever more idealistically interpreted removal of the senses? Do you not sense in the background some long-hidden blood-sucker, who begins with the senses and finally keeps, leaves behind, bones and rattling—I mean categories, formulas, words (for, forgive me, what was left over of Spinoza, the intellectual love of God, is a rattling, nothing more! what is love, what is God, if every drop of blood is missing from them?…) In sum: all philosophical idealism has so far been something like a sickness, where it was not, as in Plato’s case, the caution of a superabundant and dangerous health, the fear of overpowering senses, the cleverness of a clever Socratic.—Perhaps we moderns are simply not healthy enough to need Plato’s idealism? And we do not fear the senses because——

373 “Science” as prejudice.—It follows from the laws of rank order that scholars, insofar as they belong to the middle class of the spirit, must not come to have the really great problems and question marks in sight at all: besides, their courage and likewise their vision does not reach so far,—above all, their need, which makes them researchers, their inner anticipation and wishing that it might be constituted thus and so, their fearing and hoping, comes to rest too soon, to satisfaction. What, for example, makes the pedantic Englishman Herbert Spencer rhapsodize in his own way and draw a line of hope, a horizon line of desirability, that final reconciliation of “egoism and altruism” that he fables about—that nearly makes people like us sick:—a humanity with such Spencerian perspectives as its last perspectives would seem to us worthy of contempt, of annihilation! But already that something has to be felt by him as the highest hope which others regard, and may regard, as a mere repulsive possibility, is a question mark that Spencer would not have been able to foresee… The same goes for that belief with which so many materialistic natural scientists are now content, the belief in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thinking, in human concepts of value, in a “world of truth” which could be finally got at with the help of our square little human reason—what? do we really want to let existence be degraded in this way to an exercise for reckoning-clerks and a stay-at-home pastime for mathematicians? Above all, one should not want to strip it of its many-sided character: that is required by good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that goes beyond your horizon! That only one interpretation of the world should be right, one on which you can stand, on which research and work can go on scientifically in your sense (—do you really mean mechanistically?), one that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching and nothing more, is a crudeness and naivety, supposing it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. Would it not, conversely, be quite probable that precisely what is most superficial and external about existence—its most apparent aspect, its skin and sensory form—would be the first to be grasped? perhaps even the only thing to be grasped? A “scientific” interpretation of the world, as you understand it, could consequently still be one of the stupidest, that is, poorest in sense, of all possible interpretations of the world: this said into the ear and conscience of the gentlemen mechanists, who like to run in among the philosophers today and are quite convinced that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which, as on a foundation, all existence must be built. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially senseless world! Suppose one estimated the value of a piece of music by how much of it could be counted, calculated, brought into formulas—how absurd would such a “scientific” estimate of music be! What would one have grasped, understood, known of it! Nothing, positively nothing of what is really “music” in it!…

374 Our New "Infinite."—How far the perspective character of existence reaches, or whether it has any other character at all, whether an existence without interpretation, without "sense," doesn't simply turn into "nonsense," whether, on the other hand, all existence isn't essentially an interpreting existence—none of this can be settled, as is only fair, even by the most diligent and painstakingly conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect. For in this analysis the human intellect cannot help seeing itself under its perspective forms and seeing itself only in them. We cannot look around our corner: it is a hopeless curiosity to want to know what other kinds of intellect and perspective there could be. For example, whether some beings can feel time running backward, or alternately forward and backward (which would give a different direction of life and a different idea of cause and effect). But I think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty of decreeing from our corner that perspectives may be had only from this corner. Rather, the world has become "infinite" to us once more, in that we cannot rule out the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations. The great shudder grips us once more—but who would feel like immediately making a god of this monstrous unknown world again in the old way? And perhaps worshiping the unknown from now on as "the Unknown One"? Ah, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are counted into this unknown, too much devilry, stupidity, and foolishness of interpretation—even our own human, all-too-human one, which we know…

375 Why We Seem Like Epicureans.—We modern people are wary of final convictions. Our distrust lies in wait against the enchantments and the tricks on conscience that lie in every strong faith, every unconditional Yes and No. How is that explained? Perhaps we may see in it, to a good extent, the caution of the "burned child," of the disappointed idealist, but to another and better extent also the exulting curiosity of a former corner-sitter, whom the corner drove to despair and who now revels and raves in the opposite of the corner, in the unlimited, in the "open air as such." In this way an almost Epicurean inclination toward knowledge develops, which does not want to give up the question-mark character of things cheaply. So does a dislike of the big moral words and gestures, and a taste that rejects all clumsy, heavy-handed opposites and is proudly aware of its practice in reservations. For that is what makes up our pride: this light tightening of the reins on our forward-storming urge for certainty, this self-control of a rider on the wildest rides. For now as before we have mad, fiery animals beneath us, and if we hesitate, it is least of all the danger that makes us hesitate…

376 Our Slow Times.—This is how all artists and people of "works" feel, the motherly kind of person: at every stage of their life—which a work each time cuts off—they always believe they have already reached the goal itself, they would always accept death patiently, with the feeling: "we are ripe for it." This is not the expression of weariness—rather of a certain autumn sunniness and mildness that the work itself, the ripeness of a work, leaves each time in its creator. Then the tempo of life slows down and becomes thick and flowing like honey—until long fermatas, until belief in the long fermata…

377 We Homeless Ones.—Among the Europeans of today there is no lack of those who have a right to call themselves homeless in a distinguishing and honorable sense; it is to them above all that I commend my secret wisdom and gaya scienza! For their lot is hard, their hope uncertain, it is quite a trick to invent a consolation for them—but what good is that! We children of the future, how could we possibly be at home in this today! We are against all ideals on the strength of which anyone could still feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for the "realities" of those ideals, though, we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still bears weight today has already become very thin: the thaw wind is blowing, we ourselves, we homeless ones, are something that breaks up ice and other all-too-thin "realities"… We "conserve" nothing, we also do not want to go back to any past, we are not "liberal" at all, we do not work for "progress," we do not need to plug our ears against the future sirens of the marketplace—what they sing, "equal rights," "free society," "no more masters and no servants," does not tempt us!—we simply do not consider it desirable that the kingdom of justice and harmony be founded on earth (because it would in any case be the kingdom of the deepest mediocrity and Chinese-ness), we take pleasure in all who, like us, love danger, war, adventure, who do not let themselves be bought off, caught, reconciled, and castrated, we count ourselves among the conquerors, we think about the necessity of new orders, even of a new slavery—for every strengthening and raising of the type "human being" also requires a new kind of enslavement—isn't that so? With all this we must be badly at home in an age that likes to claim the honor of being called the most humane, mildest, most just age the sun has seen so far? It is bad enough that we have all the uglier ulterior thoughts precisely at these beautiful words! That we see in them only the expression—also the masquerade—of deep weakening, weariness, age, declining strength! What can it matter to us what tinsel a sick person dresses up their weakness in! Let them show it off as their virtue—there is no doubt that weakness makes people mild, oh so mild, so just, so inoffensive, so "human"!—The "religion of pity," which people would like to talk us into—oh, we know well enough the hysterical little men and little women who need precisely this religion today as a veil and finery! We are not humanitarians; we would never dare to speak of our "love of humanity"—one of our kind is not enough of an actor for that! Or not enough of a Saint-Simonist, not enough of a Frenchman. One must be afflicted with a Gallic excess of erotic irritability and amorous impatience to approach even humanity honestly with one's lust… Humanity! Was there ever a more hideous old woman among all old women? (—unless it were "the truth": a question for philosophers). No, we do not love humanity; on the other hand, we are also by far not "German" enough, as the word "German" is current today, to speak in favor of nationalism and race hatred, to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning because of which people in Europe now fence themselves off from one another, seal themselves off as if with quarantines. We are too unprejudiced for that, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well informed, too "traveled": we by far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or coming centuries, just to spare ourselves the silent rage to which we would know ourselves condemned as eyewitnesses of a politics that makes the German spirit barren by making it vain, and that is a petty politics besides:—does it not need, so that its own creation does not immediately fall apart again, to plant it between two deadly hatreds? Must it not want to make Europe's division into petty states permanent? … We homeless ones are too varied and mixed in race and descent to be "modern people," and so we are little tempted to take part in that lying racial self-admiration and indecency which is put on display in Germany today as a sign of German thinking, and which strikes one as doubly false and improper in the people of the "historical sense." In a word—and let it be our word of honor!—we are good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, overloaded, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of the European spirit: as such also grown out of Christianity and opposed to it, and precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians of uncompromising honesty about Christianity, who willingly sacrificed to their faith property and blood, rank and fatherland. We—do the same. But for what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, my friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all the Nos and Maybes that you and your age are sick with; and if you must go to sea, you emigrants, you too will be forced to it by—a faith!…

378 "And Become Bright Again."—We who are generous and rich in spirit, who stand like open wells by the road and do not want to keep anyone from drawing water from us: we unfortunately do not know how to defend ourselves where we would like to, and we cannot prevent in any way that people cloud us, make us dark—that the age we live in, its "most timely" stuff, that its dirty birds throw their droppings, boys their junk, and worn-out wanderers resting by us their small and great misery into us. But we will do as we have always done: whatever people throw into us, we take down into our depths—for we are deep, we do not forget—and become bright again…

379 The Fool's Interjection.—The person who wrote this book is no misanthrope: hatred of humans costs too much today. To hate the way people once hated the human being, like Timon, as a whole, without deduction, with a full heart, out of the whole love of hatred—for that one would have to give up despising:—and how much fine joy, how much patience, how much kindness even do we owe precisely to our despising! Besides, with it we are the "chosen of God": fine despising is our taste and privilege, our art, our virtue perhaps, we most modern of the moderns!… Hatred, on the other hand, makes equal, sets face to face; in hatred there is honor; and finally, in hatred there is fear, a large good part of fear. But we fearless ones, we more spiritual people of this age, know our advantage well enough to live without fear precisely as the more spiritual ones in relation to this age. Hardly anyone will behead us, imprison us, banish us; people will not even ban and burn our books. The age loves spirit, it loves us and needs us, even if we had to let it understand that we are artists in despising; that any contact with people gives us a slight shudder; that with all our mildness, patience, kindness to people, and politeness we cannot persuade our nose to give up its prejudice against the nearness of a human being; that we love nature the less human it is, and art when it is the artist's flight from the human being, or the artist's mockery of the human being, or the artist's mockery of themselves…

380 "The Wanderer" Speaks.—To see our European morality from a distance for once, to measure it against other moralities, earlier or still to come, one has to do what a wanderer does who wants to know how high the towers of a city are: for that, the wanderer leaves the city. "Thoughts on moral prejudices," unless they are to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside of morality, some beyond of good and evil to which one has to climb, scale, fly—and, in the case at hand, in any case a beyond of our good and evil, a freedom from all of "Europe," the latter understood as a sum of commanding value judgments that have passed into our flesh and blood. That one wants to go precisely out there, up there, is perhaps a small madness, an odd, unreasonable "you must"—for we who seek knowledge also have our idiosyncrasies of "unfree will"—: the question is whether one really can get up there. This may depend on many conditions; in the main it is the question of how light or how heavy we are, the problem of our "specific gravity." One must be very light to drive one's will to knowledge to such a distance, and as it were beyond one's time, to create for oneself eyes for surveying thousands of years, and clear sky in those eyes besides! One must have freed oneself from much that weighs on us Europeans of today, holds us back, holds us down, makes us heavy. The person of such a beyond, who wants to bring the highest standards of value of their time into view, first needs to "overcome" this time within themselves—it is the test of their strength—and consequently not only their time but also their previous dislike of and opposition to this time, their suffering from this time, their being out of step with the time, their romanticism…

381 On the Question of Being Understood.—When one writes, one wants not only to be understood but just as surely not to be understood. It is not yet an objection at all to a book if someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps precisely this was part of its writer's intention—the writer did not want to be understood by "just anyone." Every nobler spirit and taste, when it wants to communicate, also chooses its listeners; by choosing them, it sets up barriers against "the others" at the same time. All the finer laws of a style have their origin here: they keep away at the same time, they create distance, they forbid "entrance," understanding, as I said—while they open the ears of those who are related to us in the ears. And let me say it among ourselves and in my own case—I do not want to let either my ignorance or the liveliness of my temperament keep me from being understandable to you, my friends: not the liveliness, however much it forces me to go at a thing quickly in order to get at it at all. For I treat deep problems like a cold bath—quick in, quick out. That one does not get into the depths that way, does not get down deep enough, is the superstition of those afraid of water, of the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. Oh! The great cold makes you quick!—And by the way: does a thing really remain not understood and not known for that reason alone, that it is only touched, looked at, flashed at in flight? Must one absolutely first sit firmly on it? Have brooded on it like on an egg? Diu noctuque incubando, as Newton said of himself? At least there are truths of a particular shyness and ticklishness that one cannot get hold of in any other way than suddenly—that one must surprise or leave alone… Finally, my brevity has another value: within the kinds of questions that occupy me, I have to say much briefly so that it will be heard even more briefly. For as an immoralist one has to prevent the corruption of innocence, I mean the donkeys and the old maids of both sexes, who have nothing of life but their innocence; more than that, my writings are meant to inspire them, to lift them up, to encourage them to virtue. I would not know anything on earth that would be funnier than to see inspired old donkeys and maids who are aroused by the sweet feelings of virtue: and "I have seen that"—thus spoke Zarathustra. So much for brevity; it is worse with my ignorance, which I make no secret of even to myself. There are hours when I am ashamed of it; but also hours when I am ashamed of this shame. Perhaps we philosophers are all in a bad position with regard to knowledge today: science grows, the most learned among us are close to discovering that they know too little. But it would still be worse if it were otherwise—if we knew too much; our task is and remains first of all not to mix ourselves up with something else. We are something other than scholars, although it cannot be avoided that we are also, among other things, learned. We have different needs, a different growth, a different digestion: we need more, we also need less. How much a spirit needs for its nourishment, there is no formula for that; but if its taste is directed toward independence, toward quick coming and going, toward wandering, toward adventures perhaps that only the swiftest are up to, then it prefers to live free on slim fare rather than unfree and stuffed. Not fat, but the greatest suppleness and strength is what a good dancer wants from their food—and I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher could wish more to be than a good dancer. For the dance is their ideal, also their art, in the end also their only piety, their "divine service"…

382 The Great Health.—We new, nameless, hard-to-understand ones, we premature births of a still unproven future—for a new purpose we also need a new means, namely a new health, one that is stronger, shrewder, tougher, bolder, and merrier than all healths so far. Anyone whose soul thirsts to have lived through the whole range of values and desirable things so far, and to have sailed around all the coasts of this ideal "Mediterranean," anyone who wants to know from the adventures of their own most personal experience how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal, and likewise an artist, a saint, a lawgiver, a sage, a scholar, a pious person, a soothsayer, a divinely aloof person of the old style: that person first of all needs one thing, the great health—a kind that one not only has but also constantly acquires, and must acquire, because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up!… And now, after we have been on our way like this for a long time, we Argonauts of the ideal, braver perhaps than is wise, and often enough shipwrecked and hurt, but, as I said, healthier than people would like to allow us, dangerously healthy, healthy again and again—it seems to us that, as a reward for it, we have before us a still undiscovered land, whose borders no one has yet seen, a beyond of all the lands and corners of the ideal so far, a world so overrich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the terrible, and the divine that our curiosity as well as our thirst for possession have gone out of control—ah, so that nothing can satisfy us anymore! How could we, after such prospects and with such ravenous hunger in conscience and knowledge, still let ourselves be content with the present-day human being? It is bad enough, but it is unavoidable that we look at their worthiest goals and hopes only with a seriousness we can barely keep up, and perhaps no longer look at them at all. Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, danger-filled ideal, to which we would not want to persuade anyone, because we do not readily grant anyone the right to it: the ideal of a spirit that plays naively—that is, unintentionally and out of overflowing fullness and power—with everything that has so far been called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for which the highest thing that the people reasonably take as their measure of value would already mean about as much as danger, decay, degradation, or, at the least, as relaxation, blindness, temporary self-forgetting; the ideal of a human-superhuman well-being and goodwill that will often enough seem inhuman, for example when it places itself next to all the earthly seriousness so far, next to every kind of solemnity in gesture, word, sound, look, morality, and task, as their most lifelike involuntary parody—and with which, in spite of all that, perhaps the great seriousness first begins, the real question mark is first set down, the fate of the soul turns, the hand of the clock moves on, the tragedy begins…

383 Epilogue.—But as I slowly, slowly paint this gloomy question mark at the end, and am just about to remind my readers of the virtues of the right reader—oh, what forgotten and unknown virtues!—it happens that the most malicious, liveliest, goblin-like laughter sounds around me: the spirits of my book itself fall on me, pull me by the ears, and call me to order. "We can't stand it any longer," they call to me, "away, away with this raven-black music! Isn't it bright morning all around us? And green soft ground and grass, the kingdom of the dance? Was there ever a better hour to be merry? Who will sing us a song, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so fledged that it will not scare off the crickets—that instead invites the crickets to sing along, to dance along? And better a simple, peasant bagpipe than such mysterious sounds, such toad croaks, voices from the grave, and marmot whistles, with which you have so far entertained us in your wilderness, my dear Mr. Hermit and Musician of the Future! No! Not such tones! Let us strike up more pleasant and more joyful ones instead!"—Do you like it that way, my impatient friends? Well then! Who would not gladly do as you wish?

My bagpipe is already waiting, and so is my throat—it may sound a little rough, take it as it comes! That is what we have the mountains for. But what you get to hear is at least new; and if you do not understand it, if you misunderstand the singer, what does it matter! That is just "the singer's curse." All the more clearly can you hear the singer's music and melody, and all the better also dance to the singer's pipe. Do you want that?…

* * *

About this section

Book V 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 8 of 9 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.

Open the work page for the full contents, every edition, and the download links, or go back to Explore to browse other complete works in the European tradition. The reader keeps your place when you are signed in and lets you compare the original with each translation, one edition at a time.

Download the complete work as JSON · Retex Markdown