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 2009]
Part
Seven
Our Virtues
214
Our
virtues? It’s probable that we also still have our virtues, although it’s
reasonable to think that they will not be those naive, four-square virtues for
whose sake we respect our grandfathers, at the same time holding them somewhat
at arm’s length. We Europeans of the day-after-tomorrow, we first-born of the
twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity, and art
of disguise, our tender and, so to speak, sweetened cruelty in spirit and
sense—if we’re to have
virtues, we’ll presumably have only those which have learned best how to
tolerate our most secret and most heartfelt inclinations, our most burning
needs. So then let’s look for them in our labyrinths!— where, as we know, so
many different things get lost, so many different things disappear for ever. And
is there anything more beautiful than seeking out one’s own virtues?
Doesn’t this mean that one already almost believes in one’s own
virtues? But this phrase “believe in one’s own virtues”—isn’t that
basically the same thing people in earlier times used to call their “good
conscience,” that long worthy pigtail of an idea which our grandfathers hung
behind their heads and often enough behind their understanding as well? Thus, it
seems to follow that, no matter how little we may think ourselves as old
fashioned and as respectable as our grandfathers in other things, in one respect
we are nonetheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans
with good consciences: we, too, still carry their pigtail.—Alas, if you knew
how soon, how very soon—things will be otherwise! . . .
215
Just
as it sometimes happens in the realm of the stars that two suns determine the
orbit of a planet, and in some cases suns of different colours cast their lights
around a single planet, sometimes red light, sometimes green light, and then
again lighting it both at once, flooding it with colours, in the same way we
modern men, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our “starry heaven,” are
determined by different moralities; our actions change their lights into
different colours. They are rarely unambiguous—and there are enough cases
where we carry out actions with many colours.
216
Love
one’s enemies? I think that has been well learned. These days it happens
thousands of times, in small and big things. In fact, now and then something
even higher and more sublime takes place—we learn to despise when we
love, and precisely when we love best: but all this is unconscious, without any
fuss, without any pomp and circumstance, rather with that modesty and secret
goodness which prohibit solemn words and virtuous formulas. Morality as a
pose—that offends our taste nowadays. This is also a step forward, just as it
was a step forward for our fathers when religion as a pose finally offended
their taste, including hostility to and a Voltairean bitterness against religion
(and everything that formerly went along with the sign language of free
thinkers). It’s the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, which
wants to make all Puritan litanies, all moral sermons, and petty bourgeois
respectability sound out of tune.
217
Be
careful of those who set a high value on people’s ascribing to them moral tact
and refinement in drawing moral distinctions! They never forgive us if they ever
make a mistake in front of us (or even against us) —inevitably they
become people who instinctively slander and damage us, even when they still
remain our “friends.”—Blessed are the forgetful, for they are “done”
with their stupidities as well.
218
Psychologists
in France—and where else nowadays are there still any psychologists?—have
not yet stopped enjoying the bitter and manifold pleasure they get from bêtise
bourgoise [bourgeois stupidity]. It’s as if—but enough, by doing that
they are revealing something. For example, Flaubert, that decent citizen of
Rouen, finished up by seeing, hearing, and tasting nothing else any more. That
was his kind of self-torture and more refined cruelty.*
Now, for a change—since this is becoming tedious—I recommend something else
for our delight, and that is the unconscious shiftiness with which all good,
thick, well-behaved, average spirits react to higher spirits and their works,
that subtle complicated Jesuitical shiftiness, which is a thousand times more
subtle than the understanding and taste of these average people in their best
moments—or even than the understanding of their victims as well. This is
repeated evidence for the fact that “Instinct” is the most intelligent of
all forms of intelligence which have been discovered so far. Briefly put, you
psychologists should study the philosophy of the “norm” in its war against
the “exception.” There you’ll see a drama good enough for the gods and
divine maliciousness! Or to put the matter still more clearly: practise
vivisection on the “good people,” on the “homo bonae voluntatis” [man
of good will] . . . on yourselves!
219
Moral
judgment and condemnation are the favourite revenge of the spiritually limited
against those who are less limited, as well as a form of compensation for the
fact that Nature has thought ill of them, and finally a chance to acquire some
spirit and become refined:—spiritualized malice. Deep in their hearts
they feel good that there is a standard before which even those plentifully
endowed with spiritual wealth and privilege stand, just like them:—they fight
for the “equality of all before God” and almost require a faith in
God just for that purpose. Among them are the most powerful opponents of
atheism. Anyone who said to them “A high spirituality cannot be compared with
any of the solidity and respectability of a man who is merely moral” would
make them furious:—I’ll be careful about doing this. I’d much prefer to
flatter them with my principle that a high spirituality itself arises only as
the final offspring of moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all those
conditions which are ascribed to the “merely moral” man, after they have
been acquired one by one through long discipline and practice, perhaps through
an entire chain of generations, that the high spirituality is simply the
spiritualization of justice and that kind severity which knows that its task is
to maintain the order of rank in the world, not only among human beings,
but even among things.
220
Given
the present popular praise of “disinterestedness,” we must bring to mind,
perhaps not without a certain danger, what it is that really interests
the populace, and what, in general, are those things about which the common man
is fundamentally and deeply concerned, including educated people, even scholars,
and, unless all appearances deceive, perhaps philosophers as well. From that
fact it turns out that the vast majority of what interests and charms more
refined and more discriminating tastes and every higher nature appears
completely “uninteresting” to the average man. Nonetheless, when he notices
a devotion to these things, he calls it “désintéressé” [disinterested]
and wonders to himself how it is possible to act “without interest.” There
have been philosophers who have known how to confer a seductive and mystically
transcendental form of expression upon this popular wonder (perhaps because in
their own experience they knew nothing of higher nature?)—instead of
presenting what’s reasonable—the honest naked truth that the
“disinterested” action is a very interesting and interested action,
provided . . . . “And love?”—What’s that! Is even an action done from
love supposed to be “unegoistic”? You idiots—! “What about the praise
for those who make sacrifices?” —But anyone who has really made a sacrifice
knows that he wanted and got something for it—perhaps something of himself in
exchange for something of himself—he gave up here in order to have more there,
perhaps in general to be more or at least to feel himself as “more.” But
this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more discriminating spirit
does not like to remain, for here even truth already finds it necessary to
suppress her yawns if she must answer. In the last analysis, Truth is a woman:
we should not treat her with force.
221
It
so happens, said a moralistic pedant and pettifogger, that I respect and honour
a selfless man, not because he is selfless but because he seems to me to have a
right to be of use to another man at his own expense. All right, but it’s
always a question of who he is and who the other is. For example,
in a man who is marked out and made to command, self-denial and modest holding
back would not be a virtue but a waste of virtue: that’s what it seems like to
me. Every unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and applies
itself to everyone not only sins against taste; it also provokes sins of
omission, one more seduction under the guise of philanthropy—and, in
particular, a seduction for and injury to the higher, rarer, and privileged
people. We must compel moralities first and foremost to give way before the order
of rank. We must force into the conscience of moralities an awareness of
their own presumption—until they finally are collectively clear about the fact
that it is immoral to say “What’s right for one man is fair to
another.” As for my moralistic pedant and fine fellow: does he deserve it when
people laugh at him as he advises moralities in this way to become moral? But
people should not be too much in the right if they want those who laugh on their
side. A small grain of wrong is even a part of good taste.
222
Nowadays
wherever people preach pity—and, if one listens correctly, is there any other
religion preached any more?—the psychologist should keep his ears open:
through all the vanity, through all the noise characteristic of these preachers
(like all preachers), he’ll hear a hoarser, moaning, genuine sound of self-contempt.
It’s part of that process of making Europe dark and ugly which has been
growing now for a hundred years (and whose first symptoms were already placed in
the documentary record in a thoughtful letter from Galiani to Madame d’Epinay):
unless it’s the cause of this development! The man of “modern
ideas,” this proud ape, is uncontrollably dissatisfied with himself—that’s
established. He’s suffering. And his vanity wants him only to suffer “with
others”* . . .
223
At
any rate, the hybrid European man—a reasonably ugly plebeian, all in
all—needs a costume. He needs history as a pantry for costumes. Naturally, he
then notices that none of them fits his body properly— he changes and changes.
Just take a look at the nineteenth century, at the rapid preferences and changes
in the masquerade of style, along with the moments of despair over the fact that
“nothing suits us”—. It’s no use presenting oneself romantically or
classically or in a Christian or Florentine or Baroque or “national” manner in
moribus et artibus [in customs and the arts]—“it doesn’t suit us”!
But the “spirit,” in particular the “historical spirit,” still sees an
advantage for itself even in this despair: over and over again a new piece of
pre-history and a foreign country are explored, put on, set aside, packed away,
and above all studied:—we are the first age with a real training in
“costume”: I mean in moralities, articles of faith, tastes in art, and
religions , prepared as no other time ever was for a carnival in the grand
style, for a spiritual revelry of laughter and high spirits, for a
transcendental height of the loftiest nonsense and Aristophanic mockery of the
world.* Perhaps this is the very place
where we’ll still discover the realm of our own inventiveness, that
realm where we too can still be original as some sort of satirists of world
history and God’s clowns—perhaps when nothing else today has a future,
perhaps it’s our laughter that still has one!
224
The
historical sense (or the capability to make quick guesses about the rank
ordering of value judgments according to which a people, a society, or a person
has lived, the “instinct for divination” concerning the relations between
these value judgments, for the connections between the authority of value and
the authority of effective forces)—this historical sense which we Europeans
claim as our distinctive characteristic, came to us as a consequence of the
enchanting and wild semi-barbarianism into which Europe was plunged
through the democratic intermixing of the classes and races—the nineteenth
century knew about this sense for the first time as its sixth sense. The past of
every form and manner of living, of cultures which earlier lay right alongside
each other or over each other, flows, thanks to this intermixing, out into us
“modern souls”; our instincts now run back all over the place; we ourselves
are a kind of chaos. Finally “the spirit,” as I have said, sees an advantage
for itself in all this. Because of our semi-barbarism in body and desires we
have secret entrances in all directions, in a way no noble age ever possessed,
above all the entrances to the labyrinth of unfinished cultures and to every
semi-barbarism which has ever been present on earth. Inasmuch as the most
considerable part of human culture up to now has been semi-barbarism, the
“historical sense” almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the
taste and tongue for everything. And that establishes right away that it’s an ignoble
sense. For example, we enjoy Homer again. It’s perhaps our happiest asset
that we understand how to appreciate Homer, something which men of a noble
culture don’t know and didn’t know how to appropriate so easily and which
they hardly allowed themselves to enjoy (for example, the French of the
seventeenth century, like Saint Evremond, who criticized him for his esprit
vaste [vast and all- encompassing spirit], and even Voltaire, their final
chorus).* That very emphatic Yes and
No of their palate, their easy disgust, their hesitant holding back with respect
to everything strange, their fear of bad taste, even of lively curiosity, and,
in general, that reluctance of every noble and self-satisfied culture to
acknowledge a new desire, a dissatisfaction with what is its own, an admiration
for something foreign; all this disposes and makes them hostile even to the best
things of the world which are not their own property or could not become
a trophy of theirs—and no sense is more incomprehensible to such people than
the historical sense and its obsequious plebeian curiosity. The situation is no
different with Shakespeare, this amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of
taste, who would have made an old Athenian, one of Aeschylus’ friends, laugh
himself almost to death or irritated him. But we take up this wild display of
colours, this confusion of the most delicate, coarsest, and most artificial
things with a secret confidence and good will. We enjoy him as the very
refinement of art saved especially for us and, in the process, do not allow
ourselves to be disturbed at all by the unpleasant stink and the proximity of
the English rabble, in which Shakespeare’s art and taste lives, no more so
than on the Chiaja in Naples, where we go on our way with all our senses
enchanted and willing, no matter how much the sewers of the rabble’s quarter
fill the air.* We men of the
“historical sense,” we have our corresponding virtues. That’s beyond
dispute. We are undemanding, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-restraint,
full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very obliging:—with all that we
are perhaps not very “tasteful.” Let’s finally admit it to ourselves:
what’s hardest for us men of “historical sense” to grasp, to feel, to
taste again, to love again, what we’re basically prejudiced about and almost
hostile to is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture
and art, what is really noble in works or in men, the moment when their sea is
smooth and they have halcyon self-sufficiency, the gold and the coolness
displayed by all things which have perfected themselves. Perhaps the great
virtue of the historical sense stands in a necessary opposition to good
taste, at least to the very best taste, and we can reproduce in ourselves only
with difficulty and hesitantly, only by forcing ourselves, the small, short, and
highest strokes of luck and transfigurations of human life, as they suddenly
shine out here and there: those moments and miracles where a great force
voluntarily remains standing before the boundless and unlimited—where an
excess of sophisticated pleasure was enjoyed in sudden restraint and
petrifaction, in standing firm and holding oneself steady on still trembling
ground. Restraint is strange to us. Let’s admit that to ourselves. Our
itch is the particular itch for the unlimited, the unmeasured. Like the rider on
a steed snorting its way forward we let the reins fall before the infinite, we
modern men, we half-barbarians—and only reach our bliss in a place
where we are most—in danger.
225
Whether
hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaimonianism*—all
these ways of thinking, which measure the value of things according to pleasure
and pain, that is, according to contingent circumstances and secondary
issues, are ways of thinking in the foreground and naivete, which everyone who
knows about creative forces and an artistic conscience will look down on,
not without ridicule and not without pity. Pity for you!—that is, of
course, not pity the way you mean the term: that is not pity for social
“need,” for “society” and its sick and unlucky people, with those
depraved and broken down from the start—they’re lying on the ground all
around us—even less is it pity for the grumbling oppressed, the rebellious
slave classes, who strive for mastery—they call it “Freedom.” Our
pitying is a higher compassion which sees further—we see how man is
making himself smaller, how you are making him smaller!—and there are
moments when we look at your very pity with an indescribable anxiety,
where we defend ourselves against this pity—where we find your seriousness
more dangerous than any carelessness. You want, if possible—and there is no
more fantastic “if possible”—to
do away with suffering. What about us? It does seem that we would
prefer it to be even higher and worse than it ever was! Well being, the way you
understand it—that is no goal. To us that looks like an end, a
condition which immediately makes human beings laughable and
contemptible—something which makes their destruction desirable! The
discipline of suffering, of great suffering—don’t you realize that up
to this point it is only this suffering which has created every
enhancement in man up to now? That tension of a soul in misery which develops
its strength, its trembling when confronted with great destruction, its
inventiveness and courage in bearing, holding out against, interpreting, and
using unhappiness, and whatever has been conferred upon it by way of profundity,
secrecy, masks, spirit, cunning, and greatness—has that not been given to it
through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In human beings, creature
and creator are united. In man is material stuff, fragments, excess,
clay, mud, nonsense, chaos, but in man there is also creator, artist, hammer
hardness, the divinity of the spectator and the seventh day—do you understand
this contrast? And do you understand that your pity for the “creature
in man” is for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn apart, burned, glow,
purified—for what must necessarily suffer and should suffer? And
our pity—don’t you understand for whom our reverse pity
matters, when it protects itself against your pity as against the most wretched
of all mollycoddling and weakness?—And thus pity against pity!—But,
to say the point again, there are higher problems than all those of enjoyment,
suffering, and pity, and every philosophy that leads only to these is something
naive.—
226
We
immoral ones!—This world
which we’re concerned with, in which we have to fear and love,
this almost invisible and inaudible world of sophisticated commanding,
sophisticated obeying, a world of “almost” from every way of looking at
it—entangled, embarrassing, cutting, and tender—yes, this world is well
defended against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We have been woven
into a strict yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of it—in that
respect we are simply “men of duty,” we as well! Now and then, it’s true,
we dance happily in our “chains” and between our “swords.” More often,
it’s no less true, we gnash our teeth about it and are impatient with all the
secret hardness of our fate. But we can do what we like: the fools and
appearance speak against us: “They are men without duty.”—We always
have fools and appearance against us!
227
If
we assume that honesty is a virtue of ours from which we cannot escape, we free
spirits—well, we’ll want to work on it with all our malice and love and not
grow tired of “making ourselves perfect” in our virtue, the only one
which remains ours: may its brilliance one day remain lying like a gilded, blue,
mocking evening light over this aging culture and its dull and dark seriousness!
And if nonetheless our honesty one day grows tired and sighs and stretches its
limbs and finds us too hard and would like to have things better, lighter, more
loving, like a pleasing vice, let us remain hard, we final Stoics! And
let us send her by way of help only what we have in us of devilry—our disgust
with what is crude and approximate, our “nitimur in vetitum” [we
seek what is forbidden], our courage as adventurers, our shrewd and
discriminating curiosity, our most refined, most disguised, and most spiritual
will to power and overcoming of the world which roams and swarms greedily around
all future realms—let us come to the aid of our “God” with all our
“devils”! It is likely that because of this people fail to recognize us and
get us confused with others. What does that matter? People will say “Your
‘honesty’—that’s your devilry, nothing more than that.” What does that
matter? Even if they were right! Haven’t all gods up to now been like that,
devils who became holy by being re-christened? And what finally do we know about
ourselves? And that spirit which guides us, what does it want to be called?
(It is a matter of names). And how many spirits are we hiding? Our honesty, we
free spirits—let’s take care that it does not become our vanity, our finery
and splendour, our boundary, our stupidity! Every virtue tends towards
stupidity; every stupidity tends towards virtue: “stupid all the way to
holiness” people say in Russia—let’s take care that we don’t end up
becoming saints and bores through honesty! Isn’t life a hundred times too
short to get bored with it? We’d already have to believe in eternal life, in
order to. . . .
228
I
hope people forgive me the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been
boring and has belonged among things which send us to sleep—and that, in my
eyes, “virtue” has been impaired by nothing so much as by this tediousness
of its advocates. In saying this I still don’t wish to deny their general
utility. A great deal rests on the fact that as few people as possible think
about morality—and so it’s very important
that morality does not one day become something interesting! But that’s
not something people should worry about! These days things still stand they way
they always have: I don’t see anyone in Europe who might have (or might
provide) some idea about how reflecting on morality could be conducted
dangerously, awkwardly, seductively— that there could be disaster in
the process. People should consider, for example, the tireless unavoidable
English utilitarians, how they wander around crudely and honourably in
Bentham’s footsteps, moving this way and that (a Homeric metaphor says it more
clearly), just as Bentham himself had already wandered in the footsteps of the
honourable Helvetius (this Helvetius—no, he was no dangerous man!).*
No new idea, nothing of a more refined expression and bending
of an old idea, not even a real history of an earlier idea: an impossible
literature in its totality, unless we understand how to spice it up with some
malice. For in these moralists as well (whom we really have to read with
ulterior motives, if we have to read them—) that old English vice
called cant and moral Tartufferie [hypocrisy], has inserted
itself, this time hidden under a new form of scientific thinking. Nor is there
any lack of a secret resistance against the pangs of a guilty conscience,
something a race of former Puritans justifiably will suffer from in all its
scientific preoccupations with morality. (Isn’t a moralist the opposite of a
Puritan, namely, a thinker who considers morality something questionable, worth
raising questions about, in short, as a problem? Shouldn’t moralizing
be—immoral?). In the end they all want English morality to be
considered right, so that then mankind or “general needs” or “the
happiness of the greatest number”—no! England’s good fortune—will
be best served. They want to prove with all their might that striving for English
happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion (and, as the highest
priority, a seat in Parliament) is at the same time also the right path to
virtue, in fact, that all virtue which has existed in the world so far has
consisted of just such striving. Not one of all these ponderous herd animals
with uneasy consciences (who commit themselves to promoting egoism as an issue
of general welfare—) wants to know or catch a whiff of the fact that the
“general welfare” is no ideal, no goal, not even a concept one can somehow
grasp, but is only an emetic—that what is right for one man cannot in
any way also be right for another man, that the demand for a single morality for
everyone is a direct restriction on the higher men, in short, that there is a rank
ordering between man and man, and thus, as a result, also between morality
and morality. These utilitarian Englishmen are a modest and thoroughly mediocre
kind of man and, as mentioned, insofar as they are boring, we cannot think
highly enough of their utility. We should even encourage them, just as,
to some extent, someone has tried to do in the following rhyme:
Hail
to you, brave working lout,
“It’s always better when drawn out.”
Always stiff in head and knee
Never funny, never keen,
Always sticking to the mean.
Sans genie et sans esprit.
[Without genius and without wit]
229
In
those recent ages which may be proud of their humanity, there remains so much
residual fear, so much superstitious fear of the “wild cruel beasts,”
animals which those more humane ages are particularly proud of having overcome,
that even palpable truths stay unspoken for hundreds of years, as if by some
agreement, because they look as if they might help those wild beasts, which have
been finally slaughtered, come back to life again. Perhaps I am daring something
if I allow one such truth to escape me: let others catch it again and give it so
much “milk of the devout ways of thinking” to drink until it lies still and
forgotten in its old corner.—People should learn to think differently about
cruelty and open their eyes. They should finally learn to get impatient, so that
such presumptuous, fat errors no longer brazenly wander around as virtues, the
way they’ve been fed to us, for example, by old and new philosophers in
connection with tragedy. Almost everything which we call “higher culture”
rests on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty—that’s
my claim. That “wild beast” hasn’t been killed at all: it’s alive,
it’s flourishing. Only it has turned itself into—a god. What constitutes the
painful delight in tragedy is cruelty. What has a pleasing effect in so-called
tragic pity, and basically even in everything awe-inspiring right up to the
highest and most delicate trembling of metaphysics, gets its sweetness only from
the additional ingredient of cruelty to the mixture. What the Roman in the
arena, Christ in the raptures of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of a
burning at the stake or a bull fight, the Japanese today who crowds into
tragedies, the Parisian suburban worker who feels nostalgic for a bloody
revolution, the female fan of Wagner who, with her will unhinged, lets herself
“submit to” Tristan and Isolde—what all these people enjoy and try
to drink down with mysterious enthusiasm is the spicy liquor of the great Circe,
“cruelty.” In saying this, we must of course chase off the foolish
psychology of former times, which, so far as cruelty is concerned, knew only how
to teach us that it arose at the sight of someone else’s suffering.
There is a substantial over-abundant enjoyment also with one’s own suffering,
with making oneself suffer—and wherever people let themselves be convinced
about self-denial in a religious sense or about self-mutilation, as with
the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general about depriving themselves of
sensual experience and the flesh, about remorse, Puritan pangs of repentance,
about a vivisection of the conscience, and about a Pascalian sacrifizio
dell’intelletto [sacrifice of the intellect], they are secretly seduced
and pushed on by cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of cruelty turned against
themselves. Finally, people should consider that even the knowledgeable man,
when he compels his spirit to acknowledge things against his spirit’s
inclinations and often enough also against his heart’s desires—that is, to
say No where he’d like to affirm something, to love, to worship—rules as an
artist and a transformer of cruelty. In fact, every attempt to be profound and
thorough is a forceful violation, a willingness to do harm to the basic will of
the spirit, which always wants what’s apparent and superficial—even in that
desire to know there is a drop of cruelty.
230
Perhaps
people don’t readily understand what I’ve said here about a “basic will of
the spirit.” So permit me to offer an explanation.—The something which
commands, which people call “the spirit,” wishes to be master in and around
itself and to feel that it’s the master. It possesses the will from
multiplicity to simplicity, a will which ties up, tames, desires to dominate,
and truly does rule. Its needs and capabilities are in this respect the same as
those which physiologists indicate belong to everything which lives, grows, and
reproduces itself. The power of the spirit to appropriate other things for
itself is revealed in its strong inclination to assimilate the new with the old,
to simplify what is diverse, to ignore or push away what is totally
contradictory, just as it arbitrarily and strongly emphasizes, brings out, and
falsifies for its own purposes certain characteristics and lines in what is
foreign, in every piece of the “outside world.” Its intention in so doing is
the assimilation of new “experiences,” the organization of new things in an
old series—and also for growth, or, to put the matter even more clearly, for
the feeling of growth, for the feeling of increased power. An apparently
contradictory spiritual drive serves this same will, a suddenly erupting
decision in favour of ignorance, an arbitrary shutting out, a slamming of its
window, an inner cry of No to this or that thing, a refusal to let something in,
a kind of defensive condition against much that can be known, a satisfaction
with the darkness, with the sealed-off horizon, an affirmation and endorsement
of ignorance: and all this is necessary in proportion to the degree of its
appropriating power, its “power of digestion,” to speak metaphorically—and
“the spirit” is in fact most like a stomach. With this also belongs the
occasional will in the spirit to allow itself to be deceived, perhaps with a
high-spirited premonition that something or other is not the case, that
we simply allow something or other to be valid, a joy in all uncertainty and
ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of the self in the capricious narrowness and
secrecy of some corner, in what is all too-near-at-hand, in the foreground, in
what is magnified or made smaller, in what has been shifted around or made more
beautiful, a self-delight in the arbitrariness of all these expressions of
power. Finally with these belongs that not unobjectionable willingness of the
spirit to deceive other spirits and to play act in front of them, that constant
urge and pressure of a creative, formative, changeable force: here the spirit
enjoys its capacity for adopting multiple masks and shiftiness; it also enjoys
the feeling of its security in this activity— precisely through its protean
art is the spirit, in fact, best defended and hidden!—Working against this
will to appearances, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the
surface—for every surface is a cloak—is that sublime tendency of the person
looking for knowledge who grasps and wants to grasp things thoroughly in
their profundity and multiplicity, as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual
conscience and taste, which every bold thinker will recognize in himself,
provided that he, as is appropriate, has hardened and sharpened his eye for
himself long enough and has grown accustomed to strict discipline and to stern
language. He’ll say, “There’s something cruel in my spiritual
inclination”—let the virtuous
and charming try to persuade him that’s not so! In fact, it would sound better
if, instead of cruelty, people talked of or whispered about or credited us free,
very free spirits as having “excessive honesty”—and that’s
perhaps one day how it will really ring out—our posthumous reputation? In the
meantime—for there is plenty of time until then—we ourselves may well be the
least inclined to dress ourselves up in the finery of those kinds of moralistic
word sequins and fringes: our entire work so far spoils for us this very taste
and its merry opulence. These are the beautiful, sparkling, jingling, festive
words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism
of the truthful—there is something in them that makes the pride swell up in a
man. But we hermits and marmots, we persuaded ourselves long ago, with all the
secrecy of a hermit’s conscience, that this worthy verbal pomp also belongs
with the old lying finery, rubbish, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity,
and that underneath such flattering colours and repainted surfaces we must once
again recognize the terrifying basic text of homo natura [natural man].
In fact, to translate men back into nature, to master the many vain and effusive
interpretations and connoted meanings which so far have been scribbled and
painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura, to bring it about
that in future man stands before man in the same way he, grown hard in the
discipline of science, already stands these days before the rest of
nature, with the fearless eyes of Oedipus and the blocked ears of Odysseus, deaf
to the tempting sirens among the old metaphysical bird-catchers, who for far too
long have been piping at him, “You are more! You are higher! You are of a
different origin!”— that may be a peculiar and mad task, but it is a task—who
will deny that? Why did we choose it, this mad task? Or, to put the question
differently, “Why knowledge at all?”—Everyone will ask us about that. And
we, pressured like this, we, who have already asked ourselves that very question
a hundred times, we have found and find no better answer . . .
231
Learning
changes us. It achieves what all feeding does which doesn’t merely
“preserve,”—as a physiologist knows. But deep in us, really “down
there,” is naturally something uneducable, a granite of spiritual fate,
of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. In
every cardinal problem a steadfast “That’s what I am” speaks out. About
men and a women, for example, a thinker cannot learn to think differently; he
can only complete his learning—only finally discover how things “stand with
him” on this question. Sometimes we find certain solutions to problems which
create a strong faith in us in particular. Perhaps from then on we call
them our “convictions.” Later we see in them mere footsteps to
self-knowledge, signposts to the problem which we are—or, better, to
the great stupidity which we are, to our spiritual fate, to the unteachable
part way “down there.” After this rich civility I have just displayed
with respect to myself, perhaps there’s a better chance that I’ll be allowed
to speak out a few truths about “woman as such,” so long as from now on
people realize from the start just how very much these are simply only my
truths.
232
Woman
wants to become independent—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten
men about “woman as such”—that is among the most deleterious
developments in the general process of making Europe ugly. For what must
these crude attempts of female scholarship and self-exposure bring to light!
Woman has so many reasons for shame; hidden in women is so much pedantry,
superficiality, so many characteristics of the school teacher, petty arrogance,
petty indulgence, and immodesty—just look at the way she interacts with
children!—Up to now basically these qualities have best been kept repressed
and controlled by fear of man. Woe when the “eternally boring in
woman”—she is rich in that!—is first allowed to venture out, when she
begins thoroughly and fundamentally to forget her shrewdness and art, her
qualities of grace, of play, of driving cares away, of mitigating troubles and
taking things lightly, and her delicate skill with agreeable pleasures! Nowadays
we can already hear women’s voices which—by holy Aristophanes!—are
frightening. They threaten with medical clarity what woman wants from
man, from start to finish. Isn’t it in the very worst taste for woman to
prepare like this to become scientific? So far, enlightening has fortunately
been a man’s business, a man’s talent—in the process we remained “among
ourselves.” In dealing with everything which women write about concerning
“woman,” we may finally retain a healthy mistrust whether woman really wants
enlightenment about herself—or is capable of wanting it. . . . Unless a
woman by doing this is seeking some new finery for herself—so I do
think that dressing herself up belongs to the eternally feminine?—well, by
doing this she does want to arouse fear of herself:—in that way perhaps she
wants power. But she does not want the truth. What does a woman have to
do with truth! From the very beginning nothing is stranger, more unfavourable,
or more hostile to women than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest
concern appearance and beauty. We men should admit it—we honour and love
precisely this art and this instinct in woman, we who have a hard
time of it and are happy to get our relief by associating with beings under
whose hands, looks, and tender foolishness our seriousness, our gravity and
profundity seem almost silly. Finally I put the question: has a woman ever
herself conceded that a woman’s head is profound, that a woman’s heart is
just? And isn’t it true that, speaking generally, “woman” up to this point
has been held in contempt mostly by woman herself—and not at all by us? We men
want a woman not to continue to compromise herself by enlightenment, just as it
was masculine care and consideration for woman that made the church decree mulier
taceat in ecclesia [let a woman be silent in church]! It was an advantage
for woman, when Napoleon let the all-too-loquacious Madame de Staël understand:
mulier taceat in politicis [let women be silent in politics]!—And I
think that a true friend of women is the man who nowadays shouts out to them: mulier
taceat de muliere [let woman be silent about women]!
233
It
reveals a corruption of instincts—quite apart from revealing bad taste—when
a woman makes a direct reference to Madame Roland or Madame de Staël or Mr.
George Sand, as if by doing so they had something to prove in favour of
the “woman as such.”* Among men
those names are the three comical woman as such—nothing more!—and the
very best unintentional counter-arguments against emancipation and female
self-importance.
234
Stupidity
in the kitchen, woman as cook, the ghastly absence of intelligent thought in
taking care of the nourishment of the family and the man of the house! Woman
understands nothing about what food means, and she wants to be cook! If
woman were a thinking creature, then, as cook for thousands of years, she’d
surely have found out the most important physiological facts, while at the same
time she’d have had to take ownership of the art of healing! Because of bad
female cooks and the complete lack of reason in the kitchen, the development of
human beings has been held up for the longest time and suffered the worst
damage. Even today things are little better. A speech for fashionable young
ladies.
235
There
are expressions and successful projections of the spirit; there are aphorisms, a
small handful of words, in which an entire culture, an entire society, suddenly
crystallizes. Among these belongs that remark Madame de Lambert made at some
point to her son: “Mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que de folies, qui
vous feront grand plaisir” [My dear, never allow yourself anything but
those follies which will bring you great pleasure]—which is, by the way,
the most motherly and cleverest remark that has ever been directed to a son.
236
What
Dante and Goethe believed about women—the former when he sang “ella
guardava suso, ed io in lei” [she looked upward and I at her] and
the latter when he translated this passage as “the Eternally Feminine draws us
upwards”—I have no doubt that every more aristocratic woman will
resist this faith, for she believes the very same about the Eternally Masculine.
. . .
237
Seven
Short Maxims About Women
How
the longest boredom flees—when man crawls to us on his knees!
Old
age, alas, and science, too, give strength to even weak virtue.
Dressed
in black and speaking never—every woman then looks clever.
When
things go well, my gratitude goes—to God and the woman who cuts my clothes.
When
young, a flowery cavern home—when old, a dragon on the roam.
A
noble name, legs are fine—a man as well—would he were mine!
Brief
in speech, the sense quite nice—a female ass on treacherous ice!
237a
Up
to now women have been treated by men like birds which have strayed down to them
from some high place or other, like something finer, more sensitive, wilder,
stranger, sweeter, and with more soul— but like something which man must lock
up so that it does not fly away.
238
To
grasp incorrectly the basic problem of “man and woman,” to deny the most
profound antagonism here and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension,
perhaps in this matter to dream about equal rights, equal education, equal
entitlements and duties—that’s a typical sign of superficial
thinking. And a thinker who has shown that he’s shallow
in this dangerous place—shallow in his instincts!—may in general be
considered suspicious or, even worse, betrayed and exposed. Presumably he’ll
be too “short” for all the basic questions of life and of life in the
future, and he’ll be incapable of any profundity. By contrast, a man
who does have profundity in his spirit and in his desires as well, together with
that profundity of good will capable of severity and hardness and easily
confused with them, can think about woman only in an oriental way: he has
to grasp woman as a possession, as a property which he can lock up, as something
predetermined for service and reaching her perfection in that service. In this
matter he must take a stand on the immense reasoning of Asia, on the instinctual
superiority of Asia: just as the Greeks did in earlier times, the best heirs and
students of Asia, who, as is well known, from Homer to the time of Pericles, as
they advanced in culture and in the extent of their power, also became
step by step stricter against women, in short, more oriental. How
necessary, how logical, even how humanly desirable this was:
that’s something we’d do well to think about!
239
In
no age has the weak sex been treated with such respect on the part of men as in
our time—that’s part of the tendency and basic taste of democracy, just like
the disrespect for old age. Is it any wonder that this respect immediately leads
to abuse? People want more; people learn to make demands. They finally find this
toll of respect almost sickening and would prefer a competition for rights, in
fact, a completely genuine fight. Briefly put, woman is losing her shame.
Let’s add to that at once that she is also losing her taste. She is forgetting
to be afraid of man. But the woman who “forgets fear” abandons her
most womanly instincts. The fact that woman dares to come out when that part of
men which inspires fear—let’s say it more clearly—when the man in
men—is no longer wanted and widely cultivated—is reasonable enough, even
understandable enough. What’s more difficult to grasp is that in this very
process—woman degenerates. That’s happening today: let’s not deceive
ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the
military and aristocratic spirit, woman now strives for the economic and legal
independence of a shop assistant: “woman as clerk” stands out on the door of
the modern society which is now developing. As she thus empowers herself with
new rights and strives to become “master” and writes the “progress” of
woman on her banners and little flags, it becomes terribly clear that the
opposite is taking place: woman is regressing. Since the French
Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown smaller in
proportion to the increase in her rights and demands, and the “Emancipation of
Woman,” to the extent that that is desired and demanded by women themselves
(and not just by superficial men), has, as a result, produced a peculiar symptom
of the growing weakening and deadening of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity
in this development, an almost masculine stupidity, about which a successful
woman—who is always an intelligent woman—would have to feel thoroughly
ashamed. To lose the instinct for the ground on which one is surest to gain
victory, to neglect to practice the art of one’s own true weapons, to allow
oneself to let go before men, perhaps even “to produce a book,” where
previously one used discipline and a refined cunning humility, to work with a
virtuous audacity against man’s faith in a fundamentally different ideal concealed
in woman, some eternally and necessarily feminine, with constant chatter to talk
men emphatically out of the idea that woman, like a delicate, strangely wild,
and often pleasing domestic animal, must be maintained, cared for, protected,
and looked after, the awkward and indignant gathering up of everything slavish
and serf-like, which has inherently belonged to the position of women in the
social order up to this point and which still does (as if slavery were a
counter-argument and not rather a condition of every higher culture, every
enhancement in culture)—what does all this mean, if not a crumbling away of
feminine instinct, a loss of femininity? Of course, there are enough idiotic
friends of women and corruptors of women among the scholarly asses of the male
sex who counsel woman to defeminize herself in this manner and to imitate all
the foolish things which make the “man” in Europe and European
“manliness” sick —people who want to bring woman down to the level of a
“common education,” perhaps even to reading the newspapers and discussing
politics. Here and there they want even to make women into free spirits and
literati: as if a woman without piety were not something totally repulsive or
ridiculous to a profound and godless man. Almost everywhere people ruin
woman’s nerves with the most sickly and most dangerous of all forms of music
(our most recent German music) and make her more hysterical every day and more
incapable of her first and last vocation, giving birth to strong children. They
want to make her in general even more “cultivated” and, as they say, make
the “weak sex” strong through culture, as if history didn’t teach
us as emphatically as possible that “cultivating” human beings and making
them weak—that is, enfeebling, fracturing, making the power of the will
sick—always go hand in hand and
that the most powerful and most influential women of the world (in most recent
times even Napoleon’s mother) can thank the power of their own particular
wills—and not their school masters!—for their power and superiority over
men. The thing in woman that arouses respect and often enough fear is her nature,
which is “more natural” than man’s nature, her genuine predatory and
cunning adaptability, her tiger’s claws under the glove, the naivete of her
egotism, her ineducable nature and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility,
breadth, and roaming of her desires and virtues. . . . With all this fear, what
creates sympathy for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is that she
appears to suffer more, to be more vulnerable and in need of love, and to be
condemned to suffer disappointment more than any animal. Fear and pity: with
these feelings man has stood before woman up to this point, always with one foot
already in tragedy, which tears to pieces while it delights. How’s that? And
is this now to come to an end? Is the magic spell of woman now in the
process of being broken? Is the process of making woman boring slowly coming
about? O Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which has always been most
attractive to you. Its danger still constantly threatens you! Your old fable
could still at some point become “history”—once again a monstrous
stupidity could gain mastery of you and drag you away from it! And no god is
hiding underneath it, no, only an “idea,” a “modern idea”! . . .
Notes
.
. . Flaubert: Gustave
Flaubert (1820-1880), well known French novelist. [Back
to Text]
.
. . Galiani: Abbé Ferdinand
Glaini (1728-1787), an Italian cleric and philosopher; Madame d’Épinay:
Louise d’Épinay (1726-1783), a French writer. [Back
to Text]
.
. . Aristophanic:
Aristophanes (456-386 BC), a major dramatist in classical Athens, the foremost
writer of Old Comedy. [Back
to Text]
.
. . Saint Evremond: Charles
de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de Saint Evremond (1610-1703), French soldier and
writer. Voltaire: pen name of Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), an
enormously influential and popular French philosopher and writer. [Back
to Text]
.
. . Chiaja: an urban district
in central Naples. [Back
to Text]
.
. . eudaimonianism: the
doctrine that our highest goal is happiness. [Back
to Text]
.
. . Bentham: Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832), English utilitarian philosopher and social reformer; Helvétius:
Claude Helvétius (1715-1771), French philosopher, condemned by the pope and the
government for his godlessness. [Back
to Text]
.
. . Madame Roland (1754-1793), French historian and writer; George Sand:
pen name for Amandine Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), French novelist. [Back
to Text]
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