terrible man, who had himself as much in his own power and 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 amid, comœdia 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 uncritically and with so little selection for this or that cause:
_that_ which attracts them is the sight of eagerness for a 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
calls to 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 tear 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.