terrible man, who had himself as much in his own power, and who could be
silent as well as any wise Socrates, became indiscreet about himself in
his last words; for the first time he let his mask fall, when he gave to
understand that he had carried a mask and played a comedy,—he had played
the father of his country and wisdom on the throne well, even to the
point of illusion! _Plaudite amici, comoedia finita est!_—The thought of
the dying Nero: _qualis artifex pereo!_ was also the thought of the
dying Augustus: histrionic conceit! histrionic loquacity! And the very
counterpart to the dying Socrates!—But Tiberius died silently, that most
tortured of all self-torturers,—_he_ was _genuine_ and not a
stage-player! What may have passed through his head in the end! Perhaps
this: "Life—that is a long death. I am a fool, who shortened the lives
of so many! Was _I_ created for the purpose of being a benefactor? I
should have given them eternal life: and then I could have _seen them
dying_ eternally. I had such good eyes _for that_: _qualis spectator
pereo!_" When he seemed once more to regain his powers after a long
death-struggle, it was considered advisable to smother him with
pillows,—he died a double death.
37.
_Owing to three Errors._—Science has been furthered during recent
centuries, partly because it was hoped that God's goodness and wisdom
would be best understood therewith and thereby—the principal motive in
the soul of great Englishmen (like Newton); partly because the absolute
utility of knowledge was believed in, and especially the most intimate
connection of morality, knowledge, and happiness—the principal motive in
the soul of great Frenchmen (like Voltaire); and partly because it was
thought that in science there was something unselfish, harmless,
self-sufficing, lovable, and truly innocent to be had, in which the evil
human impulses did not at all participate—the principal motive in the
soul of Spinoza, who felt himself divine, as a knowing being:—it is
consequently owing to three errors that science has been furthered.
38.
_Explosive People._—When one considers how ready are the forces of young
men for discharge, one does not wonder at seeing them decide so
unfastidiously and with so little selection for this or that cause:
_that_ which attracts them is the sight of eagerness about any cause, as
it were the sight of the burning match—not the cause itself. The more
ingenious seducers on that account operate by holding out the prospect
of an explosion to such persons, and do not urge their cause by means of
reasons; these powder-barrels are not won over by means of reasons!
39.
_Altered Taste._—The alteration of the general taste is more important
than the alteration of opinions; opinions, with all their proving,
refuting, and intellectual masquerade, are merely symptoms of altered
taste, and are certainly _not_ what they are still so often claimed to
be, the causes of the altered taste. How does the general taste alter?
By the fact of individuals, the powerful and influential persons,
expressing and tyrannically enforcing without any feeling of shame,
_their_ _hoc est ridiculum, hoc est absurdum_; the decisions, therefore,
of their taste and their disrelish:—they thereby lay a constraint upon
many people, out of which there gradually grows a habituation for still
more, and finally a _necessity for all_. The fact, however, that these
individuals feel and "taste" differently, has usually its origin in a
peculiarity of their mode of life, nourishment, or digestion, perhaps in
a surplus or deficiency of the inorganic salts in their blood and brain,
in short in their _physis_; they have, however, the courage to avow
their physical constitution, and to lend an ear even to the most
delicate tones of its requirements: their æsthetic and moral judgments
are those "most delicate tones" of their _physis_.
40.
_The Lack of a noble Presence._—Soldiers and their leaders have always a
much higher mode of comportment toward one another than workmen and
their employers. At present at least, all militarily established
civilisation still stands high above all so-called industrial
civilisation; the latter, in its present form, is in general the meanest
mode of existence that has ever been. It is simply the law of necessity
that operates here: people want to live, and have to sell themselves;
but they despise him who exploits their necessity, and _purchases_ the
workman. It is curious that the subjection to powerful, fear-inspiring,
and even dreadful individuals, to tyrants and leaders of armies, is not
at all felt so painfully as the subjection to such undistinguished and
uninteresting persons as the captains of industry; in the employer the
workman usually sees merely a crafty, blood-sucking dog of a man,
speculating on every necessity, whose name, form, character, and
reputation are altogether indifferent to him. It is probable that the
manufacturers and great magnates of commerce have hitherto lacked too
much all those forms and attributes of a _superior race_, which alone
make persons interesting; if they had had the nobility of the nobly-born
in their looks and bearing, there would perhaps have been no socialism
in the masses of the people. For these are really ready for _slavery_ of
every kind, provided that the superior class above them constantly shows
itself legitimately superior, and _born_ to command—by its noble
presence! The commonest man feels that nobility is not to be improvised,
and that it is his part to honour it as the fruit of protracted
race-culture,—but the absence of superior presence, and the notorious
vulgarity of manufacturers with red, fat hands, brings up the thought to
him that it is only chance and fortune that has here elevated the one
above the other; well then—so he reasons with himself—let _us_ in our
turn tempt chance and fortune! Let us in our turn throw the dice!—and
socialism commences.
41.
_Against Remorse._—The thinker sees in his own actions attempts and
questionings to obtain information about something or other; success and
failure are _answers_ to him first and foremost. To vex himself,
however, because something does not succeed, or to feel remorse at
all—he leaves that to those who act because they are commanded to do so,
and expect to get a beating when their gracious master is not satisfied
with the result.
42.
_Work and Ennui._—In respect to seeking work for the sake of the pay,
almost all men are alike at present in civilised countries; to all of
them work is a means, and not itself the end; on which account they are
not very select in the choice of the work, provided it yields an
abundant profit. But still there are rarer men who would rather perish
than work without _delight_ in their labour: the fastidious people,
difficult to satisfy, whose object is not served by an abundant profit,
unless the work itself be the reward of all rewards. Artists and
contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare species of human
beings; and also the idlers who spend their life in hunting and
travelling, or in love affairs and adventures. They all seek toil and
trouble in so far as these are associated with pleasure, and they want
the severest and hardest labour, if it be necessary. In other respects,
however, they have a resolute indolence, even should impoverishment,
dishonour, and danger to health and life be associated therewith. They
are not so much afraid of ennui as of labour without pleasure; indeed
they require much ennui, if _their_ work is to succeed with them. For
the thinker and for all inventive spirits ennui is the unpleasant "calm"
of the soul which precedes the happy voyage and the dancing breezes; he
must endure it, he must _await_ the effect it has on him:—it is
precisely _this_ which lesser natures cannot at all experience! It is
common to scare away ennui in every way, just as it is common to labour
without pleasure. It perhaps distinguishes the Asiatics above the
Europeans, that they are capable of a longer and profounder repose; even
their narcotics operate slowly and require patience, in contrast to the
obnoxious suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.
43.
_What the Laws Betray._—One makes a great mistake when one studies the
penal laws of a people, as if they were an expression of its character;
the laws do not betray what a people is, but what appears to them
foreign, strange, monstrous, and outlandish. The laws concern themselves
with the exceptions to the morality of custom; and the severest
punishments fall on acts which conform to the customs of the
neighbouring peoples. Thus among the Wahabites, there are only two
mortal sins: having another God than the Wahabite God, and—smoking (it
is designated by them as "the disgraceful kind of drinking"). "And how
is it with regard to murder and adultery?"—asked the Englishman with
astonishment on learning these things. "Well, God is gracious and
pitiful!" answered the old chief.—Thus among the ancient Romans there
was the idea that a woman could only sin mortally in two ways: by
adultery on the one hand, and—by wine-drinking on the other. Old Cato
pretended that kissing among relatives had only been made a custom in
order to keep women in control on this point; a kiss meant: did her
breath smell of wine? Wives had actually been punished by death who were
surprised taking wine: and certainly not merely because women under the
influence of wine sometimes unlearn altogether the art of saying No; the
Romans were afraid above all things of the orgiastic and Dionysian
spirit with which the women of Southern Europe at that time (when wine
was still new in Europe) were sometimes visited, as by a monstrous
foreignness which subverted the basis of Roman sentiments; it seemed to
them treason against Rome, as the embodiment of foreignness.
44.
_The Believed Motive._—However important it may be to know the motives
according to which mankind has really acted hitherto, perhaps the
_belief_ in this or that motive, and therefore that which mankind has
assumed and imagined to be the actual mainspring of its activity
hitherto, is something still more essential for the thinker to know. For
the internal happiness and misery of men have always come to them
through their belief in this or that motive,—_not_ however, through that
which was actually the motive! All about the latter has an interest of
secondary rank.
45.
_Epicurus._—Yes, I am proud of perceiving the character of Epicurus
differently from anyone else perhaps, and of enjoying the happiness of
the afternoon of antiquity in all that I hear and read of him:—I see his
eye gazing out on a broad whitish sea, over the shore-rocks on which the
sunshine rests, while great and small creatures play in its light,
secure and calm like this light and that eye itself. Such happiness
could only have been devised by a chronic sufferer, the happiness of an
eye before which the sea of existence has become calm, and which can no
longer tire of gazing at the surface and at the variegated, tender,
tremulous skin of this sea. Never previously was there such a moderation
of voluptuousness.
46.
_Our Astonishment._—There is a profound and fundamental satisfaction in
the fact that science ascertains things that _hold their ground_, and
again furnish the basis for new researches:—it could certainly be
otherwise. Indeed, we are so much convinced of all the uncertainty and
caprice of our judgments, and of the everlasting change of all human
laws and conceptions, that we are really astonished _how persistently_
the results of science hold their ground! In earlier times people knew
nothing of this changeability of all human things; the custom of
morality maintained the belief that the whole inner life of man was
bound to iron necessity by eternal fetters:—perhaps people then felt a
similar voluptuousness of astonishment when they listened to tales and
fairy stories. The wonderful did so much good to those men, who might
well get tired sometimes of the regular and the eternal. To leave the
ground for once! To soar! To stray! To be mad!—that belonged to the
paradise and the revelry of earlier times; while our felicity is like
that of the shipwrecked man who has gone ashore, and places himself with
both feet on the old, firm ground—in astonishment that it does not rock.
47.
_The Suppression of the Passions._—When one continually prohibits the
expression of the passions as something to be left to the "vulgar," to
coarser, bourgeois, and peasant natures—that is, when one does not want
to suppress the passions themselves, but only their language and
demeanour, one nevertheless realises _therewith_ just what one does not
want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their
weakening and alteration,—as the court of Louis XIV. (to cite the most
instructive instance), and all that was dependent on it, experienced.
The generation _that followed_, trained in suppressing their expression,
no longer possessed the passions themselves, but had a pleasant,
superficial, playful disposition in their place,—a generation which was
so permeated with the incapacity to be ill-mannered, that even an injury
was not taken and retaliated, except with courteous words. Perhaps our
own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpart to this period: I see
everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not least in all that is
written) satisfaction at all the _coarser_ outbursts and gestures of
passion; a certain convention of passionateness is now desired,—only not
the passion itself! Nevertheless _it_ will thereby be at last reached,
and our posterity will have a _genuine savagery_, and not merely a
formal savagery and unmannerliness.
48.
_Knowledge of Distress._—Perhaps there is nothing by which men and
periods are so much separated from one another, as by the different
degrees of knowledge of distress which they possess; distress of the
soul as well as of the body. With respect to the latter, owing to lack
of sufficient self-experience, we men of the present day (in spite of
our deficiencies and infirmities), are perhaps all of us blunderers and
visionaries in comparison with the men of the age of fear—the longest of
all ages,—when the individual had to protect himself against violence,
and for that purpose had to be a man of violence himself. At that time a
man went through a long schooling of corporeal tortures and privations,
and found even in a certain kind of cruelty toward himself, in a
voluntary use of pain, a necessary means for his preservation; at that
time a person trained his environment to the endurance of pain; at that
time a person willingly inflicted pain, and saw the most frightful
things of this kind happen to others, without having any other feeling
than for his own security. As regards the distress of the soul, however,
I now look at every man with respect to whether he knows it by
experience or by description; whether he still regards it as necessary
to simulate this knowledge, perhaps as an indication of more refined
culture; or whether, at the bottom of his heart, he does not at all
believe in great sorrows of soul, and at the naming of them has in his
mind a similar experience as at the naming of great corporeal
sufferings, such as tooth-aches, and stomach-aches. It is thus, however,
that it seems to be with most people at present. Owing to the universal
inexperience of both kinds of pain, and the comparative rarity of the
spectacle of a sufferer, an important consequence results: people now
hate pain far more than earlier man did, and calumniate it worse than
ever; indeed people nowadays can hardly endure the _thought_ of pain,
and make out of it an affair of conscience and a reproach to collective
existence. The appearance of pessimistic philosophies is not at all the
sign of great and dreadful miseries; for these interrogative marks
regarding the worth of life appear in periods when the refinement and
alleviation of existence already deem the unavoidable gnat-stings of the
soul and body as altogether too bloody and wicked; and in the poverty of
actual experiences of pain, would now like to make _painful general
ideas_ appear as suffering of the worst kind.—There might indeed be a
remedy for pessimistic philosophies and the excessive sensibility which
seems to me the real "distress of the present":—but perhaps this remedy
already sounds too cruel, and would itself be reckoned among the
symptoms owing to which people at present conclude that "existence is
something evil." Well! the remedy for "the distress" is _distress_.
49.
_Magnanimity and allied Qualities._—Those paradoxical phenomena, such as
the sudden coldness in the demeanour of good-natured men, the humour of
the melancholy, and above all _magnanimity_, as a sudden renunciation of
revenge or of the gratification of envy—appear in men in whom there is a
powerful inner impulsiveness, in men of sudden satiety and sudden
disgust. Their satisfactions are so rapid and violent that satiety,
aversion, and flight into the antithetical taste, immediately follow
upon them: in this contrast the convulsion of feeling liberates itself,
in one person by sudden coldness, in another by laughter, and in a third
by tears and self-sacrifice. The magnanimous person appears to me—at
least that kind of magnanimous person who has always made most
impression—as a man with the strongest thirst for vengeance, to whom a
gratification presents itself close at hand, and who _already_ drinks it
off _in imagination_ so copiously, thoroughly, and to the last drop,
that an excessive, rapid disgust follows this rapid licentiousness;—he
now elevates himself "above himself," as one says, and forgives his
enemy, yea, blesses and honours him. With this violence done to himself,
however, with this mockery of his impulse to revenge, even still so
powerful, he merely yields to the new impulse, the disgust which has
become powerful, and does this just as impatiently and licentiously, as
a short time previously he _forestalled_, and as it were exhausted, the
joy of revenge with his fantasy. In magnanimity there is the same amount
of egoism as in revenge, but a different quality of egoism.
50.
_The Argument of Isolation._—The reproach of conscience, even in the
most conscientious, is weak against the feeling: "This and that are
contrary to the good morals of _your_ society." A cold glance or a wry
mouth, on the part of those among whom and for whom one has been
educated, is still _feared_ even by the strongest. What is really feared
there? Isolation! as the argument which demolishes even the best
arguments for a person or cause!—It is thus that the gregarious instinct
speaks in us.
51.
_Sense for Truth._—Commend me to all scepticism where I am permitted to
answer: "Let us put it to the test!" But I don't wish to hear anything
more of things and questions which do not admit of being tested. That is
the limit of my "sense for truth": for bravery has there lost its right.
52.
_What others Know of us._—That which we know of ourselves and have in
our memory is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as is
generally believed. One day it flashes upon our mind what _others_ know
of us (or think they know)—and then we acknowledge that it is the more
powerful. We get on with our bad conscience more easily than with our
bad reputation.
53.
_Where Goodness Begins._—Where bad eyesight can no longer see the evil
impulse as such, on account of its refinement,—there man sets up the
kingdom of goodness; and the feeling of having now gone over into the
kingdom of goodness brings all those impulses (such as the feelings of
security, of comfortableness, of benevolence) into simultaneous
activity, which were threatened and confined by the evil impulses.
Consequently, the duller the eye so much the further does goodness
extend! Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the populace and of children!
Hence the gloominess and grief (allied to the bad conscience) of great
thinkers.
54.
_The Consciousness of Appearance._—How wonderfully and novelly, and at
the same time how awfully and ironically, do I feel myself situated with
respect to collective existence, with my knowledge! I have _discovered_
for myself that the old humanity and animality, yea, the collective
primeval age, and the past of all sentient being, continues to meditate,
love, hate, and reason in me,—I have suddenly awoke in the midst of this
dream, but merely to the consciousness that I just dream, and that I
_must_ dream on in order not to perish; just as the sleep-walker must
dream on in order not to tumble down. What is it that is now
"appearance" to me! Verily, not the antithesis of any kind of
essence,—what knowledge can I assert of any kind of essence whatsoever,
except merely the predicates of its appearance! Verily not a dead mask
which one could put upon an unknown X, and which to be sure one could
also remove! Appearance is for me the operating and living thing itself;
which goes so far in its self-mockery as to make me feel that here there
is appearance, and Will o' the Wisp, and spirit-dance, and nothing
more,—that among all these dreamers, I also, the "thinker," dance my
dance, that the thinker is a means of prolonging further the terrestrial
dance, and in so far is one of the masters of ceremony of existence, and
that the sublime consistency and connectedness of all branches of
knowledge is perhaps, and will perhaps, be the best means for
_maintaining_ the universality of the dreaming, the complete, mutual
understandability of all those dreamers, and thereby _the duration of
the dream_.
55.
_The Ultimate Nobility of Character._—What then makes a person "noble"?
Certainly not that he makes sacrifices; even the frantic libertine makes
sacrifices. Certainly not that he generally follows his passions; there
are contemptible passions. Certainly not that he does something for
others and without selfishness; perhaps the effect of selfishness is
precisely at its greatest in the noblest persons.—But that the passion
which seizes the noble man is a peculiarity, without his knowing that it
is so: the use of a rare and singular measuring-rod, almost a frenzy:
the feeling of heat in things which feel cold to all other persons: a
divining of values for which scales have not yet been invented: a
sacrificing on altars which are consecrated to an unknown God: a bravery
without the desire for honour: a self-sufficiency which has
superabundance, and imparts to men and things. Hitherto, therefore, it
has been the rare in man, and the unconsciousness of this rareness, that
has made men noble. Here, however, let us consider that everything
ordinary, immediate, and indispensable, in short, what has been most
preservative of the species, and generally the _rule_ in mankind
hitherto, has been judged unreasonable and calumniated in its entirety
by this standard, in favour of the exceptions. To become the advocate of
the rule—that may perhaps be the ultimate form and refinement in which
nobility of character will reveal itself on earth.
56.