the past—they grasp at the future with a creative hand,
and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a
means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is
CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to
truth is—WILL TO POWER. —Are there at present
such philosophers? Have there ever been such
philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some
day? …
212. It is always more obvious to me that the
philosopher, as a man INDISPENSABLE for the morrow
and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and
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HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in contradiction
to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been
the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary
furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers—
who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but
rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators—
have found their mission, their hard, involuntary,
imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of
their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age. In
putting the vivisector’s knife to the breast of the very
VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their
own secret; it has been for the sake of a NEW greatness of
man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They
have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence,
self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was
concealed under the most venerated types of
contemporary morality, how much virtue was
OUTLIVED, they have always said ‘We must remove
hence to where YOU are least at home’ In the face of a
world of ‘modern ideas,’ which would like to confine
every one in a corner, in a ‘specialty,’ a philosopher, if
there could be philosophers nowadays, would be
compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of
‘greatness,’ precisely in his comprehensiveness and
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multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even
determine worth and rank according to the amount and
variety of that which a man could bear and take upon
himself, according to the EXTENT to which a man could
stretch his responsibility Nowadays the taste and virtue of
the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so
adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will
consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of
will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must
specially be included in the conception of ‘greatness’, with
as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a
silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to
an opposite age—such as the sixteenth century, which
suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the
wildest torrents and floods of selfishness In the time of
Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old
conservative Athenians who let themselves go—‘for the
sake of happiness,’ as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as
their conduct indicated—and who had continually on
their lips the old pompous words to which they had long
forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was
perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic
assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut
ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of
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the ‘noble,’ with a look that said plainly enough ‘Do not
dissemble before me! here—we are equal!’ At present, on
the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding-
animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours,
when ‘equality of right’ can too readily be transformed
into equality in wrong—I mean to say into general war
against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the
higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher
responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness—at
present it belongs to the conception of ‘greatness’ to be
noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different,
to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and
the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal
when he asserts ‘He shall be the greatest who can be the
most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the
man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and
of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called
GREATNESS: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as
can be full.’ And to ask once more the question: Is
greatness POSSIBLE— nowadays?
213. It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is,
because it cannot be taught: one must ‘know’ it by
experience—or one should have the pride NOT to know
it. The fact that at present people all talk of things of
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which they CANNOT have any experience, is true more
especially and unfortunately as concerns the philosopher
and philosophical matters:—the very few know them, are
permitted to know them, and all popular ideas about them
are false. Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical
combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs at
presto pace, and a dialectic rigour and necessity which
makes no false step, is unknown to most thinkers and
scholars from their own experience, and therefore, should
any one speak of it in their presence, it is incredible to
them. They conceive of every necessity as troublesome, as
a painful compulsory obedience and state of constraint;
thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and
hesitating, almost as a trouble, and often enough as
‘worthy of the SWEAT of the noble’—but not at all as
something easy and divine, closely related to dancing and
exuberance! ‘To think’ and to take a matter ‘seriously,’
‘arduously’—that is one and the same thing to them; such
only has been their ‘experience.’— Artists have here
perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only too well
that precisely when they no longer do anything
‘arbitrarily,’ and everything of necessity, their feeling of
freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing,
disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax—in short, that
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necessity and ‘freedom of will’ are then the same thing
with them. There is, in fine, a gradation of rank in
psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the
problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel
ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without
being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and
power of his spirituality. Of what use is it for nimble,
everyday intellects, or clumsy, honest mechanics and
empiricists to press, in their plebeian ambition, close to
such problems, and as it were into this ‘holy of holies’—as
so often happens nowadays! But coarse feet must never
tread upon such carpets: this is provided for in the primary
law of things; the doors remain closed to those intruders,
though they may dash and break their heads thereon.
People have always to be born to a high station, or, more
definitely, they have to be BRED for it: a person has only
a right to philosophy—taking the word in its higher
significance—in virtue of his descent; the ancestors, the
‘blood,’ decide here also. Many generations must have
prepared the way for the coming of the philosopher; each
of his virtues must have been separately acquired,
nurtured, transmitted, and embodied; not only the bold,
easy, delicate course and current of his thoughts, but
above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the
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majesty of ruling glance and contemning look, the feeling
of separation from the multitude with their duties and
virtues, the kindly patronage and defense of whatever is
misunderstood and calumniated, be it God or devil, the
delight and practice of supreme justice, the art of
commanding, the amplitude of will, the lingering eye
which rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves….
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CHAPTER VII: OUR VIRTUES
214. OUR Virtues?—It is probable that we, too, have
still our virtues, althoughnaturally they are not those
sincere and massive virtues on account of which we hold
our grandfathers in esteem and also at a little distance from
us. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we firstlings
of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous
curiosity, our multifariousness and art of disguising, our
mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and
spirit—we shall presumably, IF we must have virtues, have
those only which have come to agreement with our most
secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent
requirements: well, then, let us look for them in our
labyrinths!—where, as we know, so many things lose
themselves, so many things get quite lost! And is there
anything finer than to SEARCH for one’s own virtues? Is
it not almost to BELIEVE in one’s own virtues? But this
‘believing in one’s own virtues’—is it not practically the
same as what was formerly called one’s ‘good conscience,’
that long, respectable pigtail of an idea, which our
grandfathers used to hang behind their heads, and often
enough also behind their understandings? It seems,
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therefore, that however little we may imagine ourselves to
be old-fashioned and grandfatherly respectable in other
respects, in one thing we are nevertheless the worthy
grandchildren of our grandfathers, we last Europeans with
good consciences: we also still wear their pigtail.—Ah! if
you only knew how soon, so very soon—it will be
different!
215. As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes
two suns which determine the path of one planet, and in
certain cases suns of different colours shine around a single
planet, now with red light, now with green, and then
simultaneously illumine and flood it with motley colours:
so we modern men, owing to the complicated mechanism
of our ‘firmament,’ are determined by DIFFERENT
moralities; our actions shine alternately in different
colours, and are seldom unequivocal—and there are often
cases, also, in which our actions are MOTLEY-
COLOURED.
216. To love one’s enemies? I think that has been well
learnt: it takes place thousands of times at present on a
large and small scale; indeed, at times the higher and
sublimer thing takes place:—we learn to DESPISE when
we love, and precisely when we love best; all of it,
however, unconsciously, without noise, without
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ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness,
which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the
formula of virtue. Morality as attitude—is opposed to our
taste nowadays. This is ALSO an advance, as it was an
advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally
became opposed to their taste, including the enmity and
Voltairean bitterness against religion (and all that formerly
belonged to freethinker- pantomime). It is the music in
our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan
litanies, moral sermons, and goody- goodness won’t
chime.
217. Let us be careful in dealing with those who attach
great importance to being credited with moral tact and
subtlety in moral discernment! They never forgive us if
they have once made a mistake BEFORE us (or even with
REGARD to us)—they inevitably become our instinctive
calumniators and detractors, even when they still remain
our ‘friends.’—Blessed are the forgetful: for they ‘get the
better’ even of their blunders.
218. The psychologists of France—and where else are
there still psychologists nowadays?—have never yet
exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoyment of the
betise bourgeoise, just as though … in short, they betray
something thereby. Flaubert, for instance, the honest
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citizen of Rouen, neither saw, heard, nor tasted anything
else in the end; it was his mode of self-torment and refined
cruelty. As this is growing wearisome, I would now
recommend for a change something else for a pleasure—
namely, the unconscious astuteness with which good, fat,
honest mediocrity always behaves towards loftier spirits
and the tasks they have to perform, the subtle, barbed,
Jesuitical astuteness, which is a thousand times subtler than
the taste and understanding of the middle-class in its best
moments—subtler even than the understanding of its
victims:—a repeated proof that ‘instinct’ is the most
intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto
been discovered. In short, you psychologists, study the
philosophy of the ‘rule’ in its struggle with the
‘exception": there you have a spectacle fit for Gods and
godlike malignity! Or, in plainer words, practise
vivisection on ‘good people,’ on the ‘homo bonae
voluntatis,’ ON YOURSELVES!
219. The practice of judging and condemning morally,
is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on
those who are less so, it is also a kind of indemnity for
their being badly endowed by nature, and finally, it is an
opportunity for acquiring spirit and BECOMING
subtle—malice spiritualises. They are glad in their inmost
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heart that there is a standard according to which those
who are over-endowed with intellectual goods and
privileges, are equal to them, they contend for the
‘equality of all before God,’ and almost NEED the belief
in God for this purpose. It is among them that the most
powerful antagonists of atheism are found. If any one were
to say to them ‘A lofty spirituality is beyond all
comparison with the honesty and respectability of a merely
moral man’—it would make them furious, I shall take care
not to say so. I would rather flatter them with my theory
that lofty spirituality itself exists only as the ultimate
product of moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all
