The Gay Science Book One
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann Publisher: New York, NY: Vintage Books. Publish Date: 1887 Review Date: Status:💥
Annotations
111
Knowledge of misery.— Perhaps there is nothing that separates men or ages more profoundly than a difference in their knowledge of misery: misery of the soul as well as the body. Regarding the latter we moderns may well be, all of us, in spite of our frailties and infirmities, tyros who rely on fantasies, for lack of any ample firsthand experience—compared to the age of fear, the longest of all ages, in which individuals had to protect themselves. In those days, one received ample training in bodily torments and deprivations and one understood even a certain cruelty against oneself and a voluntary habituation to pain as a necessary means of self-preservation. In those days, one educated those close to one to endure pain; in those days, one enjoyed inflicting pain and saw the worst things of this kind happen to others without feeling anything but—one’s own safety. But regarding misery of the soul, I now look at every person to see whether he knows this from experience or only from descriptions; whether he still considers it necessary to simulate this knowledge, say, as a sign of refinement, or whether at the bottom of his soul he no longer believes in great pains of the soul and has much the same experience when they are mentioned that he has at the mention of great physical sufferings, which make him think of his own toothaches and stomachaches. But that is how matters seem to me to stand with most people today.
111
The general lack of experience of pain of both kinds and the relative rarity of the sight of anyone who is suffering have an important consequence: pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one considers the existence of the mere thought of pain scarcely endurable and turns it into a reproach against the whole of existence.
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The emergence of pessimistic philosophies39 is by no means a sign of great and terrible misery. No, these question marks about the value of all life are put up in ages in which the refinement and alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and malignant and one is so poor in real experiences of pain that one would like to consider painful general ideas40 as suffering of the first order.
112
There is a recipe against pessimistic philosophers and the excessive sensitivity that seems to me the real “misery of the present age”—but this recipe may sound too cruel and might itself be counted among the signs that lead people to judge that “existence is something evil.” Well, the recipe against this “misery” is: misery.41
113
The argument of growing solitude.— The reproaches of conscience are weak even in the most conscientious people compared to the feeling: “This or that is against the morals of your society.” A cold look or a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest. What is it that they are really afraid of? Growing solitude! This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause. —Thus the herd instinct speaks up in us.
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Where the good begins.—Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief—akin to a bad conscience—of the great thinkers.43
“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer of reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire”
110
On the suppression of the passions.—If one continually forbids oneself the expression of the passions as if that were something to be left to “common,” coarser, bourgeois or peasant types—desiring to suppress not the passions themselves but only their language and gestures—the result is nevertheless precisely what is not desired: the suppression of the passions themselves or at least their weakening and alteration. The most instructive example is furnished by the court of Louis XIV and all the circles that were dependent on the court. The period that followed, having been educated to suppress their expression, lacked the passions themselves and had in their place graceful, shallow, playful manners. It was an age marked by the incapacity for bad manners: even an insult was accepted and returned with obliging words. Perhaps our present age furnishes the most remarkable counterpart: everywhere, in life and on the stage, and not least of all in everything that is written, I see the delight in all the coarser eruptions and gestures of passion. What is demanded nowadays is a certain convention of passionateness—anything but genuine passion! Nevertheless, eventually passion itself will be reached this way, and our descendants will not only indulge in savage and unruly forms, but will be really savage.
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Heresy and witchcraft.— Thinking in a way that is not customary is much less the result of a superior intellect than it is the result of strong, evil inclinations that detach and isolate one, and that are defiant, nasty, and malicious. Heresy is the pendant of witchcraft and surely no more harmless and least of all anything essentially venerable. Heretics and witches are two species of evil human beings; what they have in common is that they also feel that they are evil but are impelled by an unconquerable lust to harm what is dominant (whether people or opinions). The Reformation, which was in a way a redoubled intensification of the medieval spirit, at a time when that was no longer accompanied by a good conscience, produced both in the greatest abundance.
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The man of renunciation.23— What does the man of renunciation do? He strives for a higher world, he wants to fly further and higher than all men of affirmation—he throws away much that would encumber his flight, including not a little that he esteems and likes; he sacrifices it to his desire for the heights. This sacrificing, this throwing way, however, is precisely what alone becomes visible and leads people to call him the man of renunciation: it is as such that he confronts us, shrouded in his hood, as if he were the soul of a hairshirt. But he is quite satisfied with the impression he makes on us: he wants to conceal from us his desire, his pride, his intention to soar beyond us. —Yes, he is cleverer than we thought and so polite to us—this man of affirmation. For that is what he is, no less than we, even in his renunciation.
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To be harmful with what is best in us.— At times, our strengths propel us so far forward that we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them. We may even foresee this outcome without wishing to have it otherwise. Thus we become hard against everything in us that desires consideration, and our greatness is also our lack of compassion.
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Such an experience, for which we must pay in the end with our lives, is a parable for the whole effect of great human beings on others and on their age: precisely with what is best in them, with what only they can do, they destroy many who are weak, unsure, still in the process of becoming, of striving; and thus they are harmful. It can even happen that, everything considered, they are only harmful because what is best in them is accepted and absorbed by those alone whom it affects like a drink that is too strong: they lose their understanding and their selfishness and become so intoxicated that they are bound to break their limbs on all the false paths on which their intoxication leads them astray.
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Not predestined for knowledge.— There is a stupid humility that is not at all rare, and those afflicted with it are altogether unfit to become devotees of knowledge. As soon as a person of this type perceives something striking, he turns on his heel, as it were, and says to himself: “You have made a mistake. What is the matter with your senses? This cannot, may not, be the truth.” And then, instead of looking and listening again, more carefully, he runs away from the striking thing, as if he had been intimidated, and tries to remove it from his mind as fast as he can. For his inner canon says: “I do not want to see anything that contradicts the prevalent opinion. Am I called to discover new truths? There are too many old ones, as it is.”
82
On the aim of science.— What? The aim of science should be to give men as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?9 And that is how things may well be. At least the Stoics believed that this was how things were, and they were consistent when they also desired as little pleasure as possible, in order to get as little displeasure as possible out of life. (When they kept saying “The virtuous man is the happiest man,” this was both the school’s eye-catching sign for the great mass and a casuistic subtlety for the subtle.)
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To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief—and in the last analysis socialists and politicians of all parties have no right to promise their people more than that—or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet. If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy. Actually, science can promote either goal. So far it may still be better known for its power of depriving man of his joys and making him colder, more like a statue, more stoic. But it might yet be found to be the great dispenser of pain. And then its counterforce might be found at the same time: its immense capacity for making new galaxies of joy flare up.
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Evil.— Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. The poison of which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong15
—nor do they call it poison.