disguise for the shame of a God to go about in? A question
worth asking!—it would be strange if some mystic has not
already ventured on the same kind of thing. There are
proceedings of such a delicate nature that it is well to
overwhelm them with coarseness and make them
unrecognizable; there are actions of love and of an
extravagant magnanimity after which nothing can be wiser
than to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly: one
thereby obscures his recollection. Many a one is able to
obscure and abuse his own memory, in order at least to
have vengeance on this sole party in the secret: shame is
inventive. They are not the worst things of which one is
most ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a mask—
there is so much goodness in craft. I could imagine that a
man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would
roll through life clumsily and rotundly like an old, green,
heavily-hooped wine-cask: the refinement of his shame
requiring it to be so. A man who has depths in his shame
meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths
which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence of
which his nearest and most intimate friends may be
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ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes,
and equally so his regained security. Such a hidden nature,
which instinctively employs speech for silence and
concealment, and is inexhaustible in evasion of
communication, DESIRES and insists that a mask of
himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his
friends; and supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will
some day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless a
mask of him there—and that it is well to be so. Every
profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around every
profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to
the constantly false, that is to say, SUPERFICIAL
interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes,
every sign of life he manifests.
41. One must subject oneself to one’s own tests that
one is destined for independence and command, and do so
at the right time. One must not avoid one’s tests, although
they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can
play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves
and before no other judge. Not to cleave to any person,
be it even the dearest—every person is a prison and also a
recess. Not to cleave to a fatherland, be it even the most
suffering and necessitous—it is even less difficult to detach
one’s heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to cleave to a
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sympathy, be it even for higher men, into whose peculiar
torture and helplessness chance has given us an insight.
Not to cleave to a science, though it tempt one with the
most valuable discoveries, apparently specially reserved for
us. Not to cleave to one’s own liberation, to the
voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which
always flies further aloft in order always to see more under
it—the danger of the flier. Not to cleave to our own
virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any of our
specialties, to our ‘hospitality’ for instance, which is the
danger of dangers for highly developed and wealthy souls,
who deal prodigally, almost indifferently with themselves,
and push the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes a
vice. One must know how TO CONSERVE
ONESELF—the best test of independence.
42. A new order of philosophers is appearing; I shall
venture to baptize them by a name not without danger. As
far as I understand them, as far as they allow themselves to
be understood—for it is their nature to WISH to remain
something of a puzzle—these philosophers of the future
might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated
as ‘tempters.’ This name itself is after all only an attempt,
or, if it be preferred, a temptation.
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43. Will they be new friends of ‘truth,’ these coming
philosophers? Very probably, for all philosophers hitherto
have loved their truths. But assuredly they will not be
dogmatists. It must be contrary to their pride, and also
contrary to their taste, that their truth should still be truth
for every one—that which has hitherto been the secret
wish and ultimate purpose of all dogmatic efforts. ‘My
opinion is MY opinion: another person has not easily a
right to it’—such a philosopher of the future will say,
perhaps. One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to
agree with many people. ‘Good’ is no longer good when
one’s neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could
there be a ‘common good’! The expression contradicts
itself; that which can be common is always of small value.
In the end things must be as they are and have always
been—the great things remain for the great, the abysses for
the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and,
to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.
44. Need I say expressly after all this that they will be
free, VERY free spirits, these philosophers of the future—
as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but
something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally
different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and
mistaken? But while I say this, I feel under
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OBLIGATION almost as much to them as to ourselves
(we free spirits who are their heralds and forerunners), to
sweep away from ourselves altogether a stupid old
prejudice and misunderstanding, which, like a fog, has too
long made the conception of ‘free spirit’ obscure. In every
country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at
present something which makes an abuse of this name a
very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who
desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and
instincts prompt—not to mention that in respect to the
NEW philosophers who are appearing, they must still
more be closed windows and bolted doors. Briefly and
regrettably, they belong to the LEVELLERS, these
wrongly named ‘free spirits’—as glib-tongued and scribe-
fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern
ideas’ all of them men without solitude, without personal
solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage
nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only, they
are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in
their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost ALL
human misery and failure in the old forms in which
society has hitherto existed—a notion which happily
inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain
with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow
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happiness of the herd, together with security, safety,
comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their two
most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called
‘Equality of Rights’ and ‘Sympathy with All Sufferers’—
and suffering itself is looked upon by them as something
which must be DONE AWAY WITH. We opposite
ones, however, who have opened our eye and conscience
to the question how and where the plant ‘man’ has
hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this has
always taken place under the opposite conditions, that for
this end the dangerousness of his situation had to be
increased enormously, his inventive faculty and
dissembling power (his ‘spirit’) had to develop into
subtlety and daring under long oppression and
compulsion, and his Will to Life had to be increased to the
unconditioned Will to Power—we believe that severity,
violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart,
secrecy, stoicism, tempter’s art and devilry of every
kind,—that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical,
predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the
elevation of the human species as its opposite—we do not
even say enough when we only say THIS MUCH, and in
any case we find ourselves here, both with our speech and
our silence, at the OTHER extreme of all modern
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ideology and gregarious desirability, as their anti-podes
perhaps? What wonder that we ‘free spirits’ are not exactly
the most communicative spirits? that we do not wish to
betray in every respect WHAT a spirit can free itself from,
and WHERE perhaps it will then be driven? And as to the
import of the dangerous formula, ‘Beyond Good and
Evil,’ with which we at least avoid confusion, we ARE
something else than ‘libres-penseurs,’ ‘liben pensatori’
‘free-thinkers,’ and whatever these honest advocates of
‘modern ideas’ like to call themselves. Having been at
home, or at least guests, in many realms of the spirit,
having escaped again and again from the gloomy,
agreeable nooks in which preferences and prejudices,
youth, origin, the accident of men and books, or even the
weariness of travel seemed to confine us, full of malice
against the seductions of dependency which he concealed
in honours, money, positions, or exaltation of the senses,
grateful even for distress and the vicissitudes of illness,
because they always free us from some rule, and its
‘prejudice,’ grateful to the God, devil, sheep, and worm in
us, inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the point of
cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with
teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for any
business that requires sagacity and acute senses, ready for
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every adventure, owing to an excess of ‘free will’, with
anterior and posterior souls, into the ultimate intentions of
which it is difficult to pry, with foregrounds and
backgrounds to the end of which no foot may run, hidden
ones under the mantles of light, appropriators, although
we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors
from morning till night, misers of our wealth and our full-
crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting,
inventive in scheming, sometimes proud of tables of
categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of
work even in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows—
and it is necessary nowadays, that is to say, inasmuch as we
are the born, sworn, jealous friends of SOLITUDE, of our
own profoundest midnight and midday solitude—such
kind of men are we, we free spirits! And perhaps ye are
also something of the same kind, ye coming ones? ye
NEW philosophers?
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CHAPTER III: THE RELIGIOUS
MOOD
45. The human soul and its limits, the range of man’s
inner experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths,
and distances of these experiences, the entire history of the
soul UP TO THE PRESENT TIME, and its still
unexhausted possibilities: this is the preordained hunting-
domain for a born psychologist and lover of a ‘big hunt".
But how often must he say despairingly to himself: ‘A
single individual! alas, only a single individual! and this
great forest, this virgin forest!’ So he would like to have
some hundreds of hunting assistants, and fine trained
hounds, that he could send into the history of the human
soul, to drive HIS game together. In vain: again and again
he experiences, profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is
to find assistants and dogs for all the things that directly
excite his curiosity. The evil of sending scholars into new
and dangerous hunting- domains, where courage, sagacity,
and subtlety in every sense are required, is that they are no
longer serviceable just when the ‘BIG hunt,’ and also the
great danger commences,—it is precisely then that they
lose their keen eye and nose. In order, for instance, to
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divine and determine what sort of history the problem of
KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIENCE has hitherto had
in the souls of homines religiosi, a person would perhaps
himself have to possess as profound, as bruised, as immense
an experience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal; and
then he would still require that wide-spread heaven of
clear, wicked spirituality, which, from above, would be
able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize this mass
of dangerous and painful experiences.—But who could do
me this service! And who would have time to wait for
such servants!—they evidently appear too rarely, they are
so improbable at all times! Eventually one must do
everything ONESELF in order to know something;
which means that one has MUCH to do!—But a curiosity
like mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices—
pardon me! I mean to say that the love of truth has its
reward in heaven, and already upon earth.
46. Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not
infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and
southernly free-spirited world, which had centuries of
struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it,
counting besides the education in tolerance which the
Imperium Romanum gave—this faith is NOT that
sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a
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Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit
remained attached to his God and Christianity, it is much
rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible
manner a continuous suicide of reason—a tough, long-
lived, worm-like reason, which is not to be slain at once
and with a single blow. The Christian faith from the
beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride,
all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time
subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. There is
cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is
adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious
conscience, it takes for granted that the subjection of the
spirit is indescribably PAINFUL, that all the past and all
the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the
