Friedrich
Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
[This document, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright restrictions. For information, please consult Copyright. Editorial comments and translations in square brackets and italics are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from Nietzsche's text. Last revised in February 2008]
Part
Six
We Scholars
204
At
the risk that moralizing here also will show itself to be what it always has
been—that is, an unabashed montrer ses plais [display of one’s wounds],
as Balzac says—I’d like to dare to stand up against an unreasonable and
harmful shift in rank ordering which nowadays, quite unnoticed and, as if with
the clearest conscience, threatens to establish itself between science and
philosophy. I think that we must on the basis of our experience—experience
means, as I see it, always bad experience?—have a right to discuss such a
higher question of rank, so that we do not speak like blind men about colour or
as women and artists do against science (“Oh, this nasty science!”
their instinct and embarrassment sigh, “it always finds out what’s behind
things”—). The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his
emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler effects of the order and
confusion in democracy: today the self-glorification and self-exaltation of the
scholar stand in full bloom everywhere and in their finest spring—but that is
still not intended to mean that in this case self-praise smells very nice.
“Away with all masters!”—that’s what the instinct of the rabble wants
here, too, and once science enjoyed its happiest success in pushing away
theology, whose “handmaiden” it was for so long, now it has the high spirits
and stupidity to set about making laws for philosophy and to take its turn
playing the “master” for once—what am I saying?—playing the philosopher.
My memory—the memory of a scientific man, if you’ll permit me to say
so!—is full to bursting with the naivete in the arrogance I have heard in
remarks about philosophy and philosophers from young natural scientists and old
doctors (not to mention from the most educated and most conceited of all
scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both of these thanks to their
profession—). Sometimes it was a specialist and man who hangs around in
corners, who generally instinctively resists all synthetic tasks and
capabilities; sometimes the industrious worker, who had taken a whiff of the otium
[leisure] and of the noble opulence within the spiritual household of the
philosopher and, as he did so, felt himself restricted and diminished. Sometimes
it was that colour blindness of the utilitarian man, who sees nothing in
philosophy other than a series of refuted systems and an extravagant
expense from which no one “receives any benefit.” Sometimes the fear of
disguised mysticism and of an adjustment to the boundaries of knowledge sprang
up; sometimes the contempt for particular philosophers had unwittingly been
generalized into a contempt for philosophy. Finally, among the young scholars I
most frequently found behind the arrogant belittlement of philosophy the
pernicious effect of a philosopher himself, a man whom people had in general
refused to follow but without escaping the spell of his value judgments
rejecting other philosophers —something which brought about a collective
irritation with all philosophy. (For example, Schopenhauer’s effect on the
most modern Germany seems to me to be something like this: with his
unintelligent anger against Hegel he created a situation in which the entire
last generation of Germans broke away from their connection with German culture,
and this culture, all things well considered, was a high point in and a
prophetic refinement of the historical sense.* But Schopenhauer
himself in this very matter was impoverished to the point of
genius—unreceptive, un-German.) From a general point of view, it may well have
been more than anything else the human, all-too-human, in short, the paltriness
of the newer philosophy itself which most fundamentally damaged respect for
philosophy and opened the gates to the instincts of the rabble. We should
nonetheless confess the extent to which, in our modern world, the whole style of
Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and of whatever all those royal and splendid
hermits of the spirit were called is disappearing. Considering the sort of
representatives of philosophy who nowadays, thanks to fashion, are just as much
on top as on the very bottom—in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin,
the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann—an honest
man of science is entitled to feel with some justice that he is of a
better sort, with a better descent.* In particular, the
sight of these mish-mash philosophers who call themselves “reality
philosophers” or “positivists” is capable of throwing a dangerous mistrust
into the soul of an ambitious young scholar: they are, in the best of cases,
scholars and specialists themselves—that’s clear enough—they are, in fact,
collectively defeated, brought back under the rule of science. At some
time or other they wanted more from themselves, without having any right
to this “more” and to its responsibilities—and now, in word and deed, they
represent in a respectable, angry, vengeful way the lack of faith in the
ruling task and masterfulness of philosophy. But finally—how could it be
anything different? Science nowadays is in bloom, and its face is filled with
good conscience, while what all new philosophy has gradually sunk to—this
remnant of philosophy today—is busy generating suspicion and ill humour
against itself, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to “theory of
knowledge” is, in fact, nothing more than a tentative division of philosophy
into epochs and a doctrine of abstinence: a philosophy which does not venture a
step over the threshold and awkwardly denies itself the right to
enter—that is philosophy at death’s door, an end, an agony, something
pitiful! How could such a philosophy—rule!
205
To
tell the truth, there are so many varied dangers for the development of a
philosopher today that we may well doubt whether this fruit can, in general,
still grow ripe. The scope and the fortress building of the sciences have grown
into something monstrous, and with these the probability that the philosopher
has already grown tired while he is still learning or has stopped somewhere and
allowed himself to “specialize,” so that he no longer reaches his full
height, that is, high enough for an overview, for looking round, for looking
down. Or else he reaches that point too late, when his best time and power
are already over, or he’s become damaged, coarsened, degenerate, so that his
glance, his comprehensive value judgment, means little any more. The very
refinement of his intellectual conscience perhaps allows him to hesitate along
the way and to delay. He’s afraid of being seduced into being a dilettante, a
millipede, something with a thousand antennae. He knows too well that a man who
has lost respect for himself may no longer give orders as a man of knowledge,
may no longer lead. At that point, he would have to be willing to become
a great actor, philosophical Cagliostro and a spiritual Pied Piper, in short, a
seducer. In the end it’s a question of taste, even if it were not a question
of conscience. Moreover, by way of doubling once again the difficulty for the
philosopher, it comes to this: he demands from himself a judgment, a Yes or No,
not about the sciences but about life and the worth of living—he learns with
reluctance to believe that he has a right or even a duty toward this judgment
and must seek his own path to that right and that belief only through the most
extensive—perhaps the most disturbing, the most destructive—experiences,
often hesitating, doubting, saying nothing. As a matter of fact, the masses have
for a long time mistaken and misidentified the philosopher, whether with the man
of science and ideal scholar, or with the religiously elevated, desensitized,
“unworldly” enthusiast drunk on God. If we hear anyone praised at all
nowadays on the ground he lives “wisely” or “like a philosopher,” that
means almost nothing other than “prudently and on the sidelines.” Wisdom:
that seems to the rabble to be some kind of escape, a means and a trick to pull
oneself well out of a nasty game. But the real philosopher—as we see
it, my friends?—lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently,
and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of
life—he always puts himself at risk. He plays the wicked game. .
. .
206
In
comparison with a genius, that is, with a being who either engenders or gives
birth, taking both words in their highest sense—the scholar, the average
scientific man, always has something of the old maid about him, for, like the
old maid, he doesn’t understand the two most valuable things men do. In fact,
for both scholars and old maids we concede, as if by way of compensation, that
they are respectable—in their cases we stress respectability—and yet having
to make this concession gives us the same sense of irritation. Let’s look more
closely: What is the scientific man? To begin with, a man who is not a noble
type. He has the virtues of a man who is not distinguished, that is, a type of
person who is not a ruler, not authoritative, and also not self-sufficient. He
has diligence, a patient endorsement of position and rank, equanimity about and
moderation in his abilities and needs. He has an instinct for people like him
and for what people like him require, for example, that bit of independence and
green meadows without which there is no peace in work, that demand for honour
and acknowledgement (which assumes, first and foremost, recognition and the
ability to be recognized—), that sunshine of a good name, that constant stamp
of approval of his value and his utility, which is necessary to overcome again
and again the inner suspicion at the bottom of the hearts of all
dependent men and herd animals. The scholar also has, as stands to reason, the
illnesses and bad habits of a non-noble variety: he is full of petty jealousy
and has a lynx eye for the baseness in those natures whose heights are
impossible for him to attain. He is trusting, only, however, as an individual
who lets himself go but does not let himself flow. With a person who is
like a great stream he just stands there all the colder and more enclosed—his
eye is then like a smooth, reluctant lake in which there is no longer any ripple
of delight or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is
capable he gets from his instinctive sense of the mediocrity of his type, from
that Jesuitry of mediocrity, which spontaneously works for the destruction of
the uncommon man and seeks to break every arched bow or—even better!—to
relax it. That is, to unbend it, with consideration, of course, naturally with a
flattering hand—to unbend it with trusting sympathy: that is the
essential art of Jesuitry, which has always understood how to introduce itself
as a religion of pity.—
207
No
matter how gratefully we may accommodate ourselves to the objective
spirit—and who has never been sick to death of everything subjective and its
damnably excessive obsession with itself [Ipsissimosität]!—we must
ultimately also learn caution concerning this gratitude and stop the
exaggeration with which in recent years we have
celebrated the depersonalizing of the spirit, emptying the self from the spirit,
as if that were the goal in itself, redemption and transfiguration. That’s
what tends to happen, for example, in the pessimism school, which, for its part,
has good reasons for awarding highest honour to “disinterested knowledge.”
The objective man who no longer curses and grumbles like the pessimist, the ideal
scholar, in whom the scientific instinct after thousands of total and partial
failures all of a sudden comes into bloom and keeps flowering to the end, is
surely one of the most valuable of implements there are, but he belongs in the
hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we say. He is a mirror—he
is no “end in himself.” The objective man is, in fact, a mirror: accustomed
to submit before everything which wishes to be known, without any delight other
than that available in knowing and “mirroring back”—he waits until
something comes along and then spreads himself out tenderly so that light
footsteps and the spiritual essences slipping past are not lost on his surface
and skin. What is still left of his “person” seems to him accidental, often
a matter of chance, even more often disruptive, so much has he become a conduit
and reflection for strange shapes and experiences. He reflects about
“himself” with effort and is not infrequently wrong. He readily gets himself
confused with others. He makes mistakes concerning his own needs, and it’s
only here that he is coarse and careless. Perhaps he gets anxious about his
health or about the pettiness and stifling atmosphere of wife and friend or
about the lack of companions and society—indeed, he forces himself to think
about his anxieties: but it’s no use! His thoughts have already wandered off
to some more general example, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew
yesterday about how he might be helped. He has lost seriousness for himself—as
well as time. He is cheerful, not from any lack of need, but from a lack
of fingers and handles for his own needs. His habitual concessions
concerning all things and all experiences, the sunny and uninhibited hospitality
with which he accepts everything which runs into him, his kind of thoughtless
good will and dangerous lack of concern about Yes and No—alas, there are
enough cases where he must atone for these virtues of his!— and as a human
being he generally becomes far too easily the caput mortuum [worthless
residue] of these virtues. If people want love and hate from him—I mean
love and hate the way God, women, and animals understand the terms—he’ll do
what he can and give what he can. But we should not be amazed when it doesn’t
amount to much—when he reveals himself in these very matters as inauthentic,
fragile, questionable, and rotten. His love is forced, his hate artificial, more
a tour de force, a tiny vanity and exaggeration. He is genuine only as
long as he is permitted to be objective: only in his cheerful comprehensiveness [Totalismus]
is he still “Nature” and “natural.” His mirror soul, always smoothing
itself out, no longer knows how to affirm or to deny. He does not command, and
he does not destroy. “Je ne méprise presque rien” [there is
almost nothing I despise] —he says with Leibnitz: We should not fail to
hear and should not underestimate that presque [almost]!* Moreover, he is no
model human being. He does not go ahead of anyone or behind. He places himself
in general too far away to have a reason to take sides between good and evil.
When people confused him for such a long time with the philosopher, with
the Caesar-like breeder and cultural power house, they held him in much too high
honour and overlooked the most essential thing about him—he is an instrument,
something of a slave, although certainly the most sublime form of slave, but in
himself nothing—presque rien [almost nothing]! The objective man is an
instrument, an expensive, easily damaged and blunted tool for measurement and an
artful arrangement of mirrors, something we should take care of and respect. But
he is no goal, no way out or upward, no complementary human being in whom the rest
of existence is justified, no conclusion—and even less a beginning, a
procreation and first cause. He is nothing strong, powerful, self-assured,
something which wants to be master. He is much rather merely a delicate, finely
blown mobile pot for forms, which must first wait for some content and meaning
or other, in order to “give himself a shape” consistent with it—usually a
man without form and content, a “selfless” man. And thus also nothing for
women, in parenthesi [in parenthesis].—
208
When
a philosopher nowadays lets us know he’s not a sceptic—I hope people have
sensed this from the description of the objective spirit immediately
above?—the whole world is unhappy to hear that. People look at him with some
awe and would like to ask so much, to question . . . in fact, among timid
listeners, and there are hordes of them today, from that point on he is
considered dangerous. For them it is as if in his rejection of scepticism they
heard coming from far away some evil threatening noise, as if a new explosive
was being tested somewhere, spiritual dynamite, perhaps a newly discovered
Russian nihilin, a pessimism bonae voluntatis [of good will],
which does not merely say No and will No but—terrible to imagine!—acts
No!* Against this form of
“good will”—a will to a truly active denial of life—there is today, by
general agreement, no better sleeping pill and sedative than scepticism, the
peaceful, gentle, soporific poppy of scepticism, and even Hamlet is
prescribed these days by contemporary doctors against the “spirit” and its
underground rumblings. “Aren’t people’s ears all full enough already of
wicked noises?” says the sceptic, as a friend of peace, almost as a sort of
security police: “This subterranean No is terrifying! Be quiet at last, you
pessimistic moles!” For the sceptic, this tender creature, is frightened all
too easily. His conscience has been trained to twitch with every No, even with
every hard, decisive Yes—to respond as if it had been bitten. Yes! And
No!—that contradicts his morality. Conversely, he loves to celebrate his
virtue with a noble abstinence, by saying with Montaigne, “What do I know?”* Or with
Socrates, “I know that I know nothing.” Or “Here I don’t trust myself.
There is no door open to me here.” Or “Suppose the door was open, why go in
right away?” Or “What use are all rash hypotheses? Not to make any
hypotheses at all could easily be part of good taste. Must you be so keen
immediately to bend back something crooked? Or stopping up every hole with some
piece of oakum? Isn’t there time for that? Doesn’t time have time? O you
devilish fellows, can’t you wait, even for a bit? What is unknown also
has its attraction—the Sphinx is a Circe, too, and Circe also was a
philosopher.”* In this way a sceptic
consoles himself, and he certainly needs some consolation. For scepticism is the
spiritual expression of a certain multifaceted physiological condition which in
everyday language is called weak nerves and infirmity. It arises every time
races or classes which have been separated from each other a long time suddenly
and decisively cross breed. In the new generation, which has inherited in its
blood, as it were, different standards and values, everything is restlessness,
disturbance, doubt, experiment; the best forces have an inhibiting effect; even
the virtues do not allow each other to grow and become strong; the body and soul
lack equilibrium, a main focus, a perpendicular self-assurance. But what is most
profoundly sick and degenerates in such mixtures is the will. These
people no longer know the independence in decision making, the bold sense of
pleasure in willing—they have doubts about the “freedom of the will,” even
in their dreams. Our Europe today, the scene of an insanely sudden attempt at
radical mixing of classes and consequently mixing of races, is as a
result sceptical in all heights and depths, sometimes with that flexible
scepticism which leaps impatiently and greedily from one branch to another,
sometimes gloomy, like a cloud overloaded with question marks, and often sick to
death of its will! Paralysis of the will —where nowadays do we not find this
cripple sitting! And often how well dressed! In such a seductive outfit! This
illness has the most beautifully splendid and deceitful clothing. For example,
most of what presents itself in the display windows today as “objectivity,”
“the practice of science,” “l’art pour l’art”[art for art’s
sake], “purely disinterested knowledge” is only dressed up scepticism
and paralysis of the will—I’ll stand by this diagnosis of the European
sickness. The sickness of the will has spread unevenly across Europe. It appears
in its greatest and most varied form where the culture has already been
indigenous for the longest time, and it disappears to the extent that the
“barbarian” still—or again—achieves his rights under the baggy clothing
of Western culture. Thus, in contemporary France, we can conclude as easily as
we can grasp it in our hands that the will is most seriously ill, and France,
which has always had a masterful skill in transforming even the fateful changes
in its spirit into something attractive and seductive, truly displays its
cultural dominance over Europe today as the school and exhibition place for all
the magical tricks of scepticism. The power to will and, indeed, to desire a
will that lasts a long time, is somewhat stronger in Germany, and in the north
of Germany even more so than in the middle, but it’s significantly stronger in
England, Spain, and Corsica. In Germany it’s bound up with apathy, and in
those other places with hard heads—to say nothing of Italy, which is too young
to know yet what it wants and which first must demonstrate whether it can will.* —But it’s
strongest and most amazing in that immense empire in between, where Europe, so
to speak, flows back into Asia, that is, in Russia. There the power to will has
for a long time lain dormant and built up, there the will waits
menacingly—uncertain whether, to borrow a favourite phrase of our physicists
today, it will be discharged as a will to negate or a will to affirm. It may
require more than Indian wars and developments in Asia for Europe to be relieved
of its greatest danger; it will require inner revolutions, too, the breaking up
of the empire into small bodies and, above all, the introduction of the
parliamentary nonsense, along with every man’s duty to read his newspaper at
breakfast. I’m not saying this because it’s what I want. The opposite would
be closer to my heart—I mean such an increase in the Russian danger, that
Europe would have to decide to become equally a threat, that is, it would have to
acquire a will, by means of a new caste which would rule Europe, a long,
fearful, individual will, which could set itself goals for thousands of years
from now—so that finally the long spun-out comic plot of its small states,
together with its multiple dynastic
and democratic petty wills, would come to an end. The time for small politics is
over. The next century is already bringing on the battle for the mastery of the
earth—the compulsion to grand politics.
209
The
extent to which the new warlike age into which we Europeans have evidently
entered may perhaps also be favourable to the development of another and
stronger variety of scepticism—on that point I’d like to state my views only
provisionally through a comparison which friends of German history will
understand easily enough. That unthinking enthusiast for good-looking,
excessively tall grenadiers, who as King of Prussia, brought into being a
military and sceptical genius—and in the process basically created that new
type of German who has just recently emerged victorious—the questionable and
mad father of Frederick the Great—in one respect himself had the grip and
lucky claw of genius.* He knew
what Germany then needed, a lack which was a hundred times more worrisome and
more urgent than some deficiency in culture and social style. His aversion to
the young Frederick emerged from the anxiety of a profound instinct. What was
missing was men. And he suspected to his most bitter annoyance that his own
son might not be man enough. On that point he was deceived, but who in his place
would not have been deceived? He saw his son decline into atheism, esprit,
the luxurious frivolousness of witty Frenchmen:—he saw in the background the
great blood sucker, the spider of scepticism. He suspected the incurable misery
of a heart that is no longer hard enough for evil and for good, of a fractured
will, which no longer commands, no longer can command. But in the
meantime there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new form of
scepticism—who knows how much it was encouraged by that very hate of
his father’s and by the icy melancholy of a will pushed into solitude?—the
scepticism of the daring masculinity, which is closely related to the genius for
war and conquest and which, in the shape of Frederick the Great, first gained
entry into Germany. This scepticism despises and nonetheless grabs hold. It
undermines and takes possession. It does not believe, but in so doing does not
lose itself. It gives the spirit a dangerous freedom, but it is hard on the
heart. It is the German form of scepticism, which, as a constant
Frederickanism intensified into the highest spirituality, has brought Europe for
some time under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and
historical mistrust. Thanks to the invincibly strong and tenacious masculine
character of the great German philologists and critical historians (who, if we
see them properly, were collectively also artists of destruction and
subversion), gradually a new idea of the German spirit established
itself, in spite of all the Romanticism in music and philosophy, an idea in
which the characteristic of manly scepticism stepped decisively forward: it
could be, for example, a fearlessness in the gaze, courage and hardness in the
destroying hand, a tough will for dangerous voyages of discovery, for
expeditions to the spiritual North Pole under arid and dangerous skies. There
may well be good reasons why warm-blooded and superficial humanitarian people
cross themselves when confronted with this particular spirit: Michelet, not
without a shudder, called it cet esprit fataliste, ironique, méphistophélique
[this fatal and ironic Mephistophelean spirit].*
But if we want to feel how distinctive this fear of the
“man” in the German spirit is, through which Europe was roused out of its
“dogmatic slumber,” we might remember the earlier idea which had to be
overthrown by it— and how it is still not so long ago that a masculine woman
could dare, with unrestrained presumption, to recommend the Germans to the
sympathy of Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, poetical idiots.*
Finally we should understand with sufficient profundity Napoleon’s surprise
when he came to visit Goethe: that reveals what people had thought about the
“German spirit” for centuries. “Voilá un homme!” [There’s a
man!]—which is, in effect, saying: That is really a man! And I had
expected only a German!—
210
Assuming,
then, that in the image of the philosophers of the future there is some
characteristic which raises the question whether they would not perhaps have to
be sceptics, in the sense indicated immediately above, that would, nonetheless,
indicate only one thing about them—and not what they themselves were.
With just as much justification they could be called critics, and it’s certain
they will be men who experiment. In the names with which I have ventured to
christen them, I have already particularly emphasized the attempting and the
enjoyment in making attempts. Did I do this because, as critics in body and
soul, they love to use experiments in a new, perhaps broader, perhaps more
dangerous sense? In their passion for knowledge, would they have to go further
with daring and painful experiments, than could be considered appropriate by the
soft-hearted and mollycoddled taste of a democratic century? There is no doubt
that these coming philosophers will at least be able to rid themselves of those
serious and not unobjectionable characteristics which separate the critic from
the sceptic—I mean the certainty in the measure of value, the conscious use of
a unity of method, the shrewd courage, the standing alone, and the ability to
answer for themselves. In fact, they will confess that they take delight
in saying No and in dismantling things and in a certain thought-out cruelty
which knows how to guide the knife surely and precisely, even when the heart is
still bleeding. They will be harder (and perhaps not always only on
themselves) than humane people might wish; they will not get involved with the
“truth,” so that the truth can “please” them or “elevate” them and
“inspire” them:—by contrast, they will have little faith that the truth
in particular brings with it such emotional entertainment. They will smile,
these strict spirits, if someone should declare in front of them, “That idea
elevates me: how could it not be true?” or “That work delights me: how could
it not be beautiful?” or, “That artist enlarges me; how could he not be
great?”—Perhaps they are prepared not only to smile at but also to feel a
genuine disgust for everything enthusiastic, idealistic, feminine,
hermaphroditic in such matters. Anyone who knew how to follow them right into
the secret chambers of their hearts would hardly find there any intention to
reconcile “Christian feelings” with “the taste of antiquity” or even
with “modern parliamentarianism” (a reconciliation which is said to be
taking place even among philosophers in our very uncertain and therefore very
conciliatory century). These philosophers of the future will demand not only of
themselves critical discipline and every habit which leads to purity
and strictness in things of the spirit: they could show them off as their
own kind of jewellery—nonetheless, for all that they still don’t wish to be
called critics. It seems to them no small insult inflicted on philosophy when
people decree, as happens so commonly today, “Philosophy itself is criticism
and critical science—and nothing else!” This evaluation of philosophy may
enjoy the applause of all French and German positivists (—and it’s possible
that it would have flattered even the heart and taste of Kant: we should
remember the title of his major works—): our new philosophers will nonetheless
affirm that critics are the tools of the philosopher and for that very reason,
the fact that they are tools, still a great way from being philosophers
themselves! Even the great Chinese citizen of Königsberg was only a great
critic.*
211
I
insist on the following point: people should finally stop confusing
philosophical labourers and scientific people in general with
philosophers—that in this particular matter we strictly assign “to each his
due” and do not give too much to the former and much too little to the latter.
It may be that the education of a real philosopher requires that he himself has
stood for a while on all of those steps where his servants, the scientific
labourers in philosophy, remain—and must remain. Perhaps he must
himself have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian and, in
addition, poet and collector and traveller and solver of riddles and moralist
and prophet and “free spirit” and almost everything, in order to move
through the range of human worth and feelings of value and to be able to
look with a variety of different eyes and consciences from the heights into
every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every
expanse. But all these things are only pre-conditions for his task: the task
itself seeks something different—it demands that he create values.
Those philosophical labourers on the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to
establish some large collection of facts or other concerning estimates of
value—that is, earlier statements
of value, creations of value which have become dominant and for a while have
been called “truths.” They have to press these into formulas, whether in the
realm of logic or politics (morality) or art. The task of
these researchers is to make everything that has happened and which has been
valued up to now clear, easy to imagine, intelligible, and manageable, to
shorten everything lengthy, even “time” itself, and to overpower the
entire past, a huge and marvellous task, in whose service every sophisticated
pride and every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. But the real
philosophers are commanders and lawgivers: they say “That is how it should
be!” They determine first the “Where to?” and the “What for?” of
human beings, and, as they do this, they have at their disposal the preliminary
work of all philosophical labourers, all those who have overpowered the
past—they reach with their creative hands to grasp the future. In that
process, everything which is and has been becomes a means for them, an
instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating; their creating is
establishing laws; their will to truth is—will to power.—Are there
such philosophers nowadays? Have there ever been such philosophers? Is it not
necessary that there be such philosophers? . . . .
212
It
is increasingly apparent to me that the philosopher, who is necessarily a
man of tomorrow and the day after, has in every age found and had to find
himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy every time was the ideal of the
day. Up to now all these extraordinary promoters of humanity whom we call
philosophers and who themselves seldom felt that they were friends of wisdom but
rather embarrassing fools and dangerous question marks have found their work,
their hard, unsought for, inescapable task—but finally the greatness of their
work—was for them to be the bad consciences of their age. By applying the
knife of vivisection to the chest of the virtues of the day, they
revealed what their own secret was—to know a new greatness for man, to
know a new untrodden path to increasing his greatness. Every time they exposed
how much hypocrisy, laziness, letting oneself go, letting oneself fall, how many
lies lay hidden under the most highly honoured type of their contemporary
morality, how much virtue was out of date; every time they said, “We
must go there, out there, where you nowadays are least at home.” Faced
with a world of “modern ideas” which would like to banish everyone into a
corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher
these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea
of “greatness,” on the basis of his own particular extensive range and
multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity. He would even
determine value and rank according to how much and how many different things one
could endure and take upon oneself, how far one could extend one’s own
responsibility. Today contemporary taste and virtue weaken and dilute the will;
nothing is as topical as the weakness of the will. Thus, in the ideal of the
philosopher it is precisely the strength of will, the hardness and ability to
make long-range decisions that must be part of the idea “greatness”—with
just as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a stupid,
denying, humble, selfless humanity was appropriate to an opposite age, one which
suffered, like the sixteenth century, from the bottled up energy of its will and
the wildest waters and storm tides of selfishness. At the time of Socrates,
among nothing but men of exhausted instincts, among conservative old Athenians,
who allowed themselves to go “for happiness,” as they said, and for
pleasure, as they did, and who, in the process, still kept mouthing the old
splendid words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, perhaps irony
was essential for greatness in the soul, that malicious Socratic confidence of
the old doctor and member of the rabble, who sliced ruthlessly into his own
flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the “noble man,” with a look which
spoke intelligibly enough “Don’t play act in front of me! Here—we are the
same!” By contrast, today, when the herd animal in Europe is the only one who
attains and distributes honours, when “equality of rights” all too easily
can get turned around into equality of wrongs—what I mean is into a common war
against everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul,
the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative fullness of power and
mastery—these days the sense of being noble, of willing to be for oneself, of
being able to be different, of standing alone, and of having to live by one’s
own initiative—these are part of the idea “greatness,” and the philosopher
will reveal something of his own ideal if he proposes “The man who is to be
the greatest is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most
deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly
endowed with will—this is simply what greatness is to be called:
capable of being as much a totality as something multifaceted, as wide as it is
full.” And to ask the question again: today—is greatness possible?
213
What
a philosopher is, that’s difficult to learn because it cannot be taught: one
must “know” it out of experience—or one should have the pride not
to know it. But the fact that these days the whole world talks of things about
which they cannot have any experience holds true above all and in the
worst way for philosophers and philosophical situations:—very few people are
acquainted with them and are allowed to know them, and all popular opinions
about them are false. And so, for example, that genuine philosophical
association of a bold, exuberant spirituality, which speeds along presto,
with a dialectical strictness and necessity which takes no false steps are
unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and hence, if
someone wishes to talk about it in front of them, they find it implausible. They
take the view that every necessity is a need, an awkward requirement to follow
and to be compelled, and for them thinking itself is considered something slow,
hesitant, almost labourious, and often enough “worth the sweat of the
noble”—but under no circumstances something light, divine, closely related
to dancing and high spirits! “Thinking” and “taking an issue seriously,”
“considering it gravely”—among them these belong together: that’s the
only way they have “experienced” thinking.—In such matters artists may
have a more subtle sense of smell. They know only too well that at the very
moment when they no longer create “arbitrarily” and make everything by
necessity, their sense of freedom, refinement, authority, of creative setting
up, disposing, and shaping is at its height—in short, that necessity and the
“freedom of the will” are then one thing for them. Ultimately there is a
rank ordering of spiritual conditions, with which the rank ordering of problems
is consistent, and the highest problems shove back without mercy anyone who
dares to approach them without having been predestined to solve them with the
loftiness and power of his spirituality. What help is it if nimble heads of
nondescript people or, as happens so often these days, clumsy honest mechanics
and empiricists with their plebeian ambition press forward into the presence of
such problems and, as it were, up to the “court of courts”! But on such a
carpet crude feet may never tread: there’s still a primeval law of things to
look after that: the doors remain closed to these people who push against them,
even if they bang or crush their heads against them! One must be born for every
lofty world: to put the matter more clearly, one must be cultivated for
it: one has a right to philosophy—taking the word in its grand sense—only
thanks to one’s descent, one’s ancestors; here, as well, “blood”
decides. For a philosopher to arise, many generations must have done the
preparatory work. Every single one of his virtues must have been acquired, cared
for, passed on, assimilated, and not just the bold, light, delicate walking and
running of his thoughts, but above all the willingness to take on great
responsibilities, the loftiness of the look which dominates and gazes down, the
feeling of standing apart from the crowd and its duties and virtues, the affable
protecting and defending what is misunderstood and slandered, whether that is
God or the devil, the desire for and practice of great justice, the art of
commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye that seldom admires, seldom looks
upward, seldom loves. . . .
Notes
. . . Hegel: Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), important German idealist philosopher. [Back to Text]
. . . Eugen Dühring (1833-1921)
and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906): two well-known philosophers in
Nietzsche’s day. [Back to Text]
. . . Leibnitz:
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), German philosopher, diplomat, and
mathematician. [Back to Text]
nihilin: a word
Nietzsche invents to designate some new form of strong pessimism discovered like
some as yet unknown chemical. [Back to Text]
. . . Montaigne: Michel
de Montaigne (1533-1592), French diplomat and writer. [Back to Text]
. . . Circe: a goddess
in the Odyssey who has magical powers to turn men into swine. [Back to Text]
. . . Italy: Italy was
not unified completely as an independent country until the mid-nineteenth
century. [Back to Text]
. . . Frederick the Great (1712-1786), son of Frederick William I, King of Prussia. Through his
military and political skill he greatly enlarged Prussian territory. [Back to Text]
. . . Michelet: Jules
Michelet (1798-1874), a French historian. Mephistopheles is the chief agent of
the Devil in Goethe’s Faust. [Back to Text]
The woman is Madame de Staël, a French writer who produced a book about
German and the Germans in 1810. [Back to Text]
. . . great Chinese citizen of Königsberg: a reference to Immanuel Kant. [Back to Text]
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