______________________________________________________
Friedrich
Nietzsche
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
______________________________________________________
[This document, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright
restrictions. For information, please consult Copyright. Editorial comments and translations in
square brackets and italics are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets
are from Nietzsche’s text. Last revised in December 2013]
[Table of Contents for Beyond Good and Evil]
PART SIX
WE SCHOLARS
204
At the risk that moralizing here also shows itself to be what it
always has been—that is, an unabashed montrer ses plais [display of one’s wounds], as
Balzac says—I’d like to dare to stand up against an unreasonable and harmful
shift in rank ordering that nowadays, quite unnoticed and as if with the
clearest conscience, threatens to establish itself between science and philosophy.
I think that on the basis of our experience—experience
means, as I see it, always bad experience?—we must have a right to discuss such
a higher question of rank, so that we do not speak like blind people about colour or as women and artists do against science
(“Oh, this nasty science!” their instinct and embarrassment sigh, “it always
finds out what’s behind things”—).
The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy,
is one of the subtler effects of the nature of and the trouble with democracy:
today the self-glorification and self-exaltation of the scholar stand
everywhere in full bloom and their finest spring—but that is still not intended
to mean that in this case self-praise smells very nice. “Away with all masters!”—that’s
what the instinct of the rabble wants here, too, and now that science has enjoyed
its happiest success in pushing away theology, whose “handmaiden” it was for
too long, it has the high spirits and stupidity to set about making laws for
philosophy and to take its turn playing the “master” for once—what am I
saying?—playing the philosopher. My
memory—the memory of a scientific man, if you’ll permit me to say so!—is filled
to bursting with the naiveté I have heard in arrogant remarks about philosophy
and philosophers from young natural scientists and old doctors (not to mention
from the most educated and most conceited of all scholars, the philologists and
schoolmen, who are both of these thanks to their profession—). Sometimes it was
a specialist and idler who in general instinctively resisted all synthetic
tasks and capabilities; sometimes the industrious worker who had taken a whiff
of the otium [leisure] and of the noble opulence within the spiritual household of the
philosopher and, as he did so, felt himself restricted and diminished.
Sometimes it was that colour blindness of the
utilitarian man, who sees nothing in philosophy other than a series of refuted systems and an extravagant expense from which no one “receives any
benefit.” Sometimes fear of disguised mysticism and of an adjustment to the
boundaries of knowledge sprang up; sometimes the contempt for particular
philosophers, which had unwittingly been generalized into a contempt for philosophy.
Finally, among young scholars I most frequently found behind the arrogant
belittlement of philosophy the pernicious effect of a philosopher himself, a
man whom they had, in fact, generally ceased to follow, but without escaping
the spell of his value judgments dismissing other philosophers—something which
brought about a collective irritation with all philosophy. (For example,
Schopenhauer’s effect on the most modern Germany seems to me to be something
like this: with his unintelligent anger against Hegel he created a situation in
which the entire last generation of Germans broke away from their connection to
German culture, and this culture, all things well considered,
was a high point in and a prophetic refinement of the historical sense.1 But Schopenhauer himself in this very matter was impoverished to
the point of genius—unreceptive and un-German.) From a general point of view
and broadly speaking, it may well have been, more than anything else, the
human, all-too-human nature of the more recent philosophers themselves, in a
word, their paltry spirit, which has most fundamentally damaged respect for
philosophy and opened the gates to the instincts of the rabble. We should
nonetheless acknowledge the extent to which the whole style of Heraclitus,
Plato, Empedocles, and of whatever all those royal and splendid hermits of the
spirit were called is absent from our modern world and how, given the sort of
representatives of philosophy who nowadays, thanks to fashion, are just as much
on top as at the bottom—in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin, the
anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann—an
honest man of science is
entitled to feel
that he is justifiably of a better sort, with a better descent. In particular,
the sight of these mishmash philosophers who call themselves “reality philosophers”
or “positivists” is capable of casting a dangerous mistrust into the soul of an
ambitious young scholar: they are, in the best of cases, scholars and specialists
themselves—that’s clear enough—they have been, in fact,
collectively defeated and brought
back under the
rule of science.2 At some time or other they wanted more from
themselves, without having any right to this “more” and to its
responsibilities—and now, in word and deed, they represent in a respectable,
angry, vengeful way the lack of
faith [den Unglauben] in the ruling task and masterfulness of philosophy. But
finally—how could it be anything different? Science nowadays is in bloom, its
face is filled with good conscience, while what all recent philosophy has
gradually sunk to—this remnant of philosophy today—is busy generating suspicion
and ill humour against itself, if not mockery and
pity. Philosophy reduced to “theory of knowledge” is, in fact, nothing more
than a tentative epochism [Epochistik] and a doctrine of abstinence: a philosophy which does not venture
one step over the threshold and painstakingly denies itself the right to enter—that is philosophy at
death’s door, an end, an agony, something pitiful! How could such a philosophy—rule!3
205
To tell the truth, there are so many varied dangers for the development
of a philosopher today that we may well doubt whether this fruit can, in general,
still grow ripe. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences have grown
into something monstrous, and with these the probability that the philosopher
has already grown tired while he is still learning or lets himself stop
somewhere and “specialize,” so that he no longer reaches his full height, that
is, high enough for an overview, for looking round, for looking down. Or else he reaches that point too late, when
his best time and power are already over, or have become damaged, coarsened,
and degenerate, so that his glance, his comprehensive value judgment, means little
any more. The very refinement of his intellectual conscience perhaps allows him
to hesitate along the way and to delay. He is afraid of being seduced into
being a dilettante, a millipede, something with a thousand antennae. He knows
too well that a man who has lost respect for himself may no longer give orders
as a man of knowledge, may no longer lead. At that
point, he would have to be willing to become a great actor, a philosophical
Cagliostro and spiritual Pied Piper, in short, a seducer. In the end it’s a
question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Moreover, by
way of doubling once again the difficulty for the philosopher, it comes to
this: he demands from himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences
but about life and the value of living—he learns with reluctance to believe
that he has a right or even a duty to make this judgment and that must seek his
own path to that right and that belief only through the most extensive—perhaps
the most disturbing, the most destructive—experiences, often hesitating,
doubting, and saying nothing. As a matter of fact, the masses have for a long
time mistaken and misidentified the philosopher, whether with the man of
science and ideal scholar, or with the religiously elevated, desensualized,
“unworldly” enthusiast drunk on God. If we hear anyone at all praised nowadays
on the ground that he lives “wisely” or “like a philosopher,” that means almost
nothing other than “prudently and on the sidelines.” Wisdom: that seems to the
rabble to be some kind of escape, a means and a trick to pull oneself well out
of a nasty game. But the real philosopher—as we see it, my friends?—lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred
attempts and temptations of life—he always puts himself at risk. He plays the wicked game. . . .
206
In comparison with a genius, that is, with a being who either engenders or gives birth, taking both words in their highest sense—the
scholar, the average scientific man, always has something of the old maid about
him, for, like the old maid, he does not understand the two most valuable
things men do. In fact, for both scholars and old maids we concede, as if by
way of compensation, that they are respectable—in their cases we stress respectability—and
yet having to make this concession gives us the same sense of irritation. Let’s
look more closely: What is the scientific man? To begin with, a man who is not
a noble type. He has the virtues of a man who is not distinguished, that is, a
type of person who is not a ruler, not authoritative, and also not
self-sufficient. He has diligence, a patient endorsement of his position and
rank, equanimity about and moderation in his abilities and needs. He has an instinct
for people like him and for what people like him require, for example, that bit
of independence and green meadows without which there is no peace in work, that
demand for honour and acknowledgement (which assumes, first and foremost,
recognition and the ability to be recognized—), that sunshine of a good name,
that constant stamp of approval of his value and his utility, which is necessary
to overcome again and again the inner suspicion
at the bottom of the hearts of all dependent men and herd animals. The scholar
also has, as stands to reason, the illnesses and bad habits of a non-noble
type: he is full of petty jealousy and has a lynx eye for what is base in those
natures whose heights are impossible for him to reach. He is trusting, but
only as an individual who lets himself go but does not let himself flow. Before a person who is like a great stream he just stands there
all the colder and more enclosed—his eye is then like a smooth, reluctant lake
in which there is no longer any ripple of delight or sympathy. The worst and
most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable he gets from his instinctive
sense of the mediocrity of his type, of that Jesuitical mediocrity, which
spontaneously works for the destruction of the uncommon man and seeks to break
every arched bow or—even better!—to relax it. That is, to unbend it, with
consideration, of course, naturally with a flattering hand—to unbend it with trusting sympathy: that is the essential art of Jesuitism,
which has always understood how to introduce itself as a religion of pity.—
207
No matter how gratefully we may accommodate ourselves to the objective spirit—and
who has never been sick to death of everything subjective and its damnable ipsissimosity [references to itself]!—we must ultimately
also learn caution concerning this gratitude and stop the exaggeration with
which in recent years we have celebrated the depersonalizing of the spirit,
emptying the self from the spirit, as if that were the goal in itself,
redemption and transfiguration.4 That’s
what tends to happen, for example, in the pessimism school, which, for its
part, has good reasons for awarding highest honour to “disinterested
knowledge.” The objective man who no longer curses and grumbles like the pessimist,
the ideal scholar, in whom the scientific instinct, after thousands of total
and partial failures, all of a sudden comes into bloom and blossoms fully, is
surely one of the most precious implements there are, but he belongs in the
hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we say. He is a mirror—he is no “end in himself.” The objective man is, in fact, a
mirror: accustomed to submit before everything that wishes to be known, without
any delight other than that available in knowing and “mirroring back”—he waits
until something comes along and then spreads himself out tenderly so that even
light footsteps and the spiritual essences slipping past are not lost on his
surface and skin. What is still left of his “person” seems to him accidental,
often a matter of chance, even more often disruptive, so completely has he himself
become a conduit and reflection for strange shapes and events. He reflects
about “himself” with effort and is not infrequently wrong. He readily gets
himself confused with others. He makes mistakes concerning his own needs, and
it is only here that he is coarse and careless. Perhaps he gets anxious about
his health or about the pettiness and stifling atmosphere of wife and friends
or about the lack of companions and society—indeed, he forces himself to think
about his anxieties: but it’s no use! His thoughts have already wandered off to
some more general example,
and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday about how he might be
helped. He has lost seriousness for himself—as well as time. He is cheerful, not from any
lack of needs, but from a lack of fingers and handles for his own needs.
His habitual concessions concerning all things and all experiences, the sunny
and uninhibited hospitality with which he accepts everything which runs into
him, his kind of thoughtless good will and dangerous lack of concern about Yes
and No—alas, there are enough cases where he must atone for these virtues of
his!—and as a human being he generally becomes far too easily the caput mortuum
[worthless residue] of these
virtues. If people want love and hate from him—I mean love and hate the way
God, women, and animals understand them—he’ll do what he can and give what he
can. But we should not be amazed when it doesn’t amount to much—when he reveals
himself in these very matters as inauthentic, fragile, questionable, and
rotten. His love is forced, his hate artificial, more a tour de force, a tiny vanity and exaggeration. He is genuine
only as long as he is permitted to be objective: only in his cheerful comprehensiveness
[Totalismus] is he still “nature” and “natural.” His mirror soul, always smoothing
itself out, no longer knows how to affirm or deny. He does not command, and he
does not destroy. “Je ne méprise presque rien” [There is almost nothing I despise]—he says with Leibnitz: we should not fail to hear and underestimate that presque [almost]!5 Moreover, he is no model human being. He does not go ahead of anyone
or behind. He places himself in general too far away to have a reason to take
sides between good and evil. When people confused him for such a long time with
the philosopher, with
the Caesar-like breeder and powerhouse [Gewaltmenschen] of culture, they held him in much too high honour and overlooked
the most essential thing about him—he is an instrument, something of a slave,
although certainly the most sublime form of slave, but in himself nothing—presque rien [almost
nothing]! The objective man is an instrument, an expensive, easily damaged
and blunted tool for measurement and an artful arrangement of mirrors, something
we should take care of and respect. But he is no goal, no way out or upward, no
complementary human being in whom the rest of existence is justified, no conclusion—and even less a
beginning, a procreation and first cause. He is nothing strong, powerful,
self-assured, something that wants to be master. He is much rather merely a
delicate, inflated, sensitive, and flexible pot for forms, which must first
wait for some content and meaning or other, in order to “give itself a shape”
consistent with it—usually a man without form and content, a “selfless” man.
And thus also nothing for women, in parenthesi [in
parenthesis].—
208
When a philosopher nowadays lets us know he is not a sceptic—I hope people have sensed this from the description
of the objective spirit immediately above?—the whole world is unhappy to hear
it. People look at him with some awe and would like to ask so much, to question
. . . in fact, among timid listeners—and there are hordes of them today—from
that point on he is considered dangerous. For them it is as if in his rejection
of scepticism they heard coming from far away some
evil threatening noise, as if a new explosive was being tested somewhere,
spiritual dynamite, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilin, a pessimism bonae voluntatis [of good
will], which does not merely say No and will No but—terrible to
imagine!—acts No!6 Against
this form of “good will”—a will to a truly active denial of life—there is
today, by general agreement, no better sleeping pill and sedative than scepticism, the peaceful, gentle, soporific poppy of scepticism, and even Hamlet is prescribed these days by contemporary doctors against the
“spirit” and its underground rumblings. “Aren’t people’s ears all full enough
already of wicked noises?” says the sceptic, as a
friend of peace and quiet, almost as a sort of security police: “This
subterranean No is terrifying! Be quiet at last, you pessimistic moles!” For
the sceptic, this tender creature, is frightened
all too easily. His conscience has been trained to twitch with every No, even
with a hard, decisive Yes—to respond as if it had been bitten. Yes! And
No!—that contradicts his morality. Conversely, he loves to celebrate
his virtue with a noble abstinence, perhaps by saying with Montaigne, “What do
I know?”7 Or with Socrates, “I know that I know nothing.” Or “Here I do not
trust myself. There is no door open to me here.” Or “Suppose the door was open,
why go in right away?” Or “What use are all rash hypotheses? Not to make any hypotheses
at all could easily be part of good taste. Must you be so keen immediately to
straighten something crooked? Or
to stop up every hole with some piece of oakum? Isn’t
there time for that? Doesn’t time have time? O you devilish fellows, can’t you wait,
even for a bit? What is unknown also has its attraction—the
Sphinx is a Circe, too, and Circe also was a philosopher.”8 In this way a sceptic consoles himself,
and he certainly needs some consolation. For scepticism
is the most spiritual expression of a certain multifaceted physiological condition
which in everyday language is called weak nerves and infirmity. It occurs every
time races or classes which have been separated from each other a long time
suddenly and decisively cross breed. In the new generation, which has inherited
in its blood, as it were, different standards and values, everything is
restlessness, disturbance, doubt, experiment; the best forces have an
inhibiting effect; even the virtues do not allow each other to grow and become
strong; the body and soul lack equilibrium, a centre of gravity, a
perpendicular self-assurance. But what is most profoundly sick and degenerates
in such mixtures is the will. These
people no longer know the independence in decision making, the bold sense of
pleasure in willing—they have doubts about the “freedom of the will,” even in
their dreams. Our Europe today, the scene of an insanely sudden attempt at
radical mixing of classes and consequently of races, is as a result sceptical in
all heights and depths, sometimes with that flexible scepticism
which leaps impatiently and greedily from one branch to another, sometimes
gloomy, like a cloud overloaded with question marks, and often sick to death of
its will! Paralysis of the will—where nowadays do we not find this cripple
sitting! And often how well dressed! In such a seductive outfit! This illness
has the most beautifully splendid and deceitful clothing. For example, most of
what presents itself in the display windows today as “objectivity,” “the practice
of science,” “l’art pour l’art” [art for art’s sake], “purely
disinterested knowledge” is only dressed up scepticism
and paralysis of the will—I’ll stand by this diagnosis of the European disease.
The sickness of the will has spread unevenly across Europe. It appears in its
greatest and most varied forms where the culture has already been indigenous
for the longest time, and it disappears to the extent that the “barbarian”
still—or again—achieves his rights under the baggy clothing of Western culture.
Thus, in contemporary France, we can conclude as easily as we can grasp it in
our hands that the will is most seriously ill, and France, which has always had
a masterful skill in transforming even the fateful changes in its spirit into
something attractive and seductive, truly displays its cultural dominance over
Europe today as the school and exhibition hall for all the charms of scepticism. The power to will and, indeed, to desire a will
that lasts a long time, is already somewhat stronger in Germany, and in the
north of Germany even more so than in the middle, but it’s significantly
stronger in England, Spain, and Corsica. In Germany it’s bound up with apathy,
and in those other places with hard heads—to say nothing of Italy, which is too
young to know yet what it wants and which first must demonstrate whether it can
will.—But it’s strongest and most amazing in that immense empire in between,
where Europe, so to speak, flows back into Asia, that is, in Russia. There the
power to will has for a long time lain dormant and built up, there the will
waits menacingly—uncertain whether, to borrow a favourite
phrase of our physicists today, it will be discharged as a will to negate or a
will to affirm. It may require more than wars in India and developments in Asia
for Europe to be relieved of its greatest danger; it will require inner revolutions,
too, the breaking up of the empire into small bodies and, above all, the
introduction of the parliamentary nonsense, along with every man’s duty to read
his newspaper at breakfast. I’m not saying this because it’s what I want. The
opposite would be closer to my heart—I mean such an increase in the Russian
danger, that Europe would have to decide to become equally a threat, that is,
it would have to acquire a
will, by means of a new caste which would rule Europe, a long, fearful,
individual will, which could set itself goals for thousands of years from
now—so that finally the long spun-out comedy of its small states, together
with its
multiple dynastic and democratic wills, would come to an end. The time for
petty politics is over. The next century is already bringing on the battle for
the mastery of the earth—the compulsion to grand politics.
209
The extent to which the new warlike age into which we Europeans
have evidently entered may perhaps also be favourable
to the development of another and stronger variety of scepticism—on
that point I’d like to state my views only provisionally through a parable
which friends of German history will understand easily enough. That harmless
enthusiast for good-looking, tall grenadiers, who, as King of Prussia, brought
into being a military and sceptical genius—and in the
process basically created that new type of German who has just recently emerged
victorious—the questionable and mad father of Frederick the
Great—in one respect himself had the grip and lucky claw of genius.9 He knew what Germany then needed, a lack which was a hundred times
more worrisome and more urgent than some deficiency in culture and social
style. His aversion to the young Frederick emerged from the anxiety of a
profound instinct. What was missing was men. And he
suspected to his most bitter annoyance that his own son might not be man
enough. On that point he was deceived, but who in his place would not have been
deceived? He saw his son decline into atheism, esprit, the pleasure-loving
frivolousness of witty Frenchmen:—he saw in the background the great blood
sucker, the spider of scepticism. He suspected the
incurable misery of a heart that is no longer hard enough for evil and for
good, of a fractured will that no longer commands, is no longer capable of
commanding. But in the meantime there grew up in his son that more dangerous
and harder new form of scepticism—who knows how much it was
encouraged by that very hatred of his father’s and by the icy melancholy of a
will pushed into solitude?—the scepticism of daring
masculinity, which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest
and which, in the shape of Frederick the Great, first gained entry into
Germany. This scepticism despises and nonetheless
grabs hold. It undermines and takes possession. It does not believe, but in so
doing does not lose itself. It gives the spirit a dangerous freedom, but it
keeps a firm grip on the heart. It is the German form of scepticism, which, as a constant
Frederickianism [Fridericianismus] intensified into the highest spirituality,
has brought Europe for some time under the dominion of the German spirit and
its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks to the invincibly strong and tenacious
masculine character of the great German philologists and historical critics
(who, if we see them properly, were collectively also artists of destruction
and subversion), gradually anew idea of
the German spirit established itself, in spite of all the Romanticism in music
and philosophy, an idea in which the characteristic of manly scepticism stepped decisively forward: it could be, for example,
a fearlessness in the gaze, courage and hardness in the dissecting hand, a
tough will for dangerous voyages of discovery, for expeditions to the spiritual
North Pole under bleak and dangerous skies. There may well be good reasons why
warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves when confronted
with this particular spirit: Michelet, not without a shudder, calls it cet esprit fataliste,
ironique, méphistophélique [this fatalistic and ironic Mephistophelean
spirit].10 But if we
want to sense how distinctive this fear of the “man” in the German spirit is,
through which Europe was roused out of its “dogmatic slumber,” we might remember
the earlier idea which it had to overthrow—and how it is still not so long ago
that a masculine woman could dare, with unrestrained presumption, to recommend
the Germans to the sympathy of Europe as gentle, good-hearted,
weak-willed, poetical idiots.11 Finally,
we should understand with sufficient profundity Napoleon’s surprise when he
happened to see Goethe: that reveals what people had thought about the “German
spirit” for centuries. “Voilá un homme!” [There is
a man!]—which is, in effect, saying: “That is really a man! And I had expected only a German!”—
210
Assuming, then, that in the image of the philosophers of the
future there is some characteristic which raises the question whether they
would not perhaps have to be sceptics, in the sense
indicated immediately above, that would, nonetheless, indicate only one thing
about them—and not what they themselves were. With just as much justification they
could let themselves be called critics, and it’s certain they will be people
who experiment. In the names with which I have ventured to christen them, I
have already particularly emphasized experiments and their enjoyment in
attempting experiments. Did I do this because, as critics in body and soul,
they love to use experiments in a new, perhaps broader, perhaps more dangerous
sense? In their passion for knowledge, will they have to go further with daring
and painful experiments, than could be considered appropriate by the
soft-hearted and mollycoddled taste of a democratic century? There is no doubt
that these coming philosophers will be least of all able to rid themselves of
those serious and not unobjectionable characteristics which separate the critic
from the sceptic—I mean the certainty in the measure
of value, the conscious use of a unity of method, the shrewd courage, the
standing alone, and the ability to answer for themselves. In fact, they confess
that they take delight in saying No and in dissecting things and in a certain thought-out
cruelty, which knows how to guide the knife surely and precisely, even when the
heart is still bleeding. They will be harder (and perhaps not always only on themselves) than humane people
might wish; they will not get involved with the “truth,” so that the truth can
“please” them or “elevate” them and “inspire” them:—by contrast, they will have
little faith that the truth itself brings with it such emotional entertainment. They will
smile, these strict spirits, if someone should declare in front of them, “That
idea elevates me: how could it not be true?” or “That work delights me: how
could it not be beautiful?” or, “That artist enlarges me; how could he not be
great?”—Perhaps they are prepared not only to smile at but also to feel a
genuine disgust for everything equally enthusiastic, idealisic,
feminine and hermaphroditic. Anyone who knew how to follow them right into the
secret chambers of their hearts would hardly find there any intention to
reconcile “Christian feelings” with “the taste of antiquity” or even with
“modern parliamentarianism” (a reconciliation which is said to be taking place
even among philosophers in our very uncertain and therefore very conciliatory
century). These philosophers of the future will demand not only of themselves
critical discipline and every habit which leads to purity and strictness in
things of the spirit: they could show them off as their own kind of jewellery—nonetheless, for all that they still do not wish
to be called critics. It seems to them no small insult inflicted on philosophy
when people decree, as they are so fond of doing today, “Philosophy itself is
criticism and critical science—and nothing else!” This evaluation of philosophy
may enjoy the applause of all French and German positivists (—and it’s possible
that it would have flattered even the heart and taste of Kant: we should remember the title of his major works—): our new philosophers
will nonetheless affirm that critics are the tools of the philosopher and for
that very reason, the fact that they are tools, are still a long way from being
philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Königsberg
[Kant] was only a great critic.
211
I insist on the following point: people should finally stop confusing
philosophical labourers and scientific people in
general with philosophers—in this particular matter we should strictly assign
“to each his due” and not give too much to the former and much too little to
the latter. It may be that the education of a real philosopher requires that he
himself has once stood on all of those steps where his servants, the scientific
labourers in philosophy, remain—and must remain. Perhaps he must himself have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian and, in addition, poet
and collector and traveller and solver of riddles and
moralist and prophet and “free spirit” and almost everything, in order to move
through the range of human worth and feelings of value and to be able to look with a variety of different eyes and consciences from the
heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the
corners into every expanse. But all these things are only preconditions for his
task: the task itself requires something different—it demands that he create values. Those philosophical labourers
on the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to establish some large collection of
facts concerning estimates of value—that is, earlier statements of value, creations
of value that have become dominant and for a while have been called
“truths”—and press them into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or politics (morality)
or art. The
task of these researchers is to make everything that has happened and which has
been valued up to now clear, easy to imagine, intelligible, and manageable, to
shorten everything lengthy, even “time” itself, and to overpower the entire past, a huge and marvellous
task, in the service of which every sophisticated pride and every tough will
can certainly find satisfaction. But the
real philosophers are commanders and lawgivers: they
say “That is how it should be!” They
determine first the “Where to?” and the “What for?” of human beings, and, as
they do this, they have at their disposal the preliminary work of all
philosophical labourers, all those who have overpowered
the past—they reach with their creative hands to grasp the future. In that
process, everything that is and has been becomes a means for them, an
instrument, a hammer.
Their “knowing” is creating; their
creating is establishing laws; their will to truth is—will to power.—Are
there such philosophers nowadays? Have there ever been such philosophers? Is it
not necessary that there be such philosophers? . . . .
212
It is increasingly apparent to me that the philosopher, who is necessarily a man of
tomorrow and the day after, has in every age found and had to find
himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy every time was the ideal of
the day. Up to now all these extraordinary promoters of humanity whom we call
philosophers and who themselves seldom felt that they were friends of wisdom
but rather embarrassing fools and dangerous question marks, have discovered
that their work, their hard, unsought for, inescapable task—but finally the
greatness of their work—was for them to be the bad conscience of their age. By
applying the knife of vivisection directly on the chest of the virtues of the day, they revealed what their
own secret was—to know a new greatness for man, to know a new untrodden path to increasing his
greatness. Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, laziness, letting oneself
go, and letting oneself fall, how many lies lay hidden under the most highly honoured type of their contemporary morality, how much
virtue was out
of date; every time they said, “We must go there, out there, where you nowadays
are least at home.” Faced with a world of “modern ideas” that would like to
banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could
be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of
mankind, the idea of “greatness,” directly on the basis of man’s range and
multiplicity, of his integrated totality in the midst of diversity. He would
even determine value and rank according to how much and how many different
things one person could endure and take upon himself, how far he could
extend his own responsibility. Today contemporary taste and virtue weaken and
dilute the will; nothing is as topical as the weakness of the will. Thus, in
the ideal of the philosopher it is precisely the strength of will, hardness,
and the ability to make lengthy decisions that must be part of the idea
“greatness”—with just as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the
ideal of a stupid, denying, humble, selfless humanity was appropriate to an
opposite age, one which suffered, like the sixteenth century, from the bottled-up
energy of its will and from the wildest torrents and storm tides of
selfishness. At the time of Socrates, among nothing but men of exhausted
instincts, among conservative old Athenians, who allowed themselves to go “for
happiness,” as they said, and for pleasure, as they did, and who, in the
process, still kept mouthing the old splendid words to which their lives no
longer gave them any right, perhaps irony was essential
for greatness in the soul, that malicious Socratic confidence of the old doctor
and member of the rabble, who sliced ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the
flesh and heart of the “noble man,” with a look which spoke intelligibly enough
“Don’t play act in front of me! Here—we are the same!” By contrast, today, when
the herd animal in Europe is the only one who attains and distributes honours, when “equality of rights” all too easily could get
turned around into equality of wrongs—what I mean is into a common war against
everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the
higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative fullness of power and
mastery—these days the sense of being noble, of willing to be for oneself, of
being able to be different, of standing alone, and of having to live by one’s
own initiative—these are part of the idea “greatness,” and the philosopher will
reveal something of his own ideal if he proposes “The man who is to be the
greatest is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most
deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed
with will—this is precisely what greatness is to be called: capable of being as much an integrated totality
as he is something multifaceted, as wide as he is full.” And to ask the
question again: today—is greatness possible?
213
What a philosopher is, that’s difficult to learn because it cannot
be taught: one must “know” it out of experience—or one should have the pride not to know
it. But the fact that these days the whole world talks of things about which it cannot have any
experience holds true above all and in the worst way for philosophers and
philosophical situations: very few people are acquainted with them and are
allowed to know them, and all popular opinions about them are false. And so,
for example, that genuine philosophical association of a bold, exuberant
spirituality, which speeds along presto, with a
dialectical strictness and necessity which takes no false steps is unknown to
most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and hence, if someone
wishes to talk about it in front of them, they find it implausible. They take
the view that every necessity is an affliction, a painful requirement they must
follow, a compulsion, and thinking itself they consider something slow,
hesitant, almost laborious, and often enough “worth the sweat of the noble”—but
under no circumstances something light, divine, closely related to dancing and
high spirits! “Thinking” and “taking an issue seriously,” “considering it
gravely”—among them these belong together: that’s the only way they have
“experienced” thinking. In such matters artists may have a more subtle sense of
smell. They know only too well that at the very moment when they no longer
create “voluntarily,” when they make everything by necessity, their sense of
freedom, refinement, authority, of creative setting up, disposing, and shaping
is at its height—in short, that necessity and the “freedom of the will” are
then one thing for them. Ultimately there is a rank ordering of spiritual
conditions, with which the rank ordering of problems is consistent, and the
highest problems shove back without mercy anyone who dares approach them
without having been predestined to solve them with the loftiness and power of
his spirituality. What help is it if nimble heads of nondescript people or, as
happens so often these days, clumsy honest mechanics and empiricists with their
plebeian ambition press forward into the presence of such problems and, as it
were, up to the “court of courts”! But on such carpets crude feet may never
tread: there is still a primeval law of things to look after that: the doors remain
closed to these people who push against them, even if they bang or crush their
heads against them! One must be born for every lofty world: to put the matter
more clearly, one must be cultivated for it: one has a right to philosophy—taking the word in its grand
sense—only thanks to one’s descent, one’s ancestors; here, as well, “blood”
decides. For a philosopher to arise, many generations must have done the
preparatory work. Every single one of his virtues must have been acquired,
cared for, passed on, assimilated, and not just the bold, light, delicate
walking and running of his thoughts, but, above all, the willingness to take on
great responsibilities, the loftiness of the look which dominates and gazes
down, the feeling of standing apart from the crowd and its duties and virtues,
the affable protecting and defending of what is misunderstood and slandered,
whether god or devil, the desire for and practice of great justice, the art of
commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye that seldom admires, seldom looks
upward, seldom loves. . . .
NOTES
1Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), important German idealist philosopher. [Back to Text]
2Eugen Dühring (1833-1921)
and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906): two well-known philosophers in Nietzsche’s
day. [Back to Text]
3Epochism means
dividing time or history up into epochs. [Back to Text]
4Nietzsche
coined the word Ipsissimosität from the
Latin ipsissima meaning very own. [Back to Text]
5Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), German philosopher, diplomat, and mathematician. [Back to Text]
6nihilin: a word
Nietzsche invents to designate some new form of strong pessimism discovered
like some as yet unknown chemical. [Back to Text]
7Michel de
Montaigne (1533-1592), French diplomat and writer. [Back to Text]
8Circe: a
goddess in Homer’s Odyssey who has magical powers to turn men into swine. [Back to Text]
9Frederick
the Great (1712-1786), son of Frederick William I, King of Prussia. Through
his military and political skill he greatly enlarged Prussian territory. [Back to Text]
10Jules
Michelet (1798-1874), a French historian. Mephistopheles is the
chief agent of the Devil in Goethe’s Faust. [Back to Text]
11The woman
is Madame de Staël, a
French writer who produced a book about German and the Germans in 1810. [Back to Text]
[Table of Contents for Beyond Good and Evil]
[Back to johnstonia Home
Page]
Page loads on johnstonia web
files
20,774,076 
View Stats