The Project Gutenberg EBook of Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche

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Title: Beyond Good and Evil

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Translator: Helen Zimmern

Release Date: December 7, 2009 [EBook #4363] Last Updated: February 4, 2013

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

Produced by John Mamoun, Charles Franks, David Widger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

  <br />

By Friedrich Nietzsche

  <br />

Translated by Helen Zimmern

    The following is a reprint of the Helen Zimmern translation from German
    into English of "Beyond Good and Evil," as published in The Complete
    Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909-1913). Some adaptations from the
    original text were made to format it into an e-text. Italics in the
    original book are capitalized in this e-text, except for most foreign
    language phrases that were italicized. Original footnotes are put in
    brackets [ ] at the points where they are cited in the text. Some
    spellings were altered. "To-day" and "To-morrow" are spelled "today" and
    "tomorrow." Some words containing the letters "ise" in the original
    text, such as "idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such as
    "idealize." "Sceptic" was changed to "skeptic."

  <br /> <br />

Contents

  [ PREFACE ](#link2H_PREF)

|

      [ CHAPTER I. ](#link2HCH0001)
     | 
      PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS
   |

| —- | —- | |

      [ CHAPTER II. ](#link2HCH0002)
     | 
      THE FREE SPIRIT
   |

|

      [ CHAPTER III. ](#link2HCH0003)
     | 
      THE RELIGIOUS MOOD
   |

|

      [ CHAPTER IV. ](#link2HCH0004)
     | 
      APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES
   |

|

      [ CHAPTER V. ](#link2HCH0005)
     | 
      THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS
   |

|

      [ CHAPTER VI. ](#link2HCH0006)
     | 
      WE SCHOLARS
   |

|

      [ CHAPTER VII. ](#link2HCH0007)
     | 
      OUR VIRTUES
   |

|

      [ CHAPTER VIII.   ](#link2HCH0008)
     | 
      PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
   |

|

      [ CHAPTER IX. ](#link2HCH0009)
     | 
      WHAT IS NOBLE?
   |

|

   |
  [ FROM THE HEIGHTS ](#link2H_4_0011) <br /> <br />

  <br /> <br /> [
   ]()

PREFACE

  SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for
  suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists,
  have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and
  clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to
  Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman?
  Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every
  kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien—IF, indeed, it
  stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen,
  that all dogma lies on the ground—nay more, that it is at its last
  gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all
  dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and
  decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism and
  tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again
  understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and
  absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared:
  perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the
  soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition,
  has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a
  deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very
  restricted, very personal, very human—all-too-human facts. The
  philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for
  thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in
  the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience
  have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to
  its "super-terrestrial" pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of
  architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart
  of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander
  about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic
  philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the
  Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be
  ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst,
  the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a
  dogmatist error—namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the
  Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of
  this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a
  healthier—sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs
  of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It
  amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the PERSPECTIVE—the
  fundamental condition—of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as
  Plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: "How did such a
  malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked
  Socrates really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all a corrupter of
  youths, and deserved his hemlock?" But the struggle against Plato, or—to
  speak plainer, and for the "people"—the struggle against the
  ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity (FOR CHRISTIANITY
  IS PLATONISM FOR THE "PEOPLE"), produced in Europe a magnificent tension
  of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely
  strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals. As a matter of fact,
  the European feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice attempts
  have been made in grand style to unbend the bow: once by means of
  Jesuitism, and the second time by means of democratic enlightenment—which,
  with the aid of liberty of the press and newspaper-reading, might, in
  fact, bring it about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in
  "distress"! (The Germans invented gunpowder—all credit to them! but
  they again made things square—they invented printing.) But we, who
  are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we GOOD
  EUROPEANS, and free, VERY free spirits—we have it still, all the
  distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the
  arrow, the duty, and, who knows? THE GOAL TO AIM AT....
<br />
  Sils Maria Upper Engadine, JUNE, 1885.
<br />
  <br /> <br />

  <br /> <br /> [
   ]()

CHAPTER I. PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS

  1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise,
  the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken
  with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us!
  What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long
  story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we
  at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That
  this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it
  really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth"
  in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of
  this Will—until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a
  yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will.
  Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty?
  Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before
  us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of
  us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous
  of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it be believed that it
  at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as
  if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING
  it? For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.
<br />
  2. "HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth
  out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the
  generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the
  wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams
  of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must
  have a different origin, an origin of THEIR own&mdash;in this transitory,
  seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and
  cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being,
  in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself&mdash;THERE
  must be their source, and nowhere else!"&mdash;This mode of reasoning
  discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can
  be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical
  procedure; through this "belief" of theirs, they exert themselves for
  their "knowledge," for something that is in the end solemnly christened
  "the Truth." The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN
  ANTITHESES OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of them to
  doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most
  necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, "DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM."
  For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and
  secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon
  which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely
  superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being
  probably made from some corner, perhaps from below&mdash;"frog
  perspectives," as it were, to borrow an expression current among painters.
  In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and
  the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental
  value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to
  delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that
  WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists
  precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to
  these evil and apparently opposed things&mdash;perhaps even in being
  essentially identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern
  himself with such dangerous "Perhapses"! For that investigation one must
  await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other
  tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent&mdash;philosophers
  of the dangerous "Perhaps" in every sense of the term. And to speak in all
  seriousness, I see such new philosophers beginning to appear.
<br />
  3. Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read between their
  lines long enough, I now say to myself that the greater part of conscious
  thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions, and it is so
  even in the case of philosophical thinking; one has here to learn anew, as
  one learned anew about heredity and "innateness." As little as the act of
  birth comes into consideration in the whole process and procedure of
  heredity, just as little is "being-conscious" OPPOSED to the instinctive
  in any decisive sense; the greater part of the conscious thinking of a
  philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into
  definite channels. And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of
  movement, there are valuations, or to speak more plainly, physiological
  demands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of life For example, that
  the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that illusion is less
  valuable than "truth" such valuations, in spite of their regulative
  importance for US, might notwithstanding be only superficial valuations,
  special kinds of , such as may be necessary for the
  maintenance of beings such as ourselves. Supposing, in effect, that man is
  not just the "measure of things."
<br />
  4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is
  here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question
  is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving,
  species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally
  inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic
  judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without
  a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with
  the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a
  constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not
  live&mdash;that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation
  of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE;
  that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous
  manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed
  itself beyond good and evil.
<br />
  5. That which causes philosophers to be regarded half-distrustfully and
  half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are&mdash;how
  often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, in short, how
  childish and childlike they are,&mdash;but that there is not enough honest
  dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when
  the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They
  all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained
  through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic
  (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of
  "inspiration"), whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or
  "suggestion," which is generally their heart's desire abstracted and
  refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.
  They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally
  astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths,"&mdash;and
  VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself,
  very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to
  let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful
  confidence and self-ridicule. The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant,
  equally stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic
  by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his "categorical imperative"&mdash;makes
  us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the
  subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. Or, still more so,
  the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which Spinoza has, as it
  were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask&mdash;in fact, the "love of HIS
  wisdom," to translate the term fairly and squarely&mdash;in order thereby
  to strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should dare
  to cast a glance on that invincible maiden, that Pallas Athene:&mdash;how
  much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a
  sickly recluse betray!
<br />
  6. It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till
  now has consisted of&mdash;namely, the confession of its originator, and a
  species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that
  the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the
  true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to
  understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher
  have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself:
  "What morality do they (or does he) aim at?" Accordingly, I do not believe
  that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that
  another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and
  mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever considers the
  fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may
  have here acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find
  that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that
  each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the
  ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other
  impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH, attempts to
  philosophize. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really
  scientific men, it may be otherwise&mdash;"better," if you will; there
  there may really be such a thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind
  of small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away
  industriously to that end, WITHOUT the rest of the scholarly impulses
  taking any material part therein. The actual "interests" of the scholar,
  therefore, are generally in quite another direction&mdash;in the family,
  perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost
  indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and
  whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom
  specialist, or a chemist; he is not CHARACTERISED by becoming this or
  that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing
  impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive
  testimony as to WHO HE IS,&mdash;that is to say, in what order the deepest
  impulses of his nature stand to each other.
<br />
  7. How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more stinging than
  the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on Plato and the Platonists;
  he called them Dionysiokolakes. In its original sense, and on the face of
  it, the word signifies "Flatterers of Dionysius"&mdash;consequently,
  tyrants' accessories and lick-spittles; besides this, however, it is as
  much as to say, "They are all ACTORS, there is nothing genuine about them"
  (for Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is
  really the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was
  annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of which Plato
  and his scholars were masters&mdash;of which Epicurus was not a master!
  He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little
  garden at Athens, and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage and
  ambitious envy of Plato, who knows! Greece took a hundred years to find
  out who the garden-god Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?
<br />
  8. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the
  philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient
  mystery:
<br />
  Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.
<br />
  9. You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what
  fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly
  extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration,
  without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain:
  imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power&mdash;how COULD you live in
  accordance with such indifference? To live&mdash;is not that just
  endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing,
  preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And
  granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually
  the same as "living according to life"&mdash;how could you do DIFFERENTLY?
  Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must
  be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend
  to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something
  quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In
  your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature
  herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be
  Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after
  your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of
  Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so
  long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature
  FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it
  otherwise&mdash;and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives
  you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over
  yourselves&mdash;Stoicism is self-tyranny&mdash;Nature will also allow
  herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But
  this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the
  Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe
  in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do
  otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most
  spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to
  the causa prima.
<br />
  10. The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness, with which
  the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is dealt with at present
  throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who
  hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot
  certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may
  really have happened that such a Will to Truth&mdash;a certain extravagant
  and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope&mdash;has
  participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of
  "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even
  be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust
  in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. But that is
  Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul,
  notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It
  seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who
  are still eager for life. In that they side AGAINST appearance, and speak
  superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the credibility of
  their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence
  that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently, allowing with
  complacency their securest possession to escape (for what does one at
  present believe in more firmly than in one's body?),&mdash;who knows if
  they are not really trying to win back something which was formerly an
  even securer possession, something of the old domain of the faith of
  former times, perhaps the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old God," in
  short, ideas by which they could live better, that is to say, more
  vigorously and more joyously, than by "modern ideas"? There is DISTRUST of
  these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all
  that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps some
  slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure the
  BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called
  Positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of the more refined
  taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these
  reality-philosophasters, in whom there is nothing either new or true,
  except this motleyness. Therein it seems to me that we should agree with
  those skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present
  day; their instinct, which repels them from MODERN reality, is
  unrefuted... what do their retrograde by-paths concern us! The main thing
  about them is NOT that they wish to go "back," but that they wish to get
  AWAY therefrom. A little MORE strength, swing, courage, and artistic
  power, and they would be OFF&mdash;and not back!
<br />
  11. It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to
  divert attention from the actual influence which Kant exercised on German
  philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon
  himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his Table of Categories;
  with it in his hand he said: "This is the most difficult thing that could
  ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics." Let us only understand this
  "could be"! He was proud of having DISCOVERED a new faculty in man, the
  faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. Granting that he deceived himself
  in this matter; the development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy
  depended nevertheless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the
  younger generation to discover if possible something&mdash;at all events
  "new faculties"&mdash;of which to be still prouder!&mdash;But let us
  reflect for a moment&mdash;it is high time to do so. "How are synthetic
  judgments a priori POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself&mdash;and what is really
  his answer? "BY MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"&mdash;but unfortunately not in
  five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of
  German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight
  of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were
  beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation
  reached its climax when Kant further discovered a moral faculty in man&mdash;for
  at that time Germans were still moral, not yet dabbling in the "Politics
  of hard fact." Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the young
  theologians of the Tubingen institution went immediately into the groves&mdash;all
  seeking for "faculties." And what did they not find&mdash;in that
  innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German spirit, to which
  Romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet
  distinguish between "finding" and "inventing"! Above all a faculty for the
  "transcendental"; Schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and
  thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally
  pious-inclined Germans. One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this
  exuberant and eccentric movement (which was really youthfulness,
  notwithstanding that it disguised itself so boldly, in hoary and senile
  conceptions), than to take it seriously, or even treat it with moral
  indignation. Enough, however&mdash;the world grew older, and the dream
  vanished. A time came when people rubbed their foreheads, and they still
  rub them today. People had been dreaming, and first and foremost&mdash;old
  Kant. "By means of a means (faculty)"&mdash;he had said, or at least meant
  to say. But, is that&mdash;an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather
  merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "By
  means of a means (faculty)," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the
  doctor in Moliere,
Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.
  But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high time to
  replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments a PRIORI
  possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgments
  necessary?"&mdash;in effect, it is high time that we should understand
  that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the
  preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they still might
  naturally be false judgments! Or, more plainly spoken, and roughly and
  readily&mdash;synthetic judgments a priori should not "be possible" at
  all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false
  judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as
  plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective view of
  life. And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German
  philosophy"&mdash;I hope you understand its right to inverted commas
  (goosefeet)?&mdash;has exercised throughout the whole of Europe, there is
  no doubt that a certain VIRTUS DORMITIVA had a share in it; thanks to
  German philosophy, it was a delight to the noble idlers, the virtuous, the
  mystics, the artiste, the three-fourths Christians, and the political
  obscurantists of all nations, to find an antidote to the still
  overwhelming sensualism which overflowed from the last century into this,
  in short&mdash;"sensus assoupire."...
<br />
  12. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted
  theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is now perhaps no
  one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification
  to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an abbreviation of the means
  of expression)&mdash;thanks chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and the Pole
  Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents
  of ocular evidence. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe,
  contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand fast, Boscovich
  has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that "stood fast" of
  the earth&mdash;the belief in "substance," in "matter," in the
  earth-residuum, and particle-atom: it is the greatest triumph over the
  senses that has hitherto been gained on earth. One must, however, go still
  further, and also declare war, relentless war to the knife, against the
  "atomistic requirements" which still lead a dangerous after-life in places
  where no one suspects them, like the more celebrated "metaphysical
  requirements": one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that
  other and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and
  longest, the SOUL-ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to designate by this
  expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible,
  eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be
  expelled from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to
  get rid of "the soul" thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and
  most venerated hypotheses&mdash;as happens frequently to the clumsiness of
  naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing
  it. But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the
  soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul of
  subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the instincts
  and passions," want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In
  that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions
  which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the
  idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new
  desert and a new distrust&mdash;it is possible that the older
  psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually,
  however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT&mdash;and,
  who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.
<br />
  13. Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the
  instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic
  being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength&mdash;life
  itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and
  most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short, here, as everywhere else, let us
  beware of SUPERFLUOUS teleological principles!&mdash;one of which is the
  instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). It
  is thus, in effect, that method ordains, which must be essentially economy
  of principles.
<br />
  14. It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural
  philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-arrangement (according to
  us, if I may say so!) and NOT a world-explanation; but in so far as it is
  based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time
  to come must be regarded as more&mdash;namely, as an explanation. It has
  eyes and fingers of its own, it has ocular evidence and palpableness of
  its own: this operates fascinatingly, persuasively, and CONVINCINGLY upon
  an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes&mdash;in fact, it follows
  instinctively the canon of truth of eternal popular sensualism. What is
  clear, what is "explained"? Only that which can be seen and felt&mdash;one
  must pursue every problem thus far. Obversely, however, the charm of the
  Platonic mode of thought, which was an ARISTOCRATIC mode, consisted
  precisely in RESISTANCE to obvious sense-evidence&mdash;perhaps among men
  who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our
  contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining
  masters of them: and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional
  networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses&mdash;the
  mob of the senses, as Plato said. In this overcoming of the world, and
  interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, there was an ENJOYMENT
  different from that which the physicists of today offer us&mdash;and
  likewise the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among the physiological
  workers, with their principle of the "smallest possible effort," and the
  greatest possible blunder. "Where there is nothing more to see or to
  grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do"&mdash;that is certainly
  an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding
  be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and
  bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH work to perform.
<br />
  15. To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist on the
  fact that the sense-organs are not phenomena in the sense of the
  idealistic philosophy; as such they certainly could not be causes!
  Sensualism, therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis, if not as
  heuristic principle. What? And others say even that the external world is
  the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external
  world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves
  would be the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete
  REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, if the conception CAUSA SUI is something
  fundamentally absurd. Consequently, the external world is NOT the work of
  our organs&mdash;?
<br />
  16. There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are
  "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as the superstition
  of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though cognition here got hold of
  its object purely and simply as "the thing in itself," without any
  falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the
  object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that "immediate
  certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself,"
  involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from
  the misleading significance of words! The people on their part may think
  that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say
  to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence,
  'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative
  proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that
  it is  who think, that there must necessarily be something that
  thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being
  who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it
  is already determined what is to be designated by thinking&mdash;that I
  KNOW what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what
  it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just
  happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion
  'I think,' assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present moment with
  other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on
  account of this retrospective connection with further 'knowledge,' it has,
  at any rate, no immediate certainty for me."&mdash;In place of the
  "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the special case,
  the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to
  him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: "Whence did
  I get the notion of 'thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What
  gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of an 'ego' as cause,
  and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?" He who ventures to answer
  these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of INTUITIVE
  perception, like the person who says, "I think, and know that this, at
  least, is true, actual, and certain"&mdash;will encounter a smile and two
  notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher
  will perhaps give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not
  mistaken, but why should it be the truth?"
<br />
  17. With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of
  emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these
  credulous minds&mdash;namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and
  not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to
  say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE
  thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put
  it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an
  "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one
  thinks"&mdash;even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the process,
  and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to
  the usual grammatical formula&mdash;"To think is an activity; every
  activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"... It was pretty
  much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the
  operating "power," the material particle wherein it resides and out of
  which it operates&mdash;the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at
  last to get along without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we
  shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get
  along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego" has refined
  itself).
<br />
  18. It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable;
  it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems
  that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its
  persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels
  himself strong enough to refute it.
<br />
  19. Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it were the
  best-known thing in the world; indeed, Schopenhauer has given us to
  understand that the will alone is really known to us, absolutely and
  completely known, without deduction or addition. But it again and again
  seems to me that in this case Schopenhauer also only did what philosophers
  are in the habit of doing&mdash;he seems to have adopted a POPULAR
  PREJUDICE and exaggerated it. Willing seems to me to be above all
  something COMPLICATED, something that is a unity only in name&mdash;and it
  is precisely in a name that popular prejudice lurks, which has got the
  mastery over the inadequate precautions of philosophers in all ages. So
  let us for once be more cautious, let us be "unphilosophical": let us say
  that in all willing there is firstly a plurality of sensations, namely,
  the sensation of the condition "AWAY FROM WHICH we go," the sensation of
  the condition "TOWARDS WHICH we go," the sensation of this "FROM" and
  "TOWARDS" itself, and then besides, an accompanying muscular sensation,
  which, even without our putting in motion "arms and legs," commences its
  action by force of habit, directly we "will" anything. Therefore, just as
  sensations (and indeed many kinds of sensations) are to be recognized as
  ingredients of the will, so, in the second place, thinking is also to be
  recognized; in every act of the will there is a ruling thought;&mdash;and
  let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the "willing,"
  as if the will would then remain over! In the third place, the will is not
  only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an EMOTION,
  and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is termed "freedom of
  the will" is essentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who
  must obey: "I am free, 'he' must obey"&mdash;this consciousness is
  inherent in every will; and equally so the straining of the attention, the
  straight look which fixes itself exclusively on one thing, the
  unconditional judgment that "this and nothing else is necessary now," the
  inward certainty that obedience will be rendered&mdash;and whatever else
  pertains to the position of the commander. A man who WILLS commands
  something within himself which renders obedience, or which he believes
  renders obedience. But now let us notice what is the strangest thing about
  the will,&mdash;this affair so extremely complex, for which the people
  have only one name. Inasmuch as in the given circumstances we are at the
  same time the commanding AND the obeying parties, and as the obeying party
  we know the sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and
  motion, which usually commence immediately after the act of will; inasmuch
  as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to
  deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic term "I": a whole
  series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false judgments about
  the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing&mdash;to such a
  degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing SUFFICES for action.
  Since in the majority of cases there has only been exercise of will when
  the effect of the command&mdash;consequently obedience, and therefore
  action&mdash;was to be EXPECTED, the APPEARANCE has translated itself into
  the sentiment, as if there were a NECESSITY OF EFFECT; in a word, he who
  wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are
  somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to
  the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power
  which accompanies all success. "Freedom of Will"&mdash;that is the
  expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising
  volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the
  executor of the order&mdash;who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over
  obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that
  overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the
  feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful
  "underwills" or under-souls&mdash;indeed, our body is but a social
  structure composed of many souls&mdash;to his feelings of delight as
  commander. L'EFFET C'EST MOI. what happens here is what happens in every
  well-constructed and happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing class
  identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing
  it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as
  already said, of a social structure composed of many "souls", on which
  account a philosopher should claim the right to include willing-as-such
  within the sphere of morals&mdash;regarded as the doctrine of the
  relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of "life" manifests
  itself.
<br />
  20. That the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or
  autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with
  each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in
  the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system
  as the collective members of the fauna of a Continent&mdash;is betrayed in
  the end by the circumstance: how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers
  always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of POSSIBLE
  philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in
  the same orbit, however independent of each other they may feel themselves
  with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them,
  something impels them in definite order the one after the other&mdash;to
  wit, the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas. Their
  thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a
  remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient
  common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew:
  philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order. The
  wonderful family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German
  philosophizing is easily enough explained. In fact, where there is
  affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar&mdash;I
  mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar
  grammatical functions&mdash;it cannot but be that everything is prepared
  at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical
  systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities
  of world-interpretation. It is highly probable that philosophers within
  the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the conception of the
  subject is least developed) look otherwise "into the world," and will be
  found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germans and
  Mussulmans, the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also
  the spell of PHYSIOLOGICAL valuations and racial conditions.&mdash;So much
  by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality with regard to the origin of
  ideas.
<br />
  21. The CAUSA SUI is the best self-contradiction that has yet been
  conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the
  extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and
  frightfully with this very folly. The desire for "freedom of will" in the
  superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately,
  in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and
  ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the
  world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less
  than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen
  daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough
  of nothingness. If any one should find out in this manner the crass
  stupidity of the celebrated conception of "free will" and put it out of
  his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his "enlightenment" a step
  further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous
  conception of "free will": I mean "non-free will," which is tantamount to
  a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly MATERIALISE "cause"
  and "effect," as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them
  naturalize in thinking at present), according to the prevailing mechanical
  doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it "effects" its
  end; one should use "cause" and "effect" only as pure CONCEPTIONS, that is
  to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual
  understanding,&mdash;NOT for explanation. In "being-in-itself" there is
  nothing of "casual-connection," of "necessity," or of "psychological
  non-freedom"; there the effect does NOT follow the cause, there "law" does
  not obtain. It is WE alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity,
  relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and
  when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as "being-in-itself,"
  with things, we act once more as we have always acted&mdash;MYTHOLOGICALLY.
  The "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of
  STRONG and WEAK wills.&mdash;It is almost always a symptom of what is
  lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and
  "psychological necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence,
  obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such
  feelings&mdash;the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have
  observed correctly, the "non-freedom of the will" is regarded as a problem
  from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly
  PERSONAL manner: some will not give up their "responsibility," their
  belief in THEMSELVES, the personal right to THEIR merits, at any price
  (the vain races belong to this class); others on the contrary, do not wish
  to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an
  inward self-contempt, seek to GET OUT OF THE BUSINESS, no matter how. The
  latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the
  side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favourite
  disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed
  embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as "la religion de la
  souffrance humaine"; that is ITS "good taste."
<br />
  22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the
  mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but
  "Nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly, as
  though&mdash;why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad
  "philology." It is no matter of fact, no "text," but rather just a naively
  humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make
  abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul!
  "Everywhere equality before the law&mdash;Nature is not different in that
  respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in which
  the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic&mdash;likewise
  a second and more refined atheism&mdash;is once more disguised. "Ni dieu,
  ni maitre"&mdash;that, also, is what you want; and therefore "Cheers for
  natural law!"&mdash;is it not so? But, as has been said, that is
  interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along, who, with
  opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the
  same "Nature," and with regard to the same phenomena, just the
  tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of
  power&mdash;an interpreter who should so place the unexceptionalness and
  unconditionalness of all "Will to Power" before your eyes, that almost
  every word, and the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually seem
  unsuitable, or like a weakening and softening metaphor&mdash;as being too
  human; and who should, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this
  world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary" and "calculable"
  course, NOT, however, because laws obtain in it, but because they are
  absolutely LACKING, and every power effects its ultimate consequences
  every moment. Granted that this also is only interpretation&mdash;and you
  will be eager enough to make this objection?&mdash;well, so much the
  better.
<br />
  23. All psychology hitherto has run aground on moral prejudices and
  timidities, it has not dared to launch out into the depths. In so far as
  it is allowable to recognize in that which has hitherto been written,
  evidence of that which has hitherto been kept silent, it seems as if
  nobody had yet harboured the notion of psychology as the Morphology and
  DEVELOPMENT-DOCTRINE OF THE WILL TO POWER, as I conceive of it. The power
  of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most intellectual
  world, the world apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced, and has
  obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive, blinding, and distorting
  manner. A proper physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious
  antagonism in the heart of the investigator, it has "the heart" against it
  even a doctrine of the reciprocal conditionalness of the "good" and the
  "bad" impulses, causes (as refined immorality) distress and aversion in a
  still strong and manly conscience&mdash;still more so, a doctrine of the
  derivation of all good impulses from bad ones. If, however, a person
  should regard even the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and
  imperiousness as life-conditioning emotions, as factors which must be
  present, fundamentally and essentially, in the general economy of life
  (which must, therefore, be further developed if life is to be further
  developed), he will suffer from such a view of things as from
  sea-sickness. And yet this hypothesis is far from being the strangest and
  most painful in this immense and almost new domain of dangerous knowledge,
  and there are in fact a hundred good reasons why every one should keep
  away from it who CAN do so! On the other hand, if one has once drifted
  hither with one's bark, well! very good! now let us set our teeth firmly!
  let us open our eyes and keep our hand fast on the helm! We sail away
  right OVER morality, we crush out, we destroy perhaps the remains of our
  own morality by daring to make our voyage thither&mdash;but what do WE
  matter. Never yet did a PROFOUNDER world of insight reveal itself to
  daring travelers and adventurers, and the psychologist who thus "makes a
  sacrifice"&mdash;it is not the sacrifizio dell' intelletto, on the
  contrary!&mdash;will at least be entitled to demand in return that
  psychology shall once more be recognized as the queen of the sciences, for
  whose service and equipment the other sciences exist. For psychology is
  once more the path to the fundamental problems.
<br />
  [
   ]()

CHAPTER II. THE FREE SPIRIT

  24. O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and
  falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has
  got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us
  clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give our
  senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire
  for wanton pranks and wrong inferences!—how from the beginning, we
  have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost
  inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety—in
  order to enjoy life! And only on this solidified, granite-like foundation
  of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge
  on the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance, to
  the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but—as its
  refinement! It is to be hoped, indeed, that LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere,
  will not get over its awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of
  opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation;
  it is equally to be hoped that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals, which
  now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and blood," will turn the words
  round in the mouths of us discerning ones. Here and there we understand
  it, and laugh at the way in which precisely the best knowledge seeks most
  to retain us in this SIMPLIFIED, thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined,
  and suitably falsified world: at the way in which, whether it will or not,
  it loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life!
<br />
  25. After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be
  heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care, ye philosophers
  and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for the
  truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It spoils all the innocence and
  fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against
  objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in
  the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse
  consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as
  protectors of truth upon earth&mdash;as though "the Truth" were such an
  innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all
  people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and
  Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it
  cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know that
  hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a
  more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you
  place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally
  after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games
  before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out of the way! Flee into
  concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may be mistaken
  for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don't forget the garden,
  the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around you who are as
  a garden&mdash;or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day
  becomes a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome
  solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense
  whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make
  one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! How PERSONAL does a
  long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! These
  pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones&mdash;also
  the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos&mdash;always
  become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and
  perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers
  and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and
  theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is
  the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour
  has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the
  sake of truth," forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor
  lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic
  curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the
  dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a
  "martyr," into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary
  with such a desire to be clear WHAT spectacle one will see in any case&mdash;merely
  a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that
  the long, real tragedy IS AT AN END, supposing that every philosophy has
  been a long tragedy in its origin.
<br />
  26. Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy,
  where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority&mdash;where he may
  forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;&mdash;exclusive only of
  the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger
  instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. Whoever, in
  intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the green and
  grey colours of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess,
  and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes; supposing,
  however, that he does not voluntarily take all this burden and disgust
  upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, and remains, as I said,
  quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is then certain: he
  was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge. For as such, he would
  one day have to say to himself: "The devil take my good taste! but 'the
  rule' is more interesting than the exception&mdash;than myself, the
  exception!" And he would go DOWN, and above all, he would go "inside." The
  long and serious study of the AVERAGE man&mdash;and consequently much
  disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad intercourse (all
  intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's equals):&mdash;that
  constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every philosopher;
  perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing part. If he is
  fortunate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge should be, he will
  meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and lighten his task; I
  mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the
  commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so
  much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and
  their like BEFORE WITNESSES&mdash;sometimes they wallow, even in books, as
  on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only form in which base souls
  approach what is called honesty; and the higher man must open his ears to
  all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown
  becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out.
  There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust&mdash;namely,
  where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet
  billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest,
  acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century&mdash;he was far
  profounder than Voltaire, and consequently also, a good deal more silent.
  It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is
  placed on an ape's body, a fine exceptional understanding in a base soul,
  an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and moral
  physiologists. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather
  quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with
  one; whenever any one sees, seeks, and WANTS to see only hunger, sexual
  instinct, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in
  short, when any one speaks "badly"&mdash;and not even "ill"&mdash;of man,
  then ought the lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently;
  he ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without
  indignation. For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and
  lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world,
  God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the
  laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more
  ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such
  a LIAR as the indignant man.
<br />
  27. It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives
  gangasrotogati [Footnote: Like the river Ganges: presto.] among those only
  who think and live otherwise&mdash;namely, kurmagati [Footnote: Like the
  tortoise: lento.], or at best "froglike," mandeikagati [Footnote: Like the
  frog: staccato.] (I do everything to be "difficultly understood" myself!)&mdash;and
  one should be heartily grateful for the good will to some refinement of
  interpretation. As regards "the good friends," however, who are always too
  easy-going, and think that as friends they have a right to ease, one does
  well at the very first to grant them a play-ground and romping-place for
  misunderstanding&mdash;one can thus laugh still; or get rid of them
  altogether, these good friends&mdash;and laugh then also!
<br />
  28. What is most difficult to render from one language into another is the
  TEMPO of its style, which has its basis in the character of the race, or
  to speak more physiologically, in the average TEMPO of the assimilation of
  its nutriment. There are honestly meant translations, which, as
  involuntary vulgarizations, are almost falsifications of the original,
  merely because its lively and merry TEMPO (which overleaps and obviates
  all dangers in word and expression) could not also be rendered. A German
  is almost incapacitated for PRESTO in his language; consequently also, as
  may be reasonably inferred, for many of the most delightful and daring
  NUANCES of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr
  are foreign to him in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius
  are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously
  clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in
  profuse variety among Germans&mdash;pardon me for stating the fact that
  even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no
  exception, as a reflection of the "good old time" to which it belongs, and
  as an expression of German taste at a time when there was still a "German
  taste," which was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus. Lessing is an
  exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much, and was
  versed in many things; he who was not the translator of Bayle to no
  purpose, who took refuge willingly in the shadow of Diderot and Voltaire,
  and still more willingly among the Roman comedy-writers&mdash;Lessing
  loved also free-spiritism in the TEMPO, and flight out of Germany. But how
  could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing, imitate the TEMPO
  of Machiavelli, who in his "Principe" makes us breathe the dry, fine air
  of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a
  boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of
  the contrast he ventures to present&mdash;long, heavy, difficult,
  dangerous thoughts, and a TEMPO of the gallop, and of the best, wantonest
  humour? Finally, who would venture on a German translation of Petronius,
  who, more than any great musician hitherto, was a master of PRESTO in
  invention, ideas, and words? What matter in the end about the swamps of
  the sick, evil world, or of the "ancient world," when like him, one has
  the feet of a wind, the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a
  wind, which makes everything healthy, by making everything RUN! And with
  regard to Aristophanes&mdash;that transfiguring, complementary genius, for
  whose sake one PARDONS all Hellenism for having existed, provided one has
  understood in its full profundity ALL that there requires pardon and
  transfiguration; there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on
  PLATO'S secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit
  fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no "Bible,"
  nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic&mdash;but a book of
  Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life&mdash;a Greek life
  which he repudiated&mdash;without an Aristophanes!
<br />
  29. It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a
  privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best
  right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not
  only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth,
  he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already
  brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and
  where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some
  minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far
  from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize
  with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to
  the sympathy of men!
<br />
  30. Our deepest insights must&mdash;and should&mdash;appear as follies,
  and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly
  to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them. The
  exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by
  philosophers&mdash;among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and
  Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and
  NOT in equality and equal rights&mdash;are not so much in
  contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class,
  standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the
  outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that
  the class in question views things from below upwards&mdash;while the
  esoteric class views things FROM ABOVE DOWNWARDS. There are heights of the
  soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically;
  and if all the woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to
  decide whether the sight of it would NECESSARILY seduce and constrain to
  sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe?... That which serves the
  higher class of men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison
  to an entirely different and lower order of human beings. The virtues of
  the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it
  might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate
  and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which
  he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he
  had sunk. There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the
  health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the
  higher and more powerful, make use of them. In the former case they are
  dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter case they are
  herald-calls which summon the bravest to THEIR bravery. Books for the
  general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people
  clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they
  reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if
  one wishes to breathe PURE air.
<br />
  31. In our youthful years we still venerate and despise without the art of
  NUANCE, which is the best gain of life, and we have rightly to do hard
  penance for having fallen upon men and things with Yea and Nay. Everything
  is so arranged that the worst of all tastes, THE TASTE FOR THE
  UNCONDITIONAL, is cruelly befooled and abused, until a man learns to
  introduce a little art into his sentiments, and prefers to try conclusions
  with the artificial, as do the real artists of life. The angry and
  reverent spirit peculiar to youth appears to allow itself no peace, until
  it has suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent its passion
  upon them: youth in itself even, is something falsifying and deceptive.
  Later on, when the young soul, tortured by continual disillusions, finally
  turns suspiciously against itself&mdash;still ardent and savage even in
  its suspicion and remorse of conscience: how it upbraids itself, how
  impatiently it tears itself, how it revenges itself for its long
  self-blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blindness! In this
  transition one punishes oneself by distrust of one's sentiments; one
  tortures one's enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even the good conscience
  to be a danger, as if it were the self-concealment and lassitude of a more
  refined uprightness; and above all, one espouses upon principle the cause
  AGAINST "youth."&mdash;A decade later, and one comprehends that all this
  was also still&mdash;youth!
<br />
  32. Throughout the longest period of human history&mdash;one calls it the
  prehistoric period&mdash;the value or non-value of an action was inferred
  from its CONSEQUENCES; the action in itself was not taken into
  consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty much as in China at
  present, where the distinction or disgrace of a child redounds to its
  parents, the retro-operating power of success or failure was what induced
  men to think well or ill of an action. Let us call this period the
  PRE-MORAL period of mankind; the imperative, "Know thyself!" was then
  still unknown.&mdash;In the last ten thousand years, on the other hand, on
  certain large portions of the earth, one has gradually got so far, that
  one no longer lets the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide
  with regard to its worth: a great achievement as a whole, an important
  refinement of vision and of criterion, the unconscious effect of the
  supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in "origin," the mark
  of a period which may be designated in the narrower sense as the MORAL
  one: the first attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. Instead of the
  consequences, the origin&mdash;what an inversion of perspective! And
  assuredly an inversion effected only after long struggle and wavering! To
  be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of
  interpretation, attained supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an
  action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as origin out
  of an INTENTION; people were agreed in the belief that the value of an
  action lay in the value of its intention. The intention as the sole origin
  and antecedent history of an action: under the influence of this prejudice
  moral praise and blame have been bestowed, and men have judged and even
  philosophized almost up to the present day.&mdash;Is it not possible,
  however, that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our
  minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental shifting of values,
  owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man&mdash;is it not
  possible that we may be standing on the threshold of a period which to
  begin with, would be distinguished negatively as ULTRA-MORAL: nowadays
  when, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion arises that the
  decisive value of an action lies precisely in that which is NOT
  INTENTIONAL, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible,
  or "sensed" in it, belongs to its surface or skin&mdash;which, like every
  skin, betrays something, but CONCEALS still more? In short, we believe
  that the intention is only a sign or symptom, which first requires an
  explanation&mdash;a sign, moreover, which has too many interpretations,
  and consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone: that morality, in the
  sense in which it has been understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has
  been a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminariness, probably
  something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy, but in any case
  something which must be surmounted. The surmounting of morality, in a
  certain sense even the self-mounting of morality&mdash;let that be the
  name for the long-secret labour which has been reserved for the most
  refined, the most upright, and also the most wicked consciences of today,
  as the living touchstones of the soul.
<br />
  33. It cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice for
  one's neighbour, and all self-renunciation-morality, must be mercilessly
  called to account, and brought to judgment; just as the aesthetics of
  "disinterested contemplation," under which the emasculation of art
  nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create itself a good conscience.
  There is far too much witchery and sugar in the sentiments "for others"
  and "NOT for myself," for one not needing to be doubly distrustful here,
  and for one asking promptly: "Are they not perhaps&mdash;DECEPTIONS?"&mdash;That
  they PLEASE&mdash;him who has them, and him who enjoys their fruit, and
  also the mere spectator&mdash;that is still no argument in their FAVOUR,
  but just calls for caution. Let us therefore be cautious!
<br />
  34. At whatever standpoint of philosophy one may place oneself nowadays,
  seen from every position, the ERRONEOUSNESS of the world in which we think
  we live is the surest and most certain thing our eyes can light upon: we
  find proof after proof thereof, which would fain allure us into surmises
  concerning a deceptive principle in the "nature of things." He, however,
  who makes thinking itself, and consequently "the spirit," responsible for
  the falseness of the world&mdash;an honourable exit, which every conscious
  or unconscious advocatus dei avails himself of&mdash;he who regards this
  world, including space, time, form, and movement, as falsely DEDUCED,
  would have at least good reason in the end to become distrustful also of
  all thinking; has it not hitherto been playing upon us the worst of scurvy
  tricks? and what guarantee would it give that it would not continue to do
  what it has always been doing? In all seriousness, the innocence of
  thinkers has something touching and respect-inspiring in it, which even
  nowadays permits them to wait upon consciousness with the request that it
  will give them HONEST answers: for example, whether it be "real" or not,
  and why it keeps the outer world so resolutely at a distance, and other
  questions of the same description. The belief in "immediate certainties"
  is a MORAL NAIVETE which does honour to us philosophers; but&mdash;we have
  now to cease being "MERELY moral" men! Apart from morality, such belief is
  a folly which does little honour to us! If in middle-class life an
  ever-ready distrust is regarded as the sign of a "bad character," and
  consequently as an imprudence, here among us, beyond the middle-class
  world and its Yeas and Nays, what should prevent our being imprudent and
  saying: the philosopher has at length a RIGHT to "bad character," as the
  being who has hitherto been most befooled on earth&mdash;he is now under
  OBLIGATION to distrustfulness, to the wickedest squinting out of every
  abyss of suspicion.&mdash;Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and
  turn of expression; for I myself have long ago learned to think and
  estimate differently with regard to deceiving and being deceived, and I
  keep at least a couple of pokes in the ribs ready for the blind rage with
  which philosophers struggle against being deceived. Why NOT? It is nothing
  more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance; it
  is, in fact, the worst proved supposition in the world. So much must be
  conceded: there could have been no life at all except upon the basis of
  perspective estimates and semblances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm
  and stupidity of many philosophers, one wished to do away altogether with
  the "seeming world"&mdash;well, granted that YOU could do that,&mdash;at
  least nothing of your "truth" would thereby remain! Indeed, what is it
  that forces us in general to the supposition that there is an essential
  opposition of "true" and "false"? Is it not enough to suppose degrees of
  seemingness, and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of
  semblance&mdash;different valeurs, as the painters say? Why might not the
  world WHICH CONCERNS US&mdash;be a fiction? And to any one who suggested:
  "But to a fiction belongs an originator?"&mdash;might it not be bluntly
  replied: WHY? May not this "belong" also belong to the fiction? Is it not
  at length permitted to be a little ironical towards the subject, just as
  towards the predicate and object? Might not the philosopher elevate
  himself above faith in grammar? All respect to governesses, but is it not
  time that philosophy should renounce governess-faith?
<br />
  35. O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the
  truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too
  humanely&mdash;"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"&mdash;I
  wager he finds nothing!
<br />
  36. Supposing that nothing else is "given" as real but our world of
  desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other "reality"
  but just that of our impulses&mdash;for thinking is only a relation of
  these impulses to one another:&mdash;are we not permitted to make the
  attempt and to ask the question whether this which is "given" does not
  SUFFICE, by means of our counterparts, for the understanding even of the
  so-called mechanical (or "material") world? I do not mean as an illusion,
  a "semblance," a "representation" (in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerian
  sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions
  themselves&mdash;as a more primitive form of the world of emotions, in
  which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity, which afterwards
  branches off and develops itself in organic processes (naturally also,
  refines and debilitates)&mdash;as a kind of instinctive life in which all
  organic functions, including self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition,
  secretion, and change of matter, are still synthetically united with one
  another&mdash;as a PRIMARY FORM of life?&mdash;In the end, it is not only
  permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded by the conscience of
  LOGICAL METHOD. Not to assume several kinds of causality, so long as the
  attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest
  extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed to say so): that is a morality
  of method which one may not repudiate nowadays&mdash;it follows "from its
  definition," as mathematicians say. The question is ultimately whether we
  really recognize the will as OPERATING, whether we believe in the
  causality of the will; if we do so&mdash;and fundamentally our belief IN
  THIS is just our belief in causality itself&mdash;we MUST make the attempt
  to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality.
  "Will" can naturally only operate on "will"&mdash;and not on "matter" (not
  on "nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded,
  whether will does not operate on will wherever "effects" are recognized&mdash;and
  whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power operates therein, is
  not just the power of will, the effect of will. Granted, finally, that we
  succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and
  ramification of one fundamental form of will&mdash;namely, the Will to
  Power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be
  traced back to this Will to Power, and that the solution of the problem of
  generation and nutrition&mdash;it is one problem&mdash;could also be found
  therein: one would thus have acquired the right to define ALL active force
  unequivocally as WILL TO POWER. The world seen from within, the world
  defined and designated according to its "intelligible character"&mdash;it
  would simply be "Will to Power," and nothing else.
<br />
  37. "What? Does not that mean in popular language: God is disproved, but
  not the devil?"&mdash;On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And
  who the devil also compels you to speak popularly!
<br />
  38. As happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times with the
  French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous when judged
  close at hand, into which, however, the noble and visionary spectators of
  all Europe have interpreted from a distance their own indignation and
  enthusiasm so long and passionately, UNTIL THE TEXT HAS DISAPPEARED UNDER
  THE INTERPRETATION), so a noble posterity might once more misunderstand
  the whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby make ITS aspect endurable.&mdash;Or
  rather, has not this already happened? Have not we ourselves been&mdash;that
  "noble posterity"? And, in so far as we now comprehend this, is it not&mdash;thereby
  already past?
<br />
  39. Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely because it
  makes people happy or virtuous&mdash;excepting, perhaps, the amiable
  "Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good, true, and beautiful, and
  let all kinds of motley, coarse, and good-natured desirabilities swim
  about promiscuously in their pond. Happiness and virtue are no arguments.
  It is willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of thoughtful minds,
  that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter-arguments.
  A thing could be TRUE, although it were in the highest degree injurious
  and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be
  such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it&mdash;so that the
  strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of "truth" it could
  endure&mdash;or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it REQUIRED
  truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. But there is
  no doubt that for the discovery of certain PORTIONS of truth the wicked
  and unfortunate are more favourably situated and have a greater likelihood
  of success; not to speak of the wicked who are happy&mdash;a species about
  whom moralists are silent. Perhaps severity and craft are more favourable
  conditions for the development of strong, independent spirits and
  philosophers than the gentle, refined, yielding good-nature, and habit of
  taking things easily, which are prized, and rightly prized in a learned
  man. Presupposing always, to begin with, that the term "philosopher" be
  not confined to the philosopher who writes books, or even introduces HIS
  philosophy into books!&mdash;Stendhal furnishes a last feature of the
  portrait of the free-spirited philosopher, which for the sake of German
  taste I will not omit to underline&mdash;for it is OPPOSED to German
  taste. "Pour etre bon philosophe," says this last great psychologist, "il
  faut etre sec, clair, sans illusion. Un banquier, qui a fait fortune, a
  une partie du caractere requis pour faire des decouvertes en philosophie,
  c'est-a-dire pour voir clair dans ce qui est."
<br />
  40. Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things
  have a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the CONTRARY only be
  the right disguise for the shame of a God to go about in? A question worth
  asking!&mdash;it would be strange if some mystic has not already ventured
  on the same kind of thing. There are proceedings of such a delicate nature
  that it is well to overwhelm them with coarseness and make them
  unrecognizable; there are actions of love and of an extravagant
  magnanimity after which nothing can be wiser than to take a stick and
  thrash the witness soundly: one thereby obscures his recollection. Many a
  one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory, in order at least to have
  vengeance on this sole party in the secret: shame is inventive. They are
  not the worst things of which one is most ashamed: there is not only
  deceit behind a mask&mdash;there is so much goodness in craft. I could
  imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would
  roll through life clumsily and rotundly like an old, green, heavily-hooped
  wine-cask: the refinement of his shame requiring it to be so. A man who
  has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon
  paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence of which his
  nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant; his mortal danger
  conceals itself from their eyes, and equally so his regained security.
  Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and
  concealment, and is inexhaustible in evasion of communication, DESIRES and
  insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and
  heads of his friends; and supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will
  some day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of him
  there&mdash;and that it is well to be so. Every profound spirit needs a
  mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there continually grows a
  mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say, SUPERFICIAL
  interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of
  life he manifests.
<br />
  41. One must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is destined for
  independence and command, and do so at the right time. One must not avoid
  one's tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one
  can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves and before
  no other judge. Not to cleave to any person, be it even the dearest&mdash;every
  person is a prison and also a recess. Not to cleave to a fatherland, be it
  even the most suffering and necessitous&mdash;it is even less difficult to
  detach one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to cleave to a
  sympathy, be it even for higher men, into whose peculiar torture and
  helplessness chance has given us an insight. Not to cleave to a science,
  though it tempt one with the most valuable discoveries, apparently
  specially reserved for us. Not to cleave to one's own liberation, to the
  voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which always flies further
  aloft in order always to see more under it&mdash;the danger of the flier.
  Not to cleave to our own virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any of
  our specialties, to our "hospitality" for instance, which is the danger of
  dangers for highly developed and wealthy souls, who deal prodigally,
  almost indifferently with themselves, and push the virtue of liberality so
  far that it becomes a vice. One must know how TO CONSERVE ONESELF&mdash;the
  best test of independence.
<br />
  42. A new order of philosophers is appearing; I shall venture to baptize
  them by a name not without danger. As far as I understand them, as far as
  they allow themselves to be understood&mdash;for it is their nature to
  WISH to remain something of a puzzle&mdash;these philosophers of the
  future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as
  "tempters." This name itself is after all only an attempt, or, if it be
  preferred, a temptation.
<br />
  43. Will they be new friends of "truth," these coming philosophers? Very
  probably, for all philosophers hitherto have loved their truths. But
  assuredly they will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary to their pride,
  and also contrary to their taste, that their truth should still be truth
  for every one&mdash;that which has hitherto been the secret wish and
  ultimate purpose of all dogmatic efforts. "My opinion is MY opinion:
  another person has not easily a right to it"&mdash;such a philosopher of
  the future will say, perhaps. One must renounce the bad taste of wishing
  to agree with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour
  takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a "common good"! The
  expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of small
  value. In the end things must be as they are and have always been&mdash;the
  great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the
  delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything
  rare for the rare.
<br />
  44. Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, VERY free
  spirits, these philosophers of the future&mdash;as certainly also they
  will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and
  fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and
  mistaken? But while I say this, I feel under OBLIGATION almost as much to
  them as to ourselves (we free spirits who are their heralds and
  forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves altogether a stupid old
  prejudice and misunderstanding, which, like a fog, has too long made the
  conception of "free spirit" obscure. In every country of Europe, and the
  same in America, there is at present something which makes an abuse of
  this name a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who
  desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt&mdash;not
  to mention that in respect to the NEW philosophers who are appearing, they
  must still more be closed windows and bolted doors. Briefly and
  regrettably, they belong to the LEVELLERS, these wrongly named "free
  spirits"&mdash;as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the
  democratic taste and its "modern ideas" all of them men without solitude,
  without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage
  nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only, they are not free, and
  are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for
  seeing the cause of almost ALL human misery and failure in the old forms
  in which society has hitherto existed&mdash;a notion which happily inverts
  the truth entirely! What they would fain attain with all their strength,
  is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with
  security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their
  two most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called "Equality of
  Rights" and "Sympathy with All Sufferers"&mdash;and suffering itself is
  looked upon by them as something which must be DONE AWAY WITH. We opposite
  ones, however, who have opened our eye and conscience to the question how
  and where the plant "man" has hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that
  this has always taken place under the opposite conditions, that for this
  end the dangerousness of his situation had to be increased enormously, his
  inventive faculty and dissembling power (his "spirit") had to develop into
  subtlety and daring under long oppression and compulsion, and his Will to
  Life had to be increased to the unconditioned Will to Power&mdash;we
  believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the
  heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind,&mdash;that
  everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man,
  serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite&mdash;we
  do not even say enough when we only say THIS MUCH, and in any case we find
  ourselves here, both with our speech and our silence, at the OTHER extreme
  of all modern ideology and gregarious desirability, as their antipodes
  perhaps? What wonder that we "free spirits" are not exactly the most
  communicative spirits? that we do not wish to betray in every respect WHAT
  a spirit can free itself from, and WHERE perhaps it will then be driven?
  And as to the import of the dangerous formula, "Beyond Good and Evil,"
  with which we at least avoid confusion, we ARE something else than
  "libres-penseurs," "liben pensatori" "free-thinkers," and whatever these
  honest advocates of "modern ideas" like to call themselves. Having been at
  home, or at least guests, in many realms of the spirit, having escaped
  again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks in which preferences and
  prejudices, youth, origin, the accident of men and books, or even the
  weariness of travel seemed to confine us, full of malice against the
  seductions of dependency which he concealed in honours, money, positions,
  or exaltation of the senses, grateful even for distress and the
  vicissitudes of illness, because they always free us from some rule, and
  its "prejudice," grateful to the God, devil, sheep, and worm in us,
  inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the point of cruelty, with
  unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth and stomachs for the
  most indigestible, ready for any business that requires sagacity and acute
  senses, ready for every adventure, owing to an excess of "free will", with
  anterior and posterior souls, into the ultimate intentions of which it is
  difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds to the end of which no
  foot may run, hidden ones under the mantles of light, appropriators,
  although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors from
  morning till night, misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers,
  economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in scheming, sometimes
  proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of
  work even in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows&mdash;and it is
  necessary nowadays, that is to say, inasmuch as we are the born, sworn,
  jealous friends of SOLITUDE, of our own profoundest midnight and midday
  solitude&mdash;such kind of men are we, we free spirits! And perhaps ye
  are also something of the same kind, ye coming ones? ye NEW philosophers?
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