qualities attributed to the ‘merely moral’ man, after they
have been acquired singly through long training and
practice, perhaps during a whole series of generations, that
lofty spirituality is precisely the spiritualising of justice, and
the beneficent severity which knows that it is authorized
to maintain GRADATIONS OF RANK in the world,
even among things—and not only among men.
220. Now that the praise of the ‘disinterested person’ is
so popular one must—probably not without some
danger—get an idea of WHAT people actually take an
interest in, and what are the things generally which
fundamentally and profoundly concern ordinary men—
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including the cultured, even the learned, and perhaps
philosophers also, if appearances do not deceive. The fact
thereby becomes obvious that the greater part of what
interests and charms higher natures, and more refined and
fastidious tastes, seems absolutely ‘uninteresting’ to the
average man—if, notwithstanding, he perceive devotion
to these interests, he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how
it is possible to act ‘disinterestedly.’ There have been
philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a
seductive and mystical, other-worldly expression (perhaps
because they did not know the higher nature by
experience?), instead of stating the naked and candidly
reasonable truth that ‘disinterested’ action is very
interesting and ‘interested’ action, provided that… ‘And
love?’—What! Even an action for love’s sake shall be
‘unegoistic’? But you fools—! ‘And the praise of the self-
sacrificer?’—But whoever has really offered sacrifice
knows that he wanted and obtained something for it—
perhaps something from himself for something from
himself; that he relinquished here in order to have more
there, perhaps in general to be more, or even feel himself
‘more.’ But this is a realm of questions and answers in
which a more fastidious spirit does not like to stay: for
here truth has to stifle her yawns so much when she is
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obliged to answer. And after all, truth is a woman; one
must not use force with her.
221. ‘It sometimes happens,’ said a moralistic pedant
and trifle- retailer, ‘that I honour and respect an unselfish
man: not, however, because he is unselfish, but because I
think he has a right to be useful to another man at his own
expense. In short, the question is always who HE is, and
who THE OTHER is. For instance, in a person created
and destined for command, self- denial and modest
retirement, instead of being virtues, would be the waste of
virtues: so it seems to me. Every system of unegoistic
morality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to
every one, not only sins against good taste, but is also an
incentive to sins of omission, an ADDITIONAL
seduction under the mask of philanthropy—and precisely a
seduction and injury to the higher, rarer, and more
privileged types of men. Moral systems must be compelled
first of all to bow before the GRADATIONS OF RANK;
their presumption must be driven home to their
conscience—until they thoroughly understand at last that
it is IMMORAL to say that ‘what is right for one is proper
for another.’’—So said my moralistic pedant and
bonhomme. Did he perhaps deserve to be laughed at
when he thus exhorted systems of morals to practise
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morality? But one should not be too much in the right if
one wishes to have the laughers on ONE’S OWN side; a
grain of wrong pertains even to good taste.
222. Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached
nowadays— and, if I gather rightly, no other religion is
any longer preached—let the psychologist have his ears
open through all the vanity, through all the noise which is
natural to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear
a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of SELF-CONTEMPT.
It belongs to the overshadowing and uglifying of Europe,
which has been on the increase for a century (the first
symptoms of which are already specified documentarily in
a thoughtful letter of Galiani to Madame d’Epinay)—IF IT
IS NOT REALLY THE CAUSE THEREOF! The man
of ‘modern ideas,’ the conceited ape, is excessively
dissatisfied with himself-this is perfectly certain. He suffers,
and his vanity wants him only ‘to suffer with his fellows.’
223. The hybrid European—a tolerably ugly plebeian,
taken all in all—absolutely requires a costume: he needs
history as a storeroom of costumes. To be sure, he notices
that none of the costumes fit him properly—he changes
and changes. Let us look at the nineteenth century with
respect to these hasty preferences and changes in its
masquerades of style, and also with respect to its moments
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of desperation on account of ‘nothing suiting’ us. It is in
vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or classical, or
Christian, or Florentine, or barocco, or ‘national,’ in
moribus et artibus: it does not ‘clothe us’! But the ‘spirit,’
especially the ‘historical spirit,’ profits even by this
desperation: once and again a new sample of the past or of
the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up, and
above all studied—we are the first studious age in puncto
of ‘costumes,’ I mean as concerns morals, articles of belief,
artistic tastes, and religions; we are prepared as no other
age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the
most spiritual festival—laughter and arrogance, for the
transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic
ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still discovering the
domain of our invention just here, the domain where
even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the
world’s history and as God’s Merry-Andrews,—perhaps,
though nothing else of the present have a future, our
laughter itself may have a future!
224. The historical sense (or the capacity for divining
quickly the order of rank of the valuations according to
which a people, a community, or an individual has lived,
the ‘divining instinct’ for the relationships of these
valuations, for the relation of the authority of the
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valuations to the authority of the operating forces),—this
historical sense, which we Europeans claim as our
specialty, has come to us in the train of the enchanting and
mad semi-barbarity into which Europe has been plunged
by the democratic mingling of classes and races—it is only
the nineteenth century that has recognized this faculty as
its sixth sense. Owing to this mingling, the past of every
form and mode of life, and of cultures which were
formerly closely contiguous and superimposed on one
another, flows forth into us ‘modern souls"; our instincts
now run back in all directions, we ourselves are a kind of
chaos: in the end, as we have said, the spirit perceives its
advantage therein. By means of our semi-barbarity in body
and in desire, we have secret access everywhere, such as a
noble age never had; we have access above all to the
labyrinth of imperfect civilizations, and to every form of
semi-barbarity that has at any time existed on earth; and in
so far as the most considerable part of human civilization
hitherto has just been semi-barbarity, the ‘historical sense’
implies almost the sense and instinct for everything, the
taste and tongue for everything: whereby it immediately
proves itself to be an IGNOBLE sense. For instance, we
enjoy Homer once more: it is perhaps our happiest
acquisition that we know how to appreciate Homer,
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whom men of distinguished culture (as the French of the
seventeenth century, like Saint- Evremond, who
reproached him for his ESPRIT VASTE, and even
Voltaire, the last echo of the century) cannot and could
not so easily appropriate—whom they scarcely permitted
themselves to enjoy. The very decided Yea and Nay of
their palate, their promptly ready disgust, their hesitating
reluctance with regard to everything strange, their horror
of the bad taste even of lively curiosity, and in general the
averseness of every distinguished and self-sufficing culture
to avow a new desire, a dissatisfaction with its own
condition, or an admiration of what is strange: all this
determines and disposes them unfavourably even towards
the best things of the world which are not their property
or could not become their prey—and no faculty is more
unintelligible to such men than just this historical sense,
with its truckling, plebeian curiosity. The case is not
different with Shakespeare, that marvelous Spanish-
Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste, over whom an ancient
Athenian of the circle of Eschylus would have half-killed
himself with laughter or irritation: but we—accept
precisely this wild motleyness, this medley of the most
delicate, the most coarse, and the most artificial, with a
secret confidence and cordiality; we enjoy it as a
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refinement of art reserved expressly for us, and allow
ourselves to be as little disturbed by the repulsive fumes
and the proximity of the English populace in which
Shakespeare’s art and taste lives, as perhaps on the Chiaja
of Naples, where, with all our senses awake, we go our
way, enchanted and voluntarily, in spite of the drain-
odour of the lower quarters of the town. That as men of
the ‘historical sense’ we have our virtues, is not to be
disputed:— we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest,
brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation,
very grateful, very patient, very complaisant—but with all
this we are perhaps not very ‘tasteful.’ Let us finally confess
it, that what is most difficult for us men of the ‘historical
sense’ to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds us
fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely
the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and
art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment
of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness
and coldness which all things show that have perfected
themselves. Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense
is in necessary contrast to GOOD taste, at least to the very
bad taste; and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly,
hesitatingly, and with compulsion the small, short, and
happy godsends and glorifications of human life as they
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shine here and there: those moments and marvelous
experiences when a great power has voluntarily come to a
halt before the boundless and infinite,—when a super-
abundance of refined delight has been enjoyed by a sudden
checking and petrifying, by standing firmly and planting
oneself fixedly on still trembling ground.
PROPORTIONATENESS is strange to us, let us confess
it to ourselves; our itching is really the itching for the
infinite, the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward
panting horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite, we
modern men, we semi- barbarians—and are only in OUR
highest bliss when we—ARE IN MOST DANGER.
225. Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism,
or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which
measure the worth of things according to PLEASURE
and PAIN, that is, according to accompanying
circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible
modes of thought and naivetes, which every one
conscious of CREATIVE powers and an artist’s
conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not
without sympathy. Sympathy for you!—to be sure, that is
not sympathy as you understand it: it is not sympathy for
social ‘distress,’ for ‘society’ with its sick and misfortuned,
for the hereditarily vicious and defective who lie on the
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ground around us; still less is it sympathy for the
grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive
after power—they call it ‘freedom.’ OUR sympathy is a
loftier and further-sighted sympathy:—we see how MAN
dwarfs himself, how YOU dwarf him! and there are
moments when we view YOUR sympathy with an
indescribable anguish, when we resist it,—when we regard
your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of
levity. You want, if possible—and there is not a more
foolish ‘if possible’ —TO DO AWAY WITH
SUFFERING; and we?—it really seems that WE would
rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever
been! Well-being, as you understand it—is certainly not a
goal; it seems to us an END; a condition which at once
renders man ludicrous and contemptible—and makes his
destruction DESIRABLE! The discipline of suffering, of
GREAT suffering—know ye not that it is only THIS
discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity
hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which
communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of
rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing,
enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and
whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or
greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not
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been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of
great suffering? In man CREATURE and CREATOR
are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess,
clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the
sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the
spectator, and the seventh day—do ye understand this
contrast? And that YOUR sympathy for the ‘creature in
man’ applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised,
forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined—to that
which must necessarily SUFFER, and IS MEANT to
suffer? And our sympathy—do ye not understand what
our REVERSE sympathy applies to, when it resists your
sympathy as the worst of all pampering and enervation?—
