{"id":45,"date":"2021-04-06T14:59:33","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T18:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca\/beyondgoodandevil\/?post_type=chapter&p=45"},"modified":"2022-01-28T11:17:24","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T16:17:24","slug":"chapter-7-our-virtues","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/beyondgoodandevil\/chapter\/chapter-7-our-virtues\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 7: Our Virtues","rendered":"Chapter 7: Our Virtues"},"content":{"raw":"214. Our\u00a0<\/em>Virtues?\u2014It is probable that we, too, have still our virtues, although naturally 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\u2014with all our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness and art of disguising, our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and spirit\u2014we shall presumably, if<\/em>\u00a0we 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!\u2014where, as we know, so many things lose themselves, so many things get quite lost! And is there anything finer than to search<\/em>\u00a0for one's own virtues? Is it not almost to\u00a0believe<\/em>\u00a0in one's own virtues? But this \"believing in one's own virtues\"\u2014is 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, 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.\u2014Ah! if you only knew how soon, so very soon\u2014it will be different!\r\n\r\n215. 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<\/em>\u00a0moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colours, and are seldom unequivocal\u2014and there are often cases, also, in which our actions are motley-coloured<\/em>.\r\n\r\n216. 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:\u2014we learn to despise<\/em>\u00a0when we love, and precisely when we love best; all of it, however, unconsciously, without noise, without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness, which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the formula of virtue. Morality as attitude\u2014is opposed to our taste nowadays. This is also<\/em>\u00a0an 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.\r\n\r\n217. 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<\/em>\u00a0us (or even with regard<\/em>\u00a0to us)\u2014they inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and detractors, even when they still remain our \"friends.\"\u2014Blessed are the forgetful: for they \"get the better\" even of their blunders.\r\n\r\n218. The psychologists of France\u2014and where else are there still psychologists nowadays?\u2014have 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 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\u2014namely, 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\u2014subtler even than the understanding of its victims:\u2014a 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<\/em>!\r\n\r\n219. 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<\/em>\u00a0subtle\u2014malice spiritualises. They are glad in their inmost 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<\/em>\u00a0the 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\"\u2014it 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 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<\/em>\u00a0in the world, even among things\u2014and not only among men.\r\n\r\n220. Now that the praise of the \"disinterested person\" is so popular one must\u2014probably not without some danger\u2014get an idea of what<\/em>\u00a0people actually take an interest in, and what are the things generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern ordinary men\u2014including 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\u2014if, 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?\"\u2014What! Even an action for love's sake shall be \"unegoistic\"? But you fools\u2014! \"And the praise of the self-sacrificer?\"\u2014But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it\u2014perhaps 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 obliged to answer. And after all, truth is a woman; one must not use force with her.\r\n\r\n221. \"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<\/em>\u00a0is, and who the other<\/em>\u00a0is. 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<\/em>\u00a0seduction under the mask of philanthropy\u2014and 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<\/em>; their presumption must be driven home to their conscience\u2014until they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral<\/em>\u00a0to say that 'what is right for one is proper for another.'\"\u2014So said my moralistic pedant and bonhomme. Did he perhaps deserve to be laughed at when he thus exhorted systems of morals to practise morality? But one should not be too much in the right if one wishes to have the laughers on one's own\u00a0<\/em>side; a grain of wrong pertains even to good taste.\r\n\r\n222. Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays\u2014and, if I gather rightly, no other religion is any longer preached\u2014let 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<\/em>. 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)\u2014 if it is not really the cause thereof<\/em>! The man of \"modern ideas,\" the conceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself\u2014this is perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity wants him only \"to suffer with his fellows.\"\r\n\r\n223. The hybrid European\u2014a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in all\u2014absolutely requires a costume: he needs history as a storeroom of costumes. To be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit him properly\u2014he 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 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\u2014we 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\u2014laughter 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,\u2014perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a future!\r\n\r\n224. 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 valuations to the authority of the operating forces),\u2014this 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\u2014it 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<\/em>\u00a0sense. For instance, we enjoy Homer once more: it is perhaps our happiest acquisition that we know how to appreciate Homer, whom men of distinguished culture (as the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for his esprit vaste<\/em>, and even Voltaire, the last echo of the century) cannot and could not so easily appropriate\u2014whom 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\u2014and 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 AEschylus would have half-killed himself with laughter or irritation: but we\u2014accept 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 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:\u2014we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation, very grateful, very patient, very complaisant\u2014but 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<\/em>\u00a0taste, 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 shine here and there: those moments and marvelous experiences when a great power has voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and infinite,\u2014when 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<\/em>\u00a0is 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\u2014and are only in our<\/em>\u00a0highest bliss when we\u2014are in most danger<\/em>.\r\n\r\n225. Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure\u00a0<\/em>and pain<\/em>, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which every one conscious of creative<\/em>\u00a0powers and an artist's conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy. Sympathy for you!\u2014to 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 ground around us; still less is it sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive after power\u2014they call it \"freedom.\" Our<\/em>\u00a0sympathy is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy:\u2014we see how man<\/em>\u00a0dwarfs himself, how you<\/em>\u00a0dwarf him! and there are moments when we view your<\/em>\u00a0sympathy with an indescribable anguish, when we resist it,\u2014when we regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. You want, if possible\u2014and there is not a more foolish \"if possible\"\u2014to do away with suffering<\/em>; and we?\u2014it really seems that we<\/em>\u00a0would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you understand it\u2014is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an end<\/em>; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible\u2014and makes his destruction desirable<\/em>! The discipline of suffering, of great<\/em>\u00a0suffering\u2014know ye not that it is only this<\/em>\u00a0discipline 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\u2014has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature<\/em>\u00a0and creator<\/em>\u00a0are 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\u2014do ye understand this contrast? And that your<\/em>\u00a0sympathy for the \"creature in man\" applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined\u2014to that which must necessarily suffer<\/em>, and is meant<\/em>\u00a0to suffer? And our sympathy\u2014do ye not understand what our reverse\u00a0<\/em>sympathy applies to, when it resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering and enervation?\u2014So it is sympathy against<\/em>\u00a0sympathy!\u2014But 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.\r\n\r\n226. We immoralists<\/em>.\u2014This world with which we<\/em>\u00a0are 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\u2014yes, it is well protected from clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We are woven into a strong net and garment of duties, and cannot<\/em>\u00a0disengage ourselves\u2014precisely 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<\/em>\u00a0duty,\"\u2014we have always fools and appearances against us!\r\n\r\n227. Honesty, granting that it is the virtue of which we cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits\u2014well, we will labour at it with all our perversity and love, and not tire of \"perfecting\" ourselves in our<\/em>\u00a0virtue, 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<\/em>, we latest Stoics, and let us send to its help whatever devilry we have in us:\u2014our disgust at the clumsy and undefined, our \"nitimur in vetitum<\/em>,\" our love of adventure, our sharpened and fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, intellectual Will to Power and universal conquest, which rambles and roves avidiously around all the realms of the future\u2014let 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'\u2014that is their devilry, and nothing else!\" What does it matter! And even if they were right\u2014have 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<\/em>? (It is a question of names.) And how many spirits we harbour? Our honesty, we free spirits\u2014let 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,\u2014let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores! Is not life a hundred times too short for us\u2014to bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal life in order to...\r\n\r\n228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances\u2014and that \"virtue,\" in my opinion, has been more<\/em>\u00a0injured by the tediousness<\/em>\u00a0of its advocates than by anything else; at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook their general 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<\/em>) an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner\u2014that calamity<\/em>\u00a0might 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\u00a0senateur pococurante<\/i>, 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<\/em>\u00a0literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief. In effect, the old English vice called cant<\/em>, which is moral tartuffism<\/em>, has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one must<\/em>\u00a0read 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,\"\u2014no! the happiness of England<\/em>, will be best served thereby. They would like, by all means, to convince themselves that the striving after English happiness, I mean after comfort<\/em>\u00a0and fashion<\/em>\u00a0(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,\u2014that what is fair to one may not<\/em>\u00a0at 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<\/em>\u00a0between 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<\/em>\u00a0them, as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes:\u2014\r\n
\r\n\r\nHail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,\r\n\r\n\"Longer\u2014better,\" aye revealing,\r\n\r\nStiffer aye in head and knee;\r\n\r\nUnenraptured, never jesting,\r\n\r\nMediocre everlasting,\r\n\r\nSans genie et sans esprit<\/em>!\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n229. In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much superstition<\/em>\u00a0of the fear, of the \"cruel wild beast,\" the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages\u2014that 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 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.[\/footnote] to drink, that it will lie down quiet and forgotten, in its old corner.\u2014One 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\u2014as, for instance, have been fostered by ancient and modern philosophers with regard to tragedy\u2014may no longer wander about virtuously and boldly. Almost everything that we call \"higher culture\" is based upon the spiritualising and intensifying of cruelty<\/em>\u2014this is my thesis; the \"wild beast\" has not been slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been\u2014transfigured. 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 homesickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who, with unhinged will, \"undergoes\" the performance of \"Tristan and Isolde\"\u2014what 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<\/em>: there is an abundant, super-abundant enjoyment even in one's own suffering, in causing one's own suffering\u2014and wherever man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious<\/em>\u00a0sense, 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<\/em>, he is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of cruelty towards himself<\/em>.\u2014Finally, 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<\/em>\u00a0its own inclination, and often enough against the wishes of his heart:\u2014he forces it to say Nay, where he would like to affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,\u2014even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty.\r\n\r\n230. 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.\u2014That 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\u2014in short, growth; or more properly, the feeling<\/em>\u00a0of growth, the feeling of increased power\u2014is 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<\/em>\u00a0so 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\u2014an 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\u2014the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein\u2014it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!\u2014counter to<\/em>\u00a0this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside\u2014for every outside is a cloak\u2014there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and insists<\/em>\u00a0on 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 try to convince him that it is not so! In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our \"extravagant honesty\" were talked about, whispered about, and glorified\u2014we free, very<\/em>\u00a0free spirits\u2014and some day perhaps such<\/em>\u00a0will actually be our\u2014posthumous glory! Meanwhile\u2014for there is plenty of time until then\u2014we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful\u2014there is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text homo natura<\/em>\u00a0must again be recognized. In effect, to translate man back again into nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over the eternal original text, homo natura<\/em>; to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline of science, stands before the other<\/em>\u00a0forms of nature, with fearless Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long: \"Thou art more! thou art higher! thou hast a different origin!\"\u2014this may be a strange and foolish task, but that it is a task<\/em>, who can deny! Why did we choose it, this foolish task? Or, to put the question differently: \"Why knowledge at all?\" Every one will ask us about this. And thus pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have not found and cannot find any better answer....\r\n\r\n231. Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that does not merely \"conserve\"\u2014as the physiologist knows. But at the bottom of our souls, quite \"down below,\" there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions. In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable \"I am this\"; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully\u2014he can only follow to the end what is \"fixed\" about them in himself. Occasionally we find certain solutions of problems which make strong beliefs for us; perhaps they are henceforth called \"convictions.\" Later on\u2014one sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge, guide-posts to the problem which we ourselves are<\/em>\u2014or more correctly to the great stupidity which we embody, our spiritual fate, the unteachable<\/em>\u00a0in us, quite \"down below.\"\u2014In view of this liberal compliment which I have just paid myself, permission will perhaps be more readily allowed me to utter some truths about \"woman as she is,\" provided that it is known at the outset how literally they are merely\u2014my<\/em>\u00a0truths.\r\n\r\n232. Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to enlighten men about \"woman as she is\"\u2014this<\/em>\u00a0is one of the worst developments of the general uglifying<\/em>\u00a0of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and self-exposure bring to light! Woman has so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed\u2014study only woman's behaviour towards children!\u2014which has really been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear<\/em>\u00a0of man. Alas, if ever the \"eternally tedious in woman\"\u2014she has plenty of it!\u2014is allowed to venture forth! if she begins radically and on principle to unlearn her wisdom and art-of charming, of playing, of frightening away sorrow, of alleviating and taking easily; if she forgets her delicate aptitude for agreeable desires! Female voices are already raised, which, by Saint Aristophanes! make one afraid:\u2014with medical explicitness it is stated in a threatening manner what woman first and last requires<\/em>\u00a0from man. Is it not in the very worst taste that woman thus sets herself up to be scientific? Enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men's affair, men's gift\u2014we remained therewith \"among ourselves\"; and in the end, in view of all that women write about \"woman,\" we may well have considerable doubt as to whether woman really desires<\/em>\u00a0enlightenment about herself\u2014and can<\/em>\u00a0desire it. If woman does not thereby seek a new ornament<\/em>\u00a0for herself\u2014I believe ornamentation belongs to the eternally feminine?\u2014why, then, she wishes to make herself feared: perhaps she thereby wishes to get the mastery. But she does not want truth\u2014what does woman care for truth? From the very first, nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth\u2014her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: we honour and love this very art and this very instinct in woman: we who have the hard task, and for our recreation gladly seek the company of beings under whose hands, glances, and delicate follies, our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity appear almost like follies to us. Finally, I ask the question: Did a woman herself ever acknowledge profundity in a woman's mind, or justice in a woman's heart? And is it not true that on the whole \"woman\" has hitherto been most despised by woman herself, and not at all by us?\u2014We men desire that woman should not continue to compromise herself by enlightening us; just as it was man's care and the consideration for woman, when the church decreed: mulier taceat in ecclesia. It was to the benefit of woman when Napoleon gave the too eloquent Madame de Stael to understand: mulier taceat in politicis!\u2014and in my opinion, he is a true friend of woman who calls out to women today: mulier taceat de mulierel.\r\n\r\n233. It betrays corruption of the instincts\u2014apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste\u2014when a woman refers to Madame Roland, or Madame de Stael, or Monsieur George Sand, as though something were proved thereby in favour of \"woman as she is.\" Among men, these are the three comical women as they are\u2014nothing more!\u2014and just the best involuntary counter-arguments against feminine emancipation and autonomy.\r\n\r\n234. Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art! Through bad female cooks\u2014through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen\u2014the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with: even today matters are very little better. A word to High School girls.\r\n\r\n235. There are turns and casts of fancy, there are sentences, little handfuls of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society suddenly crystallises itself. Among these is the incidental remark of Madame de Lambert to her son: \"Mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que des folies, qui\u00a0vous feront grand plaisir<\/i>\"\u2014the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way, that was ever addressed to a son.\r\n\r\n236. I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what Dante and Goethe believed about woman\u2014the former when he sang, \"ella guardava suso, ed io in lei<\/i>,\" and the latter when he interpreted it, \"the eternally feminine draws us aloft<\/em>\"; for this<\/em>\u00a0is just what she believes of the eternally masculine.\r\n\r\n237. Seven apophthegms for women<\/em>\r\n\r\nHow the longest ennui flees, When a man comes to our knees!\r\n\r\nAge, alas! and science staid, Furnish even weak virtue aid.\r\n\r\nSombre garb and silence meet: Dress for every dame\u2014discreet.\r\n\r\nWhom I thank when in my bliss? God!\u2014and my good tailoress!\r\n\r\nYoung, a flower-decked cavern home; Old, a dragon thence doth roam.\r\n\r\nNoble title, leg that's fine, Man as well: Oh, were he<\/em>\u00a0mine!\r\n\r\nSpeech in brief and sense in mass\u2014Slippery for the jenny-ass!\r\n\r\n237A. Woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds, which, losing their way, have come down among them from an elevation: as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet, and animating\u2014but as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it flying away.\r\n\r\n238. To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of \"man and woman,\" to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical<\/em>\u00a0sign of shallow-mindedness; and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot\u2014shallow in instinct!\u2014may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, as discovered; he will probably prove too \"short\" for all fundamental questions of life, future as well as present, and will be unable to descend into ANY of the depths. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as orientals<\/em>\u00a0do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein\u2014he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did formerly; those best heirs and scholars of Asia\u2014who, as is well known, with their increasing<\/em>\u00a0culture and amplitude of power, from Homer to the time of Pericles, became gradually stricter<\/em>\u00a0towards woman, in short, more Oriental. How<\/em>\u00a0necessary, h<\/em>ow<\/em> logical, even how<\/em> humanely desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves!\r\n\r\n239. The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present\u2014this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as disrespectfulness to old age\u2014what wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect? They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. And let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is unlearning to fear<\/em>\u00a0man: but the woman who \"unlearns to fear\" sacrifices her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man\u2014or more definitely, the man<\/em>\u00a0in man\u2014is no longer either desired or fully developed, is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough; what is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby\u2014woman deteriorates. This is what is happening nowadays: let us not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: \"woman as clerkess\" is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which is in course of formation. While she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to be \"master,\" and inscribes \"progress\" of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible obviousness: woman retrogrades<\/em>. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has declined<\/em>\u00a0in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims; and the \"emancipation of woman,\" insofar as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is stupidity<\/em>\u00a0in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman\u2014who is always a sensible woman\u2014might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition as to the ground upon which she can most surely achieve victory; to neglect exercise in the use of her proper weapons; to let-herself-go before man, perhaps even \"to the book,\" where formerly she kept herself in control and in refined, artful humility; to neutralize with her virtuous audacity man's faith in a veiled<\/em>, fundamentally different ideal in woman, something eternally, necessarily feminine; to emphatically and loquaciously dissuade man from the idea that woman must be preserved, cared for, protected, and indulged, like some delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant collection of everything of the nature of servitude and bondage which the position of woman in the hitherto existing order of society has entailed and still entails (as though slavery were a counter-argument, and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of every elevation of culture):\u2014what does all this betoken, if not a disintegration of womanly instincts, a defeminising? Certainly, there are enough of idiotic friends and corrupters of woman among the learned asses of the masculine sex, who advise woman to defeminize herself in this manner, and to imitate all the stupidities from which \"man\" in Europe, European \"manliness,\" suffers,\u2014who would like to lower woman to \"general culture,\" indeed even to newspaper reading and meddling with politics. Here and there they wish even to make women into free spirits and literary workers: as though a woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a profound and godless man;\u2014almost everywhere her nerves are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous kind of music (our latest German music), and she is daily being made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children. They wish to \"cultivate\" her in general still more, and intend, as they say, to make the \"weaker sex\" strong<\/em>\u00a0by culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner that the \"cultivating\" of mankind and his weakening\u2014that is to say, the weakening, dissipating, and languishing of his force of will<\/em>\u2014have always kept pace with one another, and that the most powerful and influential women in the world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just to thank their force of will\u2014and not their schoolmasters\u2014for their power and ascendancy over men. That which inspires respect in woman, and often enough fear also, is her nature<\/em>, which is more \"natural\" than that of man, her genuine, carnivora-like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove, her naivete<\/em>\u00a0in egoism, her untrainableness and innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, \"woman,\" is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights\u2014What? And all that is now to be at an end? And the disenchantment<\/em>\u00a0of woman is in progress? The tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which was always most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever again threatening thee! Thy old fable might once more become \"history\"\u2014an immense stupidity might once again overmaster thee and carry thee away! And no God concealed beneath it\u2014no! only an \"idea,\" a \"modern idea\"!","rendered":"

214. Our\u00a0<\/em>Virtues?\u2014It is probable that we, too, have still our virtues, although naturally 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\u2014with all our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness and art of disguising, our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and spirit\u2014we shall presumably, if<\/em>\u00a0we 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!\u2014where, as we know, so many things lose themselves, so many things get quite lost! And is there anything finer than to search<\/em>\u00a0for one’s own virtues? Is it not almost to\u00a0believe<\/em>\u00a0in one’s own virtues? But this “believing in one’s own virtues”\u2014is 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, 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.\u2014Ah! if you only knew how soon, so very soon\u2014it will be different!<\/p>\n

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<\/em>\u00a0moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colours, and are seldom unequivocal\u2014and there are often cases, also, in which our actions are motley-coloured<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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:\u2014we learn to despise<\/em>\u00a0when we love, and precisely when we love best; all of it, however, unconsciously, without noise, without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness, which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the formula of virtue. Morality as attitude\u2014is opposed to our taste nowadays. This is also<\/em>\u00a0an 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>\u00a0us (or even with regard<\/em>\u00a0to us)\u2014they inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and detractors, even when they still remain our “friends.”\u2014Blessed are the forgetful: for they “get the better” even of their blunders.<\/p>\n

218. The psychologists of France\u2014and where else are there still psychologists nowadays?\u2014have 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 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\u2014namely, 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\u2014subtler even than the understanding of its victims:\u2014a 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<\/em>!<\/p>\n

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<\/em>\u00a0subtle\u2014malice spiritualises. They are glad in their inmost 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<\/em>\u00a0the 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”\u2014it 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 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<\/em>\u00a0in the world, even among things\u2014and not only among men.<\/p>\n

220. Now that the praise of the “disinterested person” is so popular one must\u2014probably not without some danger\u2014get an idea of what<\/em>\u00a0people actually take an interest in, and what are the things generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern ordinary men\u2014including 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\u2014if, 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?”\u2014What! Even an action for love’s sake shall be “unegoistic”? But you fools\u2014! “And the praise of the self-sacrificer?”\u2014But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it\u2014perhaps 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 obliged to answer. And after all, truth is a woman; one must not use force with her.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>\u00a0is, and who the other<\/em>\u00a0is. 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<\/em>\u00a0seduction under the mask of philanthropy\u2014and 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<\/em>; their presumption must be driven home to their conscience\u2014until they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral<\/em>\u00a0to say that ‘what is right for one is proper for another.'”\u2014So said my moralistic pedant and bonhomme. Did he perhaps deserve to be laughed at when he thus exhorted systems of morals to practise morality? But one should not be too much in the right if one wishes to have the laughers on one’s own\u00a0<\/em>side; a grain of wrong pertains even to good taste.<\/p>\n

222. Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays\u2014and, if I gather rightly, no other religion is any longer preached\u2014let 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<\/em>. 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)\u2014 if it is not really the cause thereof<\/em>! The man of “modern ideas,” the conceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself\u2014this is perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity wants him only “to suffer with his fellows.”<\/p>\n

223. The hybrid European\u2014a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in all\u2014absolutely requires a costume: he needs history as a storeroom of costumes. To be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit him properly\u2014he 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 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\u2014we 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\u2014laughter 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,\u2014perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a future!<\/p>\n

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 valuations to the authority of the operating forces),\u2014this 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\u2014it 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<\/em>\u00a0sense. For instance, we enjoy Homer once more: it is perhaps our happiest acquisition that we know how to appreciate Homer, whom men of distinguished culture (as the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for his esprit vaste<\/em>, and even Voltaire, the last echo of the century) cannot and could not so easily appropriate\u2014whom 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\u2014and 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 AEschylus would have half-killed himself with laughter or irritation: but we\u2014accept 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 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:\u2014we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation, very grateful, very patient, very complaisant\u2014but 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<\/em>\u00a0taste, 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 shine here and there: those moments and marvelous experiences when a great power has voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and infinite,\u2014when 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<\/em>\u00a0is 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\u2014and are only in our<\/em>\u00a0highest bliss when we\u2014are in most danger<\/em>.<\/p>\n

225. Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure\u00a0<\/em>and pain<\/em>, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which every one conscious of creative<\/em>\u00a0powers and an artist’s conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy. Sympathy for you!\u2014to 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 ground around us; still less is it sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive after power\u2014they call it “freedom.” Our<\/em>\u00a0sympathy is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy:\u2014we see how man<\/em>\u00a0dwarfs himself, how you<\/em>\u00a0dwarf him! and there are moments when we view your<\/em>\u00a0sympathy with an indescribable anguish, when we resist it,\u2014when we regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. You want, if possible\u2014and there is not a more foolish “if possible”\u2014to do away with suffering<\/em>; and we?\u2014it really seems that we<\/em>\u00a0would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you understand it\u2014is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an end<\/em>; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible\u2014and makes his destruction desirable<\/em>! The discipline of suffering, of great<\/em>\u00a0suffering\u2014know ye not that it is only this<\/em>\u00a0discipline 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\u2014has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature<\/em>\u00a0and creator<\/em>\u00a0are 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\u2014do ye understand this contrast? And that your<\/em>\u00a0sympathy for the “creature in man” applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined\u2014to that which must necessarily suffer<\/em>, and is meant<\/em>\u00a0to suffer? And our sympathy\u2014do ye not understand what our reverse\u00a0<\/em>sympathy applies to, when it resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering and enervation?\u2014So it is sympathy against<\/em>\u00a0sympathy!\u2014But 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.<\/p>\n

226. We immoralists<\/em>.\u2014This world with which we<\/em>\u00a0are 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\u2014yes, it is well protected from clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We are woven into a strong net and garment of duties, and cannot<\/em>\u00a0disengage ourselves\u2014precisely 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<\/em>\u00a0duty,”\u2014we have always fools and appearances against us!<\/p>\n

227. Honesty, granting that it is the virtue of which we cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits\u2014well, we will labour at it with all our perversity and love, and not tire of “perfecting” ourselves in our<\/em>\u00a0virtue, 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<\/em>, we latest Stoics, and let us send to its help whatever devilry we have in us:\u2014our disgust at the clumsy and undefined, our “nitimur in vetitum<\/em>,” our love of adventure, our sharpened and fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, intellectual Will to Power and universal conquest, which rambles and roves avidiously around all the realms of the future\u2014let 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’\u2014that is their devilry, and nothing else!” What does it matter! And even if they were right\u2014have 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<\/em>? (It is a question of names.) And how many spirits we harbour? Our honesty, we free spirits\u2014let 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,\u2014let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores! Is not life a hundred times too short for us\u2014to bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal life in order to…<\/p>\n

228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances\u2014and that “virtue,” in my opinion, has been more<\/em>\u00a0injured by the tediousness<\/em>\u00a0of its advocates than by anything else; at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook their general 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<\/em>) an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner\u2014that calamity<\/em>\u00a0might 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\u00a0senateur pococurante<\/i>, 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<\/em>\u00a0literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief. In effect, the old English vice called cant<\/em>, which is moral tartuffism<\/em>, has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one must<\/em>\u00a0read 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,”\u2014no! the happiness of England<\/em>, will be best served thereby. They would like, by all means, to convince themselves that the striving after English happiness, I mean after comfort<\/em>\u00a0and fashion<\/em>\u00a0(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,\u2014that what is fair to one may not<\/em>\u00a0at 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<\/em>\u00a0between 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<\/em>\u00a0them, as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes:\u2014<\/p>\n

\n

Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,<\/p>\n

“Longer\u2014better,” aye revealing,<\/p>\n

Stiffer aye in head and knee;<\/p>\n

Unenraptured, never jesting,<\/p>\n

Mediocre everlasting,<\/p>\n

Sans genie et sans esprit<\/em>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

229. In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much superstition<\/em>\u00a0of the fear, of the “cruel wild beast,” the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages\u2014that 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 when I allow such a truth to escape; let others capture it again and give it so much “milk of pious sentiment”[1]<\/sup><\/a> to drink, that it will lie down quiet and forgotten, in its old corner.\u2014One 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\u2014as, for instance, have been fostered by ancient and modern philosophers with regard to tragedy\u2014may no longer wander about virtuously and boldly. Almost everything that we call “higher culture” is based upon the spiritualising and intensifying of cruelty<\/em>\u2014this is my thesis; the “wild beast” has not been slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been\u2014transfigured. 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 homesickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who, with unhinged will, “undergoes” the performance of “Tristan and Isolde”\u2014what 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<\/em>: there is an abundant, super-abundant enjoyment even in one’s own suffering, in causing one’s own suffering\u2014and wherever man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious<\/em>\u00a0sense, 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<\/em>, he is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of cruelty towards himself<\/em>.\u2014Finally, 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<\/em>\u00a0its own inclination, and often enough against the wishes of his heart:\u2014he forces it to say Nay, where he would like to affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,\u2014even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty.<\/p>\n

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.\u2014That 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\u2014in short, growth; or more properly, the feeling<\/em>\u00a0of growth, the feeling of increased power\u2014is 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<\/em>\u00a0so 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\u2014an 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\u2014the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein\u2014it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!\u2014counter to<\/em>\u00a0this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside\u2014for every outside is a cloak\u2014there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and insists<\/em>\u00a0on 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 try to convince him that it is not so! In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our “extravagant honesty” were talked about, whispered about, and glorified\u2014we free, very<\/em>\u00a0free spirits\u2014and some day perhaps such<\/em>\u00a0will actually be our\u2014posthumous glory! Meanwhile\u2014for there is plenty of time until then\u2014we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful\u2014there is something in them that makes one’s heart swell with pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite’s conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text homo natura<\/em>\u00a0must again be recognized. In effect, to translate man back again into nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over the eternal original text, homo natura<\/em>; to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline of science, stands before the other<\/em>\u00a0forms of nature, with fearless Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long: “Thou art more! thou art higher! thou hast a different origin!”\u2014this may be a strange and foolish task, but that it is a task<\/em>, who can deny! Why did we choose it, this foolish task? Or, to put the question differently: “Why knowledge at all?” Every one will ask us about this. And thus pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have not found and cannot find any better answer….<\/p>\n

231. Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that does not merely “conserve”\u2014as the physiologist knows. But at the bottom of our souls, quite “down below,” there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions. In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable “I am this”; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully\u2014he can only follow to the end what is “fixed” about them in himself. Occasionally we find certain solutions of problems which make strong beliefs for us; perhaps they are henceforth called “convictions.” Later on\u2014one sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge, guide-posts to the problem which we ourselves are<\/em>\u2014or more correctly to the great stupidity which we embody, our spiritual fate, the unteachable<\/em>\u00a0in us, quite “down below.”\u2014In view of this liberal compliment which I have just paid myself, permission will perhaps be more readily allowed me to utter some truths about “woman as she is,” provided that it is known at the outset how literally they are merely\u2014my<\/em>\u00a0truths.<\/p>\n

232. Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to enlighten men about “woman as she is”\u2014this<\/em>\u00a0is one of the worst developments of the general uglifying<\/em>\u00a0of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and self-exposure bring to light! Woman has so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed\u2014study only woman’s behaviour towards children!\u2014which has really been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear<\/em>\u00a0of man. Alas, if ever the “eternally tedious in woman”\u2014she has plenty of it!\u2014is allowed to venture forth! if she begins radically and on principle to unlearn her wisdom and art-of charming, of playing, of frightening away sorrow, of alleviating and taking easily; if she forgets her delicate aptitude for agreeable desires! Female voices are already raised, which, by Saint Aristophanes! make one afraid:\u2014with medical explicitness it is stated in a threatening manner what woman first and last requires<\/em>\u00a0from man. Is it not in the very worst taste that woman thus sets herself up to be scientific? Enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men’s affair, men’s gift\u2014we remained therewith “among ourselves”; and in the end, in view of all that women write about “woman,” we may well have considerable doubt as to whether woman really desires<\/em>\u00a0enlightenment about herself\u2014and can<\/em>\u00a0desire it. If woman does not thereby seek a new ornament<\/em>\u00a0for herself\u2014I believe ornamentation belongs to the eternally feminine?\u2014why, then, she wishes to make herself feared: perhaps she thereby wishes to get the mastery. But she does not want truth\u2014what does woman care for truth? From the very first, nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth\u2014her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: we honour and love this very art and this very instinct in woman: we who have the hard task, and for our recreation gladly seek the company of beings under whose hands, glances, and delicate follies, our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity appear almost like follies to us. Finally, I ask the question: Did a woman herself ever acknowledge profundity in a woman’s mind, or justice in a woman’s heart? And is it not true that on the whole “woman” has hitherto been most despised by woman herself, and not at all by us?\u2014We men desire that woman should not continue to compromise herself by enlightening us; just as it was man’s care and the consideration for woman, when the church decreed: mulier taceat in ecclesia. It was to the benefit of woman when Napoleon gave the too eloquent Madame de Stael to understand: mulier taceat in politicis!\u2014and in my opinion, he is a true friend of woman who calls out to women today: mulier taceat de mulierel.<\/p>\n

233. It betrays corruption of the instincts\u2014apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste\u2014when a woman refers to Madame Roland, or Madame de Stael, or Monsieur George Sand, as though something were proved thereby in favour of “woman as she is.” Among men, these are the three comical women as they are\u2014nothing more!\u2014and just the best involuntary counter-arguments against feminine emancipation and autonomy.<\/p>\n

234. Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed! Woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art! Through bad female cooks\u2014through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen\u2014the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with: even today matters are very little better. A word to High School girls.<\/p>\n

235. There are turns and casts of fancy, there are sentences, little handfuls of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society suddenly crystallises itself. Among these is the incidental remark of Madame de Lambert to her son: “Mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que des folies, qui\u00a0vous feront grand plaisir<\/i>“\u2014the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way, that was ever addressed to a son.<\/p>\n

236. I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what Dante and Goethe believed about woman\u2014the former when he sang, “ella guardava suso, ed io in lei<\/i>,” and the latter when he interpreted it, “the eternally feminine draws us aloft<\/em>“; for this<\/em>\u00a0is just what she believes of the eternally masculine.<\/p>\n

237. Seven apophthegms for women<\/em><\/p>\n

How the longest ennui flees, When a man comes to our knees!<\/p>\n

Age, alas! and science staid, Furnish even weak virtue aid.<\/p>\n

Sombre garb and silence meet: Dress for every dame\u2014discreet.<\/p>\n

Whom I thank when in my bliss? God!\u2014and my good tailoress!<\/p>\n

Young, a flower-decked cavern home; Old, a dragon thence doth roam.<\/p>\n

Noble title, leg that’s fine, Man as well: Oh, were he<\/em>\u00a0mine!<\/p>\n

Speech in brief and sense in mass\u2014Slippery for the jenny-ass!<\/p>\n

237A. Woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds, which, losing their way, have come down among them from an elevation: as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet, and animating\u2014but as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it flying away.<\/p>\n

238. To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of “man and woman,” to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical<\/em>\u00a0sign of shallow-mindedness; and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot\u2014shallow in instinct!\u2014may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, as discovered; he will probably prove too “short” for all fundamental questions of life, future as well as present, and will be unable to descend into ANY of the depths. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as orientals<\/em>\u00a0do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein\u2014he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did formerly; those best heirs and scholars of Asia\u2014who, as is well known, with their increasing<\/em>\u00a0culture and amplitude of power, from Homer to the time of Pericles, became gradually stricter<\/em>\u00a0towards woman, in short, more Oriental. How<\/em>\u00a0necessary, h<\/em>ow<\/em> logical, even how<\/em> humanely desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves!<\/p>\n

239. The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present\u2014this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as disrespectfulness to old age\u2014what wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect? They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. And let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is unlearning to fear<\/em>\u00a0man: but the woman who “unlearns to fear” sacrifices her most womanly instincts. That woman should venture forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man\u2014or more definitely, the man<\/em>\u00a0in man\u2014is no longer either desired or fully developed, is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough; what is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby\u2014woman deteriorates. This is what is happening nowadays: let us not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: “woman as clerkess” is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which is in course of formation. While she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to be “master,” and inscribes “progress” of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible obviousness: woman retrogrades<\/em>. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has declined<\/em>\u00a0in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims; and the “emancipation of woman,” insofar as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is stupidity<\/em>\u00a0in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman\u2014who is always a sensible woman\u2014might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition as to the ground upon which she can most surely achieve victory; to neglect exercise in the use of her proper weapons; to let-herself-go before man, perhaps even “to the book,” where formerly she kept herself in control and in refined, artful humility; to neutralize with her virtuous audacity man’s faith in a veiled<\/em>, fundamentally different ideal in woman, something eternally, necessarily feminine; to emphatically and loquaciously dissuade man from the idea that woman must be preserved, cared for, protected, and indulged, like some delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant collection of everything of the nature of servitude and bondage which the position of woman in the hitherto existing order of society has entailed and still entails (as though slavery were a counter-argument, and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of every elevation of culture):\u2014what does all this betoken, if not a disintegration of womanly instincts, a defeminising? Certainly, there are enough of idiotic friends and corrupters of woman among the learned asses of the masculine sex, who advise woman to defeminize herself in this manner, and to imitate all the stupidities from which “man” in Europe, European “manliness,” suffers,\u2014who would like to lower woman to “general culture,” indeed even to newspaper reading and meddling with politics. Here and there they wish even to make women into free spirits and literary workers: as though a woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a profound and godless man;\u2014almost everywhere her nerves are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous kind of music (our latest German music), and she is daily being made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children. They wish to “cultivate” her in general still more, and intend, as they say, to make the “weaker sex” strong<\/em>\u00a0by culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner that the “cultivating” of mankind and his weakening\u2014that is to say, the weakening, dissipating, and languishing of his force of will<\/em>\u2014have always kept pace with one another, and that the most powerful and influential women in the world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just to thank their force of will\u2014and not their schoolmasters\u2014for their power and ascendancy over men. That which inspires respect in woman, and often enough fear also, is her nature<\/em>, which is more “natural” than that of man, her genuine, carnivora-like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove, her naivete<\/em>\u00a0in egoism, her untrainableness and innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one’s sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, “woman,” is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights\u2014What? And all that is now to be at an end? And the disenchantment<\/em>\u00a0of woman is in progress? The tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which was always most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever again threatening thee! Thy old fable might once more become “history”\u2014an immense stupidity might once again overmaster thee and carry thee away! And no God concealed beneath it\u2014no! only an “idea,” a “modern idea”!<\/p>\n

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