we must also employ the same words for the same kind of
internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences
IN COMMON. On this account the people of one
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nation understand one another better than those belonging
to different nations, even when they use the same
language; or rather, when people have lived long together
under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger,
requirement, toil) there ORIGINATES therefrom an
entity that ‘understands itself’—namely, a nation. In all
souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences
have gained the upper hand over those occurring more
rarely: about these matters people understand one another
rapidly and always more rapidly—the history of language
is the history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of
this quick comprehension people always unite closer and
closer. The greater the danger, the greater is the need of
agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not
to misunderstand one another in danger—that is what
cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse. Also in all
loves and friendships one has the experience that nothing
of the kind continues when the discovery has been made
that in using the same words, one of the two parties has
feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears different
from those of the other. (The fear of the ‘eternal
misunderstanding": that is the good genius which so often
keeps persons of different sexes from too hasty
attachments, to which sense and heart prompt them—and
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NOT some Schopenhauerian ‘genius of the species’!)
Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken
most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of
command—these decide as to the general order of rank of
its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable
things. A man’s estimates of value betray something of the
STRUCTURE of his soul, and wherein it sees its
conditions of life, its intrinsic needs. Supposing now that
necessity has from all time drawn together only such men
as could express similar requirements and similar
experiences by similar symbols, it results on the whole that
the easy COMMUNICABILITY of need, which implies
ultimately the undergoing only of average and
COMMON experiences, must have been the most potent
of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon
mankind. The more similar, the more ordinary people,
have always had and are still having the advantage; the
more select, more refined, more unique, and difficultly
comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to
accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate
themselves. One must appeal to immense opposing forces,
in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural
PROGRESSUS IN SIMILE, the evolution of man to the
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similar, the ordinary, the average, the gregarious —to the
IGNOBLE!—
269. The more a psychologist—a born, an unavoidable
psychologist and soul-diviner—turns his attention to the
more select cases and individuals, the greater is his danger
of being suffocated by sympathy: he NEEDS sternness and
cheerfulness more than any other man. For the corruption,
the ruination of higher men, of the more unusually
constituted souls, is in fact, the rule: it is dreadful to have
such a rule always before one’s eyes. The manifold
torment of the psychologist who has discovered this
ruination, who discovers once, and then discovers
ALMOST repeatedly throughout all history, this universal
inner ‘desperateness’ of higher men, this eternal ‘too late!’
in every sense—may perhaps one day be the cause of his
turning with bitterness against his own lot, and of his
making an attempt at self-destruction—of his ‘going to
ruin’ himself. One may perceive in almost every
psychologist a tell-tale inclination for delightful intercourse
with commonplace and well-ordered men; the fact is
thereby disclosed that he always requires healing, that he
needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness, away from what his
insight and incisiveness—from what his ‘business’—has
laid upon his conscience. The fear of his memory is
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peculiar to him. He is easily silenced by the judgment of
others; he hears with unmoved countenance how people
honour, admire, love, and glorify, where he has
PERCEIVED—or he even conceals his silence by
expressly assenting to some plausible opinion. Perhaps the
paradox of his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely
where he has learnt GREAT SYMPATHY, together with
great CONTEMPT, the multitude, the educated, and the
visionaries, have on their part learnt great reverence—
reverence for ‘great men’ and marvelous animals, for the
sake of whom one blesses and honours the fatherland, the
earth, the dignity of mankind, and one’s own self, to
whom one points the young, and in view of whom one
educates them. And who knows but in all great instances
hitherto just the same happened: that the multitude
worshipped a God, and that the ‘God’ was only a poor
sacrificial animal! SUCCESS has always been the greatest
liar—and the ‘work’ itself is a success; the great statesman,
the conqueror, the discoverer, are disguised in their
creations until they are unrecognizable; the ‘work’ of the
artist, of the philosopher, only invents him who has
created it, is REPUTED to have created it; the ‘great
men,’ as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions
composed afterwards; in the world of historical values
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spurious coinage PREVAILS. Those great poets, for
example, such as Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist,
Gogol (I do not venture to mention much greater names,
but I have them in my mind), as they now appear, and
were perhaps obliged to be: men of the moment,
enthusiastic, sensuous, and childish, light- minded and
impulsive in their trust and distrust; with souls in which
usually some flaw has to be concealed; often taking
revenge with their works for an internal defilement, often
seeking forgetfulness in their soaring from a too true
memory, often lost in the mud and almost in love with it,
until they become like the Will-o’-the-Wisps around the
swamps, and PRETEND TO BE stars—the people then
call them idealists,—often struggling with protracted
disgust, with an ever-reappearing phantom of disbelief,
which makes them cold, and obliges them to languish for
GLORIA and devour ‘faith as it is’ out of the hands of
intoxicated adulators:—what a TORMENT these great
artists are and the so-called higher men in general, to him
who has once found them out! It is thus conceivable that
it is just from woman—who is clairvoyant in the world of
suffering, and also unfortunately eager to help and save to
an extent far beyond her powers—that THEY have learnt
so readily those outbreaks of boundless devoted
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SYMPATHY, which the multitude, above all the reverent
multitude, do not understand, and overwhelm with prying
and self-gratifying interpretations. This sympathizing
invariably deceives itself as to its power; woman would
like to believe that love can do EVERYTHING—it is the
SUPERSTITION peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows
the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and
blundering even the best and deepest love is—he finds that
it rather DESTROYS than saves!—It is possible that
under the holy fable and travesty of the life of Jesus there
is hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom
of KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LOVE: the martyrdom of
the most innocent and most craving heart, that never had
enough of any human love, that DEMANDED love, that
demanded inexorably and frantically to be loved and
nothing else, with terrible outbursts against those who
refused him their love; the story of a poor soul insatiated
and insatiable in love, that had to invent hell to send
thither those who WOULD NOT love him—and that at
last, enlightened about human love, had to invent a God
who is entire love, entire CAPACITY for love—who
takes pity on human love, because it is so paltry, so
ignorant! He who has such sentiments, he who has such
KNOWLEDGE about love—SEEKS for death!—But
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why should one deal with such painful matters? Provided,
of course, that one is not obliged to do so.
270. The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every
man who has suffered deeply—it almost determines the
order of rank HOW deeply men can suffer—the chilling
certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and
coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he KNOWS
MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that
he has been familiar with, and ‘at home’ in, many distant,
dreadful worlds of which ‘YOU know nothing’!—this
silent intellectual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of
the elect of knowledge, of the ‘initiated,’ of the almost
sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect
itself from contact with officious and sympathizing hands,
and in general from all that is not its equal in suffering.
Profound suffering makes noble: it separates.—One of the
most refined forms of disguise is Epicurism, along with a
certain ostentatious boldness of taste, which takes suffering
lightly, and puts itself on the defensive against all that is
sorrowful and profound. They are ‘gay men’ who make
use of gaiety, because they are misunderstood on account
of it—they WISH to be misunderstood. There are
‘scientific minds’ who make use of science, because it
gives a gay appearance, and because scientificness leads to
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the conclusion that a person is superficial—they WISH to
mislead to a false conclusion. There are free insolent minds
which would fain conceal and deny that they are broken,
proud, incurable hearts (the cynicism of Hamlet—the case
of Galiani); and occasionally folly itself is the mask of an
unfortunate OVER- ASSURED knowledge.—From
which it follows that it is the part of a more refined
humanity to have reverence ‘for the mask,’ and not to
make use of psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.
271. That which separates two men most profoundly is
a different sense and grade of purity. What does it matter
about all their honesty and reciprocal usefulness, what does
it matter about all their mutual good-will: the fact still
remains—they ‘cannot smell each other!’ The highest
instinct for purity places him who is affected with it in the
most extraordinary and dangerous isolation, as a saint: for
it is just holiness—the highest spiritualization of the
instinct in question. Any kind of cognizance of an
indescribable excess in the joy of the bath, any kind of
ardour or thirst which perpetually impels the soul out of
night into the morning, and out of gloom, out of
‘affliction’ into clearness, brightness, depth, and
refinement:—just as much as such a tendency
DISTINGUISHES—it is a noble tendency—it also
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SEPARATES.—The pity of the saint is pity for the
FILTH of the human, all-too-human. And there are
grades and heights where pity itself is regarded by him as
impurity, as filth.
272. Signs of nobility: never to think of lowering our
duties to the rank of duties for everybody; to be unwilling
to renounce or to share our responsibilities; to count our
prerogatives, and the exercise of them, among our
DUTIES.
273. A man who strives after great things, looks upon
every one whom he encounters on his way either as a
means of advance, or a delay and hindrance—or as a
temporary resting-place. His peculiar lofty BOUNTY to
his fellow-men is only possible when he attains his
elevation and dominates. Impatience, and the
consciousness of being always condemned to comedy up
to that time—for even strife is a comedy, and conceals the
end, as every means does—spoil all intercourse for him;
this kind of man is acquainted with solitude, and what is
most poisonous in it.
274. THE PROBLEM OF THOSE WHO WAIT.—
Happy chances are necessary, and many incalculable
elements, in order that a higher man in whom the solution
of a problem is dormant, may yet take action, or ‘break
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forth,’ as one might say—at the right moment. On an
average it DOES NOT happen; and in all corners of the
earth there are waiting ones sitting who hardly know to
what extent they are waiting, and still less that they wait in
vain. Occasionally, too, the waking call comes too late—
the chance which gives ‘permission’ to take action—when
their best youth, and strength for action have been used up
in sitting still; and how many a one, just as he ‘sprang up,’
has found with horror that his limbs are benumbed and his
spirits are now too heavy! ‘It is too late,’ he has said to
himself—and has become self-distrustful and henceforth
for ever useless.—In the domain of genius, may not the
‘Raphael without hands’ (taking the expression in its
widest sense) perhaps not be the exception, but the
rule?—Perhaps genius is by no means so rare: but rather
the five hundred HANDS which it requires in order to
tyrannize over the [GREEK INSERTED HERE], ‘the
right time’—in order to take chance by the forelock!
275. He who does not WISH to see the height of a
man, looks all the more sharply at what is low in him, and
in the foreground— and thereby betrays himself.
276. In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and
coarser soul is better off than the nobler soul: the dangers
of the latter must be greater, the probability that it will
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come to grief and perish is in fact immense, considering
the multiplicity of the conditions of its existence.—In a
