1
Why do I know more things than other people? Why, in fact, am I so
clever? I have never pondered over questions that are not questions. I
have never squandered my strength. Of actual religious difficulties,
for instance, I have no experience. I have never known what it is to
feel "sinful." In the same way I completely lack any reliable criterion
for ascertaining what constitutes a prick of conscience: from all
accounts a prick of conscience does not seem to be a very estimable
thing.... Once it was done I should hate to leave an action of mine
in the lurch; I should prefer completely to omit the evil outcome,
the consequences, from the problem concerning the value of an action.
In the face of evil consequences one is too ready to lose the proper
standpoint from which one's deed ought to be considered. A prick of
conscience strikes me as a sort of "evil eye." Something that has
failed should be honoured all the more jealously, precisely because
it has failed--this is much more in keeping with my morality.--"God,"
"the immortality of the soul," "salvation," a "beyond"--to all these
notions, even as a child, I never paid any attention whatsoever, nor
did I waste any time upon them,--maybe I was never _naif_ enough for
that?--I am quite unacquainted with atheism as a result, and still
less as an event in my life: in me it is inborn, instinctive. I am
too inquisitive, too incredulous, too high spirited, to be satisfied
with such a palpably clumsy solution of things. God is a too palpably
clumsy solution of things; a solution which shows a lack of delicacy
towards us thinkers--at bottom He is really no more than a coarse
and rude _prohibition_ of us: ye shall not think!... I am much more
interested in another question,--a question upon which the "salvation
of humanity" depends to a far greater degree than it does upon any
piece of theological curiosity: I refer to nutrition. For ordinary
purposes, it may be formulated as follows: "How precisely must _thou_
feed thyself in order to attain to thy maximum of power, or _virtù_
in the Renaissance style,--of virtue free from moralic acid?" My
experiences in regard to this matter have been as bad as they possibly
could be; I am surprised that I set myself this question so late in
life, and that it took me so long to draw "rational" conclusions
from my experiences. Only the absolute worth-_1_ lessness of German
culture--its "idealism"--can to some extent explain how it was that
precisely in this matter I was so backward that my ignorance was almost
saintly. This "culture," which from first to last teaches one to lose
sight of actual things and to hunt after thoroughly problematic and
so-called ideal aims, as, for instance, "classical culture"--as if it
were not hopeless from the start to try to unite "classical" and
"German" in one concept. It is even a little comical--try and imagine
a "classically cultured" citizen of Leipzig!--Indeed, I can say, that
up to a very mature age, my food was entirely bad--expressed morally,
it was "impersonal," "selfless," "altruistic," to the glory of cooks
and all other fellow-Christians. It was through the cooking in vogue
at Leipzig, for instance, together with my first study of Schopenhauer
(1865), that I earnestly renounced my "Will to Live." To spoil one's
stomach by absorbing insufficient nourishment--this problem seemed to
my mind solved with admirable felicity by the above-mentioned cookery.
(It is said that in the year 1866 changes were introduced into this
department.) But as to German cookery in general--what has it not got
on its conscience! Soup _before_ the meal (still called _alla tedesca_
in the Venetian cookery books of the sixteenth century); meat boiled
to shreds, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of
pastries into paper-weights! And, if you add thereto the absolutely
bestial post-prandial drinking habits of the _ancients,_ and not alone
of the ancient Germans, you will understand where German intellect
took its origin--that is to say, in sadly disordered intestines....
German intellect is indigestion; it can assimilate nothing. But even
English diet, which in comparison with German, and indeed with French
alimentation, seems to me to constitute a "return to Nature,"--that is
to say, to cannibalism,--is profoundly opposed to my own instincts. It
seems to me to give the intellect heavy feet, in fact, Englishwomen's
feet.... The best cooking is that of Piedmont. Alcoholic drinks do
not agree with me; a single glass of wine or beer a day is amply
sufficient to turn life into a valley of tears for me;--in Munich live
my antipodes. Although I admit that this knowledge came to me somewhat
late, it already formed part of my experience even as a child. As a boy
I believed that the drinking of wine and the smoking of tobacco were at
first but the vanities of youths, and later merely bad habits. Maybe
the poor wine of Naumburg was partly responsible for this poor opinion
of wine in general. In order to believe that wine was exhilarating, I
should have had to be a Christian--in other words, I should have had to
believe in what, to my mind, is an absurdity. Strange to say, whereas
small quantities of alcohol, taken with plenty of water, succeed in
making me feel out of sorts, large quantities turn me almost into a
rollicking tar. Even as a boy I showed my bravado in this respect. To
compose a long Latin essay in one night, to revise and recopy it, to
aspire with my pen to emulating the exactitude and the terseness of my
model, Sallust, and to pour a few very strong grogs over it all--this
mode of procedure, while I was a pupil at the venerable old school of
Pforta, was not in the least out of keeping with my physiology, nor
perhaps with that of Sallust, however much it may have been alien to
dignified Pforta. Later on, towards the middle of my life, I grew more
and more opposed to alcoholic drinks: I, an opponent of vegetarianism,
who have experienced what vegetarianism is,--just as Wagner, who
converted me back to meat, experienced it,--cannot with sufficient
earnestness advise all more _spiritual_ natures to abstain absolutely
from alcohol. Water answers the purpose.... I have a predilection in
favour of those places where in all directions one has opportunities
of drinking from running brooks (Nice, Turin, Sils). _In vino Veritas_:
it seems that here once more I am at variance with the rest of the
world about the concept "Truth"--with me spirit moves on the face of
the waters.... Here are a few more indications as to my morality. A
heavy meal is digested more easily than an inadequate one. The first
principle of a good digestion is that the stomach should become active
as a whole. A man ought, therefore, to know the size of his stomach.
For the same reasons all those interminable meals, which I call
interrupted sacrificial feasts, and which are to be had at any table
d'hôte, are strongly to be deprecated. Nothing should be eaten between
meals, coffee should be given up--coffee makes one gloomy. Tea is
beneficial only in the morning. It should be taken in small quantities,
but very strong. It may be very harmful, and indispose you for the
whole day, if it be taken the least bit too weak. Everybody has his own
standard in this matter, often between the narrowest and most delicate
limits. In an enervating climate tea is not a good beverage with which
to start the day: an hour before taking it an excellent thing is to
drink a cup of thick cocoa, feed from oil. Remain seated as little as
possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to
the accompaniment of free bodily motion--nor in one in which even the
muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in
the intestines. A sedentary life, as I have already said elsewhere, is
the real sin against the Holy Spirit.
2.
To the question of nutrition, that of locality and climate is next of
kin. Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and
anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim
to all his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice.
The influence of climate upon the bodily functions, affecting their
acceleration or retardation, extends so far, that a blunder in the
choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from
his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that
he never even comes face to face with it. Animal vigour never acquires
enough strength in him in order to reach that pitch of artistic freedom
which makes his own soul whisper to him: I, alone, can do that.... Ever
so slight a tendency to laziness in the intestines, once it has become
a habit, is quite sufficient to make something mediocre, something
"German" out of a genius; the climate of Germany, alone, is enough to
discourage the strongest and most heroically disposed intestines. The
tempo of the body's functions is closely bound up with the agility or
the clumsiness of the spirit's feet; spirit itself is indeed only a
form of these organic functions. Let anybody make a list of the places
in which men of great intellect have been found, and are still found;
where wit, subtlety, and malice constitute happiness; where genius
is almost necessarily at home: all of them rejoice in exceptionally
dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens--these names
prove something, namely: that genius is conditioned by dry air, by a
pure sky--that is to say, by rapid organic functions, by the constant
and ever-present possibility of procuring for one's self great and
even enormous quantities of strength. I have a certain case in mind
in which a man of remarkable intellect and independent spirit became
a narrow, craven specialist and a grumpy old crank, simply owing to
a lack of subtlety in his instinct for climate. And I myself might
have been an example of the same thing, if illness had not compelled
me to reason, and to reflect upon reason realistically. Now that I
have learnt through long practice to read the effects of climatic and
meteorological influences, from my own body, as though from a very
delicate and reliable instrument, and that I am able to calculate the
change in degrees of atmospheric moisture by means of physiological
observations upon myself, even on so short a journey as that from
Turin to Milan; I think with horror of the ghastly fact that my
whole life, until the last ten years,--the most perilous years,--has
always been spent in the wrong, and what to me ought to have been
the most forbidden, places. Naumburg, Pforta, Thuringia in general,
Leipzig, Bâle, Venice--so many ill-starred places for a constitution
like mine. If I cannot recall one single happy reminiscence of my
childhood and youth, it is nonsense to suppose that so-called "moral"
causes could account for this--as, for instance, the incontestable
fact that I lacked companions that could have satisfied me; for this
fact is the same to-day as it ever was, and it does not prevent me
from being cheerful and brave. But it was ignorance in physiological
matters--that confounded "Idealism"--that was the real curse of my
life. This was the superfluous and foolish element in my existence;
something from which nothing could spring, and for which there can be
no settlement and no compensation. As the outcome of this "Idealism"
I regard all the blunders, the great aberrations of instinct, and
the "modest specialisations" which drew me aside from the task of my
life; as, for instance, the fact that I became a philologist--why
not at least a medical man or anything else which might have opened
my eyes? My days at Bâle, the whole of my intellectual routine,
including my daily time-table, was an absolutely senseless abuse of
extraordinary powers, without the slightest compensation for the
strength that I spent, without even a thought of what I was squandering
and how its place might be filled. I lacked all subtlety in egoism,
all the fostering care of an imperative instinct; I was in a state
in which one is ready to regard one's self as anybody's equal, a
state of "disinterestedness," a forgetting of one's distance from
others--something, in short, for which I can never forgive myself.
When I had well-nigh reached the end of my tether, simply because I
had almost reached my end, I began to reflect upon the fundamental
absurdity of my life--"Idealism." It was _illness_ that first brought
me to reason.
3
After the choice of nutrition, the choice of climate and locality, the
third matter concerning which one must not on any account make a
blunder, is the choice of the manner in which one _recuperates one's
strength._ Here, again, according to the extent to which a spirit is
_sui generis,_ the limits of that which he can allow himself--in other
words, the limits of that which is beneficial to him--become more and
more confined. As far as I in particular am concerned, _reading_ in
general belongs to my means of recuperation; consequently it belongs
to that which rids me of myself, to that which enables me to wander
in strange sciences and strange souls--to that, in fact, about which
I am no longer in earnest. Indeed, it is while reading that I recover
from _my_ earnestness. During the time that I am deeply absorbed in
my work, no books are found within my reach; it would never occur
to me to allow any one to speak or even to think in my presence.
For that is what reading would mean.... Has any one ever actually
noticed, that, during the period of profound tension to which the
state of pregnancy condemns not only the mind, but also, at bottom,
the whole organism, accident and every kind of external stimulus acts
too acutely and strikes too deep? Accident and external stimuli must,
as far as possible, be avoided: a sort of walling-of-one's-self-in is
one of the primary instinctive precautions of spiritual pregnancy.
Shall I allow a strange thought to steal secretly over the wall?
For that is what reading would mean.... The periods of work and
fruit-fulness are followed by periods of recuperation: come hither,
ye delightful, intellectual, intelligent books! Shall I read German
books?... I must go back six months to catch myself with a book in
my hand. What was it? An excellent study by Victor Brochard upon the
Greek sceptics, in which my Laertiana[1] was used to advantage. The
sceptics!--the only _honourable_ types among that double-faced and
sometimes quintuple-faced throng, the philosophers!.... Otherwise I
almost always take refuge in the same books: altogether their number
is small; they are books which are precisely my proper fare. It is
not perhaps in my nature to read much, and of all sorts: a library
makes me ill. Neither is it my nature to love much or many kinds of
things. Suspicion or even hostility towards new books is much more
akin to my instinctive feeling than "toleration," _largeur de cœur,_
and other forms of "neighbour-love." ... It is to a small number of
old French authors, that I always return again and again; I believe
only in French culture, and regard everything else in Europe which
calls itself "culture" as a misunderstanding. I do not even take
the German kind into consideration.... The few instances of higher
culture with which I have met in Germany were all French in their
origin. The most striking example of this was Madame Cosima Wagner,
by far the most decisive voice in matters of taste that I have ever
heard. If I do not read, but literally love Pascal? as the most
instinctive sacrifice to Christianity, killing himself inch by inch,
first bodily, then spiritually, according to the terrible consistency
of this most appalling form of inhuman cruelty; if I have something
of Montaigne's mischievousness in my soul, and--who knows?--perhaps
also in my body; if my artist's taste endeavours to defend the names
of Molière, Corneille, and Racine, and not without bitterness, against
such a wild genius as Shakespeare--all this does not prevent me from
regarding even the latter-day Frenchmen also as charming companions.
I can think of absolutely no century in history, in which a netful of
more inquisitive and at the same time more subtle psychologists could
be drawn up together than in the Paris of the present day. Let me
mention a few at random--for their number is by no means small--Paul
Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre;
or, to point to one of strong race, a genuine Latin, of whom I am
particularly fond, Guy de Maupassant. Between ourselves, I prefer this
generation even to its masters, all of whom were corrupted by German
philosophy (Taine, for instance, by Hegel, whom he has to thank for
his misunderstanding of great men and great periods). Wherever Germany
extends her sway, she _ruins_ culture. It was the war which first saved
the spirit of France.... Stendhal is one of the happiest accidents of
my life--for everything that marks an epoch in it has been brought
to me by accident and never by means of a recommendation. He is quite
priceless, with his psychologist's eye, quick at forestalling and
anticipating; with his grasp of facts, which is reminiscent of the same
art in the greatest of all masters of facts (_ex ungue Napoleonem_);
and, last but not least, as an honest atheist--a specimen which is
both rare and difficult to discover in France--all honour to Prosper
Mérimée!... Maybe that I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed
me of the best atheistic joke, which I of all people could have
perpetrated: "God's only excuse is that He does not exist" ... I myself
have said somewhere--What has been the greatest objection to Life
hitherto?--God....
4
It was Heinrich Heine who gave me the most perfect idea of what a
lyrical poet could be. In vain do I search through all the kingdoms of
antiquity or of modern times for anything to resemble his sweet and
passionate music. He possessed that divine wickedness, without which
perfection itself becomes unthinkable to me,--I estimate the value of
men, of races, according to the extent to which they are unable to
conceive of a god who has not a dash of the satyr in him. And with
what mastery he wields his native tongue! One day it will be said of
Heine and me that we were by far the greatest artists of the German
language that have ever existed, and that we left all the efforts that
mere Germans made in this language an incalculable distance behind
us. I must be profoundly related to Byron's _Manfred:_ of all the
dark abysses in this work I found the counterparts in my own soul--at
the age of thirteen I was ripe for this book. Words fail me, I have
only a look, for those who dare to utter the name of _Faust_ in the
presence of _Manfred._ The Germans are _incapable_ of conceiving
anything sublime: for a proof of this, look at Schumann! Out of anger
for this mawkish Saxon, I once deliberately composed a counter-overture
to _Manfred,_ of which Hans von Bülow declared he had never seen the
like before on paper: such compositions amounted to a violation of
Euterpe. When I cast about me for my highest formula of Shakespeare,
I find invariably but this one: that he conceived the type of Cæsar.
Such things a man cannot guess--he either is the thing, or he is not.
The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.
This is so to such an extent, that often after a lapse of time he
can no longer endure his own work.... After casting a glance between
the pages of my _Zarathustra,_ I pace my room to and fro for half
an hour at a time, unable to overcome an insufferable fit of tears.
I know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: how a man
must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown! Is
Hamlet _understood_? It is not doubt, but certitude that drives one
mad.... But in order to feel this, one must be profound, one must be
an abyss, a philosopher.... We all fear the truth.... And, to make a
confession; I feel instinctively certain and convinced that Lord Bacon
is the originator, the self-torturer, of this most sinister kind of
literature: what do I care about the miserable gabble of American
muddlers and blockheads? But the power for the greatest realism in
vision is not only compatible with the greatest realism in deeds,
with the monstrous in deeds, with crime--_it actually presupposes the
latter._ ... We do not know half enough about Lord Bacon--the first
realist in all the highest acceptation of this word--to be sure of
everything he did, everything he willed, and everything he experienced
in his inmost soul.... Let the critics go to hell! Suppose I had
christened my _Zarathustra_ with a name not my own,--let us say with
Richard Wagner's name,--the acumen of two thousand years would not have
sufficed to guess that the author of _Human, all-too-Human_ was the
visionary of _Zarathustra._
5
As I am speaking here of the recreations of my life, I feel I must
express a word or two of gratitude for that which has refreshed me by
far the most heartily and most profoundly. This, without the slightest
doubt, was my intimate relationship with Richard Wagner. All my other
relationships with men I treat quite lightly; but I would not have the
days I spent at Tribschen--those days of confidence, of cheerfulness,
of sublime flashes, and of profound moments--blotted from my life
at any price. I know not what Wagner may have been for others; but
no cloud ever darkened _our_ sky. And this brings me back again to
France,--I have no arguments against Wagnerites, and _hoc genus omne_
who believe that they do honour to Wagner by believing him to be
like themselves; for such people I have only a contemptuous curl of
my lip. With a nature like mine, which is so strange to everything
Teutonic, that even the presence of a German retards my digestion, my
first meeting with Wagner was the first moment in my life in which I
breathed freely: I felt him, I honoured him, as a foreigner, as the
opposite and the incarnate contradiction of all "German virtues." We
who as children breathed the marshy atmosphere of the fifties, are
necessarily pessimists in regard to the concept "German"; we cannot
be anything else than revolutionaries--we can assent to no state of
affairs which allows the canting bigot to be at the top. I care not
a jot whether this canting bigot acts in different colours to-day,
whether he dresses in scarlet or dons the uniform of a hussar.[2] Very
well, then! Wagner was a revolutionary--he fled from the Germans....
As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris; that subtlety
of all the five senses which Wagner's art presupposes, those fingers
that can detect slight gradations, psychological morbidity--all these
things can be found only in Paris. Nowhere else can you meet with
this passion for questions of form, this earnestness in matters of
_mise-en-scène,_ which is the Parisian earnestness _par excellence._
In Germany no one has any idea of the tremendous ambition that fills
the heart of a Parisian artist. The German is a good fellow. Wagner was
by no means a good fellow.... But I have already said quite enough
on the subject of Wagner's real nature (see _Beyond Good and Evil,_
Aphorism 269), and about those to whom he is most closely related.
He is one of the late French romanticists, that high-soaring and
heaven-aspiring band of artists, like Delacroix and Berlioz, who in
their inmost nacres are sick and incurable, and who are all fanatics
of _expression,_ and virtuosos through and through.... Who, in sooth,
was the first intelligent follower of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire, the
very man who first understood Delacroix--that typical decadent, in whom
a whole generation of artists saw their reflection; he was perhaps the
last of them too.... What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner?
The fact that he condescended to the Germans--that he became a German
Imperialist.... Wherever Germany spreads, she _ruins_ culture.
6
Taking everything into consideration, I could never have survived my
youth without Wagnerian music. For I was condemned to the society
of Germans. If a man wish to get rid of a feeling of insufferable
oppression, he has to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner.
Wagner is the counter-poison to everything essentially German--the fact
that he is a poison too, I do not deny. From the moment that _Tristan_
was arranged for the piano--all honour to you, Herr von Bülow!--I was
a Wagnerite. Wagner's previous works seemed beneath me--they were too
commonplace, too "German." ... But to this day I am still seeking for a
work which would be a match to _Tristan_ in dangerous fascination, and
possess the same gruesome and dulcet quality of infinity; I seek among
all the arts in vain. All the quaint features of Leonardo da Vinci's
work lose their charm at the sound of the first bar in _Tristan._
This work is without question Wagner's _non plus ultra_; after its
creation, the composition of the _Mastersingers_ and of the _Ring_ was
a relaxation to him. To become more healthy--this in a nature like
Wagner's amounts to going backwards. The curiosity of the psychologist
is so great in me, that I regard it as quite a special privilege
to have lived at the right time, and to have lived precisely among
Germans, in order to be ripe for this work. The world must indeed be
empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for this "infernal
voluptuousness": it is allowable, it is even imperative, to employ a
mystic formula for this purpose. I suppose I know better than any one
the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of
strange ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar; and as I am
alive to-day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and
most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger,
I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The
bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony,
even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays,
and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men.
For, just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so, in
truth, am I, and ever will be. Ye lack two centuries of psychological
and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen!... But ye can never
recover the time lost.
7
To the most exceptional of my readers I should like to say just one
word about what I really exact from music. It must be cheerful and yet
profound, like an October afternoon. It must be original, exuberant,
and tender, and like a dainty, soft woman in roguishness and grace ... I
shall never admit that a German _can_ understand what music is. Those
musicians who are called German, the greatest and most famous foremost,
are all foreigners, either Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen--or Jews;
or else, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach, and Händel, they are Germans of
a strong race which is now extinct. For my own part, I have still
enough of the Pole left in me to let all other music go, if only I
can keep Chopin. For three reasons I would except Wagner's _Siegfried
Idyll,_ and perhaps also one or two things of Liszt, who excelled all
other musicians in the noble tone of his orchestration; and finally
everything that has been produced beyond the Alps_--this side_ of the
Alps.[3] I could not possibly dispense with Rossini, and still less
with my Southern soul in music, the work of my Venetian maestro, Pietro
Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps, all I really mean is Venice.
If I try to find a new word for music, I can never find any other
than Venice. I know not how to draw any distinction between tears
and music. I do not know how to think either of joy, or of the south,
without a shudder of fear.
On the bridge I stood
Lately, in gloomy night.
Came a distant song:
In golden drops it rolled
Over the glittering rim away.
Music, gondolas, lights--
Drunk, swam far forth in the gloom....
A stringed instrument, my soul,
Sang, imperceptibly moved,
A gondola song by stealth,
Gleaming for gaudy blessedness.
--Hearkened any thereto?
8
In all these things--in the choice of food, place, climate, and
recreation--the instinct of self-preservation is dominant, and this
instinct manifests itself with least ambiguity when it acts as an
instinct of defence. To close one's eyes to much, to seal one's ears to
much, to keep certain things at a distance--this is the first principle
of prudence, the first proof of the fact that a man is not an accident
but a necessity. The popular word for this instinct of defence is
_taste._ A man's imperative command is not only to say "no" in cases
where "yes" would be a sign of "disinterestedness," but also to say
"no" _as seldom as possible._ One must part with all that which compels
one to repeat "no," with ever greater frequency. The rationale of this
principle is that all discharges of defensive forces, however slight
they may be, involve enormous and absolutely superfluous losses when
they become regular and habitual. Our greatest expenditure of strength
is made up of those small and most frequent discharges of it. The act
of keeping things off, of holding them at a distance, amounts to a
discharge of strength,--do not deceive yourselves on this point!--and
an expenditure of energy directed at purely negative ends. Simply by
being compelled to keep constantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak
as to be unable any longer to defend himself. Suppose I were to step
out of my house, and, instead of the quiet and aristocratic city of
Turin, I were to find a German provincial town, my instinct would have
to brace itself together in order to repel all that which would pour in
upon it from this crushed-down and cowardly world. Or suppose I were
to find a large German city--that structure of vice in which nothing
grows, but where every single thing, whether good or bad, is squeezed
in from outside. In such circumstances should I not be compelled to
become a hedgehog? But to have prickles amounts to a squandering of
strength; they even constitute a twofold luxury, when, if we only chose
to do so, we could dispense with them and open our hands instead....
Another form of prudence and self-defence consists in trying to
react as seldom as possible, and to keep one's self aloof from those
circumstances and conditions wherein one would be condemned, as it
were, to suspend one's "liberty" and one's initiative, and become a
mere reacting medium. As an example of this I point to the intercourse
with books. The scholar who, in sooth, does little else than handle
books--with the philologist of average attainments their number may
amount to two hundred a day--ultimately forgets entirely and completely
the capacity of thinking for himself. When he has not a book between
his fingers he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to a stimulus
(a thought he has read),--finally all he does is to react. The scholar
exhausts his whole strength in saying either "yes" or "no" to matter
which has already been thought out, or in criticising it--he is no
longer capable of thought on his own account.... In him the instinct
of self-defence has decayed, otherwise he would defend himself against
books. The scholar is a decadent. With my own eyes I have seen gifted,
richly endowed, and free-spirited natures already "read to ruins" at
thirty, and mere wax vestas that have to be rubbed before they can give
off any sparks--or "thoughts." To set to early in the morning, at the
break of day, in all the fulness and dawn of one's strength, and to
read a book--this I call positively vicious!
9
At this point I can no longer evade a direct answer to the question,
_how one becomes what one is._ And in giving it, I shall have to
touch upon that masterpiece in the art of self-preservation, which is
_selfishness._ ... Granting that one's life-task--the determination and
the fate of one's life-task--greatly exceeds the average measure of
such things, nothing more dangerous could be conceived than to come
face to face with one's self by the side of this life-task. The fact
that one becomes what one is, presupposes that one has not the remotest
suspicion of what one is. From this standpoint even the blunders of
one's life have their own meaning and value, the temporary deviations
and aberrations, the moments of hesitation and of modesty, the
earnestness wasted upon duties which lie outside the actual life-task.
In these matters great wisdom, perhaps even the highest wisdom, comes
into activity: in these circumstances, in which _nosce teipsum_ would
be the sure road to ruin, forgetting one's self, misunderstanding
one's self, belittling one's self, narrowing one's self, and making
one's self mediocre, amount to reason itself. Expressed morally, to
love one's neighbour and to live for others and for other things
_may_ be the means of protection employed to maintain the hardest
kind of egoism. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary
to my principle and conviction, take the side of the altruistic
instincts; for here they are concerned in subserving selfishness
and self-discipline. The whole surface of consciousness--for
consciousness _is_ a surface--must be kept free from any one of the
great imperatives. Beware even of every striking word, of every
striking attitude! They are all so many risks which the instinct runs
of "understanding itself" too soon. Meanwhile the organising "idea,"
which is destined to become master, grows and continues to grow into
the depths,--it begins to command, it leads you slowly back from your
deviations and aberrations, it prepares individual qualities and
capacities, which one day will make themselves felt as indispensable
to the whole of your task,--step by step it cultivates all the
serviceable faculties, before it ever whispers a word concerning the
dominant task, the "goal," the "object," and the "meaning" of it all.
Looked at from this standpoint my life is simply amazing. For the task
of _transvaluing values,_ more capacities were needful perhaps than
could well be found side by side in one individual; and above all,
antagonistic capacities which had to be free from the mutual strife
and destruction which they involve. An order of rank among capacities;
distance; the art of separating without creating hostility; to refrain
from confounding things; to keep from reconciling things; to possess
enormous multifariousness and yet to be the reverse of chaos--all
this was the first condition, the long secret work, and the artistic
mastery of my instinct. Its superior guardianship manifested itself
with such exceeding strength, that not once did I ever dream of what
was growing within me--until suddenly all my capacities were ripe, and
one day burst forth in all the perfection of their highest bloom. I
cannot remember ever having exerted myself, I can point to no trace of
_struggle_ in my life; I am the reverse of a heroic nature. To "will"
something, to "strive" after something, to have an "aim" or a "desire"
in my mind--I know none of these things from experience. Even at this
moment I look out upon my future--a _broad_ future!--as upon a calm
sea: no sigh of longing makes a ripple on its surface. I have not the
slightest wish that anything should be otherwise than it is: I myself
would not be otherwise.... But in this matter I have always been the
same. I have never had a desire. A man who, after his four-and-fortieth
year, can say that he has never bothered himself about _honours,
women,_ or _money_!--not that they did not come his way.... It was
thus that I became one day a University Professor--I had never had
the remotest idea of such a thing; for I was scarcely four-and-twenty
years of age. In the same way, two years previously, I had one day
become a philologist, in the sense that my _first_ philological work,
my start in every way, was expressly obtained by my master Ritschl for
publication in his _Rheinisches Museum._[4] (Ritschl--and I say it
in all reverence--was the only genial scholar that I have ever met.
He possessed that pleasant kind of depravity which distinguishes us
Thuringians, and which makes even a German sympathetic--even in the
pursuit of truth we prefer to avail ourselves of roundabout ways. In
saying this I do not mean to underestimate in any way my Thuringian
brother, the intelligent Leopold von Ranke....)
10
You may be wondering why I should actually have related all these
trivial and, according to traditional accounts, insignificant details
to you; such action can but tell against me, more particularly if I
am fated to figure in great causes. To this I reply that these trivial
matters--diet, locality, climate, and one's mode of recreation, the
whole casuistry of; self-love--are inconceivably more important than,
all that which has hitherto been held in high esteem! It is precisely
in this quarter that we must begin to learn afresh. All those things
which mankind has valued with such earnestness heretofore are not even
real; they are mere creations of fancy, or, more strictly speaking,
_lies_ born of the evil instincts of diseased and, in the deepest
sense, noxious natures--all the concepts, "God," "soul," "virtue,"
"sin," "Beyond," "truth," "eternal life." ... But the greatness of
human nature, its "divinity," was sought for in them.... All questions
of politics, of social order, of education, have been falsified, root
and branch, owing to the fact that the most noxious men have been
taken for great men, and that people were taught to despise the small
things, or rather the fundamental things, of life. If I now choose to
compare myself with those creatures who have hitherto been honoured as
the first among men, the difference becomes obvious. I do not reckon
the so-called "first" men even as human beings--for me they are the
excrements of mankind, the products of disease and of the instinct
of revenge: they are so many monsters laden with rottenness, so many
hopeless incurables, who avenge themselves on life.... I wish to be
the opposite of these people: it is my privilege to have the very
sharpest discernment for every sign of healthy instincts. There is no
such thing as a morbid trait in me; even in times of serious illness
I have never grown morbid, and you might seek in vain for a trace of
fanaticism in my nature. No one can point to any moment of my life
in which I have assumed either an arrogant or a pathetic attitude.
Pathetic attitudes are not in keeping with greatness; he who needs
attitudes is false.... Beware of all picturesque men! Life was easy--in
fact easiest--to me, in those periods when it exacted the heaviest
duties from me. Whoever could have seen me during the seventy days of
this autumn, when, without interruption, I did a host of things of
the highest rank--things that no man can do nowadays--with a sense of
responsibility for all the ages yet to come, would have noticed no sign
of tension in my condition, but rather a state of overflowing freshness
and good cheer. Never have I eaten with more pleasant sensations,
never has my sleep been better. I know of no other manner of dealing
with great tasks, than as _play_: this, as a sign of greatness, is
an essential prerequisite. The slightest constraint, a sombre mien,
any hard accent in the voice--all these things are objections to a
man, but how much more to his work!... One must not have nerves....
Even to _suffer_ from solitude is an objection--the only thing I have
always suffered from is "multitude."[5] At an absurdly tender age, in
fact when I was seven years old, I already knew that no human speech
would ever reach me: did any one ever see me sad on that account? At
present I still possess the same affability towards everybody, I am
even full of consideration for the lowest: in all this there is not
an atom of haughtiness or of secret contempt. He whom I despise soon
guesses that he is despised by me: the very fact of my existence is
enough to rouse indignation in all those who have polluted blood in
their veins. My formula for greatness in man is! _amor fati_: the fact
that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or
behind him, or for all eternity. Not only must the necessary be borne,
and on no account concealed,--all idealism is falsehood in the face of
necessity,--but it must also be _loved...._
[Footnote 1: Nietzsche, as is well known, devoted much time when a
student at Leipzig to the study of three Greek philosophers, Theognis,
Diogenes Laertius, and Democritus. This study first bore fruit in the
case of a paper, _Zur Geschichte der Theognideischen Spruchsammlung_,
which was subsequently published by the most influential journal of
classical philology in Germany. Later, however, it enabled Nietzsche to
enter for the prize offered by the University of Leipzig for an essay,
_De fontibus Diogenis Laertii._ He was successful in gaining the prize,
and the treatise was afterwards published in the _Rheinisches Museum,_
and is still quoted as an authority. It is to this essay, written when
he was twenty-three years of age, that he here refers.--TR.]
[Footnote 2: The favourite uniform of the German Emperor, William
II.--TR.]
[Footnote 3: In the latter years of his life, Nietzsche practically
made Italy his home.--TR.]
[Footnote 4: See note on page 37.]
[Footnote 5: The German words are, _Einsamkeit_ and _Vielsamkeit._ The
latter was coined by Nietzsche. The English word "multitude" should,
therefore, be understood as signifying multifarious instincts and
gifts, which in Nietzsche strove for ascendancy and caused him more
suffering than any solitude. Complexity of this sort, held in check
by a dominant instinct, as in Nietzsche's case, is of course the only
possible basis of an artistic nature.--TR.]