So it is sympathy AGAINST sympathy!—But to repeat it
once more, there are higher problems than the problems
of pleasure and pain and sympathy; and all systems of
philosophy which deal only with these are naivetes.
226. WE IMMORALISTS.-This world with which
WE are concerned, in which we have to fear and love,
this almost invisible, inaudible world of delicate command
and delicate obedience, a world of ‘almost’ in every
respect, captious, insidious, sharp, and tender—yes, it is
well protected from clumsy spectators and familiar
curiosity! We are woven into a strong net and garment of
189 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
duties, and CANNOT disengage ourselves—precisely
here, we are ‘men of duty,’ even we! Occasionally, it is
true, we dance in our ‘chains’ and betwixt our ‘swords"; it
is none the less true that more often we gnash our teeth
under the circumstances, and are impatient at the secret
hardship of our lot. But do what we will, fools and
appearances say of us: ‘These are men WITHOUT
duty,’— we have always fools and appearances against us!
227. Honesty, granting that it is the virtue of which we
cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits—well, we will labour
at it with all our perversity and love, and not tire of
‘perfecting’ ourselves in OUR virtue, which alone
remains: may its glance some day overspread like a gilded,
blue, mocking twilight this aging civilization with its dull
gloomy seriousness! And if, nevertheless, our honesty
should one day grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs,
and find us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter,
easier, and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us remain
HARD, we latest Stoics, and let us send to its help
whatever devilry we have in us:—our disgust at the
clumsy and undefined, our ‘NITIMUR IN VETITUM,’
our love of adventure, our sharpened and fastidious
curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, intellectual Will to
Power and universal conquest, which rambles and roves
190 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
avidiously around all the realms of the future—let us go
with all our ‘devils’ to the help of our ‘God’! It is probable
that people will misunderstand and mistake us on that
account: what does it matter! They will say: ‘Their
‘honesty’—that is their devilry, and nothing else!’ What
does it matter! And even if they were right—have not all
Gods hitherto been such sanctified, re-baptized devils?
And after all, what do we know of ourselves? And what
the spirit that leads us wants TO BE CALLED? (It is a
question of names.) And how many spirits we harbour?
Our honesty, we free spirits—let us be careful lest it
become our vanity, our ornament and ostentation, our
limitation, our stupidity! Every virtue inclines to stupidity,
every stupidity to virtue; ‘stupid to the point of sanctity,’
they say in Russia,— let us be careful lest out of pure
honesty we eventually become saints and bores! Is not life
a hundred times too short for us— to bore ourselves? One
would have to believe in eternal life in order to …
228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral
philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to
the soporific appliances—and that ‘virtue,’ in my opinion,
has been MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its
advocates than by anything else; at the same time,
however, I would not wish to overlook their general
191 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as possible
should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very
desirable that morals should not some day become
interesting! But let us not be afraid! Things still remain
today as they have always been: I see no one in Europe
who has (or DISCLOSES) an idea of the fact that
philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a
dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner—that
CALAMITY might be involved therein. Observe, for
example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians:
how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along
(a Homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps
of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps
of the respectable Helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous
man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE, to
use an expression of Galiani). No new thought, nothing of
the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old
thought, not even a proper history of what has been
previously thought on the subject: an IMPOSSIBLE
literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to
leaven it with some mischief. In effect, the old English
vice called CANT, which is MORAL TARTUFFISM,
has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one
must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one
192 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
MUST read them), concealed this time under the new
form of the scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent
from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience,
from which a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer,
in all their scientific tinkering with morals. (Is not a
moralist the opposite of a Puritan? That is to say, as a
thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of
interrogation, in short, as a problem? Is moralizing not-
immoral?) In the end, they all want English morality to be
recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or the
‘general utility,’ or ‘the happiness of the greatest
number,’—no! the happiness of ENGLAND, will be best
served thereby. They would like, by all means, to
convince themselves that the striving after English
happiness, I mean after COMFORT and FASHION (and
in the highest instance, a seat in Parliament), is at the same
time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so far as there
has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just consisted
in such striving. Not one of those ponderous, conscience-
stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the
cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants
to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the
‘general welfare’ is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be
at all grasped, but is only a nostrum,—that what is fair to
193 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
one MAY NOT at all be fair to another, that the
requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to
higher men, in short, that there is a DISTINCTION OF
RANK between man and man, and consequently between
morality and morality. They are an unassuming and
fundamentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian
Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as they are
tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility.
One ought even to ENCOURAGE them, as has been
partially attempted in the following rhymes:—
Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,
‘Longer—better,’ aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee;
Unenraptured, never jesting,
Mediocre everlasting,
SANS GENIE ET SANS ESPRIT!
229. In these later ages, which may be proud of their
humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much
SUPERSTITION of the fear, of the ‘cruel wild beast,’ the
mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these
humaner ages—that even obvious truths, as if by the
agreement of centuries, have long remained unuttered,
because they have the appearance of helping the finally
slain wild beast back to life again. I perhaps risk something
194 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
when I allow such a truth to escape; let others capture it
again and give it so much ‘milk of pious sentiment’
[FOOTNOTE: An expression from Schiller’s William
Tell, Act IV, Scene 3.] to drink, that it will lie down quiet
and forgotten, in its old corner.—One ought to learn
anew about cruelty, and open one’s eyes; one ought at last
to learn impatience, in order that such immodest gross
errors—as, for instance, have been fostered by ancient and
modern philosophers with regard to tragedy—may no
longer wander about virtuously and boldly. Almost
everything that we call ‘higher culture’ is based upon the
spiritualising and intensifying of CRUELTY—this is my
thesis; the ‘wild beast’ has not been slain at all, it lives, it
flourishes, it has only been— transfigured. That which
constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty; that
which operates agreeably in so-called tragic sympathy, and
at the basis even of everything sublime, up to the highest
and most delicate thrills of metaphysics, obtains its
sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient of
cruelty. What the Roman enjoys in the arena, the
Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at the
sight of the faggot and stake, or of the bull-fight, the
present-day Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy,
the workman of the Parisian suburbs who has a
195 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
homesickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne
who, with unhinged will, ‘undergoes’ the performance of
‘Tristan and Isolde’—what all these enjoy, and strive with
mysterious ardour to drink in, is the philtre of the great
Circe ‘cruelty.’ Here, to be sure, we must put aside
entirely the blundering psychology of former times, which
could only teach with regard to cruelty that it originated at
the sight of the suffering of OTHERS: there is an
abundant, super-abundant enjoyment even in one’s own
suffering, in causing one’s own suffering—and wherever
man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in
the RELIGIOUS sense, or to self-mutilation, as among
the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general, to
desensualisation, decarnalisation, and contrition, to
Puritanical repentance-spasms, to vivisection of conscience
and to Pascal- like SACRIFIZIA DELL’ INTELLETO,
he is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his cruelty,
by the dangerous thrill of cruelty TOWARDS
HIMSELF.—Finally, let us consider that even the seeker
of knowledge operates as an artist and glorifier of cruelty,
in that he compels his spirit to perceive AGAINST its
own inclination, and often enough against the wishes of
his heart:—he forces it to say Nay, where he would like to
affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance of taking a
196 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an
intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit,
which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,—
even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of
cruelty.
230. Perhaps what I have said here about a
‘fundamental will of the spirit’ may not be understood
without further details; I may be allowed a word of
explanation.—That imperious something which is
popularly called ‘the spirit,’ wishes to be master internally
and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a
multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious,
and essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities
here, are the same as those assigned by physiologists to
everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power of
the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a
strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to
simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the
absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines,
makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and
lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the
‘outside world.’ Its object thereby is the incorporation of
new ‘experiences,’ the assortment of new things in the old
arrangements—in short, growth; or more properly, the
197 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power—is
its object. This same will has at its service an apparently
opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted
preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing
of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition
to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that
is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the
shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of
ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the
degree of its appropriating power, its ‘digestive power,’ to
speak figuratively (and in fact ‘the spirit’ resembles a
stomach more than anything else). Here also belong an
occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived
(perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and
so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in
uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of
arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the
too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the
diminished, the misshapen, the beautified—an enjoyment
of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power.
Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous
readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble
before them— the constant pressing and straining of a
creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys
198 of 301 Beyond Good and Evil
therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys
also its feeling of security therein—it is precisely by its
Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!—
COUNTER TO this propensity for appearance, for
simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an
outside—for every outside is a cloak—there operates the
sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes,
and INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and
thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual
conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will
acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought to be, that
he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for
introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and
even severe words. He will say: ‘There is something cruel
in the tendency of my spirit": let the virtuous and amiable
