← Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Beyond Good and Evil Chapter 6. We Scholars
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann Publisher: New York, NY: Vintage Books. Publish Date: 1886 Review Date: Status:💥
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At the risk that moralizing will here, too, turn out to be what it has always been—namely, according to Balzac, an intrepid montrer ses plaies2—I venture to speak out against an unseemly and harmful shift in the respective ranks of science3 and philosophy, which is now threatening to become established, quite unnoticed and as if it were accompanied by a perfectly good conscience. I am of the opinion that only experience—experience always seems to mean bad experience?—can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such higher questions of rank, lest we talk like blind men about colors—against science the way women and artists do (“Oh, this dreadful science!” sigh their instinct and embarrassment; “it always gets to the bottom of things!”) …
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2 “Showing one’s wounds.”
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3 Wissenschaft might just as welt be rendered as “scholarship” in this section—and in much German literature: the term does not have primary reference to the natural sciences as it does in twentieth-century English.
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The scholar’s4 declaration of independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the more refined effects of the democratic order—and disorder: the self-glorification and self-exaltation of scholars5 now stand in full bloom, in their finest spring, everywhere—which is not meant to imply that in this case self-praise smells pleasant6 “Freedom from all masters!” that is what the instinct of the rabble wants in this case, too; and after science has most happily rid itself of theology whose “handmaid” it was too long, it now aims with an excess of high spirits and a lack of understanding to lay down laws for philosophy and to play the “master” herself—what am I saying? the philosopher.
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4 Des wissenschafdichen Menschen.
5 Des Gelehrtetn.
6 An allusion the German proverb: “Self-praise stinks.”
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7Gebildet.
8Eingebildet.
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My memory—the memory of a scientific man, if you’ll forgive me—is bulging with naïvetés of overbearing that I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from the lips of young natural scientists and old physicians (not to speak of the most learned7 and conceited 8 of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both by profession). Sometimes it was the specialist and nook dweller who instinctively resisted any kind of synthetic enterprise and talent; sometimes the industrious worker who had got a whiff of otium9 and the noble riches in the psychic economy of the philosopher which had made him feel defensive and small. Sometimes it was that color blindness of the utility man who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted systems and a prodigal effort that “does nobody any good.” Sometimes the fear of masked mysticism and a correction of the limits of knowledge leaped forward; sometimes lack of respect for individual philosophers that had involuntarily generalized itself into lack of respect for philosophy.
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9Leisure.
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Most frequently, finally, I found among young scholars that what lay behind the arrogant contempt for philosophy was the bad aftereffect of—a philosopher to whom they now denied allegiance on the whole without, however, having broken the spell of his cutting evaluation of other philosophers—with the result of an over-all irritation with all philosophy. (Schopenhauer’s aftereffect on our most modern Germany, for example, seems to me to be of this kind: with his unintelligent wrath against Hegel10 he has succeeded in wrenching the whole last generation of Germans out of the context of German culture—a culture that was, considering everything, an elevation and divinatory subtlety of the historical sense. But precisely at this point Schopenhauer was poor, unreceptive, and un-German to the point of genius.)
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10Cf. section 252 below.
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Altogether, taking a large view, it may have been above all what was human, all too human, in short, the wretchedness of the most recent philosophy itself that most thoroughly damaged respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the instinct of the rabble. Let us confess how utterly our modern world lacks the whole type11 of a Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever other names these royal and magnificent hermits of the spirit had; and how it is with considerable justification that, confronted with such representatives of philosophy as are today, thanks to fashion, as much on top as they are really at the bottom—in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann12—a solid man of science may feel that he is of a better type and descent. It is especially the sight of those hodgepodge philosophers who call themselves “philosophers of reality” or “positivists” that is capable of injecting a dangerous mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young scholar: these are at best scholars and specialists themselves—that is palpable—they are all losers who have been brought back under the hegemony of science, after having desired more of themselves at some time without having had the right to this “more” and its responsibilities—and who now represent, in word and deed, honorably, resentfully, and vengefully, the unbelief in the masterly task and masterfulness of philosophy.
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Finally: how could it really be otherwise? Science is flourishing today and her good conscience is written all over her face, while the level to which all modern philosophy has gradually sunk, this rest of philosophy today, invites mistrust and displeasure, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to “theory of knowledge,” in fact no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence—a philosophy that never gets beyond the threshold and takes pains to deny itself the right to enter—that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something inspiring pity. How could such a philosophy—dominate!
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The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist”—so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent—or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his over-all value judgment does not mean much any more.
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It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae; he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge—unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience.
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Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the value of life—that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive—perhaps most disturbing and destructive13—experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence.
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11 The German word Art in this context could mean manner, but the same word near the end of the sentence plainly means type.
12 Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) and Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) were highly regarded at the time. Dühring was a virulent anti-Semite; Hartmann attempted to amalgamate Schopenhauer’s philosophy with Hegel’s.
13 Störendsten, zerstörendsten.
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Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized,14 “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God.15 And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, 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 risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game—
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14 Entsinnlichten. Cowan mistakenly translates this word as “demoralized.”
15 An allusion to the conception of Spinoza as “God-intoxicated.” Cowan: “divine alcoholic.”
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Compared to a genius—that is, to one who either begets or gives birth, taking both terms in their most elevated sense—the scholar, the scientific average man, always rather resembles an old maid: like her he is not conversant with the two most valuable functions of man. Indeed, one even concedes to both, to the scholars and to old maids, as it were by way of a compensation, that they are respectable—one stresses their respectability—and yet feels annoyed all over at having to make this concession.
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Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? To begin with, a type of man that is not noble, with the virtues of a type of man that is not noble, which is to say, a type that does not dominate and is neither authoritative nor self-sufficient: he has industriousness, patient acceptance of his place in rank and file, evenness and moderation in his abilities and needs, an instinct for his equals and for what they need; for example, that bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work, that claim to honor and recognition (which first of all presupposes literal recognition and recognizability), that sunshine of a good name, that constant attestation of his value and utility which is needed to overcome again and again the internal mistrust which is the sediment in the hearts of all dependent men and herd animals.
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The scholar also has, as is only fair, the diseases and bad manners of a type that is not noble: he is rich in petty envy and has lynx eyes for what is base in natures to whose heights he cannot attain. He is familiar, but only like those who let themselves go, not flow; and just before those who flow like great currents he freezes and becomes doubly reserved: his eye becomes like a smooth and reluctant lake with not a ripple of delight or sympathy.
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The worst and most dangerous thing of which scholars are capable comes from their sense of the mediocrity of their own type—from that Jesuitism of mediocrity which instinctively works at the annihilation of the uncommon man and tries to break every bent bow or, preferably, to unbend it Unbending—considerately, of course, with a solicitous hand—unbending with familiar pity, that is the characteristic art of Jesuitism which has always known how to introduce itself as a religion of pity.—
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16 Coinage, formed from ipsissima (very own).
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However gratefully we may welcome an objective spirit—and is there anyone who has never been mortally sick of everything subjective and of his accursed ipsissimosity? 16—in the end we also have to learn caution against our gratitude and put a halt to the exaggerated manner in which the “unselfing” and depersonalization of the spirit is being celebrated nowadays as if it were the goal itself and redemption and transfiguration. This is particularly characteristic of the pessimist’s school, which also has good reasons for according the highest honors to “disinterested knowledge.”
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The objective person who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct, after thousands of total and semi-failures, for once blossoms and blooms to the end, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are; but he belongs in the hand of one more powerful. He is only an instrument; let us say, he is a mirror—lit is no “end in himself.” The objective man is indeed a mirror: he is accustomed to submit before whatever wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that found in knowing and “mirroring”; he waits until something comes, and then spreads himself out tenderly lest light footsteps and the quick passage of spiritlike beings should be lost on his plane and skin.
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Whatever still remains in him of a “person” strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, still more often disturbing: to such an extent has he become a passageway and reflection of strange forms and events even to himself. He recollects “himself only with an effort and often mistakenly; he easily confuses himself with others, he errs about his own needs and is in this respect alone unsubtle and slovenly. Perhaps his health torments him, or the pettiness and cramped atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and company—yes, he forces himself to reflect on his torments—in vain.
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Already his thoughts roam—to a more general case, and tomorrow he knows no more than he did yesterday how he might be helped. He has lost any seriousness for himself, also time: he is cheerful, not for lack of distress, but for lack of fingers and handles for his need. His habit of meeting every thing and experience halfway, the sunny and impartial hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes his way, his type of unscrupulous benevolence, of dangerous unconcern about Yes and No—alas, there are cases enough in which he has to pay for these virtues! And as a human being he becomes all too easily the caput mortuum17 of these virtues.
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17 Dross.
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If love and hatred are wanted from him—I mean love and hatred as God, woman, and animal understand them—he will do what he can and give what he can. But one should not be surprised if it is not much—if just here he proves inauthentic, fragile, questionable, and worm-eaten. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and rather un tour de force, a little vanity and exaggeration. After all, he is genuine only insofar as he may be objective: only in his cheerful “totalism” he is still “nature” and “natural.” His mirror soul, eternally smoothing itself out, no longer knows how to affirm or negate; he does not command, neither does he destroy. “Je ne méprise presque rien,”18 he says with Leibniz: one should not overlook and underestimate that presque.19
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18 “I despise almost nothing.”
19 Almost.
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Neither is he a model man; he does not go before anyone, nor behind; altogether he places himself too far apart to have any reason to take sides for good or evil. When confusing him for so long with the philosopher, with the Caesarian cultivator and cultural dynamo,20 one accorded him far too high honors and overlooked his most essential characteristics: he is an instrument, something of a slave though certainly the most sublime type of slave, but in himself nothing—presque rien! The objective man is an instrument, a precious, easily injured and clouded instrument for measuring and, as an arrangement of mirrors, an artistic triumph that deserves care and honor; but he is ho goal, no conclusion and sunrise,21 no complementary man in whom the rest of existence is justified, no termination—and still less a beginning, a begetting and first cause, nothing tough, powerful, self-reliant that wants to be master—rather only a delicate, carefully dusted, fine, mobile pot for forms that still has to wait for some content and substance in order to “shape” itself accordingly—for the most part, a man without substance and content, a “selfless” man. Consequently, also nothing for women, in parenthesi.—
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21 Ausgang and Aufgang; literally, going out and going up.
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When a philosopher suggests these days that he is not a skeptic—I hope this is clear from the description just given of the objective spirit—everybody is annoyed. One begins to look at him apprehensively, one would like to ask, to ask so much—Indeed, among timid listeners, of whom there are legions now, he is henceforth considered dangerous. It is as if at his rejection of skepticism they heard some evil, menacing rumbling in the distance, as if a new explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihiline,22 a pessimism bonae voluntatis23 that does not merely say No, want No, but—horrible thought!—does No.
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22 Coinage, modeled on “nicotine”; cf. Antichrist, section 2 (Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).
23 Of good will.
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Against this type of “good will”—a will to the actual, active denial of life—there is today, according to common consent, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism, the gentle, fair, lulling poppy of skepticism; and even Hamlet is now prescribed by the doctors of the day against the “spirit”24 and its underground rumblings. “Aren’t our ears filled with wicked noises as it is?” asks the skeptic as a friend of quiet, and almost as a kind of security police; “this subterranean No is terrible! Be still at last, you pessimistic moles!”
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24 The Cowan translation has, instead of “against the ‘spirit’” [gegen den “Geist”], “to cure mind,” which misses the point of the remark about Hamlet.
Nietzsche had argued in one of the most brilliant passages of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, that Hamlet is no skeptic: “Action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much … Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action” (section 7).
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For the skeptic, being a delicate creature, is frightened all too easily; his conscience is trained to quiver at every No, indeed even at a Yes that is decisive and hard, and to feel as if it had been bitten.25 Yes and No—that goes against his morality; conversely, he likes to treat his virtue to a feast of noble abstinence, say, by repeating Montaigne’s “What do I know?” or Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing.” Or: “Here I don’t trust myself, here no door is open to me.” Or: “Even if one were open, why enter right away?” Or: “What use are all rash hypotheses? Entertaining no hypotheses at all might well be part of good taste. Must you insist on immediately straightening what is crooked? on filling up every hole with oakum? Isn’t there time? Doesn’t time have time? O you devilish brood, are you incapable of waiting? The uncertain has its charms, too; the sphinx, too, is a Circe; Circe, too, was a philosopher.”
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25 In German, conscience bites. Cf. the medieval “agenbite of inwit” of which James Joyce makes much in Ulysses.
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Thus a skeptic consoles himself; and it is true that he stands in need of some consolation. For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness; it always develops when races or classes that have long been separated are crossed suddenly and decisively. In the new generation that, as it were, has inherited in its blood diverse standards and values, everything is unrest, disturbance, doubt, attempt; the best forces have an inhibiting effect, the very virtues do not allow each other to grow and become strong; balance, a center of gravity, and perpendicular poise are lacking in body and soul. But what becomes sickest and degenerates most in such hybrids is the will: they no longer know independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willing—they doubt the “freedom of the will” even in their dreams.
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Our Europe of today, being the arena of an absurdly sudden attempt at a radical mixture of classes, and hence races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths—sometimes with that mobile skepticism which leaps impatiently and lasciviously from branch to branch, sometimes dismal like a cloud overcharged with question marks—and often mortally sick of its will. Paralysis of the will: where today does one not find this cripple sitting?
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And often in such finery! How seductive the finery looks! This disease enjoys the most beautiful pomp- and lie-costumes; and most of what today displays itself in the showcases, for example, as “objectivity,” “being scientific,” “l’art pour l’art” “pure knowledge, free of will,” is merely dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will: for this diagnosis of the European sickness I vouch.
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To what extent the new warlike age into which we Europeans have evidently entered may also favor the development of another and stronger type of skepticism, on that I want to comment for the present only in the form of a parable which those who like German history should understand readily. That unscrupulous enthusiast for handsome and very tall grenadiers who, as King of Prussia,26 brought into being a military and skeptical genius—and thus, when you come right down to it, that new type of German which has just now come to the top triumphantly—the questionable, mad father of Frederick the Great himself had the knack and lucky claw of genius, though only at one point: he knew what was missing in Germany at that time, and what lack was a hundred times more critical and urgent than, say, the lack of education and social graces—his antipathy against the young Frederick came from the fear of a deep instinct. Men were missing; and he suspected with the most bitter dismay that his own son was not man enough.
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26 Frederick William I, reigned 1713–40.
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In this he was deceived: but who, in his place, wouldn’t have deceived himself about that? He saw his son surrender to atheism, to esprit, to the hedonistic frivolity of clever Frenchmen: in the background he saw that great vampire, the spider of skepticism; he suspected the incurable misery of a heart that is no longer hard enough for evil or good, of a broken will that no longer commands, no longer is capable of commanding. Meanwhile there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism—who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?—the skepticism of audacious manliness which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest and first entered Germany in the shape of the great Frederick.
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This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart; it is the German form of skepticism which, in the form of a continued Frederickianism that had been sublimated spiritually, brought Europe for a long time under the hegemony of the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust.
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Thanks to the unconquerably strong and tough virility of the great German philologists and critical historians (viewed properly, all of them were also artists of destruction and dissolution), a new concept of the German spirit crystallized gradually in spite of all romanticism in music and philosophy, and the inclination to virile skepticism became a decisive trait, now, for example, as an intrepid eye, now as the courage and hardness of analysis, as the tough will to under-take dangerous journeys of exploration and spiritualized North Pole expeditions under desolate and dangerous skies.27
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27 It is essential for understanding Nietzsche to realize that he is not “for” or “against” skepticism, but that he analyzes one type of skepticism with disdain (section 208) before describing another with which he clearly identifies himself. It is equally characteristic that when he joins his countrymen in admiration of Frederick the Great he pays tribute to him not for his exploits and conquests but rather for his skepticism, and that his praise of “tough virility” is aimed at the sublimated, spiritual version found, for example, in philologists and historians. For Nietzsche’s anti-romanticism cf., e.g., The Gay Science (1887), section 370, cited at length and discussed in Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 12, section V.
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28 “That fatalistic, ironical, Mephistophelic spirit.” “Mephistophelic” obviously refers to Goethe’s Mephistopheles, not to Marlowe’s. For Goethe’s conception see Goethe’s Faust: The Original German and a New Translation and Introduction by Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, Anchor Books. 1962), pp. 22–25.
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There may be good reasons why warmblooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves just when they behold this spirit—cet esprit fataliste, ironique, méphistophelique,28 Michelet calls it, not without a shudder. But if we want to really feel what a distinction such fear of the “man” in the German spirit confers—a spirit through which Europe was after all awakened from her “dogmatic slumber” 29—we have to remember the former conception which was replaced by this one: it was not so long ago that a masculinized woman could dare with unbridled presumption to commend the Germans to the sympathy of Europe as being gentle, goodhearted, weak-willed, and poetic dolts.30 At long last we ought to understand deeply enough Napoleon’s surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what people had associated with the “German spirit” for centuries. “Voilà un homme!”— that meant: “But this is a man! And I had merely expected a German.”31—
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29 Allusion to Kant’s famous dictum, in the Preface to his Prolegomena (1783), that it was Hume who had first interrupted his “dogmatic slumber.”
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30 Allusion to Madame de Staël’s De l’ Allemagne (Paris, 1810).
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31 For Nietzsche’s conception of Goethe see, e.g., Twilight of the Idols, sections 49–51 (Portable Nietzsche, pp. 553–55.). Cf. also the title of one of Nietzsche’s last works, Ecce Homo (written in 1888).
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Suppose then that some trait in the image of the philosophers of the future poses the riddle whether they would not perhaps have to be skeptics in the sense suggested last, this would still designate only one feature and not them as a whole. With just as much right one could call them critics: and certainly they will be men of experiments.32 With the name in which I dared to baptize them I have already stressed expressly their attempts and delight in attempts: was this done because as critics in body and soul they like to employ experiments in a new, perhaps wider, perhaps more dangerous sense? Does their passion for knowledge force them to go further with audacious and painful experiments than the softhearted and effeminate taste of a democratic century could approve?
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33 Kant. Cf. Antichrist, section 11 (Portable Nietzsche, p. 577).
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No doubt, these coming philosophers will be least able to dispense with those serious and by no means unproblematic qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic; I mean the certainty of value standards, the deliberate employment of a unity of method, a shrewd courage, the ability to stand alone and give an account of themselves. Indeed, they admit to a pleasure in saying No and in taking things apart, and to a certain levelheaded cruelty that knows how to handle a knife surely and subtly, even when the heart bleeds. They will be harder (and perhaps not always only against themselves) than humane people might wish; they will not dally with “Truth” to be “pleased” or “elevated” or “inspired” by her. On the contrary, they will have little faith that truth of all things should be accompanied by such amusements for our feelings.
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They will smile, these severe spirits, if somebody should say in front of them: “This thought elevates me; how could it fail to be true?” Or: “This work delights me; how could it fail to be beautiful?” Or: “This artist makes me greater; how could he fail to be great?” Perhaps they do not merely have a smile but feel a genuine nausea over everything that is enthusiastic, idealistic, feminine, hermaphroditic in this vein. And whoever knew how to follow them into the most secret chambers of their hearts would scarcely find any intention there to reconcile “Christian feelings” with “classical taste” and possibly even with “modern parliamentarism” (though such conciliatory attempts are said to occur even among philosophers in our very unsure and consequently very conciliatory century).
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Critical discipline and every habit that is conducive to cleanliness and severity in matters of the spirit will be demanded by these philosophers not only of themselves: they could display them as their kind of jewels—nevertheless they still do not want to be called critics on that account. They consider it no small disgrace for philosophy when people decree, as is popular nowadays: “Philosophy itself is criticism and critical science—and nothing whatever besides.” This evaluation of philosophy may elicit applause from all the positivists of France and Germany (and it might even have pleased the heart and taste of Kant—one should remember the titles of his major works); our new philosophers will say nevertheless: critics are instruments of the philosopher and for that very reason, being instruments, a long ways from being philosophers themselves. Even the great Chinese of Königsberg33 was merely a great critic.—
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34 The dichotomy proposed in this section is highly questionable: we find both analyses and normative suggestions in the works of the major moral philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Spinoza and Kant; and normative thinkers or legislators who arc not also analysts are not philosophers. Yet Nietzsche’s point that something vital is lacking in the work of those who are merely “laborers” is certainly worth pondering, and the immediately following section offers a far superior suggestion about the ethos of the “true” philosopher.
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I insist that people should finally stop confounding philosophical laborers, and scientific men generally, with philosophers; precisely at this point we should be strict about giving “each his due,” and not far too much to those and far too little to these.
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It may be necessary for the education of a genuine philosopher that he himself has also once stood on all these steps on which his servants, the scientific laborers of philosophy, remain standing—have to remain standing. Perhaps he himself must have been critic and skeptic and dogmatist and historian and also poet and collector and traveler and solver of riddles and moralist and seer and “free spirit” and almost everything in order to pass through the whole range of human values and value feelings and to be able to see with many different eyes and consciences, from a height and into every distance, from the depths into every height, from a nook into every expanse. But all these are merely preconditions of his task: this task itself demands something different—it demands that he create values.
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Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations—that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called “truths.” It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even “time,” and to overcome the entire past—an enormous and wonderful task in whose service every subtle pride, every tough will can certainly find satisfaction.
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Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!” They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power.
Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers yet? Must there not be such philosophers?34—
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More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.
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By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement. Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said: “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home.”
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Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish every-body into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher—if today there could be philosophers—would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility.
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Today the taste of the time and the virtue of the time weakens and thins down the will; nothing is as timely as weakness of the will. In the philosopher’s ideal, therefore, precisely strength of the will, hardness, and the capacity for long-range decisions must belong to the concept of “greatness”—with as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a dumb, renunciatory, humble, selfless humanity was suitable for an opposite age, one that suffered, like the sixteenth century, from its accumulated energy of will and from the most savage floods and tidal waves of selfishness.
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In the age of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go—“toward happiness,” as they said; toward pleasure, as they acted—and who all the while still mouthed the ancient pompous words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, irony may have been required for greatness of soul,35 that Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the “noble,” with a look that said clearly enough: “Don’t dissemble in front of me! Here—we are equal.”
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35 Aristotle’s discussion of greatness of soul (megalopsychia) is worth quoting here, at least in part, because it evidently influenced Nietzsche. The valuations that find expression in Aristotle’s account are exceedingly remote from those of the New Testament and help us understand Nietzsche’s contrast of master morality and slave morality, introduced below (section 260). Moreover, in his long discussion of “what is noble,” Nietzsche emulates Aristotle’s descriptive mode.
“A person is thought to be great-souled if he claims much and deserves much [as Socrates did in the Apology when he said he deserved the greatest honor Athens could bestow]. … He that claims less than he deserves is small-souled. … The great-souled man is justified in despising other people—his estimates are correct; but most proud men have no good ground for their pride. … He is fond of conferring benefits, but ashamed to receive them, because the former is a mark of superiority and the latter of inferiority. … It is also characteristic of the great-souled men never to ask help from others, or only with reluctance, but to render aid willingly; and to be haughty towards men of position and fortune, but courteous towards those of moderate station. … He must be open both in love and in hate, since concealment shows timidity; and care more for the truth than for what people will think; … he is outspoken and frank, except when speaking with ironical self-depreciation, as he does to common people. … He does not bear a grudge, for it is not a mark of greatness of soul to recall things against people, especially the wrongs they have done you, but rather to overlook them. He is … not given to speaking evil himself, even of his enemies, except when he deliberately intends to give offence. … Such then being the great-souled man, the corresponding character on the side of deficiency is the small-souled man, and on that of excess the vain man” (Nicomachean Ethics IV.3, Rackham translation Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1947).
The whole passage is relevant and extremely interesting.
169
Today, conversely, when only the herd animal receives and dispenses honors in Europe, when “equality of rights” could all too easily be changed into equality in violating rights—I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and the abundance of creative power and masterfulness—today the concept of greatness entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being able to be different, standing alone and having to live independently.
169
And the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he posits: “He shall be greatest who can be loneliest, the most concealed, the most deviant, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full.” And to ask it once more: to-day—is greatness possible?
169
What a philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it, from experience—or one should have the pride not to know it. But nowadays all the world talks of things of which it cannot have any experience, and this is most true, and in the worst way, concerning philosophers and philosophical states: exceedingly few know them, may know them, and all popular opinions about them are false.
170
That genuinely philosophical combination, for example, of a bold and exuberant spirituality that runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity that takes no false step is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and therefore would seem incredible to them if somebody should speak of it in their presence. They picture every necessity as a kind of need, as a painstaking having-to-follow and being-compelled. And thinking itself they consider something slow and hesitant, almost as toil, and often-enough as “worthy of the sweat of the noble”—but not in the least as something light, divine, closely related to dancing and high spirits. “Thinking” and taking a matter “seriously,” considering it “grave”—for them all this belongs together: that is the only way they have “experienced” it.
170
Artists seem to have more sensitive noses in these matters, knowing only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything “voluntarily” but do everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, subtlety, full power, of creative placing, disposing, and forming reaches its peak—in short, that necessity and “freedom of the will” then become one in them.
170
Ultimately, there is an order of rank among states of the soul, and the order of rank of problems accords with this. The highest problems repulse everyone mercilessly who dares approach them without being predestined for their solution by the height and power of his spirituality. What does it avail when nimble smarties or clumsy solid mechanics and empiricists push near them, as is common today, trying with their plebeian ambition to enter the “court of courts,” Upon such carpets coarse feet may never step: the primeval law of things takes care of that; the doors remain closed to such obtrusiveness, even if they crash and crush their heads against them.
171
For every high world one must be born; or to speak more clearly, one must be cultivated for it: a right to philosophy—taking that word in its great sense—one has only by virtue of one’s origins; one’s ancestors, one’s “blood”36 decide here, too. Many generations must have labored to prepare the origin of the philosopher; every one of his virtues must have been acquired, nurtured, inherited, and digested singly, and not only the bold, light, delicate gait and course of his thoughts but above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the loftiness of glances that dominate and look down, feeling separated from the crowd and its duties and virtues, the affable protection and defense of whatever is misunderstood and slandered, whether it be god or devil, the pleasure and exercise of the great justice, the art of command, the width of the will, the slow eye that rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves37—
174
36 “Geblüt.” Nietzsche’s conception of “blood” is discussed, and other relevant passages are quoted, in Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, at the end of Chapter 10.
37 The element of snobbery and the infatuation with “dominating” and “looking down” are perhaps more obvious than Nietzsche’s perpetual sublimation and spiritualization of these and other similar qualities. It may be interesting to compare Nietzsche’s view with Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s in Act IV of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People:
“What a difference there is between a cultivated and an uncultivated animal family! Just look at a common barnyard hen… But now take a cultivated Spanish or Japanese hen, or take a noble pheasant or a turkey; indeed, you’ll see the difference. And then I refer you to dogs, which are so amazingly closely related to us men. Consider first a common plebeian dog—I mean, a disgusting, shaggy, moblike cur that merely runs down the streets and fouls the houses. And then compare the cur with a poodle that for several generations is descended from a noble house where it received good food and has had occasion to hear harmonious voices and music Don’t you suppose that the poodle’s brain has developed in a way quite different from the cur’s? You can count on it. It is such cultivated young poodles that jugglers can train to do the most astonishing tricks. A common peasant cur could never learn anything of the kind, even if stood on its head.”
Not only do Nietzsche and Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann share Lamarck’s belief in the heredity of acquired characteristics; both are concerned with spiritual nobility and realize that—to put it plainly—of two brothers one may have it and the other not Thus Stockmann says a little later: “But that’s how it always goes when plebeian descent is still in one’s limbs and one has not worked one’s way up to spiritual nobility… That kind of rabble of which I am speaking isn’t to be found only in the lower strata. My brother Peter—he is also a plebeian straight out of the book.”