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at the lures of dependency that lie hidden in honors, or money, or duties, or enthusiasms of the senses; grateful even for difficulties and inconstant health, because they have always freed us from some rule and In German: Versucherkunst (see note above). These are terms meaning 'free thinker' in French, Italian, and German.

its 'prejudice,' grateful to the god, devil, sheep, and maggot in us, curious to a fault, researchers to the point of cruelty, with unmindful fingers for the incomprehensible, with teeth and stomachs for the indigestible, ready for any trade that requires a quick wit and sharp senses, ready for any risk, thanks to an excess of 'free will,' with front and back souls whose ultimate aim is clear to nobody, with fore- and backgrounds that no foot can fully traverse, hidden under the cloak of light, conquerors, even if we look like heirs and prodigals, collectors and gatherers from morning until evening, miserly with our riches and our cabinets filled to the brim, economical with what we learn and forget, inventive in schemata, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls at work, even in bright daylight; yes, even scarecrows when the need arises - and today the need has arisen: inasmuch as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude , our own deepest, most midnightly, noon-likely solitude. This is the type of people we are, we free spirits! and perhaps you are something of this yourselves, you who are approaching? you new philosophers? -

The human soul and its limits, the scope of human inner experience to date, the heights, depths, and range of these experiences, the entire history of the soul so far and its still unexhausted possibilities: these are the predestined hunting grounds for a born psychologist and lover of the 'great hunt.' But how often does he have to turn to himself in despair and say: 'Only one! only a single one! and this huge forest, this primeval forest!' And then he wishes he had a few hundred hunting aides and welltrained bloodhounds he could drive into the history of the human soul to round up his game. To no avail: time and again he gets an ample and bitter reminder of how hard it is to find hounds and helpers for the very things that prick his curiosity. The problem with sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, intelligence, and subtlety in every sense are needed, is that they stop being useful the very moment the ' great hunt'(butalsothegreatdanger)begins:-thisisjustwhentheylose their sharp eye and keen nose. For instance, it might take somebody who is himself as deep, as wounded, and as monstrous as Pascal's intellectual conscience to figure out the sort of history that the problem of science and conscience has had in the soul of homines religiosi so far. And, even then, such a person would still need that vaulting sky of bright, malicious spirituality from whose heights this throng of dangerous and painful experiences could be surveyed, ordered, and forced into formulas. - But who would do me this service! But who would have the time to wait for such servants! - it is clear that they grow too rarely; they are so Religious people. Beyond Good and Evil unlikely in every age! In the end, you have to do everything yourself if you want to know anything: which means you have a lot to do! - But a curiosity like mine is still the most pleasant vice of all; - oh sorry! I meant to say: the love of truth finds its reward in heaven and even on earth. -

The sort of faith demanded (and often achieved) by early Christianity in the middle of a skeptical, southern, free-spirited world, a world that had century-long struggles between schools of philosophy behind and inside it, not to mention the education in tolerance given by the imperium Romanum - this faith is not the simple, rude, peon's faith with which a Luther or a Cromwell or some other northern barbarian of the spirit clung to its God and its Christianity. It is much closer to Pascal's faith, which has the gruesome appearance of a protracted suicide of reason - a tough, longlived, worm-like reason that cannot be killed all at once and with a single stroke. From the beginning, Christian faith has been sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, of all pride, of all self-confidence of the spirit; it is simultaneously enslavement and self-derision, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is expected of a worn-down, many-sided,badlyspoiledconscience.Itspresuppositionisthatthesubjugation of spirit causes indescribable pain , and that the entire past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum presented to it as 'faith.' Obtuse to all Christian terminology, modern people can no longer relate to the hideous superlative found by an ancient taste in the paradoxical formula 'god on the cross.' Nowhere to date has there been such a bold inversion or anything quite as horrible, questioning, and questionable as this formula. It promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity. This was the revenge of the Orient, the deep Orient, this was the revenge of the oriental slave on Rome with its noble and frivolous tolerance, on Roman 'Catholicity' of faith. And what infuriated the slaves about and against their masters was never faith itself, but rather the freedom from faith, that half-stoic and smiling nonchalance when it came to the seriousness of faith. Enlightenment is infuriating. Slaves want the unconditional; Roman Empire. Height of absurdity.

they understand only tyranny, even in morality. They love as they hate, without nuance, into the depths, to the point of pain and sickness - their copious, hidden suffering makes them furious at the noble taste that seems to deny suffering. Skepticism about suffering (which is basically just an affectation of aristocratic morality) played no small role in the genesis of the last great slave revolt, which began with the French Revolution.

Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared so far, we find it connected with three dangerous dietary prescriptions: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence, - but without being able to say for sure which is the cause and which is the effect and whether in fact there is a causal relation at all. This last doubt seems justified by the fact that another one of the most regular symptoms of the religious neurosis, in both wild and tame peoples, is the most sudden and dissipated display of voluptuousness, which then turns just as suddenly into spasms of repentance and negations of the world and will: perhaps both can be interpreted as epilepsy in disguise? But here is where interpretation must be resisted the most: no type to date has been surrounded by such an overgrowth of inanity and superstition; and none so far has seemed to hold more interest for people, or even for philosophers. It might be time to calm down a bit, as far as this topic goes, to learn some caution, or even better: to look away, to go away . - This gruesome question-mark of religious crisis and awakening still stands in the background of the newest arrival in philosophy (which is to say: the Schopenhauerian philosophy), almost as the problem in itself. How is negation of the will possible ? Howis the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher. And so it was a true Schopenhauerian consequence that his most devoted follower (and perhaps also his last, as far as Germany was concerned -), namely Richard Wagner, finished his own life's work at this very point, and finally brought to the stage the life and times of that awful and eternal type in the character of Kundry, type v'ecu . And, at the same time, psychiatrists in almost every European country had the opportunity to study this type up close, wherever the religious neurosis - or, as I call it, 'the religious character' - was having its latest epidemic outbreak and A type that has lived. Kundry is a character from Wagner's last opera, Parsifal . Beyond Good and Evil

pageant as the 'Salvation Army.' - But if someone asks what it really was in the whole phenomenon of the saint that caused such inordinate interest among people of all kinds in all ages, and even among philosophers, it was undoubtedly the aura of a miracle that clung to it; it displayed the immediate succession of opposites , of antithetically valorized moral states of soul. It seemed palpable that here was a 'bad man' turning suddenly into a good man, a 'saint.' Psychology to date has been shipwrecked on this spot. Wasn't this primarily because it had put itself under the dominance of morality, because it actually believed in opposing moral values, and saw, read, and interpreted these opposites into texts and into facts? - What? So 'miracles' are just errors of interpretation? A lack of philology? -

The Latin races seem to have much more of an affinity to their Catholicism than we northerners do to Christianity in general. Consequently, a lack of belief means something very different in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones. In Catholic countries it is a sort of anger against the spirit of the race, while with us it is more like a return to the spirit (or un-spirit -) of the race. There is no doubt that we northerners are descended from barbarian races, even as far as our talent for religion goes-itisa meager talent. The Celts are an exception, which is why they also furnished the best soil for the spread of the Christian infection to the north: - the Christian ideal came into bloom in France, at least as far as the pale northern sun would allow. Even these recent French skeptics, how strangely pious they strike our tastes, to the extent that there is some Celtic blood in their lineage! How Catholic, how un-German Auguste Comte's sociology smells to us, with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical Sainte-Beuve is, that amiable and intelligent cicerone of Port-Royal, inspiteofallhishostilitytowardstheJesuits!AndespeciallyErnestRenan: how inaccessible the language of such as Renan sounds to us northerners, this man with a soul that is voluptuous (in a more refined sense) and inclined to rest quite comfortably, but is always being thrown off balance by some nothingness of religious tension! Let us repeat these beautiful sentences after him, - along with the sort of malice and arrogance that stirs in our souls in immediate reply, souls that are probably harsher and not nearly as beautiful, being German souls! - ' disons donc hardiment que

la religion est un produit de l'homme normal, que l'homme est le plus dans le vrai quand il est le plus religieux et le plus assur'e d'une destin'ee infinie ... C'est quand il est bon qu'il veut que la vertu corresponde 'a un ordre 'eternel, c'est quand il contemple les choses d'une mani'ere d'esint'eress'ee qu'il trouve la mort r'evoltante et absurde. Comment ne pas supposer que c'est dans ces moments-l'a, que l'homme voit le mieux ? ... ' These sentences are so utterly antipodal to my ears and habits that when I found them, my initial rage wrote ' la niaiserie religieuse par excellence !' next to them - until my final rage actually started to like them, these sentences whose truth is standing on its head! It is so elegant, so distinguished, to have your own antipodes! What is amazing about the religiosity of ancient Greeks is the excessive amount of gratitude that flows out from it: - it takes a very noble type of person to face nature and life like this ! - Later, when the rabble gained prominence in Greece, religion became overgrown with fear as well, and Christianity was on the horizon. - The passion for God: there is the peasant type, naive and presumptuous - like Luther. The whole of Protestantism is devoid of any southern delicatezza . It has a certain oriental ecstasy, as when an undeserving slave has been pardoned or promoted - in Augustine, for example, who is offensively lacking any nobility of demeanor and desire. It has a certain womanly tenderness and lustfulness that pushes coyly and unsuspectingly towards a unio mystica et physica : like Madame de Guyon. It often appears, strangely enough, as a disguise for the puberty of some girl or boy; now and then it even appears as the hysteria of an old maid, and her

'So we strongly affirm that religion is a product of the normal man, that man is most in the right when he is most religious and most assured of an infinite destiny ... It is when he is good that he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order, it is when he contemplates things in a disinterested manner that he finds death revolting and absurd. How could we fail to suppose that these are the moments when man sees best?' Religious silliness par excellence . Delicacy. Mystical and physical union. Beyond Good and Evil final ambition: - in such cases, the church often declares the woman to be a saint. To this day, the most powerful people have still bowed down in veneration before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate, final renunciation: why have they bowed down like this? They sensed a superior force in the saint and, as it were, behind the question-mark of his frail and pathetic appearance, a force that wants to test itself through this sort of conquest. They sensed a strength of will in which they could recognize and honor their own strength and pleasure in domination. When they honored the saint, they honored something in themselves. Furthermore, the sight of the saint made them suspicious: 'No one would desire such a monstrosity of negation, of anti-nature, for nothing,' they said to (and asked of) themselves. 'Perhaps there is a reason for it, perhaps the ascetic has inside information about some very great danger, thanks to his secret counselors and visitors?' Enough: in front of the saint, the powerful of the world learned a new fear, they sensed a new power, an alien, still unconquered enemy: - it was the 'will to power' that made them stop in front of the saint. They had to ask him - -

The Jewish 'Old Testament,' the book of divine justice, has people, things, and speeches in such grand style that it is without parallel in the written works of Greece and India. We stand in horror and awe before this monstrous vestige of what humanity once was, and then reflect sadly on old Asia and its protruding little peninsula of Europe that desperately wants (over and against Asia) to stand for the 'progress of humanity.' Of course: there will be nothing in these ruins to astonish or distress anyone whoisjust a dull, tame, house pet himself, and understands only house pet needs (like educated people today, including the Christians of 'educated' Christianity) - the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for the 'great' and the 'small.' Perhaps he will still find the New Testament, the book of mercy, more to his liking (it is full of the proper, tender, musty stench of true believers and small souls). The fact that this New Testament (which is a type of Rococo of taste in every respect) gets pasted together with the Old Testament to make a single book, a 'Bible,' a 'book in itself ': this is probably the greatest piece of temerity and 'sin against the spirit' that literary Europe has on its conscience. Why atheism today? God 'the Father' has been thoroughly refuted; and so has 'the Judge' and 'the Reward-giver.' The same for God's 'free will': he doesn't listen, - and even if he did, he wouldn't know how to help anyway. The worst part of it is: he seems unable to communicate in an intelligible manner: is he unclear? - After hearing, questioning, discussing many things, these are the causes I have found for the decline of Europeantheism.It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed growing vigorously - but that it rejects any specifically theistic gratification with profound distrust.

So what is really going on with the whole of modern philosophy? Since Descartes (and, in fact, in spite of him more than because of him) all the philosophers have been out to assassinate the old concept of the soul, undertheguiseofcritiquingtheconceptsofsubjectandpredicate.Inother words, they have been out to assassinate the fundamental presupposition of the Christian doctrine. As a sort of epistemological skepticism, modern philosophy is, covertly or overtly, anti-Christian (although, to state the point for more subtle ears, by no means anti-religious). People used to believe in 'the soul' as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: people said that 'I' was a condition and 'think' was a predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity, and a subject must be thought of as its cause. Now, with admirable tenacity and cunning, people are wondering whether they can get out of this net - wondering whether the reverse might be true: that 'think' is the condition and 'I' is conditioned, in which case 'I' would be a synthesis that only gets produced through thought itself. Kant essentially wanted to prove that the subject cannot be proven on the basis of the subject - and neither can the object. The possibility that the subject (and therefore 'the soul') has a merely apparent existence might not always have been foreign to him, this thought that, Beyond Good and Evil in the form of the Vedanta philosophy, has already arisen on earth once before and with enormous power.

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best - this sort of phenomenon can be found in the sacrifice of the firstborn (a practice shared by all prehistoric religions), as well as in Emperor Tiberius' sacrifice in the Mithras grotto on the Isle of Capri, that most gruesome of all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god; the joy of this particular festival shines in the cruel eyes of the ascetic, that enthusiastic piece of 'anti-nature.' Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? In the end, didn't people have to sacrifice all comfort and hope, everything holy or healing, any faith in a hidden harmony or a future filled with justice and bliss? Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves? To sacrifice God for nothingness - that paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty has been reserved for the race that is now approaching: by now we all know something about this. -

Anyone like me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and naivet'e with which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking - beyond good and evil, and no longer, like SchopenhauerandtheBuddha,underthespellanddelusionofmorality -; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting

da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance, and not just to a performance, but rather, fundamentally, to the one who needs precisely this performance - and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself - and makes himself necessary. - - What? and that wouldn't be circulus vitiosus deus ? As humanity's spiritual vision and insight grows stronger, the distance and, as it were, the space that surrounds us increases as well; our world gets more profound, and new stars, new riddles and images are constantly coming into view. Perhaps everything the mind's eye has used to quicken its wit and deepen its understanding was really just a chance to practice, a piece of fun, something for children and childish people. Perhaps the day will come when the concepts of 'God' and 'sin,' which are the most solemn concepts of all and have caused the most fighting and suffering, will seem no more important to us than a child's toy and a child's pain seem to an old man, - and perhaps 'the old man' will then need another toy and another pain, - still enough of a child, an eternal child!

Has anyone really noticed the extent to which being outwardly idle or half-idle is necessary for a genuinely religious life (and for its favorite job of microscopic self-examination just as much as for that tender state of composure which calls itself 'prayer' and is a constant readiness for the 'coming of God')?-Imeananidleness with a good conscience, passed down over the ages, through the bloodline, an idleness that is not entirely alien to the aristocratic feeling that work is disgraceful , which is to say it makes the soul and the body into something base. And has anyone noticed that, consequently, it is the modern, noisy, time-consuming, self-satisfied, stupidly proud industriousness which, more than anything else, gives people an education and preparation in 'un-belief '? For example, among those in Germany today who have distanced themselves from religion, From the beginning. In musical scores, this directs the performer to return to an earlier point in the piece and repeat what has already been played. God as a vicious circle.

I find representatives of various types and extractions of 'free-thinking'; but, above all, a majority whose industriousness has, over generations, dissolved any religious instinct, so that they no longer know what religion is good for, and only register its presence in the world with a type of dull amazement. They feel they are already busy enough, these good people, whether it is with their businesses or their pleasures, not to mention the 'fatherland' and the newspapers and 'familial obligations.' They do not seem to have any time to spare for religion, particularly when it is unclear to them whether it would be a new business or a new pleasure - 'since people can't possibly be going to church just to spoil a good mood,' they tell themselves. They are not enemies of religious customs; if circumstance (or the state) requires them to take part in such customs, they do what is required, like people tend to do -, and they do it with a patient and unassuming earnestness, without much in the way of curiosity or unease: they just live too far apart and outside to even think they need a For or Against in such matters. Today, most middle-class German Protestants are also among the ranks of the indifferent, particularly in the industrious large trade and transportation centers; the same is true for the majority of industrious scholars, and the whole university apparatus (except for the theologians, whose presence and possibility here gives the psychologist increasingly many and increasingly subtle riddles to resolve). People who are devout or even just church-goers will rarely imagine howmuch goodwill (or may be 'whimsical will') is required for a German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously. On the basis of his whole craft (and, as mentioned before, on the basis of the craftsman-like industriousness his modernconsciencecommitshimto),hetendstoregardreligionwithanair of superior, almost gracious amusement, which is sometimes mixed with a slight contempt for what he assumes to be an 'uncleanliness' of spirit that exists wherever anyone still supports the church. Only with the help of history (and therefore not on the basis of his personal experience) does the scholar succeed in approaching religion with a reverential seriousness and a certain cautious consideration. But even if he reaches the point where he feels grateful for religion, he does not come a single step closer to

what still passes for church or piety: possibly even the reverse. The practical indifference towards religious matters with which he was born and raised tends, in his case, to be sublimated into a caution and cleanliness that shuns contact with religious people and religious affairs; and it can be the very depth of his tolerance and humanity that urges him to evade the subtle

crises intrinsic to toleration itself. - Every age has its own, divine type of naivet'e that other ages may envy; and how much naivet'e - admirable, childish, boundlessly foolish naivet'e - lies in the scholar's belief in his own superiority, in the good conscience he has of his tolerance, in the clueless, simple certainty with which he instinctively treats the religious man as an inferior, lesser type, something that he himself has grown out of, away from, and above , - he, who is himself a presumptuous little dwarf and rabble-man, a brisk and busy brain- and handiworker of 'ideas,' of 'modern ideas'!

Anyone who has looked deeply into the world will probably guess the wisdom that lies in human superficiality. An instinct of preservation has taught people to be flighty, light, and false. We occasionally find both philosophers and artists engaging in a passionate and exaggerated worship of 'pure forms.' Let there be no doubt that anyone who needs the cult of the surface this badly has at some point reached beneath the surface with disastrous results. Perhaps there is even an order of rank for these wounded children, the born artists, who find pleasure in life only by intending to falsify its image, in a sort of prolonged revenge against life -. We can infer the degree to which life has been spoiled for them from the extent to which they want to see its image distorted, diluted, deified, and cast into the beyond - considered as artists, the homines religiosi would belong to the highest rank. Entire millennia sink their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence, driven by a deep, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism; this fear comes from an instinct which senses that we could get hold of the truth too soon , before people have become strong enough, hard enough, artistic enough ... Seen in this light, piety - the 'life in God' - appears as the last and most subtle monstrosity produced by fear of the truth; it appears as the artists' worship and intoxication before the most consistent of all falsifications, as the will to invert the truth, the will to untruth at any price. Perhaps piety has been the most potent method yet for the beautification of humanity: it can turn people into art, surface, plays of colors, benevolence, and to such an extent that we can finally look at them without suffering. - Religious people. Beyond Good and Evil

To love humanity for the sake of God - that has been the noblest and most bizarre feeling people have attained so far. That the love of humanity, in the absence of any sanctifying ulterior motive, is one more stupidity and abomination; that the tendency to love humanity like this can only get its standard, its subtlety, its grain of salt and pinch of ambergris from a higher tendency: - whoever it was that first felt and 'experienced' all this, however much his tongue might have stumbled as it tried to express such a tenderness, let him be forever holy and admirable to us as the man who has flown the highest so far and has got the most beautifully lost! The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits -, as the man with the most comprehensive responsibility, whose conscience bears the weight of the overall development of humanity, this philosopher will make useofreligion for his breeding and education work, just as he will make use of the prevailing political and economic situation. The influence that can be exerted over selection and breeding with the help of religions (and this influence is always just as destructive as it is creative and formative) varies according to the type of person who falls under their spell and protection. For people who are strong, independent, prepared, and predestined for command, people who come to embody the reason and art of a governing race, religion is an additional means of overcoming resistances, of being able to rule. It binds the ruler together with the ruled, giving and handing the consciences of the ruled over to the rulers - which is to say: handing over their hidden and most interior aspect, and one which would very much like to escape obedience. And if individuals from such a noble lineage are inclined, by their high spirituality, towards a retiring and contemplative life, reserving for themselves only the finest sorts of rule (over exceptional young men or monks), then religion can even be used as a means of securing calm in the face of the turmoil and tribulations of the cruder forms of government, and purity in the face of the necessary dirt of politics. This is how the Brahmins, for instance, understood the matter. With the help of a religious organization, they assumed the power to appoint kings for the people, while they themselves kept and felt removed and outside, a people of higher, over-kingly tasks.

Meanwhile, religion also gives some fraction of the ruled the instruction and opportunity they need to prepare for eventual rule and command. This is particularly true for that slowly ascending class and station in which, through fortunate marriage practices, the strength and joy of the will, the will to self-control is always on the rise. Religion tempts and urges them to take the path to higher spirituality and try out feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence, and of solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race that wants to gain control over its origins among the rabble, and work its way up to eventual rule. Finally, as for the common people, the great majority, who exist and are only allowed to exist to serve and to be of general utility, religion gives them an invaluable sense of contentment with their situation and type; it puts their hearts greatly at ease, it glorifies their obedience, it gives them (and those like them) one more happiness and one more sorrow, it transfigures and improves them, it provides something of a justification for everything commonplace, for all the lowliness, for the whole half-bestial poverty of their souls. Religion, and the meaning religion gives to life, spreads sunshine over such eternally tormented people and makes them bearable even to themselves. It has the same effect that an Epicurean philosophy usually has on the suffering of higher ranks: it refreshes, refines, and makes the most of suffering, as it were. In the end it even sanctifies and justifies. Perhaps there is nothing more venerable about Christianity and Buddhism than their art of teaching even the lowliest to use piety in order to situate themselves in an illusory higher order of things, and in so doing stay satisfied with the actual order, in which their lives are hard enough (in which precisely this hardness is necessary!).

Finally, to show the downside of these religions as well and throw light on their uncanny dangers: there is a high and horrible price to pay when religions do not serve as means for breeding and education in the hands of a philosopher, but instead serve themselves and become sovereign , when they want to be the ultimate goal instead of a means alongside other means. With humans as with every other type of animal, there is a surplus of failures and degenerates, of the diseased and infirm, of those who necessarily suffer. Even with humans, successful cases are always the exception and, Beyond Good and Evil

since humans are the still undetermined animals , the infrequent exception. But it gets worse: people who represent more nobly bred types are less likely to turn out well . Chance, that law of nonsense in the overall economy of mankind, is most terribly apparent in its destructive effect on the higher men, whose conditions of life are subtle, multiple, and difficult to calculate. So how is this surplus of failures treated by the two greatest religions, those mentioned above? They try to preserve, to keep everything living that can be kept in any way alive. In fact, they take sides with the failures as a matter of principle, as religions of the suffering . They give rights to all those who suffer life like a disease, and they want to make every other feeling for life seem wrong and become impossible. Whatever merit we might find in this indulgent, preserving care, which was and is meant for the highest types of people (since these are the ones that, historically, have almost always suffered the most), along with everyone else - nevertheless, in the final analysis, the religions that have existed so far (which have all been sovereign ) have played a principal role in keeping the type 'man' on a lower level. They have preserved too much of what should be destroyed . They have done invaluable service, these religions, and who is so richly endowedwithgratitude not to grow poor in the face of everything that, for instance, the 'spiritual men' of Christianity have done for Europe so far! Andyet, after they gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed anddespairing, a staff and support to the dependent, after they found people who were inwardly destroyed or had grown wild and lured them away from society, into cloisters and spiritual prisons: what else did they have to do, to work in good conscience and conviction for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which really means working in word and in deed for the deterioration of the European race ? Stand all valuations on their head -that is what they had to do! And crush the strong, strike down the great hopes, throw suspicion on the delight in beauty, skew everything self-satisfied, manly, conquering, domineering, every instinct that belongs to the highest and best-turned-out type of 'human,' twist them into uncertainty, crisis of conscience, self-destruction; at the limit, invert the whole love of the earth and of earthly dominion

into hatred against earth and the earthly that is the task the church set and needed to set for itself until, in its estimation, 'unworldly,' 'unsensuous,' and 'higher man' finally melted together into a single feeling. If you could survey the strangely painful, crude yet subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and disinterested eye of an Epicurean god, I think you would find it to be a constant source of amazement and laughter. Doesn't it seem as if, for eighteen centuries, Europe was dominated by the single will to turn humanity into a sublime abortion? But if somebody with opposite needs were to approach the almost willful degeneration and atrophy of humanity that the Christian European (Pascal for instance) has become, somebody whose manner is no longer Epicurean, but has instead some divine hammer in hand; wouldn't he have to yell out in rage, in pity, in horror: 'Oh you fools, you presumptuous, pitying fools, what have you donehere!Wasthatworkmeantforyourhands!Lookhowyou'vewrecked and ruined my most beautiful stone! Who gave you the right to do such a thing!' - What I mean is: Christianity has been the most disastrous form of arrogance so far. People who were not high and hard enough to give human beings artistic form; people who were not strong or far-sighted enough, who lacked the sublime self-discipline to give free reign to the foreground law of ruin and failure by the thousands; people who were not noble enough to see the abysmally different orders of rank and chasms in rank between different people. People like this , with their 'equality before God' have prevailed over the fate of Europe so far, until a stunted, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something well-meaning, sickly, and mediocre has finally been bred: the European of today ...

Genuine teachers only take things seriously where their students are concerned - even themselves. 'Knowledge for its own sake' - this is the final snare morality has laid; with it, we become completely entangled in morals once again. Knowledge would have little charm if there were not so much shame to be overcome in order to reach it. a People are at their least honest when it comes to their God: he is not allowed to sin! The tendency to let oneself be debased, robbed, lied to, and exploited could be the shame of a god among men. It is barbaric to love one thing alone, since this one love will be pursued at the expense of all others. This includes love of God. Epigrams and entr'actes 'I did that' says my memory. I couldn't have done that - says my pride, and stands its ground. Finally, memory gives in. You have been a poor observer of life if you have not also seen the hand that, ever so gently - kills. If you have character, you also have a typical experience that always comes back. The sage as astronomer. - If you still experience the stars as something 'over you,' you still don't have the eyes of a knower. It is not the strength but the duration of high feelings that makes for high men. Precisely by attaining an ideal, we surpass it. a Many peacocks hide their peacock tails - and call that their pride. A man with genius is insufferable if he doesn't have at least two more things: gratitude and cleanliness.

The degree and type of a person's sexuality reaches up into the further- most peaks of their spirit., Beyond Good and Evil = . The degree and type of a person's sexuality reaches up into the further- most peaks of their spirit., Beyond Good and Evil = . The degree and type of a person's sexuality reaches up into the further- most peaks of their spirit., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . In peaceful conditions, the warlike man will attack himself., Beyond Good and Evil = . In peaceful conditions, the warlike man will attack himself., Beyond Good and Evil = . In peaceful conditions, the warlike man will attack himself., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = want utterly different things from them.. , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . Asoul that knows it is loved but does not itself love exposes its sediment: - its bottom-most aspect rises to the top. An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. - What did that god whocounseled'Knowyourself!'reallymean?Wasitperhaps:'Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!' - And Socrates? - And the 'scientific man'? - It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. So do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn't quench thirst anymore? , Beyond Good and Evil = Asoul that knows it is loved but does not itself love exposes its sediment: - its bottom-most aspect rises to the top. An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. - What did that god whocounseled'Knowyourself!'reallymean?Wasitperhaps:'Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!' - And Socrates? - And the 'scientific man'? - It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. So do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn't quench thirst anymore? . Asoul that knows it is loved but

does not itself love exposes its sediment: - its bottom-most aspect rises to the top. An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. - What did that god whocounseled'Knowyourself!'reallymean?Wasitperhaps:'Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!' - And Socrates? - And the 'scientific man'? - It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. So do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn't quench thirst anymore? , Beyond Good and Evil = Asoul that knows it is loved but does not itself love exposes its sediment: - its bottom-most aspect rises to the top. An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. - What did that god whocounseled'Knowyourself!'reallymean?Wasitperhaps:'Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!' - And Socrates? - And the 'scientific man'? - It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. So do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn't quench thirst anymore? . Asoul that knows it is loved but does not itself love exposes its sediment: - its bottom-most aspect rises to the top. An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. - What did that god whocounseled'Knowyourself!'reallymean?Wasitperhaps:'Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!' - And Socrates? - And the 'scientific man'? - It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. So do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn't quench thirst anymore? , Beyond Good and Evil = Asoul that knows it is loved but does not itself love exposes its sediment: - its bottom-most aspect rises to the top. An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. - What did that god whocounseled'Knowyourself!'reallymean?Wasitperhaps:'Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!' - And Socrates? - And the 'scientific man'? - It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. So do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn't quench

thirst anymore? . Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser., Beyond Good and Evil = . Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser., Beyond Good and Evil = . Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = People use their principles to try to tyrannize or justify or honor or insult or conceal their habits: - two people with the same principles will probably. , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = 'Pity for all' - would be harshness and tyranny for you ,. , Beyond Good and Evil = my dear

Instinct . - When your house is on fire, you even forget about lunch. - Yes, but you pick it out from the ashes. Women learn how to hate in the same proportion that they unlearn how to charm. The same affects have different tempos in men and in women: that is why men and women do not stop misunderstanding each other.

Behind all their personal vanity, women always have an impersonal contempt - for 'woman.' Boundheart, free spirit . - If someone binds up his heart and takes it captive, he can give his spirit considerable freedom: I have said this once already. But nobody will believe me if they do not already know ... You start to mistrust very clever people when they get embarrassed. Terrible experiences make you wonder if the people who have experienced them are not terrible themselves. Love and hate, the very things that weigh other people down, will make heavy, heavy-hearted people lighter and momentarily superficial.

Weall pretend to ourselves that we are more naive than we are: this is how, Epigrams and entr'actes = Weall pretend to ourselves that we are more naive than we are: this is how. we relax from other people. , Epigrams and entr'actes = we relax from other people. . animal., Epigrams and entr'actes = Today, someone with knowledge might well feel like God becoming. , Epigrams and entr'actes = . to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or - or - ', Epigrams and entr'actes = When somebody discovers their love is requited, it really should temper their feelings for their beloved. 'What? This person is unassuming enough. , Epigrams and entr'actes = . Danger in happiness. - 'Now everything is at its best, now I love every fate: - who wants to be my fate?', Epigrams and entr'actes = Danger in happiness. - 'Now everything is at its best, now I love every fate: - who wants to be my fate?'. It is not their love for humanity but rather the impotence of their love for, Epigrams and entr'actes = It is not their love for humanity but rather the impotence of their love for. humanity that keeps today's Christian from - burning us., Epigrams and entr'actes = humanity that keeps today's Christian from - burning us.. , Epigrams and entr'actes = . For free spirits, for the 'pious men of knowledge' - the pia fraus offends taste (offends their 'piety') more than the impia fraus . This explains their profound failure to understand the church, which is typical of 'free spirits' - as their un-freedom., Epigrams and entr'actes = For free spirits, for the 'pious men of knowledge' - the pia fraus offends taste (offends their 'piety') more than the impia fraus . This explains their profound failure to understand the church, which is typical of 'free spirits' - as their un-freedom.. , Epigrams and entr'actes = . Music allows the passions to enjoy themselves.,

Epigrams and entr'actes = Pious fraud. Impious fraud. Wheneveryoureachadecision,close your ears to even the best objections: this is the sign of a strong character. Which means: an occasional will to stupidity., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . There are absolutely no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of the phenomena ..., Beyond Good and Evil = . Often enough the criminal is no match for his deed: he cheapens and slanders it., Beyond Good and Evil = . Defenders of criminals are rarely artistic enough to use the beautiful, Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . Our vanity is at its strongest precisely when our pride has been wounded., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = Where neither love nor hate are in play, woman is a mediocre player., Epigrams and entr'actes = Where neither love nor hate are in play, woman is a mediocre player.. , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . Thewill to overcome an affect is, in the end, itself only the will of another, or several other, affects., Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . realize that they themselves might also be admired some day., Epigrams and entr'actes = . Disgust at filth can be so great that it prevents us from cleaning ourselves - from 'justifying' ourselves., Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . Sensuality often hurries the growth of love so that the root stays weak and is easy to tear up., Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes =

, Beyond Good and Evil = . Even concubinage gets corrupted: - by marriage., Beyond Good and Evil = . If someone rejoices while burning at the stake it is not because he has triumphed over his pain, but rather over not feeling any pain when he, Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . Whenweareforcedtochangeourmindaboutsomebody,wecountagainst, Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . Apeople is nature's roundabout way of getting six or seven great men. - Yes: and then of getting around them., Beyond Good and Evil = . All proper women find something shameful about science. They think it is too forward, as if it would let people peek under their skin - or worse!, Beyond Good and Evil = . The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more you have to, Beyond Good and Evil = . The devil has the broadest perspective on God, which is why he keeps, Beyond Good and Evil = Epigrams and entr'actes

What someone is begins to reveal itself when his talent diminishes - when he stops showing what he can do. So talent is also a piece of finery; and finery is also a hiding place.

The sexes deceive themselves about each other: which means they basically only love and honor themselves (or their own ideal, to say it more nicely - ). So men would have it that women are placid - but women above all are essentially not placid, just like cats, however much they have rehearsed the appearance of placidity. We are best punished for our virtues. Someone who does not know how to find the path to his ideal lives more carelessly and impudently than someone without an ideal.

All credibility, good conscience, and evidence of truth first come from the senses.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in good people: rather, a good part of it is the condition of any being good.

Thefirst one looks for a midwife for his thoughts - the other, for someone he can help: this is how a good conversation begins.

In dealing with scholars and artists, people are easily led in the wrong direction: behind a remarkable scholar you will not infrequently find a mediocre person, and behind a mediocre artist quite often - someone really remarkable.

When we are awake we do the same thing as when we are dreaming: we first invent and create the people we are dealing with - and then forget it immediately.

In revenge and in love, woman is more barbaric than man.

Advice as riddle . ' - If the bond does not split, - then it first must be bit.'

The abdomen is the reason why people are not so quick to consider themselves gods.

The chastest saying I ever have heard: ' Dans le v'eritable amour c'est l'ame qui enveloppe le corps .'

Our vanity would have it that the things we do best are the very things that are most difficult for us. On the origin of many morals. 'In true love, it is the soul that envelops the body.' Epigrams and entr'actes

When a woman has scholarly inclinations, there is usually something wrong with her sexuality. Even sterility makes her prone to a certain masculinity of taste; man is, if you will, 'the sterile animal.'

Comparing man and woman overall, you could say: woman would not have a genius for finery if she did not have an instinct for the secondary role.

Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

From old Florentine novellas: but also - from life: buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone . Sacchetti, Nov. .

To seduce those nearest to you into a good opinion, and then credit the credibility of this opinion: who can equal women in this piece of art? -

What an age perceives as evil is usually an untimely after-effect of something that used to be perceived as good - the atavism of an older ideal. 'Both good and bad women need the stick.' From Franco Sacchetti, Novelle (written in the late fourteenth century, but published in ). Around the hero everything turns into tragedy; around the demigod everything turns into a satyr play; and around God everything turns into - what? Perhaps 'world'? -, Beyond Good and Evil = . it, - right? my friends?, Beyond Good and Evil = . Whatever is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . Objections, minor infidelities, cheerful mistrust, a delight in mockery - these are symptoms of health. Everything unconditional belongs to pathology., Beyond Good and Evil = . A sense for the tragic grows and declines along with sensuousness., Beyond Good and Evil = . Madness is rare in the individual - but with groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule., Beyond Good and Evil = . The thought of suicide is a strong means of comfort: it helps get us, Beyond Good and Evil =

Our strongest drives, the tyrants in us, subjugate not only our reason but our conscience as well., Epigrams and entr'actes = Our strongest drives, the tyrants in us, subjugate not only our reason but our conscience as well.. Our strongest drives, the tyrants in us, subjugate not only our reason but our conscience as well., Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . We have to, Epigrams and entr'actes = repay good and bad: but why do we have to repay precisely those people who did us the good or bad?. We have to, Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . You do not love your knowledge enough anymore, as soon as you com-, Epigrams and entr'actes = . You do not love your knowledge enough anymore, as soon as you com-, Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them., Epigrams and entr'actes = . Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them., Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . next door to them, Epigrams and entr'actes = ' - this is what all peoples believe. Lovebrings to light the high and the hidden qualities of the lover - what is. next door to them, Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . Jesus said to his Jews: 'The law was for servants, - love God as I do, as his son! Why should we care about morals, we sons of God?' -, Epigrams and entr'actes = rare and exceptional about him: to this extent, love easily misleads

about his ordinary traits.. Jesus said to his Jews: 'The law was for servants, - love God as I do, as his son! Why should we care about morals, we sons of God?' -, Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . , Epigrams and entr'actes = . This means 'neighbor' in the Biblical sense, which Nietzsche is (the ones next door), a more general term for 'neighbor.'

Regarding all parties sometimes he has to be the wether himself., Beyond Good and Evil = . - A shepherd always needs another bellwether, - or. Regarding all parties sometimes he has to be the wether himself., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = Lies come through our mouths - but the face that accompanies them tells. , Beyond Good and Evil = . Withhardpeople,intimacyis a source of shame - and something precious. , Beyond Good and Evil = Withhardpeople,intimacyis a source of shame - and something precious. . Withhardpeople,intimacyis a source of shame - and something precious. , Beyond Good and Evil = Withhardpeople,intimacyis a source of shame - and something precious. . the truth., Beyond Good and Evil = . the truth., Beyond Good and Evil = . Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: - he did not die from it, but degenerated into a vice., Beyond Good and Evil = . Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: - he did not die from it, but degenerated into a vice., Beyond Good and Evil = . Talking frequently about yourself can also be a way of hiding. There is more intrusiveness in praise than in censure. Pity is almost laughable in a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops. , Beyond Good and Evil = Talking frequently about yourself can also be a way of hiding. There is more intrusiveness in praise than in censure. Pity is almost laughable in a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops. . Talking frequently about yourself can also be a way of hiding. There is more intrusiveness in praise than in censure. Pity is almost laughable in a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops. , Beyond Good and Evil = Talking frequently about yourself can also be a way of hiding. There is more intrusiveness in praise than in censure. Pity is almost laughable in a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops. . some arbitrary person (because we cannot embrace everyone): but that is precisely what we cannot let the arbitrary person know ..., Beyond Good and Evil = . some arbitrary person (because we cannot embrace everyone): but that is precisely what we cannot let the arbitrary person know

..., Beyond Good and Evil = . , Beyond Good and Evil = Every once in a while, a love of humanity will inspire us to embrace. , Beyond Good and Evil =

It is inhuman to bless where you are cursed.

The confidences of our superiors enrage us because they cannot be reciprocated. -

'I'm not upset because you lied to me, I'm upset because I don't believe you any more.' -

Goodness has a high-spiritedness that looks like malice.

'I dislike him.' - Why? - 'I'm no match for him.' - Has anyone ever given this sort of an answer?

In Europe these days, moral sentiment is just as refined, late, multiple, sensitive, and subtle as the 'science of morals' (which belongs with it) is young, neophyte, clumsy, and crude: - an attractive contrast, and one that occasionally becomes visible, embodied in the person of the moralist himself. Considering what it signifies, the very phrase 'science of morals' is much too arrogant and offends good taste, which always tends to prefer more modest terms. We should admit to ourselves with all due severity exactly what will be necessary for a long time to come and what is provisionally correct, namely: collecting material, formulating concepts, and putting into order the tremendous realm of tender value feelings and value distinctions that live, grow, reproduce, and are destroyed, - and, perhaps, attempting to illustrate the recurring and more frequent shapes of this living crystallization, - all of which would be a preparation for a typology of morals. Of course, people have not generally been this modest. Philosophers have all demanded (with ridiculously stubborn seriousness) something much more exalted, ambitious, and solemn as soon as they took up morality as a science: they wanted morality to be grounded ,-and every philosopher so far has thought that he has provided a ground for morality. Morality itself, however, was thought to be 'given.' What a distance between this sort of crass pride and that supposedly modest little descriptive project, left in rot and ruin, even though the subtlest hands and senses could hardly be subtle enough for it. Precisely because moral philosophers had only a crude knowledge of moral facta , selected arbitrarily and abbreviated at random - for instance, as the morality of Beyond Good and Evil

their surroundings, their class, their church, their Zeitgeist , their climate and region, - precisely because they were poorly informed (and not particularly eager to learn more) about peoples, ages, and histories, they completely missed out on the genuine problems involved in morality, problems that only emerge from a comparison of many different moralities. As strange as it may sound, the problem of morality itself has been missing from every 'science of morals' so far: there was no suspicion that anything was really a problem. Viewed properly, the 'grounding of morals' (as philosophers called it, as they demanded it of themselves) was only an erudite form of good faith in the dominant morality, a new way of expressing it; as such, it was itself already situated within the terms of a certain morality. In the last analysis, it even constitutes a type of denial that these morals can be regarded as a problem. But, in any event, it is the opposite of an examination, dissection, interrogation, vivisection of precisely this article of faith. For example, let us listen to the almost admirable innocence with which even Schopenhauer describes his own project, and then we can draw our conclusions as to how scientific a 'science' could be when its ultimate masters are still talking like children or old women. 'The principle,' he says (p. of the Grundprobleme der Moral ), 'the fundamental claim, on whose content all ethicists actually agree: neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva - this is actually the claim that all moralists attempt to ground ... the actual foundation of ethics that people have sought for millennia, just as they have looked for the philosophers' stone.' - The difficulty involved in grounding the claim just cited might be great indeed - Schopenhauer himself came up famously short in this regard. And anyone who has ever truly felt how inanely false and sentimental this claim is in a world whose essence is will to power -, they might recall that Schopenhauer, pessimism notwithstanding, actually - played the flute ... every day, after dinner. You can read it in his biography. And just out of curiosity: a pessimist who negates both God and world but stops before morality, - who affirms morality and plays his flute, affirms laede neminem morality: excuse me? is this really - a

pessimist? Spirit of the age. 'Harm no one, but rather help everyone as much as you can.' Schopenhauer's 'Preisschrift uber die Grundlage der Moral' (Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals), part two of Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik ( The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics )( ). The emphases are Nietzsche's. On the natural history of morals

Apart from the value of claims like 'there is a categorical imperative in us,' the question remains: what do claims like this tell us about the people who make them? There are moralities that are supposed to justify their creator in the eyes of others, and other moralities that are supposed to calm him down and allow him to be content with himself; still other moralities allow him to crucify and humiliate himself. He can use some moralities to take revenge, others to hide, and still others to transfigure himself and place himself far and away. There are moralities that help their creator to forget, and others that let him - or something about him - be forgotten. Manymoralistswouldliketowieldpowerandimposetheircreativewhims on humanity; many others (perhaps even Kant himself) want to make it clear through their morality that 'the worthy thing about me is that I can obey - and it should be the same for you as it is for me!' - in short, even morality is just a sign language of the affects !

Every morality, as opposed to laisser-aller , is a piece of tyranny against both 'nature' and 'reason.' But this in itself is no objection; for that, we would have to issue yet another decree based on some other morality forbidding every sort of tyranny and unreason. What is essential and invaluable about every morality is that it is a long compulsion. In order to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism, just remember the compulsion under which every language so far has developed strength and freedom: the compulsion of meter, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm. Look at how much trouble the poets and the orators of every country have to go through! (including some of today's prose writers, who have an inexorable conscience in their ear) - and all 'for the sake of some stupidity,' as utilitarian fools say (and think they are clever for saying it) - or 'in obsequious submission to arbitrary laws,' as anarchists say (and then imagine themselves 'free,' even free-spirited). But the strange fact is that everything there is, or was, of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, or masterly assurance on earth, whether in thinking itself, or in ruling, or in speaking and persuading, in artistic just as in ethical practices, has only developed by virtue of the 'tyranny of such arbitrary laws.' And, in all Letting go. Beyond Good and Evil

seriousness, it is not at all improbable that this is what is 'nature' and 'natural' - and not that laisser-aller ! Every artist knows how far removed this feeling of letting go is from his 'most natural' state, the free ordering, placing, disposing and shaping in the moment of 'inspiration' - he knows how strictly and subtly he obeys thousands of laws at this very moment, laws that defy conceptual formulation precisely because of their hardness and determinateness (compared with these laws, there is something floundering, multiple, and ambiguous about even the most solid concept -). I will say it again: what seems to be essential 'in heaven and on earth' is that there be obedience in one direction for a long time. In the long term, this always brings and has brought about something that makes life on earth worth living - for instance: virtue, art, music, dance, reason, intellect - something that transfigures, something refined, fantastic, and divine. The long un-freedom of spirit, the mistrustful constraint in the communicability of thought, the discipline that thinkers imposed on themselves, thinking within certain guidelines imposed by the church or court or Aristotelian presuppositions, the long, spiritual will to interpret every event according to a Christian scheme and to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every chance event, - all this violence, arbitrariness, harshness, terror, and anti-reason has shown itself to be the means through which strength, reckless curiosity, and subtle agility have been bred into the European spirit. Admittedly, this also entailed an irreplaceable loss of force and spirit, which have had to be crushed, stifled, and ruined (since here, just like everywhere else, 'nature,' shows itself in its utterly wasteful and indifferent glory, which is outrageous but noble). The fact that, for thousands of years, European thinkers have been thinking only in order to prove something (these days it is the other way around: we are suspicious of any thinker who 'has something to prove') - the fact that the results which were supposed to emerge from their most intense contemplations were in fact already firmly established (somewhat like earlier Asian astrology or even the present-day innocuous Christian-moral interpretation of the most personal events 'to the glory of god' and 'to save the soul'):

- this tyranny, this arbitrariness, this stern and grandiose stupidity has trained the spirit. Slavery, in both the crude and refined senses of the term, seems to be the indispensable means of disciplining and breeding even the spirit. We can look at every morality in the following way: whatever 'nature' it contains teaches us to hate the laisser-aller , the all-too-great freedom, and plants in us the need for

limited horizons and the closest tasks. It teaches a narrowing of perspective and so, in a certain sense, stupidity as a condition for life and growth. 'You should obey someone, anyone, and for a long time: or else you will deteriorate and lose all respect for yourself ' - this seems to me to be the moral imperative of nature, which is clearly neither 'categorical,' as the old Kant demanded it to be (hence the 'or else' -), nor directed to the individual (what does nature care about the individual!), but rather to peoples, races, ages, classes, and above all to the whole 'human' animal, to the human.

Theindustrious races find it extremely difficult to tolerate idleness: it was a stroke of genius on the part of the English instinct to spend Sundays in tedium with a te deum so that the English people would unconsciously lust for their week- and workdays. It is the same type of cleverly invented, cleverly interpolated period of fasting that you find all over the ancient world (although there, as is often the case with southern peoples, it is not exactly associated with work -). There need to be many types of fasts; and wherever powerful drives and habits rule, the law-makers have to be sure to put in leap days when these drives are chained up and made to relearn what hunger feels like. Entire generations or epochs, emerging in the grips of some moral fanaticism or another, seem (from a higher viewpoint) to be just such interposed periods of compulsion and fasting, the times when a drive learns to cower and submit, but also to keep itself clean and sharp . Some philosophical sects can be interpreted in this way as well (like the Stoa in the midst of a Hellenistic culture whose air had become heavy and lascivious with the fragrance of aphrodisiacs). - This also suggests an explanation for the paradox of why it was precisely during Europe's Christian period and only under the pressure of Christian value judgments that the sex drive sublimated itself into love ( amour-passion ).

ThereissomethinginPlato's moral philosophy that does not really belong to him, but is there in spite of him, as it were: namely, the Socratism that Love as passion.

he was really too noble for. 'Nobody wants to harm himself, and therefore everything bad happens involuntarily. The bad man brings harm to himself, and he would not do so if he knew badness was bad. Accordingly, people are bad only through error; if the error is removed, they will necessarily become - good.' - This type of inference stinks of the rabble , who see only the disagreeable effects of bad actions and are in fact judging: 'it is stupid to act badly,' while assuming that 'good' is identical with 'useful and pleasant.' If you start off with the assumption that this is the origin of every utilitarian morality and then follow your nose, you will rarely go wrong. - Plato did everything he could to interpret something refined and noble into his teacher's claim: above all, himself -, him, the most daring of all interpreters, who treated the whole of Socrates just like someone might treat a popular theme or folksong from the streets, varying it to the point of infinity and impossibility, into all his own masks and multitudes. As a joke (and a Homeric one at that), what is the Platonic Socrates if not: /rho1 ' o /Pi1 ' ' ' o ' /Pi1 ' ' X ' /rho1 .

The old theological problem of 'faith' and 'knowledge' - or, to be more precise, of instinct and reason - and so, the question of whether, with respect to the value of things, the instincts deserve more authority than reason (reason wants some ground or 'what for?', some purpose or utility behind our values and actions) - this is the same old moral problem that first emerged in the person of Socrates and divided opinions long before Christianity came along. Socrates of course had initially sided with reason, given the taste of his talent - that of a superior dialectician. And, in point of fact, didn't he spend his whole life laughing at the shortcomings of his clumsy, noble Athenians, who, like all noble people, were men of instinct and could never really account for why they acted the way they did? But in the end, silently and secretly, he laughed at himself as well; with his acute conscience and self-scrutiny, he discovered the same difficulty and shortcoming in himself. 'Why free ourselves from the instincts?' he asked himself; 'We should give them their fair dues, 'Plato at the front, Plato at the back, Chimaera in the middle.'

along with reason - we have to follow our instincts but persuade reason to come to their aid with good motives.' This was the genuine falseness of that great, secretive ironist; he made his conscience seem satisfied with a type of self-deceit. Basically, he had seen through to the irrationality of moral judgments. - Plato, who was more innocent in such matters and lacked Socrates' plebeian craftiness, wanted to use all his strength (the greatest strength a philosopher had ever had at his disposal!) to prove to himself that reason and the instincts converge independently on a single goal, on the Good, or 'God'; and, ever since Plato, all theologians and philosophers have been on the same track. Which is to say: in matters of morality, it has been instinct, or (as the Christians say) 'faith,' or (as I say) 'the herd' that has had the upper hand so far. Descartes was an exception, as the father of rationalism (and consequently grandfather of the Revolution) who granted authority to reason alone. But reason is only a tool and Descartes was superficial.

Anyone who investigates the history of a particular science will find in its development a clue to understanding the oldest and most secret processes of all 'knowledge and cognition': there as here, rash hypotheses, fictions, the dumb good will to 'believe,' and a lack of mistrust and patience develop first - our senses learn late and never fully learn to be refined, trusty, careful organs of knowledge. Given some stimulus, our eyes find it more convenient to reproduce an image that they have often produced before than to register what is different and new about an impression: the latter requires more strength, more 'morality.' It is awkward and difficult for the ear to hear something new; we are bad at listening to unfamiliar music. When we hear another language, we involuntarily try to form the sounds we hear into words that sound more comfortable and familiar to us: so, for instance, German people at one point heard ' arcubalista 'andmadeitintotheword' Armbrust .' Evenoursensesgreet everything novel with reluctance and hostility; and affects like fear, love, and hate, as well as passive affects of laziness, will be dominant during even the 'simplest' processes of sensibility. - Just as little as today's Both words mean 'crossbow.' The German term Armbrust literally means 'arm-breast' and so mimics the sound but not the sense of the Latin. Beyond Good and Evil

reader takes in all the individual words (or especially syllables) on a page (he catches maybe five out of twenty words and 'guesses' what these five arbitrary words might possibly mean) - just as little do we see a tree precisely and completely, with respect to leaves, branches, colors, and shape. We find it so much easier to imagine an approximate tree instead. Even in the middle of the strangest experiences we do the same thing: we invent most of the experience and can barely be made not to regard ourselves as the 'inventor' of some process. - What all this amounts to is: we are, from the bottom up and across the ages, used to lying .Or,to put the point more virtuously, more hypocritically and, in short, more pleasantly: people are much more artistic than they think. - In the middle of a lively conversation I will often see the other person's face expressing his thoughts (or the thoughts I attribute to him) with a degree of clarity and detail that far exceeds the power of my visual ability: - such subtlety of muscle movement and ocular expression must have come from my own imagination. In all likelihood the person had an entirely different expression, or none at all.

Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit : but vice versa too. What we experience in dreams, as long as we experience it often enough, ends up belonging to the total economy of our soul just as much as anything we have 'really' experienced. Such experiences make us richer or poorer, we have one need more or less, and finally, in the bright light of day and even in the clearest moments when minds are wide awake, we are coddled a little by the habits of our dreams. Suppose someone frequently dreams that he is flying, and as soon as he starts dreaming he becomes aware of the art and ability of flight as his privilege as well as his most particular, most enviable happiness - someone like this, who thinks he can negotiate every type of curve and corner with the slightest impulse, who knows the feeling of an assured, divine ease, an 'upwards' without tension or force, a 'downwards' without condescension or abasement - without heaviness !-how could someone with dream experiences and dream habits like these not see that the word 'happiness' is colored and determined differently in his waking day too! how could his demands for happiness not be different ? 'What happened in the light goes on in the dark.' On the natural history of morals Compared to this 'flying,' the 'soaring upwards' that the poets describe will have to be too terrestrial, muscular, violent, even too 'heavy' for him.

Human diversity is apparent not only in the variety of people's tables of goods - which is to say the fact that they consider different goods worthwhile and that they disagree with each other as to the more or less of values, the rank order of commonly acknowledged goods: - diversity is much more evident in what they think counts as actually owning and possessing a good. When it comes to a woman, for instance, a more modest person might consider disposal over her body and sexual usage as sufficient and satisfactory signs of possession, of ownership. Someone else with a more suspicious and demanding thirst for possession will see the 'question-mark' here, the fact that this is only the appearance of possession; such a person will want to examine more closely in order to be particularly clear as to whether the woman will give not only herself to him, but also give up what she has or wants for the sake of him -: only this will count as 'possession' for him. But even this would not satisfy the mistrust and possessive desires of a third person, who asks himself whether the woman who gives up everything for his sake is not doing this for some sort of a fantasized version of him. He wants to be thoroughly (even meticulously) well known before he is able to be loved at all; he does not dare to let anyone figure him out -. He will not feel that he possesses his beloved fully until she harbors no illusions about him, until she loves him just as much for his devilishness and hidden inexhaustibility as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality. Someone might want to possess a people, and he finds all the higher arts of the Cagliostro and Catilina suited to this goal. Someone else with a more subtle thirst for possession will say to himself 'one should not deceive where one wants to possess' -. He becomes irritated and impatient at the thought that a mask of himself rules the hearts of the people: 'which is why I have to let myself be known, and above all know myself!' Among helpful and charitable people you typically discover that clumsy piece of deceit that makes somebody ready before helping him: for instance, acting as if he 'deserves' help, requires precisely their help, and will prove to be deeply grateful, devoted, and obsequious for any help they give him, - with

these fantasies they treat the needy like their own property, since they are helpful and charitable out of a desire for property. You will find them jealous if you cross them while they are being charitable, or beat them to it. Parents involuntarily make children into something similar to themselves and call it 'bringing them up.' No mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that, in the child, she has given birth to a piece of property; no father questions his right to subject the child to his own ideas and valuations. In fact, there was a time (among the ancient Germans, for instance) when it seemed fair that the father should dispose of the life and death of the newborn as he saw fit. And now it is the teacher, the social class, the priest, and the prince who, like the father, see every new person as an incontrovertible opportunity for a new possession. And it follows from this ...

The Jews - a people 'born for slavery' as Tacitus and the entire ancient world say, 'the people chosen of all peoples' as they themselves say and think - the Jews have achieved that miraculous thing, an inversion of values, thanks to which life on earth has had a new and dangerous charm for several millennia: - their prophets melted together 'rich,' 'godless,' 'evil,' 'violent,' 'sensual' and for the first time coined an insult out of the word 'world.' The significance of the Jewish people lies in this inversion of values (which includes using the word for 'poor' as a synonym for 'holy' and 'friend'): the slave revolt in morality begins with the Jews.

We infer the existence of innumerable dark bodies lying close to the sun, ones that we will never see. Between you and me, this is a parable; and a psychologist of morals will read the entire book of the stars only as a language of signs and parables in which much is left silent.

You utterly fail to understand beasts of prey and men of prey (like Cesare Borgia), you fail to understand 'nature' if you are still looking for a Tacitus, Historiae ,V, . On the natural history of morals 'disease' at the heart of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths,orparticularly if you are looking for some innate 'hell' in them -: as almost all moralists so far have done. Does it seem that moralists harbor a hatred against tropics and primeval forests? And that they need to discredit the 'tropical man' at all cost, whether as a disease or degeneration of man, or as his own hell and self-martyrdom? But why? In favor of 'temperate zones?' In favor of temperate men? Of 'moralists'? Of the mediocre? - This for the chapter: 'Morality as Timidity.' -

All these morals directed at the individual person to promote what people call his 'happiness' - are they anything other than recommendations for constraint, in proportion to the degree of danger in which the individual person lives his life? or cures for his passions, his good and bad tendencies to the extent that they have will to power and want to play master? or large or small acts of cleverness and artifice, tainted with the stale smell of old folk-remedies and old wives' wisdom? They are all baroque in form and unreasonable (because they are directed at 'everyone,' because they generalize what should not be generalized); they all speak unconditionally, consider themselves unconditional; they are all seasoned with more than just one grain of salt - in fact, they only become tolerable, and occasionally even seductive, when they learn to smell over-spiced, dangerous, and, above all, 'other-worldly.' - On an intellectual scale, all this is of little value and not even remotely 'scientific' let alone 'wise'; instead, to say it again (and again and again), it is clever, clever, clever mixed with stupid, stupid, stupid, - whether we are talking about that indifference and stone column coldness which the Stoics prescribed and applied as a cure for the feverish idiocy of the affects; or that no-more-laughter, no-more-tears of Spinoza, who so naively champions the destruction of the affects through analysis and vivisection; or that method of tuning down the affects to a harmless mean where they might be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morals; or even morality as the enjoyment of affects, intentionally watered down and spiritualized through the symbolism of art, like music, for instance, or the love of God and the love of men for the sake of God - since in religion the passions regain their civil rights, provided that ... ; and finally, even that easy and high-spirited surrender to the affects taught by Hafiz and Beyond Good and Evil Goethe, that bold slackening of the reins, that spiritual-physical licentia morum in the special cases of smart old eccentrics and drunks, where there 'isn't much danger anymore.' This also for the chapter: 'Morality as Timidity.'

For as long as there have been people, there have been herds of people as well (racial groups, communities, tribes, folk, states, churches), and a very large number of people who obey compared to relatively few who command. So, considering the fact that humanity has been the best and most long-standing breeding ground for the cultivation of obedience so far, it is reasonable to suppose that the average person has an innate need to obey as a type of formal conscience that commands: 'Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something,' in short: 'Thou shalt.' This need tries to satisfy itself and give its form a content, so, like a crude appetite, it indiscriminately grabs hold and accepts whatever gets screamed into its ear by some commander or another - a parent, teacher, the law, class prejudice, public opinion - according to its strength, impatience, and tension. The oddly limited character of human development - its hesitancy and lengthiness, its frequent regressions and reversals - is due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is inherited the best and at the cost of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct ever advancing to its furthest excesses, in the end there will be nobody with independence or the ability to command; or, such people will suffer inwardly from bad consciences and need to fool themselves into thinking that they too are only obeying before they are able to command. This is in fact the situation in Europe today; I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They do not know how to protect themselves from their bad consciences except by acting like executors of older or higher commands (from their ancestors, constitution, justice system, laws, or God himself) or even by borrowing herd maxims from the herd mentality, such as the 'first servants of the people,' or the 'instruments of the commonweal.' For his part, the herd man of today's Europe gives himself the appearance of being the only permissible type of man and glorifies those Moral license. On the natural history of morals

characteristics that make him tame, easy-going and useful to the herd as the true human virtues, namely: public spirit, goodwill, consideration, industry, moderation, modesty, clemency, and pity. But in those cases where people think they cannot do without a leader and bellwether, they keep trying to replace the commander with an agglomeration of clever herd men: this is the origin of all representative constitutions, for example. What a relief it is for these European herd animals, what a deliverance from an increasingly intolerable pressure, when, in spite of everything, someone appears who can issue unconditional commands; the impact of Napoleon's appearance is the last major piece of evidence for this: - the history of Napoleon's impact is practically the history of the higher happiness attained by this whole century in its most worthwhile people and moments.

In an age of disintegration where the races are mixed together, a person will have the legacy of multiple lineages in his body, which means conflicting (and often not merely conflicting) drives and value standards that fight with each other and rarely leave each other alone. A man like this, of late cultures and refracted lights, will typically be a weaker person: his most basic desire is for an end to the war that he is . His notion of happiness corresponds to that of a medicine and mentality of pacification (for instance the Epicurean or Christian); it is a notion of happiness as primarily rest, lack of disturbance, repletion, unity at last and the 'Sabbath of Sabbaths,' to speak with the holy rhetorician Augustine, who was himself this sort of person. - But if conflict and war affect such a nature as one more stimulus and goad to life -, and if genuine proficiency and finesse in waging war with himself (which is to say: the ability to control and outwit himself) are inherited and cultivated along with his most powerful and irreconcilable drives, then what emerge are those amazing, incomprehensible, and unthinkable ones, those human riddles destined for victory and for seduction; Alcibiades and Caesar are the most exquisite expressions of this type (- and I will gladly set by their side that first European after my taste, the Hohenstaufen Frederick II), and among artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear in exactly those ages when that weaker type, with his longing for peace, comes to the fore. These types belong together and derive from the same set of causes.

Aslongasherdutility is the only utility governing moral value judgments, as long as the preservation of the community is the only thing in view and questions concerning immorality are limited to those things that seem to threaten the survival of the community; as long as this is the case, there cannot yet be a 'morality of neighbor love.' Suppose that even here, consideration, pity, propriety, gentleness, and reciprocity of aid are already practiced in a small but steady way; suppose that even in this state of society, all the drives that would later come to be called by the honorable name of 'virtues' (and, in the end, basically coincide with the concept of 'morality') - suppose that they are already active: at this point they still do not belong to the realm of moral valuations at all - they are still extra-moral . During the best days of Rome, for instance, an act done out of pity was not called either good or evil, moral or immoral; and if it were praised on its own, the praise would be perfectly compatible with a type of reluctant disdain as soon as it was held up against any action that served to promote the common good, the res publica . Ultimately, the 'love of the neighbor' is always somewhat conventional, willfully feigned andbeside the point compared to fear of the neighbor . After the structure of society seems on the whole to be established and secured against external dangers,it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Until now, in the spirit of common utility, certain strong and dangerous drives such as enterprise, daring, vindictiveness, cunning, rapacity, and a domineering spirit must have been not only honored (under different names than these of course), but nurtured and cultivated (since, given the threats to the group, they were constantly needed against the common enemies). Now, however, since there are no more escape valves for these drives, they are seen as twice as dangerous and, one by one, they are denounced as immoral and abandoned to slander. Now the opposite drives and inclinations come into moral favor; step by step, the herd instinct draws its conclusion. How much or how little danger there is to the community or to equality in an opinion, in a condition or affect, in a will, in a talent, this is now the moral perspective: and fear is once again the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest

drives erupt in passion, driving the individual up and out and far above the average, over the depths of the herd conscience, the self-esteem of the community is Commonwealth. On the natural history of morals destroyed - its faith in itself, its backbone, as it were, is broken: as a result, these are the very drives that will be denounced and slandered the most. A high, independent spiritedness, a will to stand alone, even an excellent faculty of reason, will be perceived as a threat. Everything that raises the individual over the herd and frightens the neighbor will henceforth be called evil ; the proper, modest, unobtrusive, equalizing attitude and the mediocrity of desires acquire moral names and honors. Finally, in very peaceable circumstances there are fewer and fewer opportunities and less and less need to nurture an instinct for severity or hardness; and now every severity starts disturbing the conscience, even where justice is concerned. A high and hard nobility and self-reliance is almost offensive, and provokes suspicion; 'the lamb,' and 'the sheep' even more, gains respect. - There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes pathologically enervated and tenderized and it takes sides, quite honestly andearnestly, with those who do it harm, with criminals . Punishment: that seems somehow unjust to this society, - it certainly finds the thoughts of 'punishment' and 'needing to punish' both painful and frightening. 'Isn't it enough to render him unthreatening ? Why punish him as well? Punishment is itself fearful!' - with these questions, the herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its final consequences. If the threat, the reason for the fear, could be totally abolished, this morality would be abolished as well: it would not be necessary any more, it would not consider itself necessary any more! Anyone who probes the conscience of today's European will have to extract the very same imperative from a thousand moral folds and hiding places, the imperative of herd timidity: 'we want the day to come when there is nothing more to fear !' The day to come - the will and way to that day is now called 'progress' everywhere in Europe.

Let us immediately repeat what we have already said a hundred times before, since there are no ready ears for such truths - for our truths these days. We know all too well how offensive it sounds when someone classifies human beings as animals, without disguises or allegory; and we are considered almost sinful for constantly using expressions like 'herd,' and 'herd instinct' with direct reference to people of 'modern ideas.' So what? We cannot help ourselves, since this is where our new insights happen to lie. Europe, we have found, has become unanimous in all major Beyond Good and Evil

moral judgments; and this includes the countries under Europe's influence. People in Europe clearly know what Socrates claimed not to know, and what that famous old snake once promised to teach, - people these days 'know' what is good and evil. Now it must sound harsh and strike the ear quite badly when we keep insisting on the following point: what it is that claims to know here, what glorifies itself with its praise and reproach and calls itself good is the instinct of the herd animal man, which has come to the fore, gaining and continuing to gain predominance and supremacy over the other instincts, in accordance with the growing physiological approach and approximation whose symptom it is. Morality in Europe these days is the morality of herd animals : - and therefore, as we understand things, it is only one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other (and especially higher ) moralities are or should be possible. But this morality fights tooth and nail against such a 'possibility' and such a 'should': it stubbornly and ruthlessly declares 'I am morality itself and nothing else is moral!' And in fact, with the aid of a religion that indulged and flattered the loftiest herd desires, things have reached the point where this morality is increasingly apparent in even political and social institutions: the democratic movement is the heir to Christianity. But there are indications that the tempo of this morality is still much too slow and lethargic for those who have less patience, those who are sick or addicted to the above-mentioned instinct. This is attested to by the increasingly frantic howling, the increasingly undisguised snarling of the anarchist dogs that now wander the alleyways of European culture, in apparent opposition to the peaceable and industrious democrats and ideologists of revolution, and still more to the silly philosophasters and brotherhood enthusiasts who call themselves socialists and want a 'free society.' But, in fact, they are one and all united in thorough and instinctive hostility towards all forms of society besides that of the autonomous herd (even to the point of rejecting the concepts of 'master' and 'slave' ni dieu ni matre reads a socialist formula -); they are united in their dogged opposition to any special claims, special rights, or privileges (which means, in the last analysis, that they are opposed to any rights: since when everyone is equal, no one will need 'rights' anymore -); they are united

in their mistrust of punitive justice (as if it were a violation of those who are weaker, a wrong against the necessary Neither God nor master. On the natural history of morals result of all earlier societies -); but they are likewise united in the religion of pity, in sympathy for whatever feels, lives, suffers (down to the animal and up to 'God': - the excessive notion of 'pity for God' belongs in a democratic age -); they are all united in the cries and the impatience of pity, in deadly hatred against suffering in general, in the almost feminine inability to sit watching, to let suffering happen; they are united in the way they involuntarily raise the general level of sensitivity and gloom under whose spell Europe seems threatened with a new Buddhism; they are united in their faith in the morality of communal pity, as if it were morality in itself, the height, the achieved height of humanity, the sole hope for the future, the solace of the present, the great redemption of all guilt from the past: - they are all united in their faith in the community as Redeemer , which is to say: in the herd, in 'themselves' ...

We who have a different faith -, we who consider the democratic movement to be not merely an abased form of political organization, but rather an abased (more specifically a diminished) form of humanity, a mediocritization and depreciation of humanity in value: where do we need to reach with our hopes? - Towards new philosophers , there is no alternative; towards spirits who are strong and original enough to give impetus to opposed valuations and initiate a revaluation and reversal of 'eternal values'; towards those sent out ahead; towards the men of the future who in the present tie the knots and gather the force that compels the will of millennia into new channels. To teach humanity its future as its will ,as dependent on a human will, to prepare for the great risk and wholesale attempt at breeding and cultivation and so to put an end to the gruesome rule of chance and nonsense that has passed for 'history' so far (the nonsense of the 'greatest number' is only its latest form): a new type of philosopher and commander will be needed for this some day, and whatever hidden, dreadful, or benevolent spirits have existed on earth will pale into insignificance beside the image of this type. The image of such leaders hovers before our eyes: - may I say this out loud, you free spirits? The conditions that would have to be partly created and partly exploited for them to come into being; the probable paths and trials that would enable a soul to grow tall and strong enough to feel the compulsion for these tasks; a revaluation of values whose new pressure and hammer will

steel a conscience and transform a heart into bronze to bear the weight of a responsibility like this; and, on the other hand, the necessity of such leaders, the terrible danger that they could fail to appear or simply fail and degenerate - these are our real worries and dark clouds, do you know this, you free spirits? These are the heavy, distant thoughts and storms that traverse the sky of our lives. There are few pains as intense as ever having seen, guessed, or sympathized while an extraordinary person ran off course and degenerated: but someone with an uncommon eye for the overall danger that 'humanity' itself will degenerate , someone like us, who has recognized the outrageous contingency that has been playing games with the future of humanity so far - games in which no hand and not even a 'finger of God' has taken part! - someone who has sensed the disaster that lies hidden in the idiotic guilelessness and credulity of 'modern ideas,' and still more in the whole of Christian-European morality: someone like this will suffer from an unparalleled sense of alarm. In a single glance he will comprehend everything that could be bred from humanity , given a favorable accumulation and intensification of forces and tasks; he will know with all the prescience of his conscience how humanity has still not exhausted its greatest possibilities, and how often the type man has already faced mysterious decisions and new paths: - he will know even better, from his most painful memories, the sorts of miserable things that generally shatter, crush, sink, and turn a development of the highest rank into a miserable affair. The total degeneration of humanity down to what today's socialist fools and nitwits see as their 'man of the future' - as their ideal! - this degeneration and diminution of humanity into the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, into man in a 'free society'), this brutalizing process of turning humanity into stunted little animals with equal rights and equal claims is no doubt possible ! Anyone who has ever thought this possibility through to the end knows one more disgust than other men, - and perhaps a new task as well! ...

At the risk that moralizing will prove once again to be what it always was (namely, an undismayed montrer ses plaies , in the words of Balzac), I will dare to speak out against an inappropriate and harmful shift in the rank order between science and philosophy; this shift has gone completely unnoticed and now threatens to settle in with what looks like the clearest of consciences. I mean: people need to speak from experience (and experience always seems to mean bad experience, doesn't it?) when it comes to such lofty questions of rank, or else they are like blind people talking about colors or like women and artists speaking out against science ('Oh, this awful science,' their instincts and shame will sigh, 'it always gets to the bottom of things!' -). The scientific man's declaration of independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the more subtle effects of the democratic way of life (and death): this self-glorification and presumptuousness of the scholar is in the full bloom of spring, flowering everywhere youlook, - which isn't to say that this self-importance has a pleasant smell. 'Awaywithall masters!' - that's what the rabble instinct wants, even here. And now that science has been so utterly successful in fending off theology, after having been its 'handmaiden' for far too long, it is so high in spirits and low on sense that it wants to lay down laws for philosophy and, for once, play at being 'master' - what am I saying! play at being philosopher . My memory (the memory of a scientific man, if you will!) is teeming with the arrogantly naive comments about philosophy and philosophers that I have heard from young natural scientists and old physicians (not to 'Showing one's wounds.' Beyond Good and Evil

mention from the most erudite and conceited scholars of all, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both by profession -). Sometimes it was the specialists and the pigeon-hole dwellers who instinctively resisted all synthetic tasks and skills; at other times it was the diligent workers who smelled the otium and the noble opulence of the philosopher's psychic economy and consequently felt themselves restricted and belittled. Sometimes it was that color-blindness of utilitarian-minded people who considered philosophy to be just a series of refuted systems and a wasteful expenditure that never did anybody 'any good.' Sometimes a fear of disguised mysticism and changes to the limits of knowledge sprang up; at other times, there was disdain for particular philosophers that had unwittingly become a disdain for philosophy in general. In the end, I have found that what usually lies behind young scholars' arrogant devalorizations of philosophy is the nasty after-effect of some philosopher himself. These scholars had, for the most part, stopped listening to this philosopher, but without having emerged from under the spell of his dismissive valuations of other philosophers: - and this resulted in a generalized ill will against all philosophy. (The after-affects of Schopenhauer on Germany in the most recent past seem to me an example of this sort of thing: - with his unintelligent ranting against Hegel, he has caused the whole of the last generation of Germans to break off its ties to German culture, a culture that, all things considered, represented a supreme and divinatory refinement of the historical sense . But Schopenhauer was himself impoverished, insensitive, un-German to the point of genius on precisely this point.) Looking at the overall picture, the damage done to the respectability of philosophy might be primarily due to the human, all-too-human, and, in short, miserable condition of more recent philosophy itself, which has held open the door to the rabble instinct. We have to admit the degree to which our modern world has departed from the whole Heraclitean, Platonic, Empedoclean type (or whatever names all these princely and magnificent hermits of the spirit might have had); and with what justice a worthy man of science can feel that he is of a better type and a better lineage, given the sort of representatives of philosophy who, thanks to current fashions, are just as much talked up these days as they are washed up

(in Germany, for instance, the two lions of Berlin: the anarchist Eugen Duhring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann). And Leisure.

especially those hodgepodge philosophers who call themselves 'philosophers of reality' or 'positivists' - just the sight of them is enough to instill a dangerous mistrust in the soul of an ambitious young scholar. They are, at best, scholars and specialists themselves - you can just feel it! They have all been defeated but then brought back under the domination of science; they had wanted something more of themselves at one time (without any right to this 'more' and its responsibility) - and now, in word and in deed, they respectably, wrathfully, vengefully represent a skepticism concerning philosophy's master task and authority. In the end: how could it be any other way! Science is thriving these days, its good conscience shines in its face; meanwhile whatever state recent philosophy has gradually sunk to, whatever is left of philosophy today, inspires mistrust and displeasure, if not ridicule and pity. A philosophy reduced to 'epistemology,' which is really no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence; a philosophy that does not even get over the threshold and scrupulously denies itself the right of entry - that is a philosophy in its last gasps, an end, an agony, something to be pitied. How could such a philosophy dominate ?

There are so many different kinds of dangers involved in the development of a philosopher these days that it can be doubted whether this fruit is still capable of ripening at all. The height and width of the tower of science have grown to be so monstrously vast that the philosopher is that much more likely to become exhausted before he has even finished his education, or to let himself grab hold of something and 'specialize.' And so he is never at his best, never reaches a high point in his development from which he would be able to look over, look around, and look down . Or he gets there too late, when he is already past his prime and his strength has started to fade; or he gets there disabled, having become coarse and degenerate, so that his gaze, his overall value judgment is largely meaningless. Perhaps the very refinement of his intellectual conscience lets him hesitate and be slowed down while underway; he is afraid of being seduced into becoming a dilettante, a millipede with a thousand feet and a thousand feelers; he knows too well that someone who has lost his self-respect will nolongercommandor lead , even in the field of knowledge: unless he wants to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and rabble-rouser of Beyond Good and Evil

spirits, in short, a seducer. In the end, this is a question of taste, even if it is not a question of conscience. And just to double the philosopher's difficulties again, there is the additional fact that he demands a judgment of himself, a Yes or a No, not about science but about life and the value of life. It is only with reluctance that he comes to believe he has a right or even a duty to render this sort of a judgment, and he has to draw on the most wide-ranging (and perhaps the most disturbing and destructive) experiences so that he can look - hesitantly, skeptically, silently - for a path to this right and this belief. In fact, the masses have misjudged and mistaken the philosopher for a long time, sometimes confusing him with the scientific man and ideal scholar, and sometimes with the religiously elevated, desensualized, desecularized enthusiasts and intoxicated men of God. If you hear anyone praised these days for living 'wisely' or 'like a philosopher' it basically just means he is 'clever and keeps out of the way.' To the rabble, wisdom seems like a kind of escape, a device or trick for pulling yourself out of the game when things get rough. But the real philosopher (and isn't this how it seems to us , my friends?) lives 'unphilosophically,' 'unwisely,' in a manner which is above all not clever , and feels the weight and duty of a hundred experiments and temptations of life: - he constantly puts himself at risk, he plays the rough game ...

Compared to a genius, which is to say: compared to a being that either begets or gives birth (taking both words in their widest scope -), the scholar, the average man of science, is somewhat like an old maid. Like her, he has no expertise in the two most valuable acts performed by humanity. And, as a sort of compensation, both the scholar and the old maid are admitted to be respectable - respectability is always emphasized - although in both cases we are annoyed by the obligatory nature of this admission. Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? In the first place, he is an ignoble type of person with the virtues that an ignoble type will have: this type is not dominant, authoritative, or self-sufficient. He is industrious, he is patiently lined up in an orderly array, he is regular and moderate in his abilities and needs, he has an instinct for his own kind and for the needs of his kind. These needs include: that piece of In German: Versuchen und Versuchungen (see note ,p. above).