WE SCHOLARS
204. At the risk that moralizing
may also reveal itself here as that which it has always
been namely, resolutely montrer ses
plaies, according to Balzac I would
venture to protest against an improper and injurious
alteration of rank, which quite unnoticed, and as if
with the best conscience, threatens nowadays to establish
itself in the relations of science and philosophy.
I mean to say that one must have the right out of
one’s own experience experience,
as it seems to me, always implies unfortunate experience? to
treat of such an important question of rank, so as
not to speak of colour like the blind, or against
science like women and artists ("Ah! this dreadful
science!” sigh their instinct and their shame,
“it always finds things out!").
The declaration of independence of the scientific
man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the
subtler after-effects of democratic organization and
disorganization: the self-glorification and self-conceitedness
of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom,
and in its best springtime which does not
mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells
sweet. Here also the instinct of the populace
cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and
after science has, with the happiest results, resisted
theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been
too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion
to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to
play the “master” what am I
saying! to play the philosopher on its own account.
My memory the memory of a scientific man,
if you please! teems with the naïvetés
of insolence which I have heard about philosophy and
philosophers from young naturalists and old physicians
(not to mention the most cultured and most conceited
of all learned men, the philologists and schoolmasters,
who are both the one and the other by profession).
On one occasion it was the specialist and the Jack
Horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against
all synthetic tasks and capabilities; at another time
it was the industrious worker who had got a scent of
otium and refined luxuriousness in the internal
economy of the philosopher, and felt himself aggrieved
and belittled thereby. On another occasion it
was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees
nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted
systems, and an extravagant expenditure which “does
nobody any good”. At another time the fear
of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment
of knowledge became conspicuous, at another time the
disregard of individual philosophers, which had involuntarily
extended to disregard of philosophy generally.
In fine, I found most frequently, behind the proud
disdain of philosophy in young scholars, the evil
after-effect of some particular philosopher, to whom
on the whole obedience had been foresworn, without,
however, the spell of his scornful estimates of other
philosophers having been got rid of the
result being a general ill-will to all philosophy.
(Such seems to me, for instance, the after-effect
of Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany: by
his unintelligent rage against Hegel, he has succeeded
in severing the whole of the last generation of Germans
from its connection with German culture, which culture,
all things considered, has been an elevation and a
divining refinement of the historical sense,
but precisely at this point Schopenhauer himself was
poor, irreceptive, and un-German to the extent of
ingeniousness.) On the whole, speaking generally,
it may just have been the humanness, all-too-humanness
of the modern philosophers themselves, in short, their
contemptibleness, which has injured most radically
the reverence for philosophy and opened the doors
to the instinct of the populace. Let it but be
acknowledged to what an extent our modern world diverges
from the whole style of the world of Heraclitus, Plato,
Empedocles, and whatever else all the royal and magnificent
anchorites of the spirit were called, and with what
justice an honest man of science may feel himself
of a better family and origin, in view of such representatives
of philosophy, who, owing to the fashion of the present
day, are just as much aloft as they are down below in
Germany, for instance, the two lions of Berlin, the
anarchist Eugen Duhring and the amalgamist Eduard
von Hartmann. It is especially the sight of those
hotch-potch philosophers, who call themselves “realists,”
or “positivists,” which is calculated to
implant a dangerous distrust in the soul of a young
and ambitious scholar those philosophers, at the best,
are themselves but scholars and specialists, that
is very evident! All of them are persons who have
been vanquished and brought back again
under the dominion of science, who at one time or
another claimed more from themselves, without having
a right to the “more” and its responsibility and
who now, creditably, rancorously, and vindictively,
represent in word and deed, disbelief in the master-task
and supremacy of philosophy After all, how could it
be otherwise? Science flourishes nowadays and
has the good conscience clearly visible on its countenance,
while that to which the entire modern philosophy has
gradually sunk, the remnant of philosophy of the present
day, excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn
and pity Philosophy reduced to a “theory of
knowledge,” no more in fact than a diffident
science of epochs and doctrine of forbearance a philosophy
that never even gets beyond the threshold, and rigorously
denies itself the right to enter that
is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony,
something that awakens pity. How could such a
philosophy rule!
205. The dangers that beset the
evolution of the philosopher are, in fact, so manifold
nowadays, that one might doubt whether this fruit
could still come to maturity. The extent and towering
structure of the sciences have increased enormously,
and therewith also the probability that the philosopher
will grow tired even as a learner, or will attach
himself somewhere and “specialize” so that
he will no longer attain to his elevation, that is
to say, to his superspection, his circumspection,
and his DESPECTION. Or he gets aloft too late,
when the best of his maturity and strength is past,
or when he is impaired, coarsened, and deteriorated,
so that his view, his general estimate of things, is
no longer of much importance. It is perhaps just
the refinement of his intellectual conscience that
makes him hesitate and linger on the way, he dreads
the temptation to become a dilettante, a millepede,
a milleantenna, he knows too well that as a discerner,
one who has lost his self-respect no longer commands,
no longer leads, unless he should aspire to become
a great play-actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and
spiritual rat-catcher in short, a misleader.
This is in the last instance a question of taste,
if it has not really been a question of conscience.
To double once more the philosopher’s difficulties,
there is also the fact that he demands from himself
a verdict, a Yea or Nay, not concerning science, but
concerning life and the worth of life he
learns unwillingly to believe that it is his right
and even his duty to obtain this verdict, and he has
to seek his way to the right and the belief only through
the most extensive (perhaps disturbing and destroying)
experiences, often hesitating, doubting, and dumbfounded.
In fact, the philosopher has long been mistaken and
confused by the multitude, either with the scientific
man and ideal scholar, or with the religiously elevated,
desensualized, desecularized visionary and God-intoxicated
man; and even yet when one hears anybody praised, because
he lives “wisely,” or “as a philosopher,”
it hardly means anything more than “prudently
and apart.” Wisdom: that seems to the
populace to be a kind of flight, a means and artifice
for withdrawing successfully from a bad game; but
the genuine philosopher does it not
seem so to us, my friends? lives “unphilosophically”
and “unwisely,” above all, imprudently,
and feels the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts
and temptations of life he risks himself
constantly, he plays this bad game.
206. In relation to the genius,
that is to say, a being who either engenders
or produces both words understood in
their fullest sense the man of learning,
the scientific average man, has always something of
the old maid about him; for, like her, he is not conversant
with the two principal functions of man. To both,
of course, to the scholar and to the old maid, one
concedes respectability, as if by way of indemnification in
these cases one emphasizes the respectability and
yet, in the compulsion of this concession, one has
the same admixture of vexation. Let us examine
more closely: what is the scientific man?
Firstly, a commonplace type of man, with commonplace
virtues: that is to say, a non-ruling, non-authoritative,
and non-self-sufficient type of man; he possesses
industry, patient adaptableness to rank and file,
equability and moderation in capacity and requirement;
he has the instinct for people like himself, and for
that which they require for instance:
the portion of independence and green meadow without
which there is no rest from labour, the claim to honour
and consideration (which first and foremost presupposes
recognition and recognisability), the sunshine of
a good name, the perpetual ratification of his value
and usefulness, with which the inward distrust
which lies at the bottom of the heart of all dependent
men and gregarious animals, has again and again to
be overcome. The learned man, as is appropriate,
has also maladies and faults of an ignoble kind:
he is full of petty envy, and has a lynx-eye for the
weak points in those natures to whose elevations he
cannot attain. He is confiding, yet only as one
who lets himself go, but does not Flow; and precisely
before the man of the great current he stands all
the colder and more reserved his eye is
then like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is
no longer moved by rapture or sympathy. The worst
and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable
results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type,
from the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively
for the destruction of the exceptional man, and endeavours
to break or still better, to relax every
bent bow To relax, of course, with consideration, and
naturally with an indulgent hand to relax
with confiding sympathy that is the real art of Jesuitism,
which has always understood how to introduce itself
as the religion of sympathy.
207. However gratefully one may
welcome the objective spirit and who
has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and
its confounded IPSISIMOSITY! in the end,
however, one must learn caution even with regard to
one’s gratitude, and put a stop to the exaggeration
with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the
spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were
the goal in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification as
is especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist
school, which has also in its turn good reasons for
paying the highest honours to “disinterested
knowledge” The objective man, who no longer
curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal
man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms
forth fully after a thousand complete and partial
failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments
that exist, but his place is in the hand of one who
is more powerful He is only an instrument, we may
say, he is a mirror he is no “purpose
in himself” The objective man is in truth a mirror
accustomed to prostration before everything that wants
to be known, with such desires only as knowing or
“reflecting” implies he waits
until something comes, and then expands himself sensitively,
so that even the light footsteps and gliding-past
of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface
and film Whatever “personality” he still
possesses seems to him accidental, arbitrary, or still
oftener, disturbing, so much has he come to regard
himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms
and events He calls up the recollection of “himself”
with an effort, and not infrequently wrongly, he readily
confounds himself with other persons, he makes mistakes
with regard to his own needs, and here only is he
unrefined and negligent Perhaps he is troubled about
the health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere
of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and
society indeed, he sets himself to reflect
on his suffering, but in vain! His thoughts already
rove away to the more general case, and
tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how
to help himself He does not now take himself seriously
and devote time to himself he is serene, not
from lack of trouble, but from lack of capacity for
grasping and dealing with his trouble The habitual
complaisance with respect to all objects and experiences,
the radiant and impartial hospitality with which he
receives everything that comes his way, his habit
of inconsiderate good-nature, of dangerous indifference
as to Yea and Nay: alas! there are enough of cases
in which he has to atone for these virtues of his! and
as man generally, he becomes far too easily the Caput
mortuum of such virtues. Should one wish
love or hatred from him I mean love and
hatred as God, woman, and animal understand them he
will do what he can, and furnish what he can.
But one must not be surprised if it should not be much if
he should show himself just at this point to be false,
fragile, questionable, and deteriorated. His
love is constrained, his hatred is artificial, and
rather un tour de force, a slight
ostentation and exaggeration. He is only genuine
so far as he can be objective; only in his serene totality
is he still “nature” and “natural.”
His mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no
longer knows how to affirm, no longer how to deny;
he does not command; neither does he destroy.
“Je ne Méprise presque rien” he
says, with Leibniz: let us not overlook nor undervalue
the presque! Neither is he a model man; he
does not go in advance of any one, nor after, either;
he places himself generally too far off to have any
reason for espousing the cause of either good or evil.
If he has been so long confounded with the philosopher,
with the Caesarian trainer and dictator of civilization,
he has had far too much honour, and what is more essential
in him has been overlooked he is an instrument,
something of a slave, though certainly the sublimest
sort of slave, but nothing in himself presque
rien! The objective man is an instrument,
a costly, easily injured, easily tarnished measuring
instrument and mirroring apparatus, which is to be
taken care of and respected; but he is no goal, not
outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom
the rest of existence justifies itself, no termination and
still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary
cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that
wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated,
delicate, movable potter’s-form, that must wait
for some kind of content and frame to “shape”
itself thereto for the most part a man without
frame and content, a “selfless” man.
Consequently, also, nothing for women, in PARENTHESI.
208. When a philosopher nowadays
makes known that he is not a skeptic I
hope that has been gathered from the foregoing description
of the objective spirit? people all hear
it impatiently; they regard him on that account with
some apprehension, they would like to ask so many,
many questions... indeed among timid hearers, of whom
there are now so many, he is henceforth said to be
dangerous. With his repudiation of skepticism,
it seems to them as if they heard some evil-threatening
sound in the distance, as if a new kind of explosive
were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit,
perhaps a newly discovered Russian NIHILINE, a pessimism
bonae voluntatis, that not only denies, means
denial, but dreadful thought! Practises
denial. Against this kind of “good-will” a
will to the veritable, actual negation of life there
is, as is generally acknowledged nowadays, no better
soporific and sedative than skepticism, the mild,
pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism; and Hamlet
himself is now prescribed by the doctors of the day
as an antidote to the “spirit,” and its
underground noises. “Are not our ears already
full of bad sounds?” say the skeptics, as lovers
of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police;
“this subterranean Nay is terrible! Be
still, ye pessimistic moles!” The skeptic, in
effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily
frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start
at every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea,
and feels something like a bite thereby. Yea!
and Nay! they seem to him opposed to morality;
he loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to his
virtue by a noble aloofness, while perhaps he says
with Montaigne: “What do I know?”
Or with Socrates: “I know that I know nothing.”
Or: “Here I do not trust myself, no door
is open to me.” Or: “Even if
the door were open, why should I enter immediately?”
Or: “What is the use of any hasty hypotheses?
It might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses
at all. Are you absolutely obliged to straighten
at once what is crooked? to stuff every hole with
some kind of oakum? Is there not time enough
for that? Has not the time leisure? Oh, ye
demons, can ye not at all wait? The uncertain
also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a Circe,
and Circe, too, was a philosopher.” Thus
does a skeptic console himself; and in truth he needs
some consolation. For skepticism is the most
spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological
temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous
debility and sickliness; it arises whenever races
or classes which have been long separated, decisively
and suddenly blend with one another. In the new
generation, which has inherited as it were different
standards and valuations in its blood, everything
is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and tentativeness;
the best powers operate restrictively, the very virtues
prevent each other growing and becoming strong, equilibrium,
ballast, and perpendicular stability are lacking in
body and soul. That, however, which is most diseased
and degenerated in such nondescripts is the will;
they are no longer familiar with independence of decision,
or the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing they
are doubtful of the “freedom of the will”
even in their dreams Our present-day Europe, the scene
of a senseless, precipitate attempt at a radical blending
of classes, and consequently of races, is therefore
skeptical in all its heights and depths, sometimes
exhibiting the mobile skepticism which springs impatiently
and wantonly from branch to branch, sometimes with
gloomy aspect, like a cloud over-charged with interrogative
signs and often sick unto death of its
will! Paralysis of will, where do we not find
this cripple sitting nowadays! And yet how bedecked
oftentimes’ How seductively ornamented!
There are the finest gala dresses and disguises for
this disease, and that, for instance, most of what
places itself nowadays in the show-cases as “objectiveness,”
“the scientific spirit,” “L’art
pour l’art,” and “pure
voluntary knowledge,” is only decked-out skepticism
and paralysis of will I am ready to answer
for this diagnosis of the European disease The
disease of the will is diffused unequally over Europe,
it is worst and most varied where civilization has
longest prevailed, it decreases according as “the
barbarian” still or again asserts
his claims under the loose drapery of Western culture
It is therefore in the France of today, as can be readily
disclosed and comprehended, that the will is most infirm,
and France, which has always had a masterly aptitude
for converting even the portentous crises of its spirit
into something charming and seductive, now manifests
emphatically its intellectual ascendancy over Europe,
by being the school and exhibition of all the charms
of skepticism The power to will and to persist, moreover,
in a resolution, is already somewhat stronger in Germany,
and again in the North of Germany it is stronger than
in Central Germany, it is considerably stronger in
England, Spain, and Corsica, associated with phlegm
in the former and with hard skulls in the latter not
to mention Italy, which is too young yet to know what
it wants, and must first show whether it can exercise
will, but it is strongest and most surprising of all
in that immense middle empire where Europe as it were
flows back to Asia namely, in Russia There
the power to will has been long stored up and accumulated,
there the will uncertain whether to be negative
or affirmative waits threateningly to be
discharged (to borrow their pet phrase from our physicists)
Perhaps not only Indian wars and complications in Asia
would be necessary to free Europe from its greatest
danger, but also internal subversion, the shattering
of the empire into small states, and above all the
introduction of parliamentary imbecility, together
with the obligation of every one to read his newspaper
at breakfast I do not say this as one who desires
it, in my heart I should rather prefer the contrary I
mean such an increase in the threatening attitude of
Russia, that Europe would have to make up its mind
to become equally threatening namely, to
acquire one will, by means of a new
caste to rule over the Continent, a persistent, dreadful
will of its own, that can set its aims thousands of
years ahead; so that the long spun-out comedy of its
petty-statism, and its dynastic as well as its democratic
many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a close.
The time for petty politics is past; the next century
will bring the struggle for the dominion of the world the
compulsion to great politics.
209. As to how far the new warlike
age on which we Europeans have evidently entered may
perhaps favour the growth of another and stronger
kind of skepticism, I should like to express myself
preliminarily merely by a parable, which the lovers
of German history will already understand. That
unscrupulous enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers
(who, as King of Prussia, brought into being a military
and skeptical genius and therewith, in
reality, the new and now triumphantly emerged type
of German), the problematic, crazy father of Frederick
the Great, had on one point the very knack and lucky
grasp of the genius: he knew what was then lacking
in Germany, the want of which was a hundred times
more alarming and serious than any lack of culture
and social form his ill-will to the young
Frederick resulted from the anxiety of a profound
instinct. Men were lacking; and
he suspected, to his bitterest regret, that his own
son was not man enough. There, however, he deceived
himself; but who would not have deceived himself in
his place? He saw his son lapsed to atheism,
to the esprit, to the pleasant frivolity of clever
Frenchmen he saw in the background the great
bloodsucker, the spider skepticism; he suspected the
incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard enough
either for evil or good, and of a broken will that
no longer commands, is no longer able to command.
Meanwhile, however, there grew up in his son that
new kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism who
knows to what extent it was encouraged
just by his father’s hatred and the icy melancholy
of a will condemned to solitude? the skepticism
of daring manliness, which is closely related to the
genius for war and conquest, and made its first entrance
into Germany in the person of the great Frederick.
This skepticism despises and nevertheless grasps;
it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe,
but it does not thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit
a dangerous liberty, but it keeps strict guard over
the heart. It is the German form of skepticism,
which, as a continued Fredericianism, risen to the
highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable
time under the dominion of the German spirit and its
critical and historical distrust Owing to the insuperably
strong and tough masculine character of the great
German philologists and historical critics (who, rightly
estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction
and dissolution), a new conception of the German
spirit gradually established itself in
spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy in
which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was
decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness
of gaze, as courage and sternness of the dissecting
hand, or as resolute will to dangerous voyages of
discovery, to spiritualized North Pole expeditions
under barren and dangerous skies. There may be
good grounds for it when warm-blooded and superficial
humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit,
cet esprit fataliste, ironique,
Méphistophélique, as Michelet calls it, not without
a shudder. But if one would realize how characteristic
is this fear of the “man” in the German
spirit which awakened Europe out of its “dogmatic
slumber,” let us call to mind the former conception
which had to be overcome by this new one and
that it is not so very long ago that a masculinized
woman could dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend
the Germans to the interest of Europe as gentle, good-hearted,
weak-willed, and poetical fools. Finally, let
us only understand profoundly enough Napoleon’s
astonishment when he saw Goethe it reveals what had
been regarded for centuries as the “German spirit”
“Voila un Homme!” that
was as much as to say “But this is a man!
And I only expected to see a German!”
210. Supposing, then, that in
the picture of the philosophers of the future, some
trait suggests the question whether they must not perhaps
be skeptics in the last-mentioned sense, something
in them would only be designated thereby and
not they themselves. With equal right they might
call themselves critics, and assuredly they will be
men of experiments. By the name with which I
ventured to baptize them, I have already expressly
emphasized their attempting and their love of attempting
is this because, as critics in body and soul, they
will love to make use of experiments in a new, and
perhaps wider and more dangerous sense? In their
passion for knowledge, will they have to go further
in daring and painful attempts than the sensitive
and pampered taste of a democratic century can approve
of? There is no doubt these coming ones
will be least able to dispense with the serious and
not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic
from the skeptic I mean the certainty as to standards
of worth, the conscious employment of a unity of method,
the wary courage, the standing-alone, and the capacity
for self-responsibility, indeed, they will avow among
themselves a delight in denial and dissection,
and a certain considerate cruelty, which knows how
to handle the knife surely and deftly, even when the
heart bleeds They will be Sterner (and perhaps
not always towards themselves only) than humane people
may desire, they will not deal with the “truth”
in order that it may “please” them, or
“elevate” and “inspire” them they
will rather have little faith in “Truth”
bringing with it such revels for the feelings.
They will smile, those rigorous spirits, when any one
says in their presence “That thought elevates
me, why should it not be true?” or “That
work enchants me, why should it not be beautiful?”
or “That artist enlarges me, why should he not
be great?” Perhaps they will not only have a
smile, but a genuine disgust for all that is thus
rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic,
and if any one could look into their inmost hearts,
he would not easily find therein the intention to
reconcile “Christian sentiments” with “antique
taste,” or even with “modern parliamentarism”
(the kind of reconciliation necessarily found even
among philosophers in our very uncertain and consequently
very conciliatory century). Critical discipline,
and every habit that conduces to purity and rigour
in intellectual matters, will not only be demanded
from themselves by these philosophers of the future,
they may even make a display thereof as their special
adornment nevertheless they will not want
to be called critics on that account. It will
seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have
it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that “philosophy
itself is criticism and critical science and
nothing else whatever!” Though this estimate
of philosophy may enjoy the approval of all the Positivists
of France and Germany (and possibly it even flattered
the heart and taste of Kant: let us call
to mind the titles of his principal works), our new
philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics
are instruments of the philosopher, and just on that
account, as instruments, they are far from being philosophers
themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Konigsberg
was only a great critic.
211. I insist upon it that people
finally cease confounding philosophical workers, and
in general scientific men, with philosophers that
precisely here one should strictly give “each
his own,” and not give those far too much, these
far too little. It may be necessary for the education
of the real philosopher that he himself should have
once stood upon all those steps upon which his servants,
the scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing,
and must remain standing he himself must perhaps
have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and
besides, poet, and collector, and traveler, and riddle-reader,
and moralist, and seer, and “free spirit,”
and almost everything, in order to traverse the whole
range of human values and estimations, and that he
may be able with a variety of eyes and consciences
to look from a height to any distance, from a depth
up to any height, from a nook into any expanse.
But all these are only preliminary conditions for
his task; this task itself demands something else it
requires him to create values.
The philosophical workers, after the excellent pattern
of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and formalize some
great existing body of valuations that is
to say, former determinations of value,
creations of value, which have become prevalent, and
are for a time called “truths” whether
in the domain of the logical, the political
(moral), or the artistic. It is for these
investigators to make whatever has happened and been
esteemed hitherto, conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible,
and manageable, to shorten everything long, even “time”
itself, and to subjugate the entire past:
an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying out
of which all refined pride, all tenacious will, can
surely find satisfaction. The real philosophers,
however, are commanders and law-givers;
they say: “Thus shall it be!”
They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind,
and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical
workers, and all subjugators of the past they
grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever
is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument,
and a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating,
their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth
is will to power. Are
there at present such philosophers? Have there
ever been such philosophers? Must there
not be such philosophers some day? ...
212. It is always more obvious
to me that the philosopher, as a man indispensable
for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever
found himself, and has been obliged
to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which
he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his
day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers
of humanity whom one calls philosophers who
rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but
rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators have
found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative
mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their
mission), in being the bad conscience of their age.
In putting the vivisector’s knife to the breast
of the very virtues of their age,
they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for
the sake of a new greatness of man, a new untrodden
path to his aggrandizement. They have always
disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence,
and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed
under the most venerated types of contemporary morality,
how much virtue was outlived, they have always
said “We must remove hence to where you
are least at home” In the face of a world of
“modern ideas,” which would like to confine
every one in a corner, in a “specialty,”
a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays,
would be compelled to place the greatness of man,
the conception of “greatness,” precisely
in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his
all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank
according to the amount and variety of that which
a man could bear and take upon himself, according to
the extent to which a man could stretch his responsibility
Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and
attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit
of the age as weakness of will consequently, in the
ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness,
and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially
be included in the conception of “greatness”,
with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with
its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless
humanity, was suited to an opposite age such
as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its
accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents
and floods of selfishness In the time of Socrates,
among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative
Athenians who let themselves go “for
the sake of happiness,” as they said, for the
sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated and
who had continually on their lips the old pompous
words to which they had long forfeited the right by
the life they led, irony was perhaps necessary
for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance
of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly
into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of
the “noble,” with a look that said plainly
enough “Do not dissemble before me! here we
are equal!” At present, on the contrary, when
throughout Europe the herding-animal alone attains
to honours, and dispenses honours, when “equality
of right” can too readily be transformed into
equality in wrong I mean to say into general
war against everything rare, strange, and privileged,
against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher
duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence
and lordliness at present it belongs to
the conception of “greatness” to be noble,
to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different,
to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative,
and the philosopher will betray something of his own
ideal when he asserts “He shall be the greatest
who can be the most solitary, the most concealed,
the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil,
the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of
will; precisely this shall be called greatness:
as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be
full.” And to ask once more the question:
Is greatness possible nowadays?
213. It is difficult to learn
what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught:
one must “know” it by experience or
one should have the pride not to know it.
The fact that at present people all talk of things
of which they cannot have any experience, is true
more especially and unfortunately as concerns the
philosopher and philosophical matters: the
very few know them, are permitted to know them, and
all popular ideas about them are false. Thus,
for instance, the truly philosophical combination
of a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs at presto
pace, and a dialectic rigour and necessity which makes
no false step, is unknown to most thinkers and scholars
from their own experience, and therefore, should any
one speak of it in their presence, it is incredible
to them. They conceive of every necessity as
troublesome, as a painful compulsory obedience and
state of constraint; thinking itself is regarded by
them as something slow and hesitating, almost as a
trouble, and often enough as “worthy of the Sweat
of the noble” but not at all as something
easy and divine, closely related to dancing and exuberance!
“To think” and to take a matter “seriously,”
“arduously” that is one and
the same thing to them; such only has been their “experience.” Artists
have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know
only too well that precisely when they no longer do
anything “arbitrarily,” and everything
of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety,
of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping,
reaches its climax in short, that necessity
and “freedom of will” are then the same
thing with them. There is, in fine, a gradation
of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation
of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest
problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too
near them, without being predestined for their solution
by the loftiness and power of his spirituality.
Of what use is it for nimble, everyday intellects,
or clumsy, honest mechanics and empiricists to press,
in their plebeian ambition, close to such problems,
and as it were into this “holy of holies” as
so often happens nowadays! But coarse feet must
never tread upon such carpets: this is provided
for in the primary law of things; the doors remain
closed to those intruders, though they may dash and
break their heads thereon. People have always
to be born to a high station, or, more definitely,
they have to be bred for it: a person has
only a right to philosophy taking the word
in its higher significance in virtue of
his descent; the ancestors, the “blood,”
decide here also. Many generations must have prepared
the way for the coming of the philosopher; each of
his virtues must have been separately acquired, nurtured,
transmitted, and embodied; not only the bold, easy,
delicate course and current of his thoughts, but above
all the readiness for great responsibilities, the
majesty of ruling glance and contemning look, the
feeling of separation from the multitude with their
duties and virtues, the kindly patronage and defense
of whatever is misunderstood and calumniated, be it
God or devil, the delight and practice of supreme
justice, the art of commanding, the amplitude of will,
the lingering eye which rarely admires, rarely looks
up, rarely loves....