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Existentialism
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844 - 1900)
Ecce Homo: Why am I so clever?
|
A
sublime one saw I today, a solemn one, a penitent of the
spirit: Oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness! (thus
spake zarathustra) |
1
Why do I know more than other
people? Why, in general, am I so clever? I have never pondered over questions
that are not really questions. I have never wasted my strength. I have
no experience, for instance, of actual religious difficulties. I am quite
unfamiliar with the feeling of "sinfulness." Similarly I lack
a reliable criterion for determining a prick of conscience: from what
one hears, a prick of conscience does not seem to me anything very worthy
of veneration. . . . I dislike to leave an action of mine in the lurch;
I prefer to omit utterly the bad result, the consequences, from any problem
involving values. In the face of evil . consequences it is too easy to
lose the proper standpoint from which to view an action. A prick of conscience
seems to me a sort of "evil eye." Something that has failed
should be all the more honored just because it has failed-this agrees
much better with my morality.-"God," "the immortality of
the soul," tcsalvation," a "beyond"-these are mere
notions, to which I paid no attention, on which I never wasted any time,
even as a child-though perhaps I was never enough of a child for that-I
am quite unacquainted with atheism as a result, and still less as an event:
with me it is instinctive. I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant
', to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things.
God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer
indelicacy to us thinkers-at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse
commandment against us: ye shall not think! . . . I am much more interested
in another question which the "salvation of humanity" depends
much more than upon any piece of theological curiosity: the question of
nutrition. For ordinary purposes, it may be formulated thus: "How
precisely must thou nourish thyself in order to attain to thy maximum
of power, or virtue in the Renaissance style of virtue free from moralism?"
Here my experiences -have been the worst possible; I am surprised that
it took me so long to become aware of this question and to derive "understanding"
from my experiences. Only the utter worthlessness of our German culture-its
"idealism"-can to some extent explain how it was that precisely
in this matter I was so baclzward that my ignorance was almost saintly.
For this "culture" from first to last teaches one to lose sight
of realities and instead to hunt after thoroughly problematic, so-called
ideal goals, as, for instance, "classical culture"-as if we
were not doomed from the start in our endeavor to unite "classical"
and "German" in one concept! It is even a little comicaljust
try to picture a "classically cultured" citizen of Leipzigl-Indeed,
I confess that up to a very mature age, my food was quite bad expressed
in moral terms, it was "impersonal," "selfless," "altruistic,"
to the glory of cooks and other fellow-Christians. For example, it was
the Leipzig cookery, together with my first study of Schopenhauer (i865),
that made me gravely renounce my "Will to Live." To become a
malnutritient and to spoil one's stomach in the process-this problem seemed
to me to be admirably solved by the above-mentioned cookery. (It is said
that the year i866 introduced changes into this department.) But as to
German cookery in general-what has it not got on its conscience! Soup
before the meal (still called alla tedesca in the sixteenth century Venetian
cook-books; meat cooked till the flavor is gone, vegetables cooked with
fat and flour; the degeneration of pastries into paper-weights! Add to
this the utterly bestial postprandial habits of the ancients, not merely
of the ancient Germans, and you will begin to understand where German
intellect had its origin-in a disordered intestinal tract. . . . German
intellect is indigestion; it can assimilate nothing. But even English,
which, as against German, and indeed French, diet, seems to me to be a
"return to Nature"-that is to say, to cannibalism-is basically
repugnant to my own instincts. It seems to me that it gives the intellect
heavy feet, Englishwomen's feet. . . . The best cooking is that of Piedmont.
Alcohol does not agree with me; one glass of wine or beer a day is enough
to turn life into a valley of tears for me; in Munich live my antipodes.
Admitting that I came to understand this rationally rather late, yet I
had experienced it as a mere child. As a boy I believed that wine-drinking
and tobacco-smoking were at first but youthful vanities, and later simply
bad habits. Perhaps the wine of Naumburg was partly responsible for this
harsh judgment. To believe that wine was exhilarating, I should have had
to be a Christian-in other words, I should have had to believe in what,
for me, is an absurdity. Strangely enough, whereas small largely diluted
quantities of alcohol depressed me, great quantities made me act almost
like a sailor on shore leave. Even as a boy I showed my bravado in this
respect. To compose and transcribe a long Latin essay in one night, ambitious
of emulating with my pen the austerity and terseness of my model, Sallust,
and to sprinkle the exercise with a few strong hot toddiesthis procedure,
while I was a pupil at the venerable old school of Pforta, did not disagree
in the least with my physiology, nor perhaps with that of Sallust-however
badly it may have agreed with dignified Pforta. Later on, towards the
middle of my life, I grew more and more decisive in my opposition to spirituous
drinks: 1, an opponent of vegetarianism from experience-like Richard Wagner,
who reconverted in annot with sufficient earnest-ness advise all more
spiritual natures to abstain absolutely from alcohol. Water answers the
same purpose. I prefer those places where there are numerous opportunities
of drinking from running brooks as at Nice, Turin, Sils, where water follows
me wherever I turn. In vino veritas: it seems that here too I disagree
with the rest of the world about the concept "Truth"-with me
spirit moves on the face of the waters. Here are a few more bits of advice
taken from my morality. A heavy meal is digested more easily than one
that is too meager. The first condition of a good digestion is that the
stomach should be active as a whole. Therefore a man ought to know the
size of his stomach. For the sanae reasons I advise against all those
interminable meals, which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts, and which
are to be had at any table d'hdte. Nothing between meals, no coffee-coffee
makes onLgloomy. Tea is advisable only in the morning-in small quantities,
but very strong. It may be very harmful, and indispose you for the whole
day, if it is the least bit too weak. Here each one has his own standard,
often between the narrowest and most delicate limits. In a very enervating
climate it is, inadvisable to begin the day with tea: an hour before,
it is a good thing to have a cup of thick cocoa, free from oil. Remain
seated as little as possible; trust no thought that is not born in the
open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion-nor one in which your
very muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices may be traced back
to the intestines. A sedentary life, as I have already said elsewhere,
is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.
2
The question of nutrition is
closely related to that of locality and climate. None of us can live anywhere;
and he who has great tasks to perform, which demand all his energy, has,
in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon
the bodil functions, affecting their retardation or acceleration, is so
great, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate may not merely
alienate a man from his duty, but may withhold it from him altogether,
so that he never comes face to face with it. Animal vigor never preponderates
in him to the extent that it lets him attain that exuberant freedom in
which he may say to himself: I, alone, can do that. . . . The slightest
torpidity of the intestines, once it has become a habit, is quite sufficient
to turn a genius into something mediocre, something "German";
the climate of Germany, alone, is more than enough to discourage the strongest
and most heroic intestines. Upon the tempo of the body's functions closely
depend the agility or the slowness of the spirit's feet; indeed spirit
itself is only a form of these bodily functions. Enumerate the places
in which men of great intellect have been and are still found; where wit,
subtlety, and malice are a part ,of happiness; where genius is almost
necessarily athome: all of them have an unusually dry atmosphere. Paris,
Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens-these names prove this: that genius
is dependent on dry air, on clear skies-in other words, on rapid organic
functions, on the possibility of contenuously securing for one's self
great and even s quantities of energy. I have a case in mind where a man
of significant and independent mentality became a narrow, craven specialist,
an d a crank, simply because he had no feeling for climate. I myself might
have come to the same end, if illness had not forced me to reason, and
to reflect upon reason realistically. Now long practice has taught me
to read the effects of climatic and meteorological influences, from self-observation,
as though from a very delicate and reliable instrument, so that I can
calculate the change in the degree of at MOSpheric moisture by means of
this physiological selfobservation, even on so short a journey as that
from Turin to Milan; accordingly I think with horror of the ghastly fact
that my whole life, up to the last ten years-the most dangerous years-has
always been spent in the wron- places, places that should have been precisely
forbidden to me. Naumburg, Pforta, Thuringia in general, Leipzig, Basel,
Venice -so many disastrous places for my constitution. if I have not a
single happy memory of my childhood and youth, it would be foolish to
account for this by so-called "moral" causes-as, for instance,
the incontestable lack of sufficient companionship; f or this lack is
present to-day as it was before and it does not prevent me from being
cheerful and brave. But it was ignorance of physiology-that confounded
"Idealism"-that was the real curse of my life, the superfluous
and stupid element in it; from which nothing good could develop, for which
there can be no settlement and no compensation. The consequences of this
"Idealism" explain all the blunders, the great aberrations of
instinct, and the modest specializations" which diverted me from
my life-task; as, for instance, the fact that I became a philologist-why
not at least a doctor or anything else that might have opened my eyes?
During my stay at Basel, my whole intellectual routine, including my daily
schedule, was an utterly senseless abuse of extraordinary powers, without
any sort of compensation for the strength I spent, without even a thought
of its exhaustion and the problem of replacement. I lacked that subtle
egoism, the protection that an imperative instinct gives; I regarded all
men as my equals, I was disinterested," I forgot my distance from
others-in short, I was in a condition for which I can never forgive myself.
When I had almost reached the end, simply because I had almost reached
it, I began to reflect upon the basic absurdity of my life-'tldealism.3)
It was illness that first brought me to reason.
3
The choice of nutrition; the
choice of climate and locality; the third thing in which one must not
on any account make a blunder, concerns the method of recuperation or
recreation. Here, again, according to the extent to which a spirit is
sui generis, the limits of what is perrriitted-that is, beneficial to
him-become more and more narrow. In my case, reading in general is one
of my methods of recuperation; consequently it is a part of that which
enables me to escape from myself, to wander in strange sciences and strange
souls of that, about which I am no longer in earnest. Indeed, reading
allows me to recover from my earnestness. When I am deep in work, no books
are to be seen near me; I carefully guard against allowing any one to
speak or even to think in my presence. For that is what reading amounts
to. . . . Has any one ever actually noticed, that, during that profound
tension to which the state of pregnancy condemns the mind, and fundamentally,
the whole organism, accident and every kind of external stimulus acts
too vigorouslv and penetrates too deeply? One must avoid accident and
external stimuli as far as possible: a sort of self-circumvallation is
one of the first instinctive precautions of spiritual pregnancy. Shall
I permit a strange thought to climb secretly over the wall? For that is
just what reading would mean.The periods of work and productivity are
followed by periods of recuperation: to me, ye pleasant, intellectual,
intelligent books! Shall it be a German book? I must go back six months
to catch myself with a book in my hand. What was it? An excellent study
by Victor Brochard, Les Seeptiques Grecques, in reading which my Laertiana
I was of great help to me. The skeptics! the only honorable types among
that double-faced, aye, quintuple-faced race, the philosophers! . . .
Otherwise I almost always take refuge in the same books, few in number,
books exactly fitting my needs. Perhaps it is not in my nature to read
much, or variously: a library makes me ill. Neither is it my nature to
love much or many kinds of things. Suspicion, even hostility towards new
books is nearer to my instinct than "toleration," largeur de
cteur, and other forms of "neighborly love." . . . Ultimately
it is to a few old French authors that I return again and again; I believe
only in French culture, and regard everything else in Europe which calls
itself "culture" as pure misunderstanding. It is hardly necessary
to speak of the German variety. . . . The few instances of higher culture
I have encountered in Germany were all French in their origin, above all,
Madame Cosima Wagner, who had by far the most superior judgment in matters
of taste that I have ever heard. Even if I do not read, but literally
love Pascal, as the most instructive sacrifice to Christianity, killing
himself slowly, first in body, then in mind in accord with the logic of
this most horrible form of inhuman cruelty; even if I have something of
Montaigne's malice in my soul, and-who knows?-perhaps in my body, too;
even if my artist's taste endeavors to protect the names of Moli6re, Comeille,
and Racine, not without bitterness, against a wild genius like Shakespear
-all this does not prevent me from regarding everr e the modem Frenchmen
as charming companions also. I can imagine no century in history in which
a netful of more inquisitive and at the same time more subtle psychologists
could be drawn up to, gether than in present-day Paris. I will name a
few at random-for their number is by no means small -Paul Bourget, Pierre
Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules LemoCitre; or, singling out
one of strong race, a genuine Latin, of whom I am particularly fond, Guy
de Maupassant. Between ourselves, I prefer this generation even to its
great masters, all of whom were corrupted by German philosophy (Taine,
for instance, by Hegel, whom he has to thank for his misunderstanding
of great men and great ages). Wherever Germany penetrates, she corrupts
culture. It was the war which first "redeemed" the spirit of
France. . . . Stendhal is one of the happiest accidents of my life-for
everything epochal in that life came to me by accident, never by recommendation-Stendhal
is quite priceless, with his anticipatory psychologist's eye; with his
grasp of facts, reminiscent of the greatest of all masters of facts (ex
ungue Napoleoneum); and, last, but not least, as an honest atheist-a specimen
both rare and difficult to discover in France- honor to Prosper M6rim6e!
. . . Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best
atheistic joke I of all people could have made: "God's only excuse
is that He does not exist." . . . I myself have said somewhere-What
hitherto has been the greatest objection to Life?-God. . . .
4
It was Heinrich Heine who gave
me the highest -conception of a lyrical poet. I search vainly through
the kingdoms of all the ages for anything to equal his sweet and passionate
music. He possessed that divine wickedness, without which I cannot conceive
,of perfection; I value men and races, according to the necessity they
have to imagine a god partaking of the nature of the satyr. And how masterfully
he handles German! Some day men will declare of Heine and myself that
we were by far the greatest of all artists in the German language; that
we outstripped incalculably all that pure Germans could do with this language.
I must be profoundly related to Byron's Manfred: I discovered all his
abysses in my own soul-at thirteen I was ripe for this book. Words fail
me, I have merely a glance of contempt for those who dare to mention Faust
in the presence of Manfred. The Germans are incapable of a conception
of greatness-witness Schuniann! Angry at this cloying Saxon, I once composed
a counter-overture to Manfred, of which Hans von Billow declared he had
never seen the like before on paper: it was a sheer violation of Euterpe.
Seeking for my highest formula for Shakespeare, I invariably find only
this: he conceived the type of CTsar. Such things a man cannot guess-he
either is the thing, or he is not. The great poet draws only from his
own experience-to such an extent that later he can no longer endure his
own work. After glancing at my ZarathWtra, I pace to and fro in my room
for a half hour, unable to control an unbearable fit of sobbing. I know
of no more, heart-rending reading than Shakespeare: what he must have
suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown! Is Hamlet understood?
Not doubt but certainty drives one mad. But to feel this,. one must be
profound, abysmal, a philosopher.We all fear the truth. And, to make a
confession: I feel instinctively certain that Lord Bacon is the originator,
the self-torturer, of this most appalling literature: what do I care about
the wretched gabble of American fools and half-wits? But the power for
the greatest realism in vision is not only compatible with the greatest
realism in deeds, with the monstrous, with crime-it actually presupposes
the latter. . . . We hardly know enough about Lord Bacon-the first realist
in the, highest sense of the word-to be sure of everything he did, everything
he willed, and everything he experienced in himself. To the devil with
the critics! Suppose I had christened my Zaratkustra with a name not my
own-with Richard Wagner's, for instance -the insight of two thousand years
would not have sufficed to guess that the author of Human, all-tooHuman
was the visionary of Zaratkustra.
5
In speaking of the recreations
of my life, I must express a word or two of gratitude for the one which
has afforded me by far the greatest and heartiest refreshment. This was
undoubtedly my intimate relationship with Richard Wagner. I pass over
my other relationships with men quite lightly; but at no price would I
have my life deprived of those days at Tribschen-days of confidence, of
cheerfulness, of sublime flashes, and of profound moments. I know not
what Wagner may have been for others; but no cloud ever obscured our sky.
And this brings me back again to France-I have no quarrel with Wagnerites,
and hoc genus omne, who think to honor Wagner by believing him to be like
themselves; for such people I have only a contemptuous curl of my lip.
With my nature, so alien to everything Teutonic that the mere presence
of a German retards my digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also
the first moment in my life in which I breathed freely: I felt him, I
honored him, as a foreigner, as the antithesis of and incarnate protest
against all "German virtues." We who as children breathed the
marshy atmosphere of the fifties, are necessarily pessimists with regard
to the idea "German"; we can be nothing else but revolutionaries-we
can give our assent to no state of affairs in which a hypocrite is at
the top. It is a matter of indifference to me whether this hypocrite acts
in different colors to-day, whether he dresses in scarlet or dons the
uniform of a hussar.' Very good, then! Wagner, too, was a revolutionary-he
Red from the Germans. The artist has no home in Europe except in Paris;
that subtlety of all the five senses which is the condition of Wagner's
art, that sensitivity to the nuance, to psychological morbiditythese are
to be found only in Paris. Nowhere else is there this passion for problems
of form, this seriousness about the mise-en-scene, which is the Parisian
seriousness par excellence. In Germany one can have no notion of the tremendous
ambition that lives in the soul of a Parisian artist. The German is good-natured.
IVagner was by no means good-natured. . . . But I have already said enough
on the subject of Wagner's attachments (see Be, yond Good and Evil, Aphorism
2 69), and about those to whom he is most closely related. He is one of
the late French ronianticists, that high-soaring and heaven-aspiring band
of artists, like Delacroix and Berlioz, who are essentially sick and incurable,
pure fanatics of expression, virtuosos through and through. . . Who was
the first intelligent follower of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire, the same
man who was the first to understand Delacroix-that typical decadent, in
whom a whole generation of artists has recognized itself; he was perhaps
the last of them too. . . . What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner?
The fact that he condescended to the Germans-that he became a German Imperialist.
. . . IN'herever Germany spreads, she corrupts culture.
6
All things considered, I could
never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I seemed condemned
to the society of Germans. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling
of unbearable oppression., he may have to take to hashish. Well, I had
to take to Wagner. Wagner is the counterpoison to everything essentially
German-he is a poison, I do not, deny it. From the moment that Tristan
was arranged for the piano-my compliments, Herr von Biilow!-I was a Wagnerite.
I deemed Wagner's previous works beneath methey were too common, too "German.
. . . But to this day I,am still looking for a work to equal Tristan in
dangerous fascination, that gruesome yet sweet quality of infinity; I
seek among all the arts in vain. All the bizarreries of Leonardo da Vinci
lose their charm with the first note of Tristan. It is absolutely Wagner's
non plifs idtra; the Mastersingers and the Ring were mere relaxation to
him. To become more healthy-this is a step backwards for a nature like
Wagner's. I regard it as a first-class bit of good luck to have lived
at the right time, and to have lived precisely among Germans, in order
to be ripe for this work: so strongly in me works the curiosity of the
psychologist. The world must be a poor thing for him who has never been
unhealthy enough for this "voluptuousness of Hell": it is allowable,
it is even imperative, that one here employ a mystic formula. I suppose
I know better than any one else the prodigies of which Wagner was capable,
the fifty worlds of strange ecstasies to reach which no one but he had
win,-s strong enough; and as I'am today sufficiently powerful to turn
even the most dubious and dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus
to grow more powerful, I name Wagner as the greatest benefactor of my
life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suff ered greater
agony, even at each other's hands, than most -men of this century are
able to bear; and this will associate our names forever. For, just as
Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so surely am I, and
ever will be. You must first have two centuries of psychological and artistic
discipline, my dear countrymen! But you can never turn back the hands
of the clock.
7
To the most exceptional of my readers I should
like to say just a word as to what I really demand of music. It should
be cheerful and yet profound, like an October afternoon. It should be
unique, wanton, and tender, and like a dainty, sweet woman in roguishness
and grace. . . . I shall never admit that a German can understand what
music is. Those musicians, the greatest of them, who are called German,
are all foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen-or Jews; or else,
like Heinrich Schiitz, Bach, and Hdndel, they are Germans of a strong
race, a type now extinct. I myself have still enough of the Pole in me
to let all other music go, if only Chopin is left to me. For three reasons
I would except '"7agner's Siegfried Idyll, and perhaps also a few
things of Liszt, who excelled all other musicians in the noble accent
of his orchestration; and finally everything that has come from beyond
the Alps-this side of the Alps. I would not know how to dispense with
Rossini, and still less with my Southern counterpart in music, my Venetian
maestro, Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps, I really mean only
Venice. Seeking to find another word for music, I inevitably come back
to Venice. I do not know how to make a distinction between tears and music.
I do not know how to think of joy, or of the south, without a shudder
of fear.
On the bridge I stood
But lately, in the dark night.
From far away came the sound of singing;
In golden drops it rolled away
Over the glittering rim.
Gondolas, lights, music
Drunk, swam far out in the darkness...
My soul, a stringed instrument,
Invisibly moved,
Sang a gondola song secretly,
Gleaming in bright happiness.
-Did any hearken?
8
In all these things-the choice
of food, locality, climate, and recreation-the instinct of self-preservation
dominates, expressing itself with least ambiguity in the form of an instinct
of self-defense. To limit what one hears and sees, to detach one's self
from many things-this is elementary prudence, the first proof that a man
is not an accident but a necessity. The customary word for this instinct
of self-defense is taste. It is imperative not only to say ig no"
where "yes" would indicate "disinterestedness," but
even to say "no" as seldom as Possible. One must separate from
anything that forces one to repeat "no," again and again. The
reason for this is that all expenditures of defensive energy, however
slight, involve enormous and absolutely superfluous losses when they become
regular and habitual. Our greatest expenditure of energy is comprised
of these small frequent discharges of it. To preserve one's self intact,
to hold things at a distance, not deceive yourselves on this point!-is
an expenditure of energy and one directed towards purely negative ends.
The mere constant necessity of being on his guard may weaken a man so
much that he can no longer defend himself. Suppose I were to step out
of my house, and, instead of the quiet and aristocratic city of Turin,
I were to find a German provincial town; my instinct would have to pull
itself together to repel everything that would invade it from this downtrodden
cowardly world. Or suppose I found a German y metropoli@that structure
of vice in which nothing grows, but where every single thing, good or
bad, is imported. Would I not have to become a hedgehog? ' But to have
quills amounts to a squandering of strength; a twofold luxury, for, if
we chose, we could dispense with them and open our hands instead. . .
. Another form of prudence and self-defense consists in reacting as seldom
as possible, and in detaching one's self from those circumstances and
conditions which condemn one, as it were, to suspend one's "liberty"
and initiative, and become a mere bundle of reactions. A good type of
this is furnished by intercourse with books. The scholar who actually
does little else than welter in a sea of books-the average philologist
may handle two hundred a day finally loses completely the ability to think
for himself. He cannot think unless he has a book in his hands. When he
thinks, he responds to a stimulus (a thought he has read)-and finally
all he does is react. The scholar devotes all his energy to affirming
or denying or criticizing matter which has already been thought out-he
no longer thinks himself. . . . In him the instinct of selfdefense has
decayed, otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar
is a decadent. With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly-endowed, free-spirited
natures already "read to pieces" at thirty-nothing but matches
that have to be struck before they can emit any sparks-or "thoughts."
To read a book early in the morning, at daybreak, in the vigor and dawn
of one's strength -this is sheer viciousness!
9
At this point I can no longer
evade a direct answer to the question, kow one becomes wkat one is. And
here I touch upon the master stroke of the art of self-preservation-selfiskness.
If we assume that one's life-task-the determination and the fate of one's
life-task-appreciably surpasses the average measure, nothing would be
more dangerous than to come face to face with one's self by the side of
this life-task. The fact that one becomes what one is, presupposes that
one has not the remotest suspicion ,of what one is. From this standpoint
a unique meaning and value is given to even the blunders of one's life,
the temporary deviations and aberrations, the hesitations, the timidities,
the earnestness wasted upon tasks remote from the central one. In these
matters there is opportunity for great wisdom, perhaps even the highest
wisdom; in circumstances, where nosce teipsum would be the passport to
ruin, the forgetting of one's self, the misunderstanding, the belittling,
the narrowing and the mediocratizing of one's self, amount to reason itself.
In moral terms: to love one's neighbor and to live,for others and for
other thin-s may be the means of protection for the maintenance of the
most rigorous egoism. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary
to my custom and conviction, take the side of the "selfless"
tendencies, for here they are engaged in the service of selfishness and
self-discipline. The whole surface of consciousness-for consciousness
is a surface-must be kept free of any of the great imperatives. Beware
even of every striking word, of every striking gesture! They all lead
to the dangerous possibility that the instinct may "understand itself"
too soon. Meanwhile the organizing "idea," destined to mastery,
continues to grow in the depths-it begins to command, it leads you slowly
back from your deviations and aberrations, it makes ready individual qualities
and capacities, which will some day make themselves felt as indispensable
to the whole of your task-gradually it cultivates all the serviceable
faculties before it ever whispers a word concerning the dominant task,
the "goal," the "purpose," and the "meaning."
Viewed from this angle, my life is simply amazing. For the task of transvaluing
values, more abilities were necessary perhaps than could ever be found
combined in one individual; and above all, opposed abilities which must
yet not be mutually inimical and destructive. An order of rank among capacities;
distance; the art of separating without creating hostility; to confuse
nothing; to reconcile nothing; to be tremendously various and yet to be
the reverse of chaos-all this was the first condition, the long secret
work and artistry of my instinct. Its superior guardianship manifested
itself so powerfully that at no time did I have any intimation of what
was growing within me-until suddenly all my capacities were ripe, and
one day burst forth in full perfection. I can recall no instance of my
ever having exerted myself, there is no evidence of struggle in my life;
I am the reverse of a heroic nature. To "will" something, to
"strive" after something, to have a "purpose" or a
"desire" in my mind - I know none of these things from experience.
At this very moment I look out upon my future-a broad future!-as upon
a calm sea: no longing disturbs its serenity. I have not the slightest
wish that anything should be, different than it is: I myself do not wish
to be different. I have always been this way. I have never had a desire.
A man who, after his forty-fourth year, can say that he has never troubled
himself about honors, women, or money!not that they were lacking to me.
. . . It was in this way, for example, that one day I became a University
Professor-such an idea had never even entered my head, for I was hardly
twenty-four. In the same way, two years before, I had one day become a
philologist, in the sense that my first philological work,' my start in
every way, was requested by my master, Ritschl, for publication in his
Rheinisckes Museum. (Ritschl-I say it in all reverence-was the only genial
scholar I have ever known. He possessed that engaging depravity which
distinguishes us Thuringians, and which can make even a German sympathetic-even
to arrive at truth we prefer roundabout ways. These words should not be
taken as a deprecation in any sense of my Thuringian co-dweller, the intelligent
Leopold von Ranke.
10
The question will be raised why I should
actually have related all these trivial and, judged according to ordinary
standards, insignificant details. I would seem to be hurting my own cause,
more particularly if I am destined to assume great tasks. I rep ly that
these trivial details-diet, locality, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry
of self-love-are inconceivably more important than everything men have
hitherto considered essential. It is just here that we must begin to learn
afresh. All the things men have valued with such earnestness heretofore
are not even realities; they are mere fantasies, or, more strictly speaking,
lies arising from the evil instincts of diseased and, in the deepest sense,
harmful natures-all the concepts, "God," "soul," "virtue,
"sin," "Beyond," "truth," "eternal
life." And yet men sought in them for the greatness of human nature,
its "divinity. All questions of politics, of the social order, of
education, have been falsified from top to bottom, because the most harmful
men have been taken for great men, and because people were taught to despise
the "details," more properly, the fundamentals of life. If I
now compare myself with those creatures who have hitherto been honored
as the first among men, the difference becomes obvious. I do not consider
these so-called "first" men as human beings-for me they are
the excrement of mankind, the products of disease and the instinct of
revenge: they are so many monsters, rotten, utterly incurable, avenging
themselves on life. . . . I would be their very opposite. It is my privilege
to be extremely sensitive to any sign of healthy instincts. There is not
a morbid trait in me; even in times of serious illness I have never become
morbid; you will look in vain for a trace of fanaticism in my nature.
No one can point out -I single moment of my life in which I have assumed
either an arrogant or a pathetic attitude. Pathetic attitudes do not belong
to greatness; he who needs attitudes is false. . . . Beware of all picturesque
men t Life came most easily to me when it demanded the greatest labor
from me. Whoever could have seen me during the seventy days of this autumn,
when, without interruption, with a sense of responsibility to posterity,
I performed so much work of the highest type-work no man did before or
will do after me would have noticed no sign of tension in me, but on the
contrary exuberant freshness and gayety. Never have my meals been more
enjoyable, never has my sleep been better. I know of no other manner of
dealing with great tasks than as play: this, as a sign of greatness, is
an essential prerequisite. The slightest constraint, a gloomy appearance,
anv hard accent in the voice -all these things are objections to a man,
but how much more to his work! . . . One must have no nerves. . . . Even
to suffer from solitude is an objection-the only thing I have always suffered
from is "multitude," the infinite variety of my own soul. At
the absurdly tender age of seven, I already knew that no human speech
would ever reach me: did any one ever see me disconsolate therefor? To-day
I still possess the same affability towards everybody, I am even full
of consideration for the humblest: in all this there is not an ounce of
arrogance or contempt. He whom I despise divines the fact that I despise
him; my mere existence angers those who have bad blood in their veins.
My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to
have nothing altered, either in the future, the past, or for all eternity.
Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it-all idealism
is falsehood in the face of necessity-but he must love it. . . .
Ce
qu'on fait n'est jamais compris mais seulement loué ou blâmé.
Nietzsche, Gay Science |
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