← Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Beyond Good and Evil Chapter 7. Our Virtues
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann Publisher: New York, NY: Vintage Books. Publish Date: 1886 Review Date: Status:💥
Annotations
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Our virtues?—It is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, although in all fairness they will not be the simpleminded and four-square virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honor—and at arm’s length. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we firstborn of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity and art of disguises, our mellow and, as it were, sweetened cruelty in spirit and senses—if we should have virtues we shall presumably have only virtues which have learned to get along best with our most secret and cordial inclinations, with our most ardent needs.
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Well then, let us look for them in our labyrinths—where, as is well known, all sorts of things lose themselves, all sorts of things are lost for good. And is there anything more beautiful than looking for one’s own virtues? Doesn’t this almost mean: believing in one’s own virtue? But this “believing in one’s virtue”—isn’t this at bottom the same thing that was formerly called one’s “good conscience,” that venerable long pigtail of a concept which our grandfathers fastened to the backs of their heads, and often enough also to the backside of their understanding? So it seems that however little we may seem old-fashioned and grandfatherly-honorable to ourselves in other matters, in one respect we are nevertheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience: we, too, still wear their pigtail.—Alas, if you knew how soon, very soon—all will be different!—
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As in the realm of stars the orbit of a planet is in some cases determined by two suns; as in certain cases suns of different colors shine near a single planet, sometimes with red light, sometimes with green light, and then occasionally illuminating the planet at the same time and flooding it with colors—so we modern men are determined, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our “starry sky,” by different moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colors, they are rarely univocal—and there are cases enough in which we perform actions of many colors.
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Love one’s enemies? I think this has been learned well: it is done thousands of times today, in small ways and big ways. Indeed, at times something higher and more sublime is done: we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best—but all of this unconsciously, without noise, without pomp, with that modesty and concealed goodness which forbids the mouth solemn words and virtue formulas. Morality as a pose—offends our taste today. That, too, is progress—just as it was progress when religion as a pose finally offended our fathers’ taste, including hostility and Voltairian bitterness against religion (and everything that formerly belonged to the gestures of free-thinkers). It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, with which the sound of all puritan litanies, all moral homilies and old-fashioned respectability won’t go.
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Beware of those who attach great value to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in making moral distinctions. They never forgive us once they have made a mistake in front of us (or, worse, against us): inevitably they become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if they should still remain our “friends.”
Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities, too.
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The psychologists of France—and where else are any psychologists left today?—still have not exhausted their bitter and manifold delight in the bêtise bourgeoise,1 just as if—enough, this betrays something. Flaubert, for example, that solid citizen of Rouen, in the end no longer saw, heard, or tasted anything else any more: this was his kind of self-torture and subtler cruelty. Now, for a change—since this is becoming boring—I propose another source of amusement: the unconscious craftiness with which all good, fat, solid, mediocre spirits react to higher spirits and their tasks—that subtle, involved, Jesuitical craftiness which is a thousand times more subtle than not only the understanding and taste of this middle class is at its best moments, but even the understanding of its victims—which proves once again that “instinct” is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent. In short, my dear psychologists, study the philosophy of the “norm” in its fight against the “exception”: there you have a spectacle that is good enough for gods and godlike malice! Or, still more clearly: vivisect the “good man,” the “homo bonae voluntatis” 2—yourselves!
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1 Bourgeois stupidity.
2 “Man of good will.”
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Moral judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those less limited—also a sort of compensation for having been ill-favored by nature—finally an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming refined—malice spiritualized. It pleases them deep down in their hearts that there are standards before which those overflowing with the wealth and privileges of the spirit are their equals: they fight for the “equality of all men before God” and almost need faith in God just for that They include the most vigorous foes of atheism. Anyone who said to them, “high spirituality is incomparable with any kind of solidity and respectability of a merely moral man” would enrage them—and I shall beware of doing this. Rather I want to flatter them with my proposition, that high spirituality itself exists only as the ultimate product of moral qualities; that it is a synthesis of all those states which are attributed to “merely moral” men, after they have been acquired singly through long discipline and exercise, perhaps through whole chains of generations; that high spirituality is the spiritualization of justice and of that gracious severity which knows that it is its mission to maintain the order of rank in the world, among things themselves—and not only among men.
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In view of the modern popularity of praise of the “disinterested,” we should bring to consciousness, perhaps not without some danger, what it is that elicits the people’s interest, and what are the things about which the common man is deeply and profoundly concerned—including the educated, even the scholars, and unless all appearances deceive, perhaps even the philosophers. Then the fact emerges that the vast majority of the things that interest and attract choosier and more refined tastes and every higher nature seem to the average man totally “uninteresting”; and when he nevertheless notices a devotion to such matters he calls it “désintéressé” and wonders how it is possible to act “without interest.”
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There have been philosophers who have known how to lend to this popular wonder a seductive and mystical-transcendental expression3(—perhaps because they did not know the higher nature from experience?)—instead of positing the naked truth, which is surely not hard to come by, that the “disinterested” action is an exceedingly interesting and interested action, assuming—
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3 Notably Kant.
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“And love?”—What? Even an action done from love is supposed to be “unegoistic”? But you dolts! “And the praise of sacrifices?”—But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return—perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself—that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more or at least to feel that he was “more.” But this a realm of questions and answers in which a choosier spirit does not like to dwell: even now truth finds it necessary to stifle her yawns when she is expected to give answers. In the end she is a woman: she should not be violated.
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It does happen, said a moralistic pedant and dealer in trifles, that I honor and exalt a man free of self-interest—not because he is free of self-interest but because he seems to me to be entitled to profit another human being at his own expense. Enough; the question is always who he is, and who the other person is. In a person, for example, who is called and made to command, self-denial and modest self-effacement would not be a virtue but the waste of a virtue: thus it seems to me. Every unegoistic morality that takes itself for unconditional and addresses itself to all does not only sin against taste: it is a provocation to sins of omission, one more seduction under the mask of philanthropy—and precisely a seduction and injury for the higher, rarer, privileged. Moralities must be forced to bow first of all before the order of rank; their presumption must be brought home to their conscience—until they finally reach agreement that it is immoral to say: “what is right for one is fair for the other.”
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4 What the “moralistic pedant” says, especially after the “Enough” (several lines above), seems very close, to put it mildly. to Nietzsche’s own position. Yet Nietzsche here dissociates himself from these remarks and ascribes them to a “pedant”—not because they are wrong but because he considers it pedantic and self-righteous to be so unhumorously and completely right See sections 30 and 40 above. With the final sentence of section 221 com-pare Ecce Homo, Chapter 1, end of section 5.
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Thus my moralistic pedant and bonhomme:4 does he deserve to be laughed at for thus admonishing moralities to become moral? But one should not be too right if one wants to have those who laugh on one’s own side; a grain of wrong actually belongs to good taste.
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Where pity is preached today—and, if you listen closely, this is the only religion preached now—psychologists should keep their cars open: through all the vanity, through all the noise that characterizes these preachers (like all preachers) they will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine sound of self-contempt. This belongs to that darkening and uglification of Europe which has been growing for a century now (and whose first symptoms were registered in a thoughtful letter Galiani wrote to Madame d’Epinay)5—unless it is the cause of this process. The man of “modern ideas,” this proud ape, is immeasurably dissatisfied with himself: that is certain. He suffers—and his vanity wants him to suffer only with others, to feel pity.—
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5 See note for section 26 above.
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The hybrid European—all in all, a tolerably ugly plebeian—simply needs a costume: he requires history as a storage room for costumes. To be sure, he soon notices that not one fits him very well; so he keeps changing. Let anyone look at the nineteenth century with an eye for these quick preferences and changes of the style masquerade; also for the moments of despair over the fact that “nothing is becoming.” It is no use to parade as romantic or classical, Christian or Florentine, baroque or “national,” in moribus et artibus: it “does not look good.”
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But the “spirit,” especially the “historical spirit,” finds its advantage even in this despair: again and again a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, and above all studied: we are the first age that has truly studied “costumes”—I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, tastes in the arts, and religions—prepared like no previous age for a carnival in the grand style, for the laughter and high spirits of the most spiritual revelry, for the transcendental heights of the highest nonsense and Aristophanean derision of the world.
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Perhaps this is where we shall still discover the realm of our invention, that realm in which we, too, can still be original, say as parodists of world history and God’s buffoons—perhaps, even if nothing else today has any future, our laughter may yet have a future.
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The historical sense (or the capacity for quickly guessing the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived; the “divinatory instinct” for the relations of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of active forces)—this historical sense to which we Europeans lay claim as our specialty has come to us in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe had been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races: only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and way of life, of cultures that formerly lay right next to each other or one on top of the other, now flows into us “modern souls,” thanks to this mixture; our instincts now run back everywhere; we ourselves are a kind of chaos. Finally, as already mentioned, “the spirit” sees its advantage in this.
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Through our semi-barbarism in body and desires we have secret access in all directions, as no noble age ever did; above all access to the labyrinths of unfinished cultures and to every semi-barbarism that ever existed on earth. And insofar as the most considerable part of human culture so far was semi-barbarism, “historical sense” almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything—which immediately proves it to be an ignoble sense.
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6 Vast or comprehensive spirit.
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We enjoy Homer again, for example: perhaps it is our most fortunate advantage that we know how to relish Homer whom the men of a noble culture (say, the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for his esprit vaste,6 and even their afterglow, Voltaire) cannot and could not assimilate so easily—whom to enjoy they scarcely permitted themselves. The very definite Yes and No of their palate, their easy nausea, their hesitant reserve toward everything foreign, their horror of the poor taste even of a lively curiosity, and altogether the reluctance of every noble and self-sufficient culture to own a new desire, a dissatisfaction with what is one’s own, and admiration for what is foreign—all this inclines and disposes them unfavorably even against the best things in the world which are not theirs or could not become their prey. No sense is more incomprehensible for such people than the historical sense and its submissive plebeian curiosity.
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It is no different with Shakespeare, that amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of tastes that would have all but killed an ancient Athenian of Aeschylus’ circle with laughter or irritation. But we—accept precisely this wild abundance of colors, this medley of what is most delicate, coarsest, and most artificial, with a secret familiarity and cordiality; we enjoy him as a superb subtlety of art saved up especially for us; and the disgusting odors and the proximity of the English rabble in which Shakespeare’s art and taste live we do not allow to disturb us any more than on the Chiaja of Naples, where we go our way with all our senses awake, enchanted and willing, though the sewer smells of the plebeian quarters fill the air.
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As men of the “historical sense” we also have our virtues; that cannot be denied: we are unpretentious, selfless, modest, courageous, full of self-overcoming, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating; but for all that we are perhaps not paragons of good taste. Let us finally own it to ourselves; what we men of the “historical sense” find most difficult to grasp, to feel, to taste once more, to love once more, what at bottom finds us prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity of every culture and art,7 that which is really noble in a work or human being, the moment when their sea is smooth and they have found halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and cold aspect of all things that have consummated themselves.
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Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is necessarily opposed to good taste, at least to the very best taste; and precisely the highest little strokes of luck and transfigurations of human life that briefly light up here and there we can recapture only poorly, hesitantly, by forcing ourselves—those moments and marvels when great power voluntarily stopped this side of the immeasurable and boundless, when an excess of subtle delight in sudden restraint and petrification, in standing firm and taking one’s measure, was enjoyed on still trembling ground. Measure is alien to us; let us own it; our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a steed that flies forward, we drop the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians—and reach our bliss only where we are most—in danger.
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Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism—all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naïvetés on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity.
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Pity with you—that, of course, is not pity in your sense: it is not pity with social “distress,” with “society” and its sick and unfortunate members, with those addicted to vice and maimed from the start, though the ground around us is littered with them; it is even less pity with grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata who long for dominion, calling it “freedom.” Our pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller—and there are moments when we behold your very pity with indescribable anxiety, when we resist this pity—when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity.
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You want, if possible—and there is no more insane “if possible”—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it-—that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible—that makes his destruction8 desirable.
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8 Untergang. Compare with this whole passage the Prologue of Zarathustra, especially sections 3–6, where Nietzsche plays with the words Untergang, Ubermensch (overman), and übenwinden (overcome) and contrasts the overman with “the last man” who has “invented happiness” and is contemptible.
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The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its. strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
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In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the “creature in man,” for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified—that which necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity—do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?
Thus it is pity versus pity.
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But to say it once more: there are higher problems than all problems of pleasure, pain, and pity; and every philosophy that stops with them is a naïveté.—
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We immoralists!—This world that concerns us, in which we fear and love, this almost invisible and inaudible world of subtle commanding and subtle obeying, in every way a world of the “almost,” involved, captious, peaked, and tender—indeed, it is defended well against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity. We have been spun into a severe yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of that—and in this we are “men of duty,” we, too. Occasionally, that is true, we dance in our “chains” and between our “swords”; more often, that is no less true, we gnash our teeth and feel impatient with all the secret hardness of our destiny. But we can do what we like—the dolts and appearances speaks against us, saying: “These are men without duty.” We always have the dolts and appearances against us.
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Honesty,9 supposing that this is our virtue from which we can-not get away, we free spirits—well, let us work on it with all our malice and love and not weary of “perfecting” ourselves in our virtue, the only one left us. May its splendor remain spread out one day like a gilded blue mocking evening light over this aging culture and its musty and gloomy seriousness! And if our honesty should nevertheless grow weary one day and sigh and stretch its limbs and find us too hard, and would like to have things better, easier, tenderer, like an agreeable vice—let us remain hard, we last Stoics! And let us dispatch to her assistance whatever we have in us of devilry: our disgust with what is clumsy and approximate, our “nitimur in vetitum”10 our adventurous courage, our seasoned and choosy curiosity, our subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the world that flies and flutters covetously around all the realms of the future—let us come to the assistance of our “god” with all our “devils”!
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9 Redlichkeit.
10 “We strive for the forbidden,” The quotation is from Ovid’s Amores, III. 4,17.
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11 Cf. Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), section 4: “… He will be mistaken for another and long be considered an ally of powers which he abominates… “ There, too, this is pictured as a consequence of honesty and courage. But when Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, in 1888, he no longer felt: “what matter?” Thus the first section of the Preface ends: “Under these circumstances there is a duty against which my custom, and even more the pride of my instincts, revolts at bottom; namely, to say: Listen to me! For I am not this one or that! Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!” There is also a note of the period 1885–88, published posthumously: “One generally mistakes me for someone else: I confess it; also that I should be done a great service if someone else were to defend and define me against these mistakes [Verwecheselungen]” (Werke, Musarion edition, vol. XIV, 318f.).
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It is probable that we shall be misunderstood and mistaken for others on this account: what matter?11
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Our honesty, we free spirits—let us see to it that it does not become our vanity, our finery and pomp, our limit, our stupidity. Every virtue inclines toward stupidity; every stupidity, toward virtue. “Stupid to the point of holiness,” they say in Russia; let us see to it that out of honesty we do not finally become saints and bores. Is not life a hundred times too short—for boredom? One really would have to believe in eternal life to——
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May I be forgiven the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and was a soporific and that “virtue” has been impaired more for me by its boring advocates than by anything else, though I am not denying their general utility. It is important that as few people as possible should think about morality; hence it is very important that morality should not one day become interesting. But there is no reason for worry. Things still stand today as they have always stood: I see nobody in Europe who has (let alone, promotes) any awareness that thinking about morality could become dangerous, captious, seductive—that there might be any calamity involved.
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Consider, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable British utilitarians, how they walk clumsily and honorably in Bentham’s footsteps,
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Not a new idea, no trace of a subtler version or twist of an old idea, not even a real history of what had been thought before: altogether an impossible literature, unless one knows how to flavor it with some malice.
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For into these moralists, too (one simply has to read them with ulterior thoughts, if one has to read them), that old English vice has crept which is called cant and consists in moral Tartuffery; only this time it hides in a new, scientific, form. A secret fight against a bad conscience is not lacking either, as it is only fair that a race of former Puritans will have a bad conscience whenever it tries to deal with morality scientifically. (Isn’t a moral philosopher the opposite of a Puritan? Namely, insofar as he is a thinker who considers morality questionable, as calling for question marks, in short as a problem? Should moralizing not be—immoral?)
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Ultimately they all want English morality to be proved right—because this serves humanity best, or “the general utility,” or “the happiness of the greatest number”—no, the happiness of England. With all their powers they want to prove to themselves that the striving for English happiness—I mean for comfort and fashion14(and at best a seat in Parliament)—is at the same time also the right way to virtue; indeed that whatever virtue has existed in the world so far must have consisted in such striving.
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None of these ponderous herd animals with their unquiet consciences (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as the cause of the general welfare) wants to know or even sense that “the general welfare” is no ideal, no goal, no remotely intelligible concept, but only an emetic—that what is fair for one cannot by any means for that reason alone also be fair for others; that the demand of one morality for all is detrimental for the higher men; in short, that there is an order of rank between man and man, hence also between morality and morality. They are a modest and thoroughly mediocre type of man, these utilitarian Englishmen, and, as said above, insofar as they are boring one cannot think highly enough of their utility.
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In late ages that may be proud of their humanity, so much fear remains, so much superstitious fear of the “savage cruel beast” whose conquest is the very pride of these more humane ages, that even palpable truths remain unspoken for centuries, as if by some agreement, because they look as if they might reanimate that savage beast one has finally “mortified.”
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We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes. We should at long last learn impatience lest such immodest fat errors keep on strutting about virtuously and saucily, as have been fostered about tragedy, for example, by philosophers both ancient and modern. Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That “savage animal” has not really been “mortified”; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine.
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What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty.
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—what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, “cruelty.”
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To see this we must, of course, chase away the clumsy psychology of bygone times which had nothing to teach about cruelty except that it came into being at the sight of the sufferings of others. There is also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment at one’s own suffering, at making oneself suffer—and wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation, as among Phoenicians and ascetics, or altogether to de-serialization, decarnalization, contrition, Puritanical spasms of penitence, vivisection of the conscience, and sacrifizio dell’intelletto17 à la Pascal, he is secretly lured and pushed forward by his cruelty, by those dangerous thrills of cruelty turned against oneself.
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17 Sacrifice of the intellect
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Finally consider that even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclination of the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart—by way of saying No where he would like to say Yes, love, and adore—and thus acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty. Indeed, any insistence on profundity and thoroughness is a violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial—in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty,
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What I have just said of a “basic will of the spirit” may not be readily understood: permit me an explanation.
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That commanding something which the people call “the spirit” Wants to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel that it is master; it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that ties up, tames, and is domineering and truly masterful. Its needs and capacities are so far the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The spirit’s power to appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory—just as it involuntarily emphasizes certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the “external world,” retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate new “experiences,” to file new things in old files—growth, in a word-—or, more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of in-creased power.
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An apparently opposite drive serves this same will: a suddenly erupting decision in favor of ignorance, of deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one’s windows, an internal No to this or that thing, a refusal to let things approach, a kind of state of defense against much that is knowable, a satisfaction with the dark, with the limiting horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignorance—all of which is necessary in proportion to a spirit’s power to appropriate, its “digestive capacity,” to speak metaphorically—and actually “the spirit” is relatively most similar to a stomach.
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Here belongs also the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a capricious intimation of the fact that such and such is not the case, that one merely accepts such and such a delight in all uncertainty and ambiguity, a jubilant self-enjoyment in the arbitrary narrowness and secrecy of some nook, in the all too near, in the foreground, in what is enlarged, diminished, displaced, beautified, a self-enjoyment in the caprice of all these expressions of power.
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Here belongs also, finally, that by no means unproblematic readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to dissimulate in front of them, that continual urge and surge of a creative, form-giving, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and craftiness of its masks, it also enjoys the feeling of its security behind them: after all, it is surely its Protean arts that defend and conceal it best.
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This will to mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface—for every surface is a cloak—is countered by that sublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge who insists on profundity, multiplicity, and thoroughness, with a will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste. Every courageous thinker will recognize this in himself, assuming only that, as fit, he has hardened and sharpened his eye for himself long enough and that he is used to severe discipline, as well as severe words. He will say; “there is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit”; let the virtuous and kindly try to talk him out of that!
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Indeed, it would sound nicer if we were said, whispered, reputed18 to be distinguished not by cruelty but by “extravagant honesty,” we free, very free spirits—and perhaps that will actually be our—posthumous reputation.19 Meanwhile—for there is plenty of time until then—we ourselves are probably least inclined to put on the garish finery of such moral word tinsels: our whole work so far makes us sick of this taste and its cheerful luxury. These are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful—they have something that swells one’s pride.
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But we hermits and marmots have long persuaded ourselves in the full secrecy of a hermit’s conscience that this worthy verbal pomp, too, belongs to the old mendacious pomp, junk, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such flattering colors and make-up as well, the basic text of homo natura must again be recognized.
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To translate man back into nature; to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura; to see to it that man henceforth stands before man as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, “you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!”—that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task—who would deny that? Why did we choose this insane task? Or, putting it differently: “why have knowledge at all?”
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Everybody will ask us that And we, pressed this way, we who have put the same question to ourselves a hundred times, we have found and find no better answer—
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20 Fate.
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Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely “preserve”—as physiologists know. But at the bottom of us, really “deep down,” there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum,20 of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. When-ever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable “this is I”; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn but only finish learning—only discover ultimately how this is “settled in him.” At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later—we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are—rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.” 21
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21 Cf. Freud
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After this abundant civility that I have just evidenced in relation to myself I shall perhaps be permitted more readily to state a few truths about “woman as such”—assuming that it is now known from the outset how very much these are after all only—my truths.
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Woman wants to become self-reliant—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about “woman as such”: this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of women at scientific self-exposure bring to light! Woman has much reason for shame; so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty licentiousness and immodesty lies concealed in woman—one only needs to study her behavior with children!—and so far all this was at bottom best repressed and kept under control by fear of man. Woe when “the eternally boring in woman”22—she is rich in that!—is permitted to venture forth! When she begins to unlearn thoroughly and on principle her prudence and art—of grace, of play, of chasing away worries, of lightening burdens and taking things lightly—and her subtle aptitude for agreeable desires!
199
Even now female voices are heard which—holy Aristophanes!—are frightening: they threaten with medical explicitness what woman wants from man, first and last Is it not in the worst taste when woman sets about becoming scientific that way? So far enlightenment of this sort was fortunately man’s affair, man’s lot-—we remained “among ourselves” in this; and whatever women write about “woman,” we may in the end reserve a healthy suspicion whether woman really wants enlightenment about herself—whether she can will it—
200
Unless a woman seeks a new adornment for herself that way—I do think adorning herself is part of the Eternal-Feminine?—she surely wants to inspire fear of herself—perhaps she seeks mastery. But she does not want truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. Let us men confess it: we honor and love precisely this art and this instinct in woman—we who have a hard time and for our relief like to associate with beings under whose hands, eyes, and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity23 almost appear to us like folly.
200
Finally I pose the question: has ever a woman conceded profundity to a woman’s head, or justice to a woman’s heart? And is it not true that on the whole “woman” has so far been despised most by woman herself—and by no means by us?
200
We men wish that woman should not go on compromising herself through enlightenment—just as it was man’s thoughtfulness and consideration for woman that found expression in the church decree: mutter taceat in ecclesial24 It was for woman’s good when Napoleon gave the all too eloquent Madame de Staël to understand: mutter taceat in politicis!25 And I think it is a real friend of women that counsels them today: mutter taceat de mulierel26
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24 Woman should be silent in church.
25 Woman should be silent when it comes to politics.
26 Woman should be silent about woman.
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It betrays a corruption of the instincts—quite apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste—when a woman adduces Madame Roland or Madame de Staël or Monsieur George Sand, of all people, as if they proved anything in favor of “woman as such.” Among men these three are the three comical women as such-nothing morel—and precisely the best involuntary counterarguments against emancipation and feminine vainglory.
201
Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook: the gruesome thoughtlessness to winch the feeding of the family and of the master of the house is abandoned! Woman does not understand what food means— and wants to be cook. If woman were a thinking creature, she, as cook for millennia, would surely have had to discover the greatest physiological facts, and she would have had to gain possession of the art of healing. Bad cooks—and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen—have delayed human development longest and impaired it most: nor have things improved much even today. A lecture for finishing-school girls.
201
There are expressions and bull’s-eyes of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized. Among these belongs the occasional remark of Madame de Lambert to her son: “mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que de folies, qui vous feront grand plaissir” 27—incidentally the most motherly and prudent word ever directed to a son.
201
What Dante and Goethe believed about woman—the former when he sang, “ella guardava suso, ed io in lei”28 and the latter when he translated this, “the Eternal-Feminine attracts us higher”— I do not doubt that every nobler woman will resist this faith, for she believes the same thing about the Eternal-Masculine—
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27 “My friend, permit yourself nothing but follies—that will give you great pleasure.”
28 “She looked up, and I at her.”
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SEVEN EPIGRAMS ON WOMAN
How the longest boredom flees, when a man comes on his knees!
Science and old age at length give weak virtue, too, some strength.
Black dress and a silent part make every woman appear—smart.
Whom I thank for my success? God!—and my dear tailoress.
Young: flower-covered den. Old: a dragon denizen.
Noble name, the legs are fine, man as well: that he were mine!
Ample meaning, speech concise29—she-ass, watch for slippery ice!
201
Men have so far treated women like birds who had strayed to them from some height: as something more refined and vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, and more soulful—but as something one has to lock up lest it fly away.
202
To go wrong on the fundamental problem of “man and woman,” to deny the most abysmal antagonism between them and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, to dream perhaps of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations—that is a typical sign of shallowness, and a thinker who has proved shallow in this dangerous place—shallow in his instinct—may be considered altogether suspicious, even more—betrayed, exposed: probably he will be too “short” for all fundamental problems of life, of the life yet to come, too, and incapable of attaining any depth.31
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31 Fortunately for Nietzsche, this is surely wrong. But it is worth asking which, if any, of his other ideas are of a piece with his secondhand wisdom about “woman”: probably his embarrassingly frequent invocation of ‘…severity” and “hardness” and other such terms—the almost ritual repetition of the words, not necessarily, if at all, the spiritualized conceptions he develops with their aid—and perhaps also the tenor of his remarks about democracy and parliaments. Goethe said: “The greatest human beings are always connected with their century by means of some weakness” (Elective Affinities). At these points Nietzsche’s deliberate “untimeliness” now seems time-bound, dated, and as shallow as what he attacked.
202
A man, on the other hand, who has depth, in his spirit as well as in his desires, including that depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and hardness and easily mistaken for them, must always think about woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of woman as a possession, as property that can be locked, as something predestined for service and achieving her perfection in that. Here he must base himself on the tremendous reason of Asia, on Asia’s superiority in the instincts, as the Greeks did formerly, who were Asia’s best heirs and students: as is well known, from Homer’s time to the age of Pericles, as their culture increased along with the range of their powers, they also gradually became more severe, in brief, more Oriental, against woman. How necessary, how logical, how humanely desirable even, this was—is worth pondering.
202
In no age has the weaker sex been treated with as much respect by men as in ours: that belongs to the democratic inclination and basic taste, just like disrespectfulness for old age. No wonder that this respect is immediately abused. One wants more, one learns to demand, finally one almost finds this tribute of respect insulting, one would prefer competition for rights, indeed even a genuine fight: enough, woman loses her modesty. Let us immediately add that she also loses taste. She unlearns her fear of man: but the woman who “unlearns fear” surrenders her most womanly instincts.
203
That woman ventures forth when the aspect of man that inspires fear—let us say more precisely, when the man in man is no longer desired and cultivated—that is fair enough, also comprehensible enough. What is harder to comprehend is that, by the same token—woman degenerates. This is what is happening today: let us not deceive ourselves about that.
203
Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now aspires to the economic and legal self-reliance of a clerk:32 “woman as clerk” is inscribed on the gate to the modern society that is taking shape now. As she thus takes possession of new rights, aspires to become “master”33 and writes the “progress” of woman upon her standards and banners, the opposite development is taking place with terrible clarity: woman is retrogressing.
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32 Commis.
33 “Herr.”
203
Since the French Revolution, woman’s influence in Europe has decreased proportionately as her rights and claims have increased; and the “emancipation of woman,” insofar as that is demanded and promoted by women themselves (and not merely by shallow males) is thus seen to be an odd symptom of the increasing weakening and dulling of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity of which a woman who had turned out well—and such women are always prudent—would have to be thoroughly ashamed.
204
To lose the sense for the ground on which one is most certain of victory; to neglect practice with one’s proper weapons; to let oneself go before men, perhaps even “to the point of writing a book,” when formerly one disciplined oneself to subtle and cunning humility; to work with virtuous audacity against men’s faith in a basically different ideal that he takes to be concealed in woman, something Eternally-and-Necessarily-Feminine—to talk men emphatically and loquaciously out of their notion that woman must be maintained, taken care of, protected, and indulged like a more delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animal; the awkward and indignant search for everything slavelike and serflike that has characterized woman’s position in the order of society so far, and still does (as if slavery were a counterargument and not instead a condition of every higher culture, every enhancement of culture)—what is the meaning of all this if not a crumbling off feminine instincts, a defeminization?
204
To be sure, there are enough imbecilic friends and corrupters of woman among the scholarly asses of the male sex who advise woman to defeminize herself in this way and to imitate all the stupidities with which “man” in Europe, European “manliness,” is sick: they would like to reduce woman to the level of “general education,” probably even of reading the newspapers and talking about politics. Here and there they even want to turn women into freethinkers and scribblers—as if a woman without piety would not seem utterly obnoxious and ridiculous to a profound and godless man.
205
Almost everywhere one ruins her nerves with the most pathological and dangerous kind of music (our most recent German music) and makes her more hysterical by the day and more incapable of her first and last profession—to give birth to strong children. Altogether one wants to make her more “cultivated” and, as is said, make the weaker sex strong through culture—as if history did not teach us as impressively as possible that mating men “cultivated” and making them weak—weakening, splintering, and sicklying over the force of the will—have always kept pace, and that the most powerful and influential women of the world (most recently Napoleon’s mother) owed their power and ascendancy over men to the force of their will—and not to schoolmasters!
205
What inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature, which is more “natural” than man’s, the gennine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey, the tiger’s claw under the glove, the naïveté of her egoism, her uneducability and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, scope, and movement of her desires and virtues—
205
What, in spite of all fear, elicits pity for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is that she appears to suffer more, to be more vulnerable, more in need of love, and more condemned to disappointment than any other animal. Fear and pity: with these feelings man has so far confronted woman, always with one foot in tragedy34 which tears to pieces as it enchants.35
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34 Ever since Aristotle’s Poetics (1449b), pity and fear have been associated with tragedy. Cf. also 1452a, 1453b.
35 Allusion to Schiller’s famous line about fate in classical tragedy (in “Shakespeare’s Shadow”); “which elevates man when it crushes man.”
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What? And this should be the end? And the breaking of woman’s magic spell is at work? The “borification” of woman is slowly dawning? O Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal you always found most attractive; it still threatens you! Your old fable could yet become “history”—once more an immense stupidity might become master over you and cany you off. And this time no god would hide in it; no, only an “idea,” a “modern idea”!——