Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy

Postby admin » Thu Mar 23, 2017 5:51 pm

PART EIGHT: PEOPLES AND FATHERLANDS

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I heard once again for the first time Richard Wagner’s Overture to the Meistersinger: it is a splendid, overloaded, difficult, and late art, which prides itself on the fact that, in order to understand it, one has to assume that two centuries of music is still vital. It is to the Germans’ credit that such a pride did not make an error! What juices and forces, what seasons and heavenly strokes are intermingled here! It impresses us sometimes as old fashioned, sometimes as strange, dry, and too young; it is as arbitrary as it is conventionally grandiose, if not infrequently mischievous, still more frequently tough and coarse — it has fire and courage and, at the same time, the loose dun-coloured skin of fruits which become ripe too late. It streams out wide and full, and suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, a gap, as it were, springs up between cause and effect, a pressure which makes us dream, almost a nightmare — but already the old stream of contentment is spreading and widening once more, the stream of contentment, of manifold contentment, of old and new happiness, which very much includes the happiness of the artist with himself, something he will not conceal, his amazed and happily shared knowledge of the mastery of the means he has used here, new and newly acquired artistic means, so far untried, as he seems to inform us. All in all, no beauty, nothing of the south, nothing of the fine southern brightness of heaven, nothing of grace, no dance, scarcely any will for logic, indeed a certain awkwardness that is even emphasized, as if the artist wanted to tell us, “That is part of my purpose,” a ponderous drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonial, a shimmy of scholarly and reverend treasures and fine points; something German, in the best and worst senses of the word, something manifold, formless, and inexhaustible in the German way, a certain German power and spiritual excess, which has no fear of hiding under the refinements of decay — and which perhaps feels at its best only there, a truly authentic landmark of the German soul, young and obsolete both at the same time, over-rotten and still over-rich for the future. This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow — but they still have no today.

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We “good Europeans,” we too have hours when we allow ourselves a hearty feeling for our fatherland, a bump and relapse into old loves and narrow places — I just gave a sample of that — hours of national tumults, patriotic apprehensions, and all sorts of other floods of old-fashioned emotion. Slower moving spirits than we are might take a longer period of time to be done with things which with us last and have run their course in a matter of hours — some need half a year; others require half a human lifetime, each according to the speed and power with which they digest and “transform their stuff.” In fact, I could think of some dull hesitant races who, even in our shrinking Europe, would require half a century in order to overcome such atavistic attacks of patriotism and attachment to their soil and to return to reason, that is to say, to “good Europeanness.” And while I indulge myself excessively with this possibility, it so happens that I listen in on a conversation between two old “patriots.” They both were obviously hard of hearing and so spoke all the louder. One said, “That manthinks about and understands philosophy as much as a farmer or a student in a fraternity. He is still innocent. But what does that matter these days! This is age of the masses, who prostrate themselves before everything built on a massive scale. That’s how it is in politics, as well. If a statesman piles up a new tower of Babel for them, anything at all that’s immense in riches and power, they call him ‘great.’ What does it matter that in the meantime those of us who are more cautious and more reserved still do not give up the old belief that only a great idea confers greatness on an act or a cause? What if a statesman brought his people into a situation where from that point on they had to practise ‘grand politics,’ something for which they were by nature poorly adapted and prepared, so that it would be necessary for them to sacrifice their love of their old and certain virtues to a new and doubtful mediocrity — suppose that a statesman sentenced his people to a general ‘politicking,’ although up to that point those same people had better things to do and think about and that in the depth of their souls they could not rid themselves of a cautious disgust with the anxiety, emptiness, blaring, and devilish squabbling of those peoples who were truly politicking — suppose such a statesman goaded the sleeping passions and desires of his people, and turned their earlier shyness and their pleasure in standing to one side into stains, their interaction with strangers and their secret boundlessness into a liability, devalued their most heartfelt inclinations, turned their conscience around, made their spirit narrow, their taste ‘national,’— well, would a statesman who did all those things which his people would have to atone for through all future time, in the event they had a future, would such a statesman be great?” “Undoubtedly,” the other old patriot answered him vehemently, “otherwise he would have been incapable of doing it! Perhaps it was idiotic to want something like that? But perhaps every great thing was merely idiotic at the beginning!” “That’s an abuse of words!” cried his conversational partner in response, “Strong! Strong! Strong and idiotic! Not great!” The old men had evidently worked themselves up, as they shouted their “truths” into each other’s faces like this. But I, in my happiness and remoteness, thought about how a stronger man would soon become master over the strong, and also how there is a compensation for the spiritual flattening of one people, namely, the spiritual deepening of another people. —

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Now, let’s call what we’re looking for as the distinguishing mark of Europeans “civilization,” or “humanizing,” or “progress”; let’s use a political formula and call it simply, without praise or blame, Europe’s democratic movement. Behind all the moral and political foregrounds indicated with such labels, an immense physiological process is completing itself, something whose momentum is constantly growing — the process by which the Europeans are becoming more similar to each other, the growing detachment from the conditions under which arise races linked to a climate and class, their increasing independence from every distinct milieu which for centuries wanted to inscribe itself on body and soul with the same demands — thus, the slow emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man, who, physiologically speaking, possesses as his characteristic mark a maximum of the art and power of adaptation. This process of the developing European, which can be held back by great relapses in tempo, but which for that very reason perhaps acquires and augments its vehemence and depth, the furious storm and stress of “national feeling” still raging today, belongs here, along with that anarchism which is just emerging — this process will probably rush ahead to conclusions which its naive proponents and advocates, the apostles of “modern ideas,” are least likely to expect. The same new conditions which will, on average, create a situation in which men are homogenous and mediocre — useful, hard-working, practical in many tasks, clever men from an animal herd — are to the highest degree suitable for giving rise to exceptional men with the most dangerous and most attractive qualities. For while that power to adapt, which keeps testing constantly changing conditions and begins a new task with every generation, almost with every decade, by no means makes possible the power of the type, while the collective impression of such future Europeans probably will be one of many kinds of extremely useful chattering workers with little will power, men who will need a master, someone to give orders, as much as they need their daily bread, and while the democratizing of Europe thus moves towards the creation of a new type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense, the strong man, in single and exceptional cases, will have to turn out stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before now — thanks to the absence of prejudice in his education, thanks to the immense multiplicity of practice, art, and mask. What I wanted to say is this: the democraticizing of Europe is at the same time an involuntary way of organizing for the breeding of tyrants — understanding that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.

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I am pleased to hear that our sun is caught up in a rapid movement towards the constellation Hercules, and I hope that men on this earth act like the sun in this respect. And we first, we good Europeans!

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There was a time when people were accustomed to designate the Germans with the label “profound.” Now, when the most successful type of the new Germanism craves completely different honours and perhaps finds “briskness” lacking in everything profound, it is almost timely and patriotic to doubt whether we were not deceiving ourselves previously with that praise: in short, whether German profundity is not basically something else, something worse — and something which, thank God, we are about to succeed in removing. So let’s make the attempt to learn to think differently about German profundity. For that we don’t have to do anything except a little vivisection on the German soul. The German soul is, above all, multifaceted, with different origins, more cobbled together and layered than truly constructed. That comes from how it emerged. A German who wished the audacity to claim “Alas, two souls live inside my breast”1 would be seriously violating the truth, or, putting the matter more correctly, would lag behind the truth by several souls. As a people of the most monstrous mixing and stirring together of races, perhaps even with an excess of pre-Aryan elements, as “a people in the middle” in every sense, the Germans are more incomprehensible, more extensive, more contradictory, more unknown, more unpredictable, more surprising, and more terrifying to themselves than other people are to themselves — they elude definition and for that reason alone are the despair of the French. It’s typical of the Germans that with them the question “What is German?” never dies away. Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough: “We have been acknowledged,” they cheered to him — but Sand also thought he knew them. John Paul knew what he was doing when he expressed his anger over Fichte’s false but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations — but is it likely that Goethe’s thinking about the Germans was any different from Jean Paul’s, even if he thought he was right in his opinion about Fichte?2What did Goethe really think about the Germans? — But he never spoke clearly about many things around him, and all his life he knew how to keep a delicate silence — he probably had good reasons for that. What’s certain is that “the wars of liberation” did not make him look up in a happier mood, any more than the French Revolution.3 The event which made him rethink his Faust and, indeed, the entire problem of “man” was the appearance of Napoleon. There are words of Goethe in which, as if from a foreign country, he denies with an impatient heart what the Germans reckon as something they can be proud of: the famous German disposition he once defined as “leniency with the weaknesses of strangers and with their own.” Was he wrong in that? It’s a characteristic of the Germans that one is rarely completely wrong about them. The German soul has within it lanes and connecting paths; in it there are high points, hiding places, dungeons. Its lack of order has a great deal of the charm of something full of secrets. On the secret routes to chaos, the German knows what he is doing. And just as everything loves its own metaphorical likeness, so the German loves the clouds and everything associated with a lack of clarity, with becoming, with twilight, with dampness: any kind of uncertainty, shapelessness, shifting around, or developing he senses as something “profound.” In himself, the German man is nothing — he is becoming something, he “is developing himself.” Hence, “developing” is the essential German discovery and invention in the great realm of philosophical formulas — a governing idea which, along with German beer and German music, is working to Germanize all Europe. Foreigners stand there amazed at and attracted to the riddles which the contradictory nature underlying the German soul present to them (something Hegel organized into a system and Richard Wagner finally even set to music). “Good natured and treacherous”— such a juxtaposition, a contradiction if applied to any other people, unfortunately justifies itself too often in Germany. Just live for a while among the Swabians!4 The ponderousness of the German scholar, his social tastelessness, gets on alarmingly well with an inner agility in dancing on a tightrope and with a light impudence, faced with which all the gods have by now learned about fear. If people want an ad oculos [visual] demonstration of “the German soul,” let them only look into German taste, into German arts and customs: what a boorish indifference to “taste”! See how there the noblest and the meanest stand next to each other! How disorderly and rich this entire spiritual household is! The German drags his soul along; he drags along everything he experiences. He digests his experiences badly — he’s never “finished” with them. German profundity is often only a difficult and hesitant “digestion.” And just as all the habitual invalids, all the dyspeptics, have an inclination for comfort, so the German loves “openness” and “conventional probity”: how comfortable it is to be open and conventional! — Today that is perhaps the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German knows — this trusting, cooperative, cards-on-the-table nature of German honesty. It is his true Mephistophelean art; with it he can “still go far!” The German lets himself go, as he gazes with true, blue, empty German eyes — and foreigners immediately confuse him with his nightgown! What I wanted to say is this — let “German profundity” be what it will — when we are entirely among ourselves perhaps we’ll allow ourselves to laugh about it? — we’ll do well to hold its appearance and its good name in honour in future and not to dispose of our old reputation as people of profundity too cheaply for Prussian “boldness” and Berlin wit and sand. It’s clever for a people to make itself and let others think it profound, clumsy, good natured, honest, unwise. That could even be — profound! Finally one should be a credit to one’s name — not for nothing are we called the “tiusche” people, the deceiving people . . .

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The “good old” days are gone. In Mozart they sang themselves out:— how lucky we are that his rococo still speaks to us, that his “good society,” his loving raptures, his childish delight in Chinese effects and curlicues, the civility in his heart, his desire for delicacy, lovers, dancers, those with blissful tears, his faith in the south can still appeal to some remnant in us! Alas, at some point it will be gone! — But who can doubt that the understanding of and taste for Beethoven will be gone even earlier! — He was, in fact, only the final chords of a stylistic transition, a break in style, and not, like Mozart, the final notes of a great centuries-long European taste.5 Beethoven is something that happens between an old crumbling soul which is constantly breaking up and a very young soul of the future which is constantly coming. In his music there lies that half light of eternal loss and of eternally indulgent hoping — that same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced around the freedom tree of revolution and finally almost worshipped before Napoleon. But how quickly now this very feeling fades. Nowadays how difficult it has already become to know this feeling — how foreign to our ears sounds the talk of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron, in whom collectively the same European fate found a way in words which it knew how to sing in Beethoven!6 What has come in German music since then belongs to the Romantic period, that is, historically considered, to an even shorter, even more fleeting, even more superficial movement than was that great interlude, that transition in Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the arrival of democracy. There’s Weber: but what are Freischutz and Oberon these days for us! Or Marschner’s Hans Heiling and Vampyr! Or even Wagner’s Tannhauser! That music has faded, even if it has not yet been forgotten.7 In addition, all this Romantic music was not sufficiently noble, not sufficiently musical, to justify itself anywhere other than in the theatre and in front of crowds. Right from the start it was second-rate music, of little interest among true musicians. The situation was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who won rapid admiration for his lighter, purer, and happier soul and then was forgotten just as quickly, as the lovely intermission in German music.8 But in the case of Robert Schumann, who took his work seriously and from the beginning was also taken seriously — he was the last one who founded a school — nowadays don’t we count it as good luck, as a relief, and as a liberation that this very Schumann-style Romanticism has been overthrown? Schumann ran off into the “Saxon Switzerland” of his soul, half like Werther, half like Jean-Paul, but certainly nothing like Beethoven, certainly nothing like Byron! — the music of his Manfred is an error in judgment and a misunderstanding to the point of injustice.9 — Schumann with his taste, which was basically a petty taste (that is, a dangerous tendency, doubly dangerous among the Germans, toward quiet lyricism and a drunken intoxication of feeling), always going off to the side, shyly withdrawing himself and pulling back, a nobly tender soul, who wallowed in nothing but anonymous happiness and sorrow, from the start a sort of young maiden and noli me tangere [do not touch me]: this Schumann was already merely a German event in music, no longer something European, as Beethoven was, and, to an even greater extent, Mozart. With him German music was threatened by its greatest danger, the loss of the voice for the soul of Europe and its descent to something dealing merely with the fatherland.

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What a torture are books written in German for the man who has a thirdear! How reluctantly he stands beside the slowly revolving swamp of sounds without melody, of rhythms without dance, what among Germans is called a “book!” And as for the German who reads books! How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know and demand from themselves the knowledge that there is art in every good sentence, art which must be correctly grasped if the sentence is to be understood! With a misunderstanding about its tempo, for example, the sentence itself is misunderstood! That one must not be in doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one must feel the break in the extremely strict symmetry as intentional and charming, that one must lend a refined and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one sorts out the sense in the series of vowels and diphthongs, how softly and richly they can colour and re-colour each other as they follow in their sequence — who among our book-reading Germans has enough good will to recognize these sorts of duties and demands and to listen for so much art and intentionality in the language? In the end we just “don’t have the ear for that.” And thus the most pronounced contrasts in style are not heard and the most refined artistry is wasted, as if on deaf people. These were my thoughts as I observed how crudely and naively people confused two masters of the art of prose with each other — one whose words drip down, hesitant and cold, as if from the roof of a damp cavern — he’s relying on their dull sound and echo — and the other who handles his language like a flexible sword and feels from his arm down to his toes the dangerous joy in the excessively sharp, shimmering blade that wants to bite, hiss, and cut. —

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Just how little German style concerns itself with sound and with the ear is demonstrated in the fact that even our good musicians write badly. The German does not read aloud, not for the ear, but merely with his eyes. In the process he has put his ears away in a drawer. In antiquity a man read, when he read — and that happened rarely enough — to himself aloud and in a loud voice. People were amazed if someone read quietly, and they secretly asked themselves why. With a loud voice — that is to say, with all the swellings, inflections, changes in tone, and shifts in tempo which the ancient public world enjoyed. At that time the principles of writing style were the same as those for the speaking style, and these principles depended in part on the astonishing development and the sophisticated needs of the ear and larynx and in part on the strength, endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. A syntactic period is, as the ancients understood it, above all a physiological totality, insofar as it is held together by a single breath. Such periods, as they manifest themselves in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling up twice and sinking down twice, all within the single breath — that’s what ancient men enjoyed.10 From their own schooling they knew how to value the virtue in such periods — how rare and difficult it was to deliver them. We really have no right to the great syntactical period, we moderns, we short-winded people in every sense! These ancient people were, in fact, themselves collectively dilettantes in public speaking — and as a result connoisseurs and thus critics. Hence, they drove their speakers to the utmost limits. In a similar way in the last century, once all Italian men and women understood how to sing, among them virtuoso singing (and with that the art of melody as well) reached its high point. But in Germany (right up until very recent times, when a sort of platform eloquence started flapping its young wings timidly and crudely enough) there was really only one form of public speaking which came close to being artistic: what came from the pulpit. In Germany only the preacher understood what a syllable or what a word weighs, how a sentence strikes, leaps, falls, runs, and ends; only he had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience. For there is no shortage of reasons why it’s precisely the German who rarely, and almost always too late, achieves a proficiency in speaking. It is appropriate therefore that the masterwork of German prose is the masterwork of its greatest preacher: up to this point, the Bible has been the best German book. In comparison with Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is mere “literature”— something that did not grow in Germany and hence also did not grow and does not grow into German hearts, as the Bible has.

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There are two kinds of genius: one which above all breeds and desires to breed, and another which is happy to let itself be fertilized and give birth. In just the same way, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the female problem of pregnancy and the secret task of shaping, maturing, and perfecting have been assigned — the Greeks, for example, were a people of this kind, like the French — and there are others who have to fertilize and become the origin of new orders of life — like the Jews, the Romans, and, one could ask in all modesty, the Germans? — People tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly driven outside themselves, in love with and lusting after foreign races (after those who “let themselves be fertilized”—) and thus obsessed with mastery, like everything which has a knowledge of itself as full of procreative power and thus “by the grace of God.” These two types of genius seek each other out, like man and woman, but they also misunderstand each other — like man and woman.

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Every people has its characteristic Tartufferie [hypocrisy] and calls it its virtues. — The best that man is he does not know — he cannot know.

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What does Europe owe the Jews? — All sorts of things, good and bad, and above all one that is at the same time among the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the terror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and grandeur of morally questionable things [moralischen Fragwürdigkeiten] — and as a result precisely the most attractive, most awkward, and most exquisite parts of those plays of colours and enticements to life, whose afterglow these days makes the sky of our European culture glow in its evening light — perhaps as it burns itself out. Among the spectators and philosophers, we artists are grateful to the Jews for that.

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When a people is suffering from nationalistic nervous fever and political ambition and wants to suffer, we have to accept the fact that various kinds of clouds and disturbances — in short, small attacks of dullness — will pass over its spirit: for example, among contemporary Germans sometimes the anti-French stupidity, sometimes the anti-Jewish, sometimes the anti-Polish, sometimes the Christian-Romantic, sometimes the Wagnerian, sometimes the Teutonic, sometimes the Prussian (take a look at these poor historians Sybel and Treitzschke and their thickly bandaged heads —), and whatever else all these small obfuscations of the German spirit and conscience may call themselves.11 May I be forgiven for the fact that I, too, during a short and risky stay in a very infected region did not remain wholly free of this illness and, like all the world, began to have ideas about things which were no concern of mine, the first sign of the political infection. For example, about the Jews. Hear me out. — I have not yet met a single German who was well disposed towards the Jews. And no matter how absolute the rejection of real anti-Semitism on the part of all cautious and political types may be, nonetheless this caution and politics directs itself not against this type of feeling itself, but only against its dangerous excess, in particular against the tasteless and disgraceful expression of this excessive feeling — on that point people should not deceive themselves. That Germany has a richly sufficient number of Jews, that the German stomach and German blood have difficulty (and will still have difficulty for a long time to come) absorbing even this quantum of “Jew”— in the way the Italians, the French, and the English have absorbed them, as a result of a stronger digestive system — that is the clear message and language of a general instinct which we must listen to and according to which we must act. “Let no more Jews in! And especially bar the doors to the east (also to Austria)!” So orders the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and uncertain, so that it could be easily erased, easily dissolved away by a stronger race. But the Jews are without any doubt the strongest, most tenacious, and purest race now living in Europe. They understand how to assert themselves even under the worst conditions (better even than under favourable conditions), as a result of certain virtues which today people might like to stamp as vices — thanks, above all, to a resolute faith which has no need to feel shame when confronted by “modern ideas.” They always change, if they change, only in the way the Russian empire carries out its conquests — as an empire that has time and was not born yesterday — that is, according to the basic principle “as slowly as possible!” A thinker who has the future of Europe on his conscience will, in all the designs which he draws up for himself of this future, take the Jews as well as the Russians into account as, for the time being, the surest and most probable factors in the great interplay and struggle of forces. What we nowadays call a “nation” in Europe is essentially more a res facta [something made] than a res nata [something born] (indeed sometimes it looks confusingly like a res ficta et picta [something made up and unreal]— ), in any case something developing, young, easily adjusted, not yet a race, to say nothing of aere perennius [more enduring than bronze], as is the Jewish type. But these “nations” should be very wary of every hot-headed competition and enmity! That the Jews, if they wanted to — or if people were to force them, as the anti-Semites seem to want to do — could even now become predominant, in fact, quite literally gain mastery over Europe, is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain. Meanwhile by contrast they desire and wish–-even with a certain insistence — to be absorbed into and assimilated by Europe. They thirst to be finally established somewhere or other, allowed, respected, and to bring to an end their nomadic life, to the “Wandering Jew.” And people should pay full attention to this tendency and impulse (which in itself perhaps even expresses a moderating of Jewish instincts) and accommodate it. And for this, it might perhaps be useful and reasonable to expel the anti-Semitic ranters out of the country. We should comply with all caution, and selectively, more or less the way the English aristocracy does it. It’s clear that the stronger and already firmly established type of the new Germanism could involve itself with them with the least objection, for example, the aristocratic officers from the Mark [of Brandenburg].12 It would be interesting in all sorts of ways to see whether the genius of gold and patience (and above all of some spirit and spirituality, which are seriously deficient in the people just referred to) could be added to and bred into the inherited art of commanding and obeying — in both of which the land mentioned above is nowadays a classic example. But at this point it’s fitting that I break off my cheerful Germanomania [Deutschthümelei]and speech of celebration. For I’m already touching on something seriousto me, on the “European problem,” as I understand it, on the breeding of a new ruling caste for Europe. —

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These Englishmen are no race of philosophers. Bacon signifies an attackon the spirit of philosophy in general; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke have been a debasement and a devaluing of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century. Kant raised himself and rose up in reaction against Hume. It was Locke of whom Schelling was entitled to say, “Je méprise Locke” [I despise Locke]. In the struggle with the English mechanistic dumbing down of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer (along with Goethe) were unanimous — both of these hostile fraternal geniuses in philosophy, who moved away from each other towards opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other, as only brothers can.13 What’s lacking in England, and what has always been missing, that’s something that semi-actor and rhetorician Carlyle understood well enough, the tasteless muddle-headed Carlyle, who tried to conceal under his passionate grimaces what he understood about himself, that is, what was lacking in Carlyle — a real power of spirituality, a real profundity of spiritual insight, in short, philosophy.14 It is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it clings strongly to Christianity. They need its discipline to develop their “moralizing” and humanizing. The Englishman is more gloomy, more sensual, stronger willed, and more brutal than the German — he is also for that very reason, as the more vulgar of the two, more pious than the German. He is even more in need of Christianity. For more refined nostrils this same English Christianity has still a lingering and truly English smell of spleen and alcoholic dissipation, against which it is used for good reasons as a medicinal remedy — that is, the more delicate poison against the coarser one. Among crude people, a subtler poisoning is, in fact, already progress, a step towards spiritualization. The crudity and peasant seriousness of the English are still most tolerably disguised or, stated more precisely, interpreted and given new meaning, by the language of Christian gestures and by prayers and singing psalms. And for those drunken and dissolute cattle who in earlier times learned to make moral grunts under the influence of Methodism and more recently once again as the “Salvation Army,” a twitch of repentance may really be, relatively speaking, the highest achievement of “humanity” to which they can be raised: that much we can, in all fairness, concede. But what is still offensive even in the most humane Englishman is his lack of music, speaking metaphorically (and not metaphorically —). He has in the movements of his soul and his body no rhythm and dance — in fact, not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for “music.” Listen to him speak, or watch the most beautiful English woman walk — in no country of the earth are there lovelier doves and swans — and finally, listen to them sing! But I’m demanding too much . . .

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There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre heads, because they are most appropriate for them; there are truths which have charm and seductive power only for mediocre minds:— at this very point we are pushed back onto this perhaps unpleasant proposition, since the time the spirit of respectable but mediocre Englishmen — I cite Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer — has succeeded in gaining pre-eminence in the middle regions of European taste.15 In fact, who could doubt how useful it is that such spirits rule for a while? It would be a mistake to think that highly cultivated spirits who fly off to great distances would be particularly skilful at establishing many small, common facts, collecting them, and pushing to a conclusion:— they are, by contrast, as exceptional men, from the very start in no advantageous position vis-à-visthe “rules.” And finally, they have more to do than merely to have knowledge — for they have to be something new, to mean something new, to present new values! The gap between know and can is perhaps greater as well as more mysterious than people think. It’s possible the man who can act in the grand style, the creating man, will have to be a man who does not know; whereas, on the other hand, for scientific discoveries of the sort Darwin made a certain narrowness, aridity, and diligent carefulness, in short, something English, may not make a bad disposition. Finally we should not forget that the English with their profoundly average quality have already once brought about a collective depression of the European spirit. What people call “modern ideas” or “the ideas of the eighteenth century” or even “French ideas”— in other words, what the German spirit has risen against with a deep disgust — were English in origin. There’s no doubt of that. The French have been only apes and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, as well, and at the same time unfortunately their first and most complete victims. For with the damnable Anglomania of “modern ideas” the âme française [French soul] has finally become so thin and emaciated that nowadays we remember almost with disbelief its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profoundly passionate power, its resourceful nobility. But with our teeth we must hang on to the following principle of historical fairness and defend it against the appearance of the moment: European noblesse — in feeling, in taste, in customs, in short, the word taken in every higher sense — is the work and invention of France; European nastiness, the plebeian quality of modern ideas, the work of England.

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Even now France is still the place with the most spiritual and most refined European culture and the leading school of taste. But we have to know how to find this “France of taste.” Whoever belongs to it keeps himself well concealed — the number of those in whom it is embodied and lives may be small, and in addition they may perhaps be people who are not standing on the strongest legs, partly fatalistic, dark, sick, and partly mollycoddled and artificial, such people as have the ambition to conceal themselves. All them have something in common: confronted with the raging stupidity and the noisy chattering of the democratic bourgeois, they keep their ears plugged. In fact, rolling around these days in the foreground is a stupid and coarsened France — recently, at the funeral of Victor Hugo, it celebrated a true orgy of tastelessness and at the same time of self-admiration.16 Something else is also common to them: a good will to stand against spiritual Germanization — and an even better inability to do so! Perhaps these days Schopenhauer is already more at home and has become more indigenous in this France of the spirit, which is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany, not to mention Heinrich Heine, who has long since been transformed into the flesh and blood of the more sophisticated and discriminating Parisian lyric poets, or Hegel, who today exercises an almost tyrannical influence in the form of Taine, thepre-eminent living historian.17 And so far as Richard Wagner is concerned — the more French music learns to shape itself according to the real needs of the âme moderne [modern soul], the more it will becomes “Wagnerian.” That’s something we can predict — it’s already doing enough of that now. Nonetheless, in spite of all the voluntary or involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing of taste, there are three things which nowadays the French can still point to with pride as their inheritance and property and as the unforgotten mark of an old cultural superiority over Europe. The first is the capacity for artistic passions, for devotion to “form,” for which the expression l’art pour l’art [art for art’s sake] has been invented, along with a thousand others — something like that has been present in France for three centuries and, thanks to the reverence for the “small number,” has made possible again and again a kind of chamber music in literature which is not to be found in the rest of Europe. — The second thing on which the French can base a superiority over Europe is their ancient multifaceted moralistic culture, because of which we find, on average, even in the small romanciers [novelists] of the newspapers and random boulevardiers of Paris, a psychological sensitivity and curiosity, of which people in Germany, for example, have no idea (to say nothing of the thing itself!). For that the Germans are lacking a couple of centuries of moralistic behaviour which, as mentioned, France did not spare itself. Anyone who calls the Germans “naive” because of this is praising them for a defect. (In contrast to the German inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica [psychological delight], which is not too distantly related to the boredom of associating with Germans — and as the most successful expression of a genuine French curiosity and talent for invention in this empire of tender thrills, Henry Beyle may well qualify, that remarkably prescient and pioneering man, who ran at a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as a tracker and discoverer of this soul. It took two generations to catch upwith him somehow, to grasp some of the riddles which tormented and delighted him, this strange Epicurean and question mark of a man, who was France’s last great psychologist). There is still a third claim to superiority: in the nature of the French is a semi-successful synthesis of north and south, which enables them to understand many things and tells them to do other things which an Englishman will never understand. In them, the temperament which periodically turns towards and away from the south and in which, from time to time, the Provencal and Ligurian blood bubbles over, protects them from the dreadful northern gray on gray and the sunless conceptual ghostliness and anaemia — our Germansickness of taste, against the excesses of which at the moment we have prescribed for ourselves, with great decisiveness, blood and iron — or I should say “grand politics” (in accordance with a dangerous art of healing which teaches me to wait and wait, but up to this point has not taught me to hope).18 Even today there is still in France an advance understanding of and an accommodation with those rarer and rarely satisfied men who are too all-embracing to find their contentment in some patriotism or other and know how to love the south in the north and the north in the south — the born mid-landers, the “good Europeans.”— For them Bizet created his music, this last genius who saw a new beauty and enticement and — who discovered a piece of the south in music.19

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I think all sorts of precautions are necessary against German music. Suppose that someone loves the south the way I love it, as a great school for convalescing in the spiritual and sensual sense, as an unrestrained abundance of sun and transfiguration by the sun, which spreads itself over an existence which rules itself and believes in itself. Now, such a man will learn to be quite careful as far as German music is concerned, because in ruining his taste again it ruins his health again as well. Such a man of the south, not by descent but by faith, must, if he dreams of the future of music, also dream of a redemption of music from the north and have in his ears the prelude to a more profound, more powerful, perhaps more evil and more mysterious music, a supra-German music which does not fade away, turn yellow, and grow pale at the sight of the blue voluptuous sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky, the way all German music does, a supra-European music which justifies itself even when confronted with the brown desert sunsets, whose soul is related to the palm trees and knows how to be at home and to wander among huge, beautiful, solitary predatory beasts. . . . I could imagine to myself a music whose rarest magic consisted in the fact that it no longer knew anything about good and evil, only that perhaps here and there some mariner’s nostalgia or other, some golden shadow and tender weaknesses would race across it, an art which from a great distance could see speeding towards it the colours of a sinking moral world — one which has become almost unintelligible — and which would be sufficiently hospitable and deep to take in such late fugitives. —

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Thanks to the pathological alienation which the nationalist idiocy has established and still establishes among European peoples, thanks as well to the short-sighted politicians with hasty hands, who are on top nowadays with the help of this idiocy and have no sense of how much the politics of disintegration which they carry on can necessarily be only politics for an intermission — thanks to all this and to some things today which are quite impossible to utter, now the most unambiguous signs indicating that Europe wants to become a unity are being overlooked or wilfully and mendaciously reinterpreted. With all the more profound and more comprehensive men of this century the real overall direction in the mysterious work of their souls has been to prepare the way to that new synthesis and to anticipate, as an experiment, the European of the future. Only in their foregrounds or in their weaker hours, as in old age, did they belong to their “fatherlands”— they were only taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I’m thinking of men like Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer. Don’t get angry with me if I also count Richard Wagner among them. About him people should not let themselves be seduced by his own misunderstandings — geniuses of his kind rarely have the right to understand themselves. Even less, of course, by the uncivilized noise with which people in France these days close themselves off from and resist Richard Wagner. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the late French Romanticism of the forties and Richard Wagner belong together in the closest and most inner relation. In all the heights and depths of their needs they are related to each other, fundamentally related. It is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul pushes out and upward through their manifold and impetuous art, and it longs to go — where? Into a new light? Towards a new sun? But who could express exactly what all these masters of new ways of speaking did not know how to express clearly? What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented them, that they sought in the same way, these last great seekers! All of them were dominated by literature up to their eyes and ears — the first artists educated in world literature — most of them were even themselves writers, poets, conveyers of and mixers in the arts and senses (Wagner belongs as a musician with the painters, as a poet with the musicians, as an artist generally with the actors); they were all fanatics of expression “at any price”— I’ll cite Delacroix, the one most closely related to Wagner — they were all great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, as well as of the ugly and the horrific, even greater discoverers in effects, in display, in the art of the store window — all talents far beyond their genius, virtuosos through and through, with mysterious access to everything which seduces, entices, compels, knocks over, born enemies of logic and the straight line, greedy for the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, the self-contradictory; as men they were Tantaluses of the will, up-and-coming plebeians, who knew that they were incapable of a noble tempo, a lento [slow movement], in their lives and works — think, for example, of Balzac — unrestrained workers, almost killing themselves with work, antinomians and rebels against customs, ambitious and insatiable without equilibrium and enjoyment; all of them finally collapsing and sinking down before the Christian cross (and they were right and justified in that, for who among them would have been sufficiently profound and original for a philosophy of the Antichrist? —), on the whole, a boldly daring, marvellously violent, high-flying kind of higher men, who pulled others up into the heights, men who first taught the idea of “higher man” to their century — and it’s the century of the masses!20 The German friends of Richard Wagner should think about whether there is anything essentially German in Wagnerian art or whether it is not precisely its distinction that it comes from supra-German sources and urges. In doing that, one should not underestimate just how indispensable Paris was for the development of a type like him, how at the decisive period the depth of his instincts called him there, and how his whole way of appearing and his self-apostleship could first perfect itself at the sight of the model of French socialists. Perhaps with a more sophisticated comparison people will discover, to the honour of Richard Wagner’s German nature, that he had driven himself in all things more strongly, more daringly, harder, and higher than a Frenchman of the nineteenth century could — thanks to the fact that we Germans stand even closer to barbarism than the French. Perhaps the most peculiar thing that Richard Wagner created is even inaccessible and unsympathetic and beyond the emulation of the entire Latin race, which is so mature, for all time and not merely for today: the character of Siegfried, that very freeman, who, in fact, may be far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of an old and worn cultured people. He may even have been a sin against Romanticism, this anti-romantic Siegfried. Well, Wagner more than made up for this sin in his old and gloomy days when — in anticipation of a taste which in the meantime has become political — he began, with his characteristic religious vehemence, if not to go to Rome, at least to preach the way there. So that you don’t misunderstand these last words of mine, I’ll summon a few powerful rhymes to my assistance, which will reveal to less refined ears what I want — what I have against the “late Wagner” and his Parsifal music:

-Is that still German?
Did this oppressive screech come from a German heart?
Is this self-mutilation of the flesh a German part?
And is this German, such priestly affectation,
this incense-smelling, sensual stimulation?
And German this faltering, plunging, staggering,
this uncertain bim-bam dangling?
This nun-like ogling and ringing Ave bells,
this whole false heavenly super-heaven of spells?
Is that still German?
Think! You’re still standing by the entrance way.
You’re hearing Rome, Rome’s faith without the words they say.

_______________

Notes:

1. A quotation from Goethe’s Faust.

2. . . . Kotzebue: August Kotzebue (1761-1819), a well-known German writer assassinated by Karl Sand (1795-1820). John Paul (1763-1825), pen name of Johann Richter, an influential German writer in the Romantic era. Fichte: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1797-1879), an influential German philosopher.

3. . . . wars of liberation: the wars against Napoleon which followed the French Revolution.

4. . . . Swabians: inhabitants of a region in eastern Germany.

5. Mozart: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791); Beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).

6. Freedom tree of revolution: a reference to the French Revolution (1789-1799); Napoleon: Napoleon Bonaparte (I1769-1821) French general, ruler of France, and conqueror of much of Europe; Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), critic, philosopher and writer whose work influenced the French Revolution; Schiller: Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German poet, playwright, and philosopher; Shelley: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), a major English poet in the Romantic era;Byron: George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron) (1788-1824), English poet in the Romantic era, a leading international presence in European Romanticism.

7. Weber: Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber (1786-1826), German musician during the Romantic period; Marschner: Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861), German composer of operas.

8. . . . Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) German composer in the early Romantic period.

9. . . . Robert Schumann (1810-1856) German composer and music critic. Werther: Hero of a famous Romantic novel by Goethe. He commits suicide.

10. . . . Cicero (106-43 BC), the greatest of the Roman orators and prose stylists. Demosthenes (384-322 BC), a very famous Greek orator.

11. . . . Sybel and Treitzsche: Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895) and Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), important mid-nineteenth century German historians.

12. . . . Mark of Brandenburg: a region near Berlin.

13. . . . Hobbes: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English philosopher. David Hume (1711-1776), Scottish historian and philosopher. John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher. Schelling: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), German philosopher.

14. . . . Carlyle: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, historian, and biographer.

15. . . . Charles Darwin (1809-1882) English scientist, whose Origin of Species was published in 1859; John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English utilitarian philosopher and economist; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), English philosopher.

16. . . . Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French poet, playwright, and novelist.

17. . . . Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German lyric poet; Taine: Hippolye Adolphe Taine (1828-1893), French critic and historian.

18. . . . blood and iron: a phrase made famous by Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck (1815-1898), First Chancellor of Germany: “Not by speeches and votes of the majority are the great questions of the time decided . . . but by iron and blood.”

19. . . . Bizet: Georges Bizet (1838-1875), French composer and pianist.

20. . . . Delacroix: Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), important French Romantic painter; Balzac: Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), prolific French novelist.
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Re: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy

Postby admin » Thu Mar 23, 2017 5:55 pm

Part 1 of 2

PART NINE: WHAT IS NOBLE?

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Every enhancement in the type “man” up to this point has been the work of an aristocratic society — and that’s how it will always be, over and over again: a society which believes in a long scale of rank ordering and differences in worth between man and man and which, in some sense or other, requires slavery. Without the pathos of distance, the sort which grows out of the deeply rooted difference between the social classes, out of the constant gazing outward and downward of the ruling caste on the subjects and work implements, and out of their equally sustained practice of obedience and command, holding down and holding at a distance, that other more mysterious pathos would have no chance of growing at all, that longing for an ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states, in short, simply the enhancement in the type “man,” the constant “self-conquest of man,” to cite a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. Of course, where the history of the origins of aristocratic society is concerned (and thus the precondition for that raising of the type “man”—), we should not surrender to humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. So without further consideration, let’s admit to ourselves how up to this point every higher culture on earth has started! People with a still natural nature, barbarians in every dreadful sense of the word, predatory men still in possession of an unbroken power of the will and a desire for power, threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or on old, worn cultures, in which at that very moment the final forces of life were flaring up in a dazzling fireworks display of spirit and corruption. At the start the noble caste has always been the barbarian caste: its superiority has lain not primarily in physical might but in spiritual power — it has been a matter of more complete human beings (which at every level also means “more complete beasts”).

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Corruption as the expression of the fact that within the instincts anarchy is threatening and that the foundation of the affects, what we call “life,” has been shaken: according to the living structure in which it appears, corruption is something fundamentally different. When, for example, an aristocracy, like France’s at the start of the Revolution, throws away its privileges with a sublime disgust and sacrifices itself to a dissipation of its moral feelings, this is corruption:— essentially it was only the final act in that centuries-long corruption, thanks to which step-by-step it gave up its ruling authority and reduced itself to a function of the monarchy (finally even to the monarch’s finery and display pieces). The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it feels itself not as a function (whether of a monarchy or of a community) but as its significance and highest justification — that it therefore with good conscience accepts the sacrifice of an enormous number of people, who for its sake must be oppressed and reduced to incomplete men, slaves, and instruments of work. Its fundamental belief must, in fact, be that the society should exist, not for the sake of the society, but only as a base and framework on which an exceptional kind of nature can raise itself to its higher function and, in general, to a higher form of being, comparable to those heliotropic climbing plants on Java — people call them Sipo Matador — whose branches clutch an oak tree so much and for so long until finally, high over the tree but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and make a display of their happiness. —

259

Mutually refraining from wounding each other, from violence, and from exploitation, and setting one’s will on the same level as others — these can in a certain crude sense become good habits among individuals, if conditions exist for that (namely, a real similarity in the quality of their power and their estimates of value, as well as their belonging together within a single body). However, as soon as people wanted to take this principle further and, where possible, establish it as the basic principle of society, it immediately showed itself for what it is, as the willed denial of life, as the principle of disintegration and decay. Here we must think through to the fundamentals and push away all sentimental weakness: living itself is essentially appropriation from and wounding and overpowering strangers and weaker men, oppression, hardness, imposing one’s own forms, annexing, and at the very least, in its mildest actions, exploitation — but why should we always use these precise words, which have from ancient times carried the stamp of a slanderous purpose? Even that body in which, as previously mentioned, the individuals deal with each other as equals — and that happens in every healthy aristocracy — must itself, if it is a living body and not dying out, do to other bodies all those things which the individuals in it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the living will to power, it will grow, grab things around it, pull to itself, and want to acquire predominance — not because of some morality or immorality, but because it is alive and because living is simply the will to power. But in no point is the common consciousness of the European more reluctant to be instructed than here. Nowadays people everywhere, even those in scientific disguises, are raving about the coming conditions of society from which “the exploitative character” is to have disappeared:— to my ears that sounds as if people had promised to invent a life which abstained from all organic functions. The “exploitation” is not part of a depraved or incomplete and primitive society: it belongs in the essential nature of what is living, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the real will to power, which is simply the will to live. — Assuming that this is something new as a theory — it is, nonetheless, in reality the fundamental fact of all history: we should at least be honest with ourselves to this extent!

260

As the result of a stroll though the many more sophisticated and cruder moral systems which up to this point have ruled or still rule on earth, I found certain characteristics routinely return with each other, bound up together, until finally two basic types revealed themselves to me and a fundamental difference sprang up. There is master morality and slave morality — to this I immediately add that in all higher and mixed cultures attempts at a mediation between both moralities make an appearance as well, even more often, a confusion and mutual misunderstanding between the two, in fact, sometimes their harsh juxtaposition — even in the same man, within a single soul. Distinctions in moral value have arisen either among a ruling group, which was happily conscious of its difference with respect to the ruled — or among the ruled, the slaves and dependent people of every degree. In the first case, when it’s the masters who establish the idea of the good, the elevated and proud conditions of the soul emotionally register as the distinguishing and defining order of rank. The noble man separates his own nature from that of people in whom the opposite of such exalted and proud states expresses itself. He despises them. We should notice at once that in this first kind of morality the opposites “good” and “bad” mean no more than “noble” and “despicable”— the opposition between “good” and “evil” has another origin. The despised one is the coward, the anxious, the small, the man who thinks about narrow utility, also the suspicious man with his inhibited look, the self-abasing man, the species of human dogs who allow themselves to be mistreated, the begging flatterer, above all, the liar:— it is a basic belief of all aristocrats that the common folk are liars. “We tellers of the truth”— that’s what the nobility called themselves in ancient Greece. It’s evident that distinctions of moral worth everywhere were first applied to men and later were established for actions; hence, it is a serious mistake when historians of morality take as a starting point questions like “Why was the compassionate action praised?” The noble kind of man experiences himself as a person who determines value and does not need to have other people’s approval. He makes the judgment “What is harmful to me is harmful in itself.” He understands himself as something which in general first confers honour on things, as someone who creates values. Whatever he recognizes in himself he honours. Such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of fullness, the power which wants to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of riches which wants to give and deliver:— the noble man also helps the unfortunate, however not, or hardly ever, from pity, but more in response to an impulse which the excess of power produces. The noble man honours the powerful man in himself and also the man who has power over himself, who understands how to speak and how to keep silent, who takes delight in dealing with himself severely and toughly and respects, above all, severity and toughness. “Wotan set a hard heart in my breast,” it says in an old Scandinavian saga: that’s how poetry emerged, with justice, from the soul of a proud Viking. A man of this sort is simply proud of the fact that he has not been made for pity. That’s why the hero of the saga adds a warning, “In a man whose heart is not hard when he is still young the heart will never become hard.” Noble and brave men who think this way are furthest removed from that morality which sees the badge of morality in pity or actions for others or désintéressement [disinterestedness]. The belief in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony against “selflessness” belong to noble morality, just as much as an easy contempt and caution before feelings of pity and the “warm heart.” Powerful men are the ones who understand how to honour; that is their art, their realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and for ancestral tradition — all justice stands on this double reverence — the belief and the prejudice favouring forefathers and working against newcomers are typical in the morality of the powerful, and when, by contrast, the men of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future” and increasingly lack any respect for age, then in that attitude the ignoble origin of these “ideas” already reveals itself well enough. However, a morality of the rulers is most alien and embarrassing to present taste because of the severity of its basic principle that man has duties only with respect to those like him, that man should act towards those beings of lower rank, towards everything strange, at his own discretion, or “as his heart dictates,” and, in any case, “beyond good and evil.” Here pity and things like that may belong. The capacity for and obligation to a long gratitude and to a long revenge — both only within the circle of one’s peers — the sophistication in paying back again, the refined idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as, so to speak, drainage ditches for the feelings of envy, quarrelsomeness, and high spirits — basically in order to be capable of being a good friend): all those are typical characteristics of a noble morality, which, as indicated, is not the morality of “modern ideas” and which is thus nowadays difficult to sympathize with, as well as difficult to dig up and expose. Things are different with the second type of moral system, slave morality. Suppose the oppressed, depressed, suffering, and unfree people, those ignorant of themselves and tired out, suppose they moralize: what will be the common feature of their moral estimates of value? Probably a pessimistic suspicion directed at the entire human situation will express itself, perhaps a condemnation of man, along with his situation. The gaze of a slave is not well disposed towards the virtues of the powerful; he possesses scepticism and mistrust; he has a subtlety of mistrust against everything “good” which is honoured in it — he would like to persuade himself that even happiness is not genuine there. By contrast, those characteristics will be pulled forward and flooded with light which serve to mitigate existence for those who suffer: here respect is given to pity, to the obliging hand ready to help, to the warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness — for these are here the most useful characteristics and almost the only means to endure the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility. Here is the focus for the origin of that famous opposition of “good” and “evil”:— people sense power and danger within evil, a certain terror, subtlety, and strength, which does not permit contempt to spring up. According to slave morality, the “evil” man thus inspires fear; according to master morality, it is precisely the “good” man who inspires and desires to inspire fear, while the “bad” man will be felt as despicable. This opposition reaches its peak when, in accordance with the consequences of slave morality, finally a trace of disregard is also attached to the “good” of this morality — it may be light and benevolent — because within the way of thinking of the slave the good man must definitely be the harmless man: he is good natured, easy to deceive, perhaps a bit stupid, a bonhomme [good fellow]. Wherever slave morality gains predominance the language reveals a tendency to bring the words “good” and “stupid” into closer proximity. A final basic difference: the longing for freedom, the instinct for happiness, and the refinements of the feeling for freedom belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as art and enthusiasm in reverence and in devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic way of thinking and valuing. From this we can without further ado understand why love as passion — which is our European specialty — must clearly have a noble origin: as is well known, its invention belongs to the Provencal knightly poets, those splendidly inventive men of the “gay saber” [gay science] to whom Europe owes so much — almost its very self.

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Vanity is among the things which are perhaps hardest for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted even to deny its existence where another kind of man thinks he has grasped it with both hands. For him the problem is imagining to himself beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves, an opinion of themselves which they do not have — and which, as a result, they also have not “earned”— people who, nonetheless, themselves later believe in this good opinion. Half of this seems to the noble man so tasteless and disrespectful of oneself and the other half so unreasonably Baroque, that he would be happy to understand vanity as an exception and has doubts about it in most cases when people talk of it. For example, he’ll say: “I can make a mistake about my own value and yet still demand that my value, precisely as I determine it, is recognized by others — but that is not vanity (but arrogance or, in the more frequent cases, something called “humility” and “modesty”). Or again, “For many reasons I can take pleasure in the good opinion of others, perhaps because I honour and love them and enjoy all of their pleasures, perhaps also because their good opinion underscores and strengthens the faith I have in my own good opinion of myself, perhaps because the good opinion of others, even in cases where I do not share it, is still useful to me or promises to be useful — but all that is not vanity.” The noble man must first compel himself, particularly with the help of history, to see that since time immemorial, in all the levels of people dependent in some way or other, the common man was only what people thought of him:— not being at all accustomed to set values himself, he measured himself by no value other than by how his masters assessed him (that is the essential right of masters, to create values). We should understand that, as the consequence of an immense atavism, the common man even today still always waitsfirst for an opinion about himself and then instinctively submits himself to it: however, that is by no means merely a “good” opinion, but also a bad and unreasonable one (think, for example, of the greatest part of the self-assessment and self-devaluing which devout women absorb from their father confessors and the devout Christian in general absorbs from his church). Now, in accordance with the slow arrival of the democratic order of things (and its cause, the blood mixing between masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare impulse to ascribe to oneself a value on one’s own and “to think well” of oneself will really become more and more encouraged and widespread. But in every moment it has working against it an older, more extensive, and more deeply incorporated tendency — and where the phenomenon of “vanity” is concerned, this older tendency will become master over the more recent one. The vain man takes pleasure inevery good opinion which he hears about himself (quite apart from all considerations of its utility and equally apart from its truth or falsity), just as he suffers from every bad opinion. For he submits to both; he feels himself subjected to them on the basis of that oldest of instincts for submission which breaks out in him. It is “the slave” in the blood of the vain man, a trace of the slave’s roguishness — and how much of the “slave” still remains nowadays in woman, for example! — that tries to tempt him into good opinions of himself; in the same way it’s the slave who later prostrates himself immediately in front of these opinions, as if he had not summoned them up. — To state the matter once again: vanity is an atavism.

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A species arises, a type becomes established and strong, under the long struggle with essentially unchanging, unfavourable conditions. By contrast, we know from the experience of breeders that species which receive an ultra-abundant nourishment and, in general, an increase in protection and care immediately tend towards variety in the type in the strongest manner and are rich in wonders and monstrosities (as well as monstrous vices). Now, let’s look for a moment at an aristocratic commonwealth, for example, an ancient Greek polis [city state] or Venice, as an organization, whether voluntary or involuntary, for the purpose of breeding. There are men there living together who rely upon themselves and who want their species to succeed mainly because it has to succeed or run the fearful risk of being annihilated. Here there is a lack of that advantage, that abundance, that protection under which variations are encouraged. The species senses the need for itself as a species, as something which, particularly thanks to its hardness, uniformity, simplicity of form, can generally succeed and enable itself to keep going in the constant struggles with neighbours or with the rebellious oppressed people or with those who threaten rebellion. The most varied experience teaches them which characteristics they have to thank, above all, for the fact that they are still there, in spite of all the gods and men, that they have always been victorious. These characteristics they call virtues, and they cultivate only these virtues to any great extent. They do that with force — in fact, they desire force. Every aristocratic morality is intolerant in its education of the young, its provisions for women, its marriage customs, its relationships between young and old, its penal laws (which fix their eyes only on those who are deviants)— it reckons intolerance itself among the virtues, under the name “justice.” A type with few but very strong characteristics, a species of strict, war-like, shrewdly laconic people, united and reserved (and, as such, having the most sophisticated feelings for the magic and nuances of society) will in this way establish itself over the succession of generations. The constant struggle with unvarying, unfavourable conditions is, as mentioned, the factor that makes a type fixed and hard. Finally, however, at some point a fortunate time arises, which lets the immense tension ease. Perhaps there are no more enemies among the neighbours, and the means for living, even for enjoying life, are there in abundance. With one blow the bond and the compulsion of the old discipline are torn apart: that discipline no longer registers as necessary, as a condition of existence — if it wished to remain in existence, it could do so only as a form of luxury, as an archaic taste. Variation, whether as something abnormal (something higher, finer, rarer) or as degeneration and monstrosity, suddenly bursts onto the scene in the greatest abundance and splendour; the individual dares to be individual and stand out. At these historical turning points there appear alongside each other and often involved and mixed up together marvellous, multifaceted, jungle-like growths, an upward soaring, a kind of tropical tempo in competitiveness for growing and an immense annihilation and self-destruction, thanks to the wild egoisms turned against each other and, as it were, exploding, which wrestle with one another “for sun and light” and no longer know how to derive any limit, any restraint, or any consideration from the morality they have had up to that point. This very morality was the one which built up such immense power, which bent the bow in such a threatening manner — now, at this moment, it has become “outdated.” The dangerous and disturbing point is reached where the greater, more multifaceted, and more comprehensive life lives over and above the old morality; the “individual” stands there, forced to give himself his own laws, his own arts and tricks for self-preservation, self-raising, self-redemption. Nothing but new what-for’s, nothing but new how-to’s, no common formula any more, misunderstanding and contempt bound up together, decay, spoilage, and the highest desires tied together in a ghastly way, the genius of the race brimming over from all the horns of plenty with good and bad, a catastrophic simultaneous presence of spring and autumn, full of new charms and veils, characteristic of young, still unexhausted, still unwearied depravity. Once again there’s danger there, the mother of morality, great danger, this time transferred into the individual, into one’s neighbour and friend, into the alleyways, into one’s own child, into one’s own heart, into all the most personal and most secret wishes and desires. What will the moral philosophers who emerge at such a time now have to preach? They discover, these keen observers and street loafers, that things are quickly coming to an end, that everything around them is going rotten and spreading corruption, that nothing lasts until the day after tomorrow, except for one kind of person, the incurably mediocre. Only the mediocre have the prospect of succeeding, of reproducing themselves — they are the people of the future, the only survivors, “Be like them! Become mediocre!”— from now on that’s the only morality which still makes sense, which people still hear. — But it is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! — it may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and worth and duty and love of one’s neighbour — it will have difficulty concealing its irony!

263

There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything, is already an indication of a high rank. There is a delight in the nuances of respect which permits us to surmise a noble origin and habits. The refinement, good, and loftiness of a soul are put to a dangerous test when something goes past in front of it which is of the first rank, but which is not yet protected by the shudders of authority from prying clutches and crudities: something that goes its way unmarked, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps arbitrarily disguised and hidden, like a living touchstone. The man whose task and practice is to investigate souls will use precisely this art in a number of different forms in order to establish the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will put it to the test for its instinct of reverence. Différence engendre haine [difference engenders hatred]: the nastiness of some natures suddenly spurts out like dirty water when some sacred container, some precious object from a locked shrine, some book with marks of a great destiny is carried by. On the other hand, there is an involuntary falling silent, a hesitation in the eye, an end to all gestures, things which express that a soul feels close to something most worthy of reverence. The way in which reverence for the Bible in Europe has, on the whole, been maintained so far is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of tradition for which Europe owes a debt of thanks to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate significance need for their protection an externally imposed tyranny of authority in order to last for those thousands of years which are necessary to exhaust them and sort out what they mean. Much has been achieved when in the great mass of people (the shallow ones and all sorts of people with diarrhoea) that feeling has finally been cultivated that they are not permitted to touch everything, that there are sacred experiences before which they have to pull off their shoes and which they must keep their dirty hands off — this is almost the highest intensification of their humanity. By contrast, perhaps nothing makes the so-called educated people, those who have faith in “modern ideas,” so nauseating as their lack of shame, the comfortable impudence in their eyes and hands, with which they touch, lick, and grope everything, and it is possible that these days among a people, one still finds in the common folk, particularly among the peasants, more relative nobility of taste and tactful reverence than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, among the educated.

264

One cannot erase from a human being’s soul those actions which his ancestors loved most and carried out most steadfastly: whether they were, for example, industrious savers attached to a writing table and money box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, as well as modest in their virtues, or whether they were accustomed to live giving orders from morning until night, fond of harsh entertainment and, along with that, perhaps of even harsher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they had at some time or other once sacrificed the old privileges of their birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith — their “God”— as men of an unrelenting and delicate conscience, which blushes when confronted with any compromise. It is in no way possible that a man does not possess in his body the characteristics and preferences of his parents and forefathers, no matter what appearance might say to the contrary. This is the problem of race. If we know something about the parents, then we may draw a conclusion about the child: some unpleasant excess or other, some lurking envy, a crude habit of self-justification — as these three together have at all times made up the essential type of the rabble — something like that must be passed onto the child as surely as corrupt blood, and with the help of the best education and culture people will succeed only indeceiving others about such heredity. And nowadays what else does education and culture want! In our age, one very much of the people — I mean to say our uncouth age —“education” and “culture” must basically be the art of deception — to mislead about the origin of the inherited rabble in one’s body and soul. Today an educator who preached truthfulness above everything else and constantly shouted at his students “Be true! Be natural! Act as you really are!”— even such a virtuous and true-hearted jackass would after some time learn to take hold of that furca [pitchfork] of Horace, in order to naturam expellere [drive out nature]. With what success? “Rabble” usque recurret [always returns].1

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At the risk of annoying innocent ears, I propose the following: egoism belongs to the nature of the noble soul; I mean that unshakeable faith that to a being such as “we are” other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves. The noble soul takes this fact of its egoism without any question mark and without the feeling that there is anything harsh, compelled, or arbitrary in it, much more as something that may be established in the fundamental law of things. If he sought out a name for this, he would say “It is justice itself.” In some circumstances which make him hesitate at first, he admits that there are those with rights equal to his own. As soon as he has cleared up this question of rank, he moves among these equals who have the same rights as his with the same confident modesty and sophisticated reverence which he has in his dealings with himself — in accordance with an inborn heavenly mechanism which all the stars understand. It is one more part of his egoism, this sophistication and self-restraint in his relations with his equals — every star is such an egoist —: it honours itself in them and in the rights which it concedes to them. It has no doubt that the exchange of respect and rights, as the essential quality of all interactions, also belongs to the natural condition of things. The noble soul gives as it takes, out of the passionate and sensitive instinct for repayment, which lies deep within it. The idea “favour” has no sense and agreeable fragrance inter pares [among equals]; there may be a sublime manner of allowing presents from above to wash over one, as it were, and of drinking them up thirstily like water drops, but for this art and gesture the noble soul has no skill. Here its egoism hinders it: in general, it is not happy to look “up above”— instead it looks either directly forward, horizontally and slowly, or down — it knows that it is on a height.

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“We can only truly respect highly the man who is not seeking himself” Goethe to Rat Schlosser.

267

There is a saying among the Chinese that mothers really teach their children: siao-sin, “Make your heart small!” This is the essential and basic tendency of late civilizations: I have no doubt that an ancient Greek would recognize this self-diminution in us contemporary Europeans as well — and for that reason alone we would already go “against his taste.”

268

Ultimately, what does it mean to be ignoble? — Words are sound signals for ideas, but ideas are more or less firm image signs for sensations which return frequently and occur together, for groups of sensations. To understand each other, it is not yet sufficient that people use the same words; they must use the same words also for the same form of inner experiences; ultimately they must hold their experience in common with each other. That’s why human beings belonging to a single people understand each other better among themselves than associations of different peoples, even when they themselves use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (climate, soil, danger, needs, work), then something arises out of that which “understands itself,” a people. In all souls, a similar number of frequently repeating experiences have won the upper hand over those which come more rarely; people understand each other on the basis of the former, quickly and with ever-increasing speed — the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation. On the basis of this rapid understanding, people bind with one another, closely and with ever-increasing closeness. The greater the danger, the greater the need quickly and easily to come to agreement over what needs to be done; not to misunderstand each other when in danger is what people simply cannot do without in their interactions. With every friendship or love affair people still make this test: nothing of that sort lasts as soon as people reach the point where, with the same words, one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, or fears something different from the other one. (The fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the benevolent genius which so often prevents people of different sexes from over-hasty unions, to which their senses and hearts urge them — and not some Schopenhauerish “genius of the species”! —). Which groups of sensations within the soul wake up most rapidly, seize the word, give the order — that decides about the whole rank ordering of its values, that finally determines its tables of goods. The assessments of value in a man reveal something about the structure of his soul and where it looks for its conditions of life, its essential needs. Now, assume that need has always brought together only such people as could indicate with similar signs similar needs, similar experiences, then it would generally turn out that the easy ability to communicate need, that is, in the last analysis, familiarity with only average and common experiences, must have been the most powerful of all the forces which have so far determined things among human beings. People who are more similar and more ordinary were and always have been at an advantage; the more exceptional, more refined, rarer, and more difficult to understand easily remain isolated; in their isolation they are subject to accidents and rarely propagate themselves. People have to summon up huge counter-forces to cross this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile [advance into similarity], the further training of human beings into what’s similar, ordinary, average, herd-like — intowhat’s common.

269

The more a psychologist — a born and inevitable psychologist and analyst of the soul — turns himself towards exceptional examples and human beings, the greater the danger to him of suffocation from pity. He has to be hard and cheerful, more so than another man. For the corruption and destruction of loftier men, of the stranger type of soul, is the rule: it is terrible to have such a rule always before one’s eyes. The multifaceted torture of the psychologist who has uncovered this destructiveness, who once discovers and then almost always rediscovers throughout all history this entire inner “hopelessness” of the loftier people, this eternal “too late!” in every sense, can perhaps one day come to the point where he turns with bitterness against his own lot and attempts self-destruction — where he “corrupts” himself. With almost every psychologist we will see a revealing inclination for and delight in associating with ordinary and well-adjusted people: that indicates that he always needs healing, that he requires some sort of refuge and forgetting, far from what his insights and incisions, his “trade,” has laid on his conscience. Fear of his memory is characteristic of him. He is easily reduced to silence before the judgments of others; he listens with an unmoving face as people revere, admire, love, and transfigure where he has seen, or he even hides his silence, while he expressly agrees with some foreground point of view or other. Perhaps the paradox of his situation gets so terrible that the crowd, the educated, and the enthusiasts learn great admiration precisely where he has learned great pity as well as great contempt — the admiration for “great men” and miraculous animals for whose sake people bless and honour the fatherland, the earth, the value of humanity, and themselves, those to whom they draw the attention of the young and whom they use as role models in their education . . . And who knows whether in all great examples up to this point the very same thing has not happened: the crowd worshipped a god — and the “god” was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar, and the “work” itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised in his creation to the point where he is unrecognizable; the “work” of the artist and the philosopher first invents the man who has created it or is supposed to have created it; the “great men,” as they are honoured, are small inferior works of fiction in the background; in the world of historical values counterfeit is king. These great poets, for example, this Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I don’t dare mention greater names, but I have them in mind)— perhaps have to be the way they are now: men of the moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, childish, careless and sudden with trust and mistrust; with souls in which some fracture or other normally has to be concealed; often taking revenge in their works for an inner slur, often seeking with their flights upward to forget some all-too-true memory, often lost in the mud and almost infatuated, until they become like will o’ the wisps around a swamp and pretend that they are stars — then the populace may well call them idealists — often struggling against a long disgust, with a recurring ghost of unbelief which makes them cold and forces them to yearn for gloria [glory] and to gobble up “belief in themselves” from the hands of intoxicated flatterers — what torture are these great artists and the loftier human beings in general for the man who has once guessed who they are! It is so understandable that these artists should so readily experience from woman — who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering and who unfortunately also seeks to help and to save far beyond her powers — those eruptions of unlimited and most devoted pitywhich the crowd, above all the worshipping masses, does not understand and which it showers with curious and complacent interpretations. This pity regularly deceives itself about its power; woman may believe that love can do everything — that’s a belief essential to her. Alas, anyone who knows about the heart can guess how poor, stupid, helpless, presumptuous, mistaken, more easily destroyed than saved even the best and most profound love is! It is possible that beneath the sacred story and disguise of the life of Jesus there lies hidden one of the most painful examples of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most desiring heart, which was never satisfied with any human love, which demanded love, to be loved and nothing else, with hardness, with madness, with fearful outbreaks against those who denied him love; the history of a poor man unsatisfied and insatiable with love, who had to invent hell in order to send there those who did not wish to love him — and who finally, having grown to understand human love, had to invent a God who is entirely love, who is capable of total love — who takes pity on human love because it is so pathetic, so unknowing! Anyone who feels this way, who knows about love in this way — seeks death. — But why dwell on such painful things? Assuming we don’t have to. —
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Re: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy

Postby admin » Thu Mar 23, 2017 5:56 pm

Part 2 of 2

270

The spiritual arrogance and disgust of every man who has suffered deeply — how profoundly men can suffer almost determines their order of rank — his chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly soaked and coloured, that thanks to his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest can know, that he has known and at some point been “at home” in many terrible far-off worlds, about which “you know nothing!” . . . this spiritual and silent arrogance of the sufferer, this pride of the one chosen to know, of the “initiate,” of the one who has almost been sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect himself from contact with prying and compassionate hands and, in general, from everything which is not his equal in pain. Profound suffering ennobles; it separates. One of the most sophisticated forms of disguise is Epicureanism and a certain future courageousness in taste adopted as a show, which takes suffering lightly and resists everything sad and deep. There are “cheerful men” who use cheerfulness because it makes them misunderstood — they want to be misunderstood. There are “scientific men” who use science because that provides a cheerful appearance and because being scientific enables one to infer that the man is superficial — they want to tempt people to a false conclusion. There are free, impudent spirits who would like to hide and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts; and now and then even foolishness is a mask for an unholy, all-too-certain knowledge. Hence, it follows that it’s part of a more sophisticated humanity to have reverence “for the mask” and not to pursue psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.

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What most profoundly divides two men is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What help is all honesty and mutual utility, what help is all the good will for each other: in the end the fact remains — they “can’t stand each other’s smell!” The highest instinct for cleanliness puts the person marked by it in the strangest and most dangerous isolation, as a saint: for that’s simply what saintliness is — the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question. Any awareness of an indescribable abundance of pleasure in the bath, any lust and thirst which constantly drives the soul out of the night into the morning and out of cloudiness, the “affliction,” into what is bright, gleaming, profound, fine; just as such a tendency singles out — it is a noble tendency — so it also separates. The pity of the saint is pity for the dirt of those who are human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights where the saint feels pity itself as contamination, as dirt . . .

272

Signs of nobility: never thinking of reducing our duties to duties for everyone; not wanting to give up one’s own responsibility, not wanting to share it; to include one’s privileges and acting on them among one’s duties.

273

A human being who strives for something great looks at everyone he meets along his way either as a means or as a delay and an obstacle — or as a temporary place to rest. His characteristic high-quality goodness towards his fellow men is first possible when he has reached his height and governs. His impatience and his awareness that until that point he is always sentenced to comedy — for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means hides the end — corrupt all contacts for him: this kind of man knows loneliness and what is most poisonous in it.

274

The problem for those who wait. — For a higher man in whom the solution to a problem lies asleep, strokes of luck and all sorts of unpredictable things are necessary for him to swing into action at just the right time —“for an eruption,” as we could say. Ordinarily it does nothappen, and in all the corners of the earth sit people waiting, who hardly know to what extent they are waiting, but even less that they are waiting in vain. From time to time the call to wake up, that chance which provides the “permission” for action comes too late — at a time when the best youth and power for action have already been used up in sitting still. And many a man, in the very moment he “sprang up,” has found to his horror that his limbs have gone to sleep and his spirit is already too heavy! “It is too late,” he says to himself, having lost faith in himself, and is now forever useless. — In the realm of the genius, could “Raphael without hands,” taking that phrase in the widest sense, perhaps not be the exception but the rule?2 — Genius is perhaps not really so rare, but the five hundred hands needed to tyrannize the kairos, “the right time,” to seize chance by the forelock!

275

Anyone who does not want to see the height of a man looks all the more keenly at what is low and in his foreground — and in the process gives himself away.

276

With all kinds of injury and loss the lower and cruder soul is better off than the more noble one: the dangers for the latter must be greater; the probability that it will go wrong and die is even immense, given the multifaceted nature of its living conditions. — With a lizard a finger which has been lost grows back: not so with a man.

277

Bad enough! The old story again! When we have finished building our house, we suddenly notice that we have learned something in the process, something we simply had to know before we started to build. The eternally tiresome “Too late!”— The melancholy of everything finished! . . .

278

Wanderer, who are you? I see you going on your way, without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes, damp and sad like a lead sinker which has come back unsatisfied from every depth into the light — what was it looking for down there? — with a breast which does not sigh, with a lip which hides its disgust, with a hand which now grasps only slowly: Who are you? What have you been doing? Have a rest here: this place is hospitable to everyone — relax! And whoever you happen to be, what would you like now? What do you need to recuperate? Just name it: what I have I’ll offer you! “For relaxation? For recuperation? O you inquisitive man, what are you talking about! But give me, I beg . . .” What? What? Say it! —“One more mask! A second mask!” . . . .

279

Men of profound sorrow betray themselves when they are happy: they have a way of grabbing happiness as if they would like to overwhelm and strangle it from jealousy — alas, they know too well that it’s running away from them!

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“Bad! Bad! What? Is he not going — back?”— Yes! But you understand him badly if you complain about it. He’s going back, as every man does who wants to make a huge jump. —

281

“Will people believe me? But I demand that people believe me: I have always thought only badly of myself and about myself, only in very rare cases, only when under compulsion, always without delight ‘for the subject,’ ready to wander off from ‘myself,’ always without faith in the conclusion, thanks to the uncontrollable mistrust of the possibility of self-knowledge which has taken me so far that I find even the idea of ‘immediate knowledge,’ which the theoreticians allow themselves, a contradictio in adjecto [contradiction in terms]: this entire fact is almost the surest thing I know about myself. Within me there must be some kind of aversion to believing anything definite about myself. Is a riddle perhaps hidden in that? Probably, but fortunately nothing for my own teeth. Perhaps it reveals the species to which I belong? — But not to me: and that’s enough to satisfy me.”

282

“But what has happened to you?”—“I don’t know,” he said, hesitating; “perhaps the harpies have flown over my table.”3 Occasionally nowadays it happens that a mild, moderate, reserved man suddenly becomes violent, smashes plates, throws over the table, screams, stomps around, slanders the entire world — and finally goes to the side ashamed, furious with himself. — Where? What for? To starve off on his own? To suffocate on his memory? Anyone who has the desires of a lofty discriminating soul and only rarely finds his table set and his nourishment ready will be in great danger at all times: but today the danger is extraordinary. Thrown into a noisy and uncouth age, with which he does not want to eat out of the same dish, he can easily perish from hunger and thirst, or, if he finally nonetheless “catches on,”— from sudden disgust. — All of us have probably already sat at tables where we did not belong; and it’s precisely the most spiritual ones among us who are the most difficult to feed, who know that dangerous dyspepsia which comes from a sudden insight and disappointment about our food and those sitting next to us at the table — the after-dinner disgust.

283

Assuming that one wants to praise at all, there’s a refined and at the same time noble self-control which always gives praise only where one does notagree:— in other cases one would really be praising oneself, something that contradicts good taste — naturally, a self-control which provides a good opportunity and provocation for one to be constantly misunderstood. In order to permit oneself this true luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among spiritual fools, but rather among people whose misunderstandings and false ideas are still amusing for their sophistication — or one will have to pay dearly for it! —“He is praising me: thus, he admits I’m right”— this asinine way of making conclusions ruins half of life for us hermits, for it brings the asses into our neighbourhood and friendship.

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To live with an immense and proud composure: always beyond. — To have and not have one’s feelings, one’s for and against, voluntarily, to condescend to them for hours, to sit on them, as if on a horse, often as if on a donkey:— for one needs to know how to use their stupidity as well as their fire. To preserve one’s three hundred foregrounds, as well as one’s dark glasses: for there are occasions when no one should be allowed to look into our eyes, even less into our “reasons.” And to select for company that mischievous and cheerful vice, courtesy. And to remain master of one’s four virtues: courage, insight, sympathy, and loneliness. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime tendency and impulse for cleanliness, which senses how contact between one person and another —“in society”— must inevitably bring impurity with it. Every community somehow, somewhere, sometime makes people — “common.”

285

The greatest events and ideas — but the greatest ideas are the greatest events — are understood last of all: the generations contemporary with them do not experience such events — they go on living past them. What happens then is something like in the realm of the stars. The light of the most distant star comes to men last of all: and before that light arrives, men deny that there are stars there. “How many centuries does a spirit need in order to be understood?”— that is also a standard with which people construct a rank ordering and etiquette, as is necessary, for spirits and stars. —

286

“Here the view is free, the spirit elevated.”— But there is a reverse kind of person who is also on the heights and also has a free view — but who looks down.

287

What is noble? What does the word “noble” still mean to us nowadays? What reveals the noble human being, how do people recognize him, under this heavy, oppressive sky at the beginning of the rule of the rabble, which is making everything opaque and leaden? — It is not the actions which prove him — actions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable —; nor is it the “works.” Among artists and scholars today we find a sufficient number of those who through their works reveal how a profound desire for what is noble drives them: but this very need for what is noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself and is really the eloquent and dangerous indication that such a soul is lacking. It’s not the works; it’s the belief which decides here, which here establishes the order of rank, to take up once more an old religious formula with a new and more profound understanding: some basic certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which does not allow itself to be sought out or found or perhaps even to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself. —

288

There are human beings who have spirit in an inevitable way. They may toss and turn as they wish and hold their hands in front of their tell-tale eyes (— as if the hand were not a give away! —): finally it always comes out that they have something which they are hiding, that is, spirit. One of the most sophisticated ways to deceive, at least for as long as possible, and to present oneself successfully as stupider than one is — what in common life is often as desirable as an umbrella — is called enthusiasm, including what belongs with it, for example, virtue. For, as Galiani, who must have known, says:— vertu est enthousiasme [virtue is enthusiasm].

289

In the writings of a hermit we always hear something of the echo of desolation, something of the whispers and the timid gazing around of isolation; from his strongest words, even from his screaming, still resounds a new and dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. Whoever has sat down, year in and year out, day and night, alone in an intimate dispute and conversation with his soul, whoever has become a cave bear or digger for treasure or guardian of treasure and dragon in his own cavern — it can be a labyrinth but also a gold mine — such a man’s very ideas finally take on a distinct twilight colouring and smell as much of mould as they do of profundity, something incommunicable and reluctant, which blows cold wind over everyone passing by. The hermit does not believe that a philosopher — assuming that a philosopher has always first been a hermit — has ever expressed his real and final opinion in his books. Don’t people write books expressly to hide what they have stored inside them? — In fact, he will have doubts whether a philosopher could generally have “real and final” opinions, whether in his case behind every cave there does not still lie, and must lie, an even deeper cavern — a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every reason, under every “foundation.” Every philosophy is a foreground-philosophy — that is the judgment of a hermit: “There is something arbitrary about the fact that he remained here, looked back, looked around, that at this point he set his shovel aside and did not dig more deeply — there is also something suspicious about it.” Every philosophy also hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.

290

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than being misunderstood. In the latter case, perhaps his vanity suffers, but the former hurts his heart, his sympathy, which always says, “Alas, why do youwant to have it as hard as I did?”

291

Man, a multifaceted, lying, artificial, and impenetrable animal, who spooks other animals less by his power than by his cunning and intelligence, has invented good conscience in order to enjoy his own soul for once as something simple; and all of morality is a long spirited falsification, thanks to which it’s at all possible to enjoy a glimpse at the soul. From this point of view, perhaps much more belongs to the idea of “art” than people commonly believe.

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A philosopher: that is a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his very own thoughts as if from outside, as if from above and below, as if they are experiences and lightning strikes tailor-made for him; who himself is perhaps a storm which moves along pregnant with new lightning flashes; a fateful man, around whom things always rumble and mutter and gape and mysteriously close. A philosopher: alas, a being which often runs away from itself, often is afraid of itself — but which is too curious not to “come back to itself” again and again. . .

293

A man who says, “That pleases me. I take that for my own and will protect it and defend it against everyone”; a man who can carry out a task, put a decision into effect, remain true to an idea, hold on to a woman, punish and cast down an insolent person; a man who has his anger and his sword and to whom the weak, the suffering, the distressed, and even the animals are happy to go and belong to by nature — in short, a man who is by nature a master — when such a man has pity, well, this pity is worth something! But what is there in the pity of those who suffer! Or even of those who preach pity! Today in almost all of Europe there is a pathological susceptibility and sensitivity to pain, as well as a nasty lack of restraint in complaining, a mollycoddling, which likes to dress itself up with religion and philosophical bits and pieces as something loftier — there is a formal culture of suffering. In my view, the unmanliness of what is christened “pity” in such enthusiastic circles is what always strikes the eye first. — We must excommunicate this latest form of bad taste, powerfully and thoroughly; and finally I wish that people would set against their hearts and throats the good amulet “gai saber,”— gay science”, to clarify this matter for the Germans.

294

The Olympian vice. — In spite of that philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to make laughing a defamation of character among all thinking men —“Laughter is a serious infirmity of human nature which every thinking man will strive to overcome” (Hobbes)— I would really allow myself to order the ranks of philosophers according to the rank of their laughter — right up to those who are capable of golden laughter.4And assuming that the gods also practise philosophy, a fact which many conclusions have already driven me to — I don’t doubt that in the process they know how to laugh in a superhuman and new way — and at the expense of all serious things! Gods delight in making fun: even where sacred actions are concerned, it seems they cannot stop laughing.

295

The genius of the heart, as that great hidden presence possesses it, the tempter-god and born pied piper of the conscience, whose voice knows how to climb down into the underworld of every soul, who does not say a word or cast a glance in which there does not lie some concern with and trace of temptation, whose mastery includes the fact that he understands how to seem — and not what he is, but what for those who follow him is one more compulsion to press themselves always closer to him, to follow him ever more inwardly and fundamentally:— that genius of the heart, who makes all noise and self-satisfaction fall silent and teaches it to listen, who smooths out the rough souls and gives them a new desire to taste — to lie still as a mirror so that the deep heaven reflects itself in them —; the genius of the heart who teaches the foolish and over-hasty hand to hesitate and reach out more delicately; who senses the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under the thick cloudy ice and is a divining rod for every grain of gold which has lain buried for a long time in a dungeon crammed with mud and sand; the genius of the heart, at whose touch everyone goes forward richer, not divinely gifted and surprised, not as if delighted and oppressed with strange, fine things, but richer in his own self, newer to himself than previously, broken open, blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, more uncertain perhaps, more tender, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes which as yet have no names, full of new will and flowing, full of new dissatisfactions and opposing currents . . . But what am I doing, my friends? Whom am I speaking to you about? Have I forgotten myself so much that I have not once named him to you? It could be that you have already guessed for yourself who this dubious spirit and god is who wants to be praised in such a way. For just as things go with anyone who from the time he walked on childish legs has always been on the move and through alien territory, so many strange and not un-dangerous spirits have crossed my path, too, above all the one I have just been speaking about, who has come again and again, namely, no less a spirit than the god Dionysus, that enormously ambiguous and tempter god, to whom in earlier times, as you know, I offered up my first work, in all secrecy and reverence — as the last person, so I thought, who had offered a sacrifice to him: for I found no one who understood what I was doing then.5Meanwhile I learned a great deal, much too much, about the philosophy of this god, and, as mentioned, from mouth to mouth — I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus: and I might well at last begin to give you, my friends, a little taste of this philosophy, as much as I am permitted? In a hushed voice, as is reasonable: for this concerns a number of things which are secret, new, strange, odd, mysterious. Even the fact that Dionysus is a philosopher and that the gods also carry on philosophy seems to me a novelty which is not harmless and which perhaps might excite mistrust precisely among philosophers — among you, my friends it has less against it, although it could be that it comes too late and not at the right moment: for people have revealed to me that nowadays you are not happy to believe in god and gods. Also perhaps the fact that in my explanation I must proceed with more candour than is always pleasing to the strict habits of your ears? Certainly the god under discussion went further, very much further, in conversations like this and was always several steps ahead of me . . . in fact, if it were permitted, I would, following human practices, attach to him beautifully solemn names of splendour and virtue; I would have to provide a great deal of praise for his courage as an explorer and discoverer, for his daring honesty, truthfulness, and love of wisdom. But such a god has no idea how to begin with all this venerable rubbish and pageantry. “Keep that,” he would say, “for yourself and people like you and anyone else who needs it! I have no reason to decorate my nakedness!”— Do people sense that this type of divinity and philosopher perhaps lacks shame? He said it this way once, “In some circumstances, I love human beings”— and in saying that, he was alluding to Ariadne, who was present —“for me a human being is a pleasant, brave, inventive animal which has no equal on earth; it finds the right path even in every labyrinth. I like him: I often reflect how I could bring him further forwards and make him stronger, more evil, and more profound than he is.”—“Stronger, more evil, and more profound?” I asked shocked. “Yes,” he said once more, “stronger, more evil, and more profound, also more beautiful”— and with that the tempter god smiled with his halcyon smile, as if he had just uttered an enchanting compliment We can see here also that it is not just shame this divinity lacks —; and there are in general good reasons to suppose that in some things the gods collectively could learn from us human beings. We human beings are — more human. . .6

296

Alas, what are you then, my written and painted thoughts! It’s not so long ago that you were still so colourful, young, and malicious, full of stings and secret seasonings, so that you made me sneeze and laugh. — And now? You have already stripped off your novelty and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths: you already look so immortal, so heartbreakingly honest, so boring! And was it ever different? What things we transcribe in our writing and painting, we mandarins with a Chinese paintbrush, we immortalizers of things which let themselves be written — what are the only things we are capable of painting? Alas, always only what is just about to fade and is beginning to lose its fragrance! Alas, always only storms which are worn out and withdrawing and old yellow feelings! Alas, always only birds which have exhausted themselves flying and lost their way and now let themselves be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what can no longer live and fly, only tired and crumbling things! And it is only your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, for which I alone have colours, many colours perhaps, many colourful caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds:— but no one will sense from me how you looked in your dawn, you sudden sparks and miracles of my loneliness, you, my old loved ones — my wicked thoughts!

_______________

Notes:

1. . . . Horace: Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BC) an important poet in classical Rome.

2. . . . Raphael (1483-1520): major Italian painter of the Renaissance, who died at age thirty-seven.

3. . . harpies: winged monsters from Greek mythology who steal food.

4. What Nietzsche offers here in German as a quotation from Hobbes is not, according to Walter Kaufmann, found in any of Hobbes’ works, although Hobbes does discuss laughter on a number of occasions (see Kaufmann’s translation of Beyond Good and Evil, 231).

5. The “first work” Nietzsche is referring to is his Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, in which he proposes the struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian.

6. . . . Ariadne: in Greek mythology the daughter of Minos, king of Crete. She helped Theseus kill the Minotaur in the Labyrinth and escaped with him. When Theseus abandoned Ariadne, Dionysus fell in love with her.
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Re: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy

Postby admin » Thu Mar 23, 2017 5:58 pm

OUT OF THE HIGH MOUNTAINS: AFTERSONG

O noon of life! A time to celebrate!
Oh garden of summer!
Restless happiness in standing, gazing, waiting:—
I wait for friends, ready day and night.
You friends, where are you? Come! It's time! It's time!
Was it not for you that the glacier's grayness
today decked itself with roses?
The stream is seeking you, and wind and clouds
with yearning push themselves higher into the blue today
to look for you from the furthest bird's eye view.
For you my table has been set at the highest point.
Who lives so near the stars?
Who's so near the furthest reaches of the bleak abyss?
My realm — what realm has stretched so far?
And my honey — who has tasted that? . . .
There you are, my friends! — Alas, so I am not the man,
not the one you're looking for?
You hesitate, surprised! — Ah, your anger would be better!
Am I no more the one? A changed hand, pace, and face?
And what am I— for you friends am I not the one?
Have I become another? A stranger to myself?
Have I sprung from myself?
A wrestler who overcame himself so often?
Too often pulling against his very own power,
wounded and checked by his own victory?
I looked where the wind blows most keenly?
I learned to live
where no one lives, in deserted icy lands,
forgot men and god, curse and prayer?
Became a ghost that moves over the glaciers?
— You old friends! Look! Now your gaze is pale,
full of love and horror!
No, be off! Do not rage! You can't live here:
here between the furthest realms of ice and rock —
here one must be a hunter, like a chamois.
I've become a wicked hunter! See, how deep
my bow extends!
It was the strongest man who made such a pull —
Woe betide you! The arrow is dangerous —
like no arrow — away from here! For your own good! . . .
You're turning around? — O heart, you deceive enough,
your hopes stayed strong:
hold your door open for new friends!
Let the old ones go! Let go the memory!
Once you were young, now — you are even younger!
What bound us then, a band of one hope —
who reads the signs,
love once etched there — still pale?
I compare it to parchment which the hand
fears to touch — like that discoloured, burned.
No more friends — they are . . . But how can I name that? —
Just friendly ghosts!
That knocks for me at night on my window and my heart,
that looks at me and says, "But we were friends?"—
— O shrivelled word, once fragrant as a rose!
O youthful longing which misunderstands itself!
Those yearned for,
whom I imagined changed to my own kin,
they have grown old, have exiled themselves.
Only the one who changes stays in touch with me.
O noon of life! A second youthful time!
O summer garden!
Restless happiness in standing, gazing, waiting!
I wait for friends, ready day and night.
You friends, where are you? Come! It's time! It's time
* *
*
The song is done — the sweet cry of yearning
died in my mouth:
A magician did it, a friend at the right hour,
a noontime friend — no! Do not ask who it might be —
it was at noon when one turned into two . . . .
Now we celebrate, certain of victory, united,
the feast of feasts:
friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests!
Now the world laughs, the horror curtain splits,
the wedding came for light and darkness . . . .
* * * *
* *
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