themselves ‘realists,’ or ‘positivists,’ which is calculated to
implant a dangerous distrust in the soul of a young and
ambitious scholar those philosophers, at the best, are
themselves but scholars and specialists, that is very evident!
All of them are persons who have been vanquished and
BROUGHT BACK AGAIN under the dominion of
science, who at one time or another claimed more from
themselves, without having a right to the ‘more’ and its
responsibility—and who now, creditably, rancorously, and
vindictively, represent in word and deed, DISBELIEF in
the master-task and supremacy of philosophy After all,
how could it be otherwise? Science flourishes nowadays
and has the good conscience clearly visible on its
countenance, while that to which the entire modern
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philosophy has gradually sunk, the remnant of philosophy
of the present day, excites distrust and displeasure, if not
scorn and pity Philosophy reduced to a ‘theory of
knowledge,’ no more in fact than a diffident science of
epochs and doctrine of forbearance a philosophy that
never even gets beyond the threshold, and rigorously
DENIES itself the right to enter—that is philosophy in its
last throes, an end, an agony, something that awakens pity.
How could such a philosophy—RULE!
205. The dangers that beset the evolution of the
philosopher are, in fact, so manifold nowadays, that one
might doubt whether this fruit could still come to
maturity. The extent and towering structure of the
sciences have increased enormously, and therewith also the
probability that the philosopher will grow tired even as a
learner, or will attach himself somewhere and ‘specialize’
so that he will no longer attain to his elevation, that is to
say, to his superspection, his circumspection, and his
DESPECTION. Or he gets aloft too late, when the best
of his maturity and strength is past, or when he is
impaired, coarsened, and deteriorated, so that his view, his
general estimate of things, is no longer of much
importance. It is perhaps just the refinement of his
intellectual conscience that makes him hesitate and linger
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on the way, he dreads the temptation to become a
dilettante, a millepede, a milleantenna, he knows too well
that as a discerner, one who has lost his self-respect no
longer commands, no longer LEADS, unless he should
aspire to become a great play-actor, a philosophical
Cagliostro and spiritual rat- catcher—in short, a misleader.
This is in the last instance a question of taste, if it has not
really been a question of conscience. To double once
more the philosopher’s difficulties, there is also the fact
that he demands from himself a verdict, a Yea or Nay, not
concerning science, but concerning life and the worth of
life—he learns unwillingly to believe that it is his right and
even his duty to obtain this verdict, and he has to seek his
way to the right and the belief only through the most
extensive (perhaps disturbing and destroying) experiences,
often hesitating, doubting, and dumbfounded. In fact, the
philosopher has long been mistaken and confused by the
multitude, either with the scientific man and ideal scholar,
or with the religiously elevated, desensualized,
desecularized visionary and God- intoxicated man; and
even yet when one hears anybody praised, because he lives
‘wisely,’ or ‘as a philosopher,’ it hardly means anything
more than ‘prudently and apart.’ Wisdom: that seems to
the populace to be a kind of flight, a means and artifice for
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withdrawing successfully from a bad game; but the
GENUINE philosopher—does it not seem so to US, my
friends?—lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely,’ above
all, IMPRUDENTLY, and feels the obligation and
burden of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he
risks HIMSELF constantly, he plays THIS bad game.
206. In relation to the genius, that is to say, a being
who either ENGENDERS or PRODUCES—both words
understood in their fullest sense—the man of learning, the
scientific average man, has always something of the old
maid about him; for, like her, he is not conversant with
the two principal functions of man. To both, of course, to
the scholar and to the old maid, one concedes
respectability, as if by way of indemnification—in these
cases one emphasizes the respectability—and yet, in the
compulsion of this concession, one has the same admixture
of vexation. Let us examine more closely: what is the
scientific man? Firstly, a commonplace type of man, with
commonplace virtues: that is to say, a non-ruling, non-
authoritative, and non-self-sufficient type of man; he
possesses industry, patient adaptableness to rank and file,
equability and moderation in capacity and requirement; he
has the instinct for people like himself, and for that which
they require—for instance: the portion of independence
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and green meadow without which there is no rest from
labour, the claim to honour and consideration (which first
and foremost presupposes recognition and recognisability),
the sunshine of a good name, the perpetual ratification of
his value and usefulness, with which the inward
DISTRUST which lies at the bottom of the heart of all
dependent men and gregarious animals, has again and
again to be overcome. The learned man, as is appropriate,
has also maladies and faults of an ignoble kind: he is full of
petty envy, and has a lynx-eye for the weak points in
those natures to whose elevations he cannot attain. He is
confiding, yet only as one who lets himself go, but does
not FLOW; and precisely before the man of the great
current he stands all the colder and more reserved— his
eye is then like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is
no longer moved by rapture or sympathy. The worst and
most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results
from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the
Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the
destruction of the exceptional man, and endeavours to
break—or still better, to relax—every bent bow To relax,
of course, with consideration, and naturally with an
indulgent hand—to RELAX with confiding sympathy that
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is the real art of Jesuitism, which has always understood
how to introduce itself as the religion of sympathy.
207. However gratefully one may welcome the
OBJECTIVE spirit—and who has not been sick to death
of all subjectivity and its confounded IPSISIMOSITY!—in
the end, however, one must learn caution even with
regard to one’s gratitude, and put a stop to the
exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing
of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the
goal in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification—as is
especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school,
which has also in its turn good reasons for paying the
highest honours to ‘disinterested knowledge’ The
objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like the
pessimist, the IDEAL man of learning in whom the
scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand
complete and partial failures, is assuredly one of the most
costly instruments that exist, but his place is in the hand of
one who is more powerful He is only an instrument, we
may say, he is a MIRROR—he is no ‘purpose in himself’
The objective man is in truth a mirror accustomed to
prostration before everything that wants to be known,
with such desires only as knowing or ‘reflecting’ implies—
he waits until something comes, and then expands himself
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sensitively, so that even the light footsteps and gliding-past
of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface and film
Whatever ‘personality’ he still possesses seems to him
accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing, so much
has he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection
of outside forms and events He calls up the recollection of
‘himself’ with an effort, and not infrequently wrongly, he
readily confounds himself with other persons, he makes
mistakes with regard to his own needs, and here only is he
unrefined and negligent Perhaps he is troubled about the
health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere of wife
and friend, or the lack of companions and society—
indeed, he sets himself to reflect on his suffering, but in
vain! His thoughts already rove away to the MORE
GENERAL case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he
knew yesterday how to help himself He does not now
take himself seriously and devote time to himself he is
serene, NOT from lack of trouble, but from lack of
capacity for grasping and dealing with HIS trouble The
habitual complaisance with respect to all objects and
experiences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with
which he receives everything that comes his way, his habit
of inconsiderate good-nature, of dangerous indifference as
to Yea and Nay: alas! there are enough of cases in which
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he has to atone for these virtues of his!—and as man
generally, he becomes far too easily the CAPUT
MORTUUM of such virtues. Should one wish love or
hatred from him—I mean love and hatred as God,
woman, and animal understand them—he will do what he
can, and furnish what he can. But one must not be
surprised if it should not be much—if he should show
himself just at this point to be false, fragile, questionable,
and deteriorated. His love is constrained, his hatred is
artificial, and rather UNN TOUR DE FORCE, a slight
ostentation and exaggeration. He is only genuine so far as
he can be objective; only in his serene totality is he still
‘nature’ and ‘natural.’ His mirroring and eternally self-
polishing soul no longer knows how to affirm, no longer
how to deny; he does not command; neither does he
destroy. ‘JE NE MEPRISE PRESQUE RIEN’— he says,
with Leibniz: let us not overlook nor undervalue the
PRESQUE! Neither is he a model man; he does not go in
advance of any one, nor after, either; he places himself
generally too far off to have any reason for espousing the
cause of either good or evil. If he has been so long
confounded with the PHILOSOPHER, with the
Caesarian trainer and dictator of civilization, he has had far
too much honour, and what is more essential in him has
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been overlooked—he is an instrument, something of a
slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but
nothing in himself—PRESQUE RIEN! The objective
man is an instrument, a costly, easily injured, easily
tarnished measuring instrument and mirroring apparatus,
which is to be taken care of and respected; but he is no
goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man
in whom the REST of existence justifies itself, no
termination— and still less a commencement, an
engendering, or primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful,
self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft,
inflated, delicate, movable potter’s- form, that must wait
for some kind of content and frame to ‘shape’ itself
thereto—for the most part a man without frame and
content, a ‘selfless’ man. Consequently, also, nothing for
women, IN PARENTHESI.
208. When a philosopher nowadays makes known that
he is not a skeptic—I hope that has been gathered from
the foregoing description of the objective spirit?—people
all hear it impatiently; they regard him on that account
with some apprehension, they would like to ask so many,
many questions … indeed among timid hearers, of whom
there are now so many, he is henceforth said to be
dangerous. With his repudiation of skepticism, it seems to
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them as if they heard some evil- threatening sound in the
distance, as if a new kind of explosive were being tried
somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly
discovered Russian NIHILINE, a pessimism BONAE
VOLUNTATIS, that not only denies, means denial, but-
dreadful thought! PRACTISES denial. Against this kind of
‘good-will’—a will to the veritable, actual negation of
life—there is, as is generally acknowledged nowadays, no
better soporific and sedative than skepticism, the mild,
pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism; and Hamlet himself
is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an antidote
to the ‘spirit,’ and its underground noises. ‘Are not our
ears already full of bad sounds?’ say the skeptics, as lovers
of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police; ‘this
subterranean Nay is terrible! Be still, ye pessimistic moles!’
The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is far too
easily frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start at
every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels
something like a bite thereby. Yea! and Nay!—they seem
to him opposed to morality; he loves, on the contrary, to
make a festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness, while
perhaps he says with Montaigne: ‘What do I know?’ Or
with Socrates: ‘I know that I know nothing.’ Or: ‘Here I
do not trust myself, no door is open to me.’ Or: ‘Even if
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the door were open, why should I enter immediately?’
Or: ‘What is the use of any hasty hypotheses? It might
quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses at all.
Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is
crooked? to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum? Is
there not time enough for that? Has not the time leisure?
Oh, ye demons, can ye not at all WAIT? The uncertain
also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a Circe, and Circe,
too, was a philosopher.’—Thus does a skeptic console
himself; and in truth he needs some consolation. For
skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain
