NIETZSCHE - THE GAY SCIENCE E-Book

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Nietzche Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 456

Beschreibung

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher, writer, poet, philologist, and musician, and is considered one of the most influential and important modern thinkers of the 19th century. The Gay Science (in German: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) is the last work of Nietzsche's positive phase, resembling "Dawn" and "Human, All Too Human" in its light, pleasant, and flowery style of composition. This is one of the author's most widely read works. It is also in this book that Nietzsche refers, for the first time, to Zarathustra, the ancient Persian prophet, creator of the doctrine called Zoroastrianism, whom Nietzsche made the herald of his philosophy in his book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".

Leseprobe

Friedrich Nietzsche

THE GAY SCIENE

Original Title:

“Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”

Contents

Introduction

The Gay Science (‘La gaya scienza’)

Preface to the second edition

‘Joke, Cunning, and Revenge’ Prelude in German Rhymes

Book One

Book Two

Book Three

Book Four: St Januarius

Book Five: We Fearless Ones

Appendix: Songs of Prince Vogelfrei

Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in the city of Röcken, Germany. His father was a learned person, and his grandparents were Lutheran pastors. Raised in a family of clergymen, Nietzsche was groomed to become a pastor. He grew up in Saale, with his mother, two aunts, and his grandmother. In 1858, Nietzsche received a scholarship to the prestigious Pforta school. He then moved to Bonn, where he excelled in his studies of theology and philosophy. At the age of 18, he lost faith in God and went through a period of debauchery during which he contracted syphilis. Nietzsche became a professor of Greek philosophy and poetry at the young age of 24 at the University of Basel in 1869. However, he left the university in 1879.

As he suffered from intense headaches and increasing loss of vision, he led a solitary life, wandering between Italy, the Swiss Alps, and the French Riviera. He attributed to his illness the power to confer upon him superior clairvoyance and lucidity. In 1871, he wrote "The Birth of Tragedy". Later, in 1879, he began his extensive critique of values by writing "Human, All Too Human". In 1881, he developed the concept of the "Eternal Return", where the world endlessly passes through cycles of creation and destruction, joy and suffering, good and evil. In the years 1882-1883, he wrote "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" in the bay of Rapallo. In the autumn of 1883, he returned to Germany and lived in Naumburg with his mother and sister. In 1882, he wrote "The Gay Science". This was followed by works such as "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886), "The Case of Wagner" (1888), "The Twilight of the Idols" (1888), "Nietzsche contra Wagner" (1888), and "Ecce Homo" (1888). In 1889, upon witnessing a carriage driver whipping a horse, he embraced the animal's neck to protect it and fell to the ground. Had he gone mad? Many friends visiting Nietzsche in the psychiatric clinic doubted his illness, and some of his biographers claim that, far from being mad, he had achieved great clarity.

Nietzsche's Thought

Nietzsche established a fundamental distinction between the "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" attributes, wherein Apollo represented lucidity, harmony, and order, while Dionysus represented intoxication, exuberance, and disorder.

Based on nihilism, he subverted traditional philosophy, turning it into a pathological discourse that appreciated illness as a viewpoint on health and vice versa. He argued that neither health nor illness were fixed entities and that oppositions between good and evil, truth and falsehood, sickness and health were mere superficial alternatives.

The concept of the "Antichrist" emerged from his critique of Christian ethics as a slave morality that oppressed human impulses and weakened the life-affirming powers of Western society.

Nietzsche envisioned the earthly world as a valley of suffering in contrast to the afterlife of eternal life in Christian theology. The "will to power" and the "eternal return" were fundamental concepts in his philosophy. He broke with the Hegelian notion of history as a chronicle of rationality and considered an excess of history as hostile and dangerous to life, as it limited human action.

He opposed the idea that historical events instructed men not to repeat them, and his theory of eternal return implied an assent to cyclical "world destructions."

The "Nietzschean Übermensch" was not someone whose will desired domination, but someone who sought to create, shape, and value. Nietzsche was a critic of democracy and totalitarianism, advocating for a new elite uncorrupted by Christianity and liberalism. His philosophy deeply influenced Western culture.

About the work: "The Gay Science".

"The Gay Science" (in German: "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft") is the last work of Nietzsche's positive phase, and it resembles "Dawn" and "Human, All Too Human" in its light, pleasant, and flowery style in which it is composed. This is one of the author's most widely read works. The author's preface already sets the ironic tone of the book:

"I live in my own house. I never imitated anything from anyone

And I always laughed at all the masters, who never laughed at themselves."

It was published in 1882, and five years later, the author himself added a new chapter written around the same time as "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," sharing with the latter a austere and critical style.

The expression "Gay Science" refers to the birth of modern European poetry that occurred in Provence during the 12th century. It derives from Provençal, the language used by the troubadours of medieval literature, in which "gai saber" or "gaya scienza" refers to the technical skill and free spirit necessary to write poetry. In "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (Section 20), Nietzsche observes that "love as passion, which is our European specialty, was invented by the Provençal poet-knights, those magnificent and inventive human beings of 'gai saber' to whom Europe owes so much and to whom she owes almost entirely herself."

The five chapters that compose the book are subdivided into 383 aphorisms, in which Nietzsche expounds his concepts about art, morality, history, politics, knowledge, religion, women, wars, illusion, and truth. It is in this book where his theories on the eternal return (formulated by the Greek Stoics and considered by Nietzsche as the supreme symbol of all affirmation of life) and the death of God (a concept with which Nietzsche deals with the new phase of European intellectualism of the 19th century, portrayed in the book through the dialogue of a madman with enlightened atheists, who represent the entire European intellectual class: scientists, philosophers, scholars, and even artists, about the grand act they have committed: the murder of the Christian God and the subsequent nihilism that was brewing in the minds of these intellectuals, as a result of the loss of general references for life, which were directly represented by Christianity and its morality).

It is also in this book where Nietzsche refers for the first time to Zarathustra, the ancient Persian prophet and creator of the doctrine called Zoroastrianism, which Nietzsche turns into the herald of his philosophy in his book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." It is important to remember that in this work, the German philosopher highlights his ideological and artistic differences with regard to Richard Wagner, who ended his life as a follower of Arthur Schopenhauer.

The Gay Science (‘La gaya scienza’)

This house is my own and here I dwell,

I’ve never aped nothing from no one

and - laugh at each master, mark me well,

who at himself has not poked fun.

Over my front door.

The title is a translation into German (in our edition, into English) of the Provencal subtitle. Gaya scienza (‘joyful, cheerful, or gay science’) was a term used by the troubadours in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries to refer to the art of poetry. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes that he has used the term gaya scienza here to designate the specific unity of ‘singer, knight, and free spirit’ which was characteristic of early Provencal culture.

Preface to the second edition

1

This book might need more than one preface; and in the end there would still be room for doubting whether someone who has not experienced something similar could, by means of prefaces, be brought closer to the experiences of this book. It seems to be written in the language of the wind that brings a thaw: it contains high spirits, unrest, contradiction, and April weather, so that one is constantly reminded of winter’s nearness as well as of the triumph over winter that is coming, must come, perhaps has already come. . .Gratitude flows forth incessantly, as if that which was most unexpected had just happened - the gratitude of a convalescent - for recovery was what was most unexpected.

‘Gay Science’: this signifies the saturnalia{1} of a mind that has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure - patiently, severely, coldly, without yielding, but also without hope - and is now all of a sudden attacked by hope, by hope for health, by the intoxication of recovery. Is it any wonder that in the process much that is unreasonable and foolish comes to light, much wanton tenderness, lavished even on problems that have a prickly hide, not made to be fondled and lured? This entire book is really nothing but an amusement after long privation and powerlessness, the jubilation of returning strength, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of reopened seas, of goals that are permitted and believed in again.

How many and what sorts of things did not lie behind me then! This stretch of desert, exhaustion, loss of faith, icing-up in the midst of youth; this onset of dotage at the wrong time; this tyranny of pain surpassed still by the tyranny of a pride that refused the conclusions of pain - and conclusions are consolations; this radical seclusion as a self-defense against a pathologically clairvoyant contempt for humanity, this limitation in principle to what was bitter, harsh, painful to know, as prescribed by the nausea that had gradually developed from an incautious and excessively luxurious spiritual diet - one calls it romanticism - oh, who could re-experience all of this as I did? But if anyone could, he would surely pardon even more than a bit of foolishness, exuberance, ‘gay science’ - for example, the handful of songs that have been added to the book this time, songs in which a poet makes fun of all poets in a manner that is hard to forgive. Alas, it is not only the poets and their beautiful ‘lyrical sentiments’ on whom this resurrected author has to vent his malice: who knows what kind of victim he is looking for, what kind of monster will stimulate him to pardon it? Incipit tragoedia{2}, we read at the end of this suspiciously innocent book. Beware! Something utterly wicked and mischievous is being announced here: incipit parodia,{3} no doubt.

2

But let us leave Mr. Nietzsche: what is it to us that Mr Nietzsche has got well again?. . .A psychologist knows few questions as attractive as that concerning the relation between health and philosophy; and should he himself become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into the illness. For assuming that one is a person, one necessarily also has the philosophy of that person; but here there is a considerable difference. In some, it is their weaknesses that philosophize, in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, be it as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation; for the latter, it is only a beautiful luxury, in the best case the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually has to inscribe itself in cosmic capital letters on the heaven of concepts. In the former, more common case, however, when it is distress that philosophizes, as in all sick thinkers - and perhaps sick thinkers are in the majority in the history of philosophy - what will become of the thought that is itself subjected to the pressure of illness? This is the question that concerns the psychologist, and here an experiment is possible. Just like a traveler who resolves to wake up at a certain hour and then calmly gives himself up to sleep, so too we philosophers, should we become ill, temporarily surrender with body and soul to the illness - we shut our eyes to ourselves, as it were. And as the traveler knows that something is not asleep, something that will count the hours and wake him up, we, too, know that the decisive moment will find us awake, that something will then leap forward and catch the mind in the act, i.e. in its weakness or repentance or hardening or gloom, and whatever else the pathological states of the mind are called that on healthy days are opposed by the pride of the mind (for the old saying still holds: ‘the proud mind, the peacock, and the horse are the three proudest animals on earth’). After such self-questioning, self-temptation, one acquires a subtler eye for all philosophizing to date; one is better than before at guessing the involuntary detours, alleyways, resting places, and sunning places of thought to which suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of their suffering; one now knows where the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and lure the mind - towards sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense.

Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far - and I have asked myself often enough whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgements that have hitherto guided the history of thought are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution - of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies; and if such world affirmations or world negations lack altogether any grain of significance when measured scientifically, they give the historian and psychologist all the more valuable hints as symptoms of the body, of its success or failure, its fullness, power and highhandedness in history, or of its frustrations, fatigues, impoverishments, its premonitions of the end, its will to an end. I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the term -someone who has set himself the task of pursuing the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity - to summon the courage at last to push my suspicion to its limit and risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all ‘truth’ but rather something else - let us say health, future, growth, power, life...

3

- One might guess that I do not want to take my leave ungratefully from that time of severe illness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today: I am well aware of the advantages that my erratic health gives me over all burly minds. A philosopher who has passed through many kinds of health, and keeps passing through them again and again, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot but translate his state every time into the most spiritual form and distance - this art of transfiguration just is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to separate soul from body as the common people do; we are even less free to separate soul from spirit. We are no thinking frogs, no objectifying and registering devices with frozen innards - we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and maternally endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and disaster. Life - to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for illness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we can do without it at all? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of the great suspicion that turns every U into an X, a real, proper X{4}, that is, the penultimate one before the final one.

Only great pain, that long, slow pain that takes its time and in which we are burned, as it were, over green wood, forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and put aside all trust, everything good-natured, veiling, mild, average - things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’ - but I know that it makes us deeper. Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our willpower against it, like the savage who, however badly tormented, repays his tormentor with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw before pain into the Oriental Nothingness - called Nirvana - into mute, rigid, deaf self-surrender, self-forgetting, self-extinction: one emerges from such dangerous exercises in self-mastery as a different person, with a few more question marks, above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly, and quietly than one had previously questioned. The trust in life is gone life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one sullen. Even love of life is still possible - only one loves differently. It is like the love for a woman who gives us doubts. . .But the attraction of everything problematic, the delight in an X, is so great in highly spiritual, spiritualized people such as these that this delight flares up like bright embers again and again over all the distress of what is problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness...

4

Finally, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe illness, also from the illness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, joyful with a more dangerous second innocence, more childlike, and at the same time a hundred times subtler than one had ever been before. How repulsive enjoyment is to us now, that crude, muggy, brown enjoyment as understood by those who enjoy it, our ‘educated’, our rich, and our rulers! How maliciously we nowadays listen to the great fairground boom-boom with which the ‘educated person’ and urbanite today allows art, books and music - aided by spirituous beverages - to rape him for ‘forms of spiritual enjoyment’! How the theatrical cry of passion now hurts our ears; that whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses that is loved by the educated mob together with its aspirations towards the sublime, the elevated, the distorted, how foreign it has become to our taste! No, if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art - a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a bright flame, blazes into an unclouded sky! Above all: an art for artists, only for artists! In addition we will know better what is first and foremost needed for that: cheerfulness - any cheerfulness, my friends! As artists, too, we will know this - I would like to prove it. There are some things we now know too well, we are knowing ones: oh, how we nowadays learn as artists to forget well, to be good at not knowing! And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths{5} who make temples unsafe at night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, we have grown sick of this bad taste, this will to truth, to ‘truth at any price’, this youthful madness in the love of truth: we are too experienced, too serious, too jovial, too burned, too deep for that. . .We no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the veil; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, to be present everywhere, to understand and ‘know’ everything. ‘Is it true that God is everywhere?’ a little girl asked her mother; ‘I find that indecent!’ - a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for not showing her grounds? Perhaps her name is - to speak Greek - Baubo?{6} . . .Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words - in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity! And is not this precisely what we are coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of current thought and looked around from up there, looked down from up there? Are we not just in this respect - Greeks? Worshippers of shapes, tones, words? And therefore - artists?

Ruta near Genoa Autumn, 1886

‘Joke, Cunning, and Revenge’ Prelude in German Rhymes{7}

1. Invitation

Dare to taste my fare, dear diner!

Come tomorrow it tastes finer

and day after even good!

If you still want more - I’ll make it,

from past inspiration take it,

turning food for thought to food.

2. My Happiness

Since I grew weary of the search

 I taught myself to find instead.

Since cross winds caused my ship to lurch

 I sail with all winds straight ahead.

3. Undaunted

Where you stand, there dig deep!

Below you lies the well!

Let obscurantists wail and weep:

‘Below is always - hell! ’

4. Dialogue

A. Was I ill? Have I recovered?

Has my doctor been discovered?

How have I forgotten all?

B. Now I know you have recovered:

Healthy is who can’t recall.

5. To the Virtuous

Our virtues too should step lively to and fro:

Like the verses of Homer, they have to come and go!

6. Worldly Wisdom

Stay not where the lowlands are!

Climb not into the sky!

The world looks best by far

when viewed from halfway high.

7. Vademecum - Vadetecum{8}

My way and language speak to you,

you follow me, pursue me too?

To thine own self and way be true:

Thus follow me, but gently do!

8. On the Third Shedding

Already cracks and breaks my skin,

my appetite unslaking

is fuelled by earth I’ve taken in:

This snake for earth is aching.

Among the stones and grass I wear

a path from fen to firth,

to eat what’s always been my fare

you, my snake food, you my earth.

9. My Roses

Yes! My joy - it wants to gladden -,

every joy wants so to gladden!

Would you pluck my rose and sadden?

You must crouch on narrow ledges,

prop yourself on ropes and wedges,

prick yourself on thorny hedges!

For my joy - it loves to madden!

For my joy - is malice laden!

Would you pluck my rose and sadden?

10.The Scornful One

Much do I let fall and spill,

thus I’m scornful, you malign.

One who drinks from cups too full will

often let much fall and spill -,

yet never think to blame the wine.

11.The Proverb Speaks

Sharp and mild, dull and keen,

well known and strange, dirty and clean,

where both the fool and wise are seen:

All this am I, have ever been,

-in me dove, snake and swine convene!

12.To a Friend of Light

If you want to spare your eyes and your mind,

follow the sun from the shadows behind.

13.For Dancers

Slipp’ry ice is paradise

as long as dancing will suffice.

14.The Good Man

Better an enmity cut from one block

than friendship held together by glue.

15.Rust

Rust must be added: sharpness goes unsung!

Else they will always say: ‘He is too young!’

16.Upward

‘How do I best get to the top of this hill?’

‘Climb it, don’t think it, and maybe you will.’

17.Motto of A Brute

Never beg! It’s whining I dread!

Take, I beg you, just take instead!

18.Narrow Souls

It’s narrow souls that I despise;

not good, not evil, not my size.

19.The Involuntary Seducer

He shot an empty word into the blue

to pass the time - and downed a woman too.

20.Consider This

A twofold pain is easier to bear

than one pain: care to take a dare?

21.Against Arrogance

Don’t let your ego swell too much,

a bubble bursts with just a touch.

22.Man and Female

‘Rob yourself the female, who to your heart appeals!’ –

So thinks a man; but she won’t rob, a woman only steals.

23.Interpretation

If I read me, then I read into me:

I can’t construe myself objectively.

But he who climbs consuming his own might

bears me with him unto the brighter light.

24.Medication for Pessimists{9}

You whine that nothing pleases you?

Still pouting, friend, and must you mutter?

I hear you curse, and shout and sputter

-it breaks my heart and patience too!

Come with me, friend! A nice fat toad,

if swallowed voluntarily

with eyes closed and summarily -

might lessen your dyspeptic load.

25.Request

I know another person’s thought

and who I am, I know that not.

My vision is too close to me –

I am not what I saw and see.

I’d use myself more perfectly

if I could move away from me.

Yet not so distant as my foe!

My closest friend’s too far off, no –

give me instead the middle ground!

Do you surmise what I propound?

26.My Hardness

I must leave by a hundred stairs,

I must ascend though I hear your cares:

‘You are hard: Are we made of stone?’

I must leave by a hundred stairs,

And being a stair appeals to none.

27.The Wanderer

‘The path ends! Abyss and deathly silence loom!’

You wanted this! Your will strayed to its doom!

Now wanderer, stand! Be keen and cool as frost!

Believe in danger now and you - are lost.

28.Consolation for Beginners

See the child, with pigs she’s lying,

helpless, face as white as chalk!

Crying only, only crying –

will she ever learn to walk?

Don’t give up! Stop your sighing,

soon she’s dancing ‘round the clock!

Once her own two legs are trying,

she’ll stand on her head and mock.

29.Stellar Egotism

If I, round barrel that I am,

did not roll ‘round me like a cam,

how could I bear, and not catch fire,

to the chase the sun as I desire?

30.The Closest One

The closest one from me I bar:

Away and up with him, and far!

How else could he become my star?

31.The Disguised Saint

Joy too great you are concealing,

you engage in dev’lish dealing,

devil’s wit and devil’s dress.

But no use! Your eye’s revealing

piety and holiness!

32.The Bound Man

A. He stands and hears: what’s wrong, he’s thinking?

What sound provokes his heart to sinking?

What was it hurled him to the ground?

B. Like all who once in chains were bound,

He hears around him - iron clinking.

33.The Solitary One

Despised by me are following and leading.

Commanding? Even worse to me than heeding!

Who does not scare himself can frighten no one:

The one who causes fear can lead another.

But just to lead myself is too much bother!

I love, as do the sea and forest creatures,

to lose myself a while in nature’s features,

to hide away and brood in secret places

until, lured home at last from distant traces,

my self-seduction lets me see - my features.

34.Seneca et hoc genus omne{10}

They write and write their desiccat

-ing learned la-di-da-di,

as if primum scribere, deinde philosophari.

35.Ice

Yes! At times I do make ice:

Useful is ice for digesting!

If you had much for digesting, oh how you would love my ice!

36.Juvenilia{11}

My old wisdom’s A and O

sounded here: what did I hear?

Now it does not strike me so,

just the tired Ah! and Oh!

that youth inspired fills my ear.

37.Caution

Into that region trav’lers must not go:

And if you’re smart, be cautious even so!

They lure and love you till you’re torn apart:

They’re halfwit zealots - : witless from the heart!

38.The Pious One Speaks

God loves us because he created us!

‘Man created God!’ - respond the jaded.

And yet should not love what he created?

Should even deny it because he made it?

Such cloven logic is limping and baited.

39.In Summer{12}

Beneath the sweat of our own brow

we have to eat our bread?

If you sweat, eat nothing now,

the wise physician said.

The Dog Star winks: what does it know?

What says its fiery winking?

Beneath the sweat of our own brow our wine we should be drinking!

40.Without Envy

His gaze is envyless: and him you praise?

No thirst for your esteem perturbs his gaze;

he has the eagle’s vision for the long view,

it’s stars he sees, just stars - he looks beyond you!

41.Heracliteanism

Happiness on earth, friends, only stems from war!

Powder smoke, in fact, mends friendship even more!

One in three all friends are:

Brothers in distress, equals facing rivals, free men - facing death!

41. Principle of the All-Too-Refined

Rather on your tiptoes stand

than crawling on all fours!

Rather through the keyhole scanned

than gazed through open doors!

43.Admonition

It’s fame on which your mind is set?

Then heed what I say:

Before too long prepare to let honor slip away.

44.The Well-Grounded One{13}

A scholar I? I’ve no such skill! –

I’m merely grave - just heavy set!

I fall and fall and fall until I to the bottom get.

45.Forever

‘Today I come, I choose today’ –

think all who come and mean to stay.

Though all the world may speculate:

‘You come too early! Come too late!’

46.Judgements of the Weary

The sun is cursed by all men jaded;

to them the worth of trees is - shaded!

47.Going Down{14}

‘He sinks, he falls now’ - thus resumes your mocking;

in truth, look closely: Down to you he’s walking!

His super-joy became too much to bear,

his super-light dispels your gloomy air.

48.Against the Laws

From now on time hangs by a hair

around my neck, suspended there:

from now on stars shine randomly, sun, rooster crow, and shadow flee,

whatever brought time to my mind

that now is mute and deaf and blind: -

All nature’s still in me, it balks

at ticking laws and ticking clocks.

49.The Wise Man Speaks

Unknown to folks, yet useful to the crowd,

I drift along my way, now sun, now cloud

and always I’m above this crowd!

50.Lost His Head

Now she has wit - what led her to this find?

Because of her a man had lost his mind.

His head was rich before this misadventure:

His head went straight to hell - no! no! to her!

51.Pious Wishes{15}

‘Keys should all just disappear,

lost from stem to stern,

and in keyholes far and near skeletons should turn!’

Thus thinks when the day is done

each who is - a skeleton.

52.Writing With One’s Foot

I do not write with hand alone:

My foot does writing of its own.

Firm, free, and bold my feet engage

in running over field and page.

53.‘Human, All Too Human. ‘A Book{16}

When looking back you’re sad and not robust,

you trust the future when yourself you trust:

Oh bird, do you belong to eagle’s brood?

Are you Minerva’s favorite hoot hoot?

54.To My Reader

Strong teeth and good digestion too –

this I wish thee!

And once my book’s agreed with you,

then surely you’ll agree with me!

55.The Realistic Painter

‘To all of nature true!’ - How does he plan?

Would nature fit an image made by man?

The smallest piece of world is infinite! –

He ends up painting that which he sees fit.

And what does he see fit? Paint what he can!

56.Poet’s Vanity

I’ll find wood, just give me substance

strong enough to bind like glue!

Cramming sense in rhyme is

nonsense worthy of a boast - or two!

57.Choosy Taste

Were it my choice to exercise,

I know that I would opt for

a cosy place in Paradise:

Better still - outside the door!

58.The Crooked Nose{17}

Your nose projects, so grand and plump,

into the land, its nostrils pump –

thus hornless rhino, lacking grace

you fall, proud mortal, on your face!

And that’s the way it always goes:

Straight pride alongside crooked nose.

59.The Pen Scribbles

My pen, it scribbles: this is hell!

Have I been damned to have to scribble? -

I dip it boldly in the well

and write broad streams of inky drivel.

See how it flows, so full, so pure!

See how each thing I try succeeds!

The text’s not lucid, to be sure -

So what? What I write no one reads.

60.Higher Men

He climbs on high - him we should praise!

But that one comes from high up always!

Immune to praise he lives his days,

he is the sun’s rays!

61.The Sceptic Speaks

Your life is halfway spent,

the clock hand moves, your soul now quakes with fear!

Long roaming forth it went

and searched but nothing found - and wavers here?

Your life is halfway spent:

In pain and error how the hours did crawl!

Why can you not relent? -

Just this I seek - some reason for it all!

62.Ecce Homo

Yes! I know now whence I came!

Unsatiated like a flame

my glowing ember squanders me.

Light to all on which I seize,

ashen everything I leave:

Flame am I most certainly!

63.Stellar Morals

Ordained to move as planets do,

what matters, star, the dark to you?

Roll blithely through our human time!

Beyond its wretched mis’ry climb!

The furthest world deserves your shine:

For you compassion is a crime!

One law applies to you: be thine!

Book One

1

The teachers of the purpose of existence. - Whether I regard human beings with a good or with an evil eye, I always find them engaged in a single task, each and everyone of them: to do what benefits the preservation of the human race. Not from a feeling of love for the race, but simply because within them nothing is older, stronger, more inexorable and invincible than this instinct -because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species and herd. One might quickly enough, with the usual myopia from five steps away, divide one’s neighbors into useful and harmful, good and evil; but on a large-scale assessment, upon further reflection on the whole, one grows suspicious of this tidying and separating and finally abandons it. Even the most harmful person may actually be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures in himself or through his effects on others drives without which humanity would long since have become feeble or rotten.

Hatred, delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and rule, and whatever else is called evil: all belong to the amazing economy of the preservation of the species, an economy which is certainly costly, wasteful, and on the whole most foolish - but still proven to have preserved our race so far. I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbor, are even capable of living in a way which is damaging to the species, i.e. ‘unreasonably’ and ‘badly’. What might have harmed the species may have become extinct many thousands of years ago and may by now belong to the things that are no longer possible even for God. Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all, perish! In both cases you are probably still in some way a promoter and benefactor of humanity and are thus entitled to your eulogists -as well as to your mockers! But you will never find someone who could completely mock you, the individual, even in your best qualities, someone who could bring home to you as far as truth allows your boundless, fly- and frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth - for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius! Perhaps even laughter still has a future - when the proposition ‘The species is everything, an individual is always nothing’ has become part of humanity and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility is accessible to everyone at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only ‘gay science’ will remain.

At present, things are still quite different; at present, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself; at present, we still live in the age of tragedy, in the age of moralities and religions. What is the meaning of the ever-new appearance of these founders of moralities and religions, of these instigators of fights about moral valuations, these teachers of pangs of conscience and religious wars? What is the meaning of these heroes on this stage? For these have been the heroes thus far; and everything else, even if at times it was all that we could see and was far too near, has always served only to set the stage for these heroes, whether as machinery and backdrop or in the role of confidant and servant. (The poets, for example, were always the servants of some kind of morality.) It is obvious that these tragedies, too, work in the interest of the species, even if they should believe that they are working in the interest of God, as God’s emissaries. They, too, promote the life of the species by promoting the faith in life. ‘Life is worth living’, each of them shouts, ‘there is something to life, there is something behind life, beneath it; beware!’ This drive, which rules the highest as well as the basest of human beings - the drive for the preservation of the species -erupts from time to time as reason and passion of mind; it is then surrounded by a resplendent retinue of reasons and tries with all its might to make us forget that fundamentally it is drive, instinct, stupidity, lack of reasons.

Life ought to be loved, because -! Man ought to advance himself and his neighbor, because -! What names all these Oughts and Becauses have been given and may yet be given in the future! The ethical teacher makes his appearance as the teacher of the purpose of existence in order that what happens necessarily and always, by itself and without a purpose, shall henceforth seem to be done for a purpose and strike man as reason and an ultimate commandment; to this end he invents a second, different existence and takes by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence off its old, ordinary hinges. To be sure, in no way does he want us to laugh at existence, or at ourselves - or at him; for him, an individual is always an individual, something first and last and tremendous; for him there are no species, sums, or zeroes.

Foolish and fanciful as his inventions and valuations may be, badly as he may misjudge the course of nature and deny its conditions - and all ethical systems hitherto have been so foolish and contrary to nature that humanity would have perished from everyone had it gained power over humanity - all the same! Every time ‘the hero’ appeared on stage, something new was attained: the gruesome counterpart of laughter, that profound shock that many individuals feel at the thought: ‘Yes, living is worth it! Yes, I am worthy of living!’ Life and I and you and all of us became interesting to ourselves once again for a while. There is no denying that in the long run each of these great teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature: the brief tragedy always changed and returned into the eternal comedy of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter’ - to cite Aeschylus{18} -must in the end also come crashing down on the greatest of these tragedians. Despite all this corrective laughter, human nature on the whole has surely been altered by the recurring emergence of such teachers of the purpose of existence - it has acquired one additional need, the need for the repeated appearance of such teachers and such teachings of a ‘purpose’.

Man has gradually become a fantastic animal that must fulfil one condition of existence more than any other animal: man must from time to time believe he knows why he exists; his race cannot thrive without a periodic trust in life - without faith in the reason in life! And ever again the human race will from time-to-time decree: ‘There is something one is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh at.’ And the most cautious friend of man will add: ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom but also the tragic, with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of the preservation of the species.’ And therefore! Therefore! Therefore! Oh, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood? We, too, have our time!

2

Intellectual conscience. - I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it anew each time; I do not want to believe it although I can grasp it as with my hands: the great majority lacks an intellectual conscience - indeed, it has often seemed to me as if someone requiring such a conscience would be as lonely in the most densely populated cities as he would be in the desert. Everyone looks at you with strange eyes and goes on handling their scales, calling this good and that evil; nobody as much as blushes when you notice that their weights are underweight - nor do they become indignant with you; perhaps they laugh at your doubts. I mean: to the great majority it is not contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly without first becoming aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterwards: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this ‘great majority’. But what are good heartedness, refinement, and genius to me when the person possessing these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his believing and judging and when he does not consider the desire for certainty to be his inmost craving and deepest need - as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower! I discovered in certain pious people a hatred of reason and I was well disposed towards them for that: at least this betrayed their bad intellectual conscience! But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors{19} and the whole marvelous uncertainty and ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and rapture of questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even being faintly amused by him - that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling I look for first in anyone. Some folly keeps persuading me that every person has this feeling, simply as human. That is my type of injustice.

3

Noble and common. - For common natures all noble, magnanimous feelings appear to be inexpedient and therefore initially incredible: they give a wink when they hear of such things and seem to want to say, ‘Surely there must be some advantage involved; one cannot see through every wall’ - they are suspicious of the noble person, as if he were furtively seeking his advantage. If they become all too clearly convinced of the absence of selfish intentions and gains, they view the noble person as a kind of fool: they despise him in his pleasure and laugh at the sparkle in his eye. ‘How could one enjoy being at a disadvantage? How could one want with open eyes to be disadvantaged? Some disease of reason must be linked to the noble affection’ - thus they think and look disparagingly, the way they disparage the pleasure that a madman derives from his fixed idea. What distinguishes the common nature is that it unflinchingly keeps sight of its advantage, and that this thought of purpose and advantage is even stronger than its strongest drives; not to allow these drives to lead it astray to perform in expeditious acts - that is its wisdom and self-esteem. In comparison, the higher nature is more unreasonable - for the noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing person does in fact succumb to his drives; and in his best moments, his reason pauses.

An animal that protects its young at the risk of its own life or during the mating period follows the female unto death does not think of danger and death; its reason likewise pauses because the pleasure in its brood or in the female and the fear of being deprived of this pleasure dominate it totally; the animal becomes stupider than it usually is -just like the person who is noble and magnanimous. Such persons have several feelings of pleasure and displeasure so strong that they reduce the intellect to silence or to servitude: at that point their heart displaces their head, and one speaks thenceforth of ‘passion’. (Occasionally we also encounter the opposite, the ‘reversal of passion’, as it were; for example, somebody once laid his hand on Fontenelle’s heart and said, ‘What you have here, my dear sir, is also brains.’{20}) The unreason or odd reason (Unvernunft oder Quervernunft) of passion is what the common type despises in the noble, especially when this passion is directed at objects whose value seems quite fantastic and arbitrary. He is annoyed by the person who succumbs to the passion of the belly, but at least he comprehends the appeal that plays the tyrant in this case; but he cannot comprehend how anyone could, for example, risk health and honor for the sake of a passion for knowledge.

The higher nature’s taste is for exceptions, for things that leave most people cold and seem to lack sweetness; the higher nature has a singular value standard. Moreover, it usually believes that the idiosyncrasy of its taste is not a singular value standard; rather, it posits its values and disvalues as generally valid and so becomes incomprehensible and impractical. It is very rare that a higher nature has enough reason left over to understand and treat commonplace people as what they are; above all, it believes in its own passion as something that is present in everyone but concealed, and in this belief it is full of ardor and eloquence. Now when such exceptional people do not themselves feel like exceptions, how can they ever understand the common natures and arrive at a proper estimate of the rule! - and so they, too, speak of the stupidity, inexpedience, and fancifulness of humanity, stunned that the world is taking such an insane course and that it will not commit itself to that which ‘is needful’. - This is the eternal injustice of the noble.

4

What preserves the species. - The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: time and again they rekindled the dozing passions - every ordered society puts the passions to sleep -, time and again they reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in what is new, daring, unattempted; they forced men to pit opinion against opinion, ideal model against ideal model. Mostly by force of arms, by toppling boundary stones, by violating pieties - but also by means of new religions and moralities! In every teacher and preacher of what is new we find the same ‘mischief’ that makes conquerors infamous, even if its expression is subtler and does not instantly set the muscles in motion and for just that reason does not make one as infamous! What is new, however, is under all circumstances evil, being that which wants to conquer, to overthrow the old boundary stones and pieties; and only what is old is good! In every age the good men are those who bury the old thoughts deeply and make them bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But that land is eventually exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must come time and again. Nowadays there is a thoroughly erroneous moral theory which is celebrated especially in England: it claims that judgements of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ sum up experiences of what is ‘expedient’ and ‘inexpedient’; that what is called good preserves the species while what is called evil harms it. In truth, however, the evil drives are just as expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable as the good ones - they just have a different function.

5

Unconditional duties. - All persons who feel that they need the strongest words and sounds, the most eloquent gestures and postures, in order to be effective at all - revolutionary politicians, socialists, preachers of repentance with or without Christianity, all of whom refuse to accept semi-successes: they all speak of ‘duties’, and indeed always of duties with an unconditional character - without such duties they would have no right to their great pathos; they know that quite well! So they reach for moral philosophies that preach some categorical imperative, or they ingest a goodly piece of religion, as Mazzini{21} did, for example. Because they want the unconditional confidence of others, they first need unconditional confidence in themselves on the basis of some ultimate, indisputable and inherently sublime commandment, and they want to feel like and pass themselves off as its servants and instruments. Here we have the most natural and usually very influential opponents of moral enlightenment and scepticism; but they are rare.

On the other hand, a very comprehensive class of these opponents can be found wherever self-interest teaches submission while reputation and honor seem to prohibit it. Whoever feels his dignity violated by the thought of being the instrument of a prince or party or sect or even a financial power - say, as the descendant of an old, proud family - but still wants to or must be this instrument before himself and before the public, needs poignant principles that can be mouthed any time, principles of an unconditional ‘ought’ to which one may openly submit and be seen to have submitted without shame. All refined servility clings to the categorical imperative and is the mortal enemy of those who want to deprive duty of its unconditional character: that is what decency demands of them, and not only decency.

6

Loss of dignity. - Reflection has lost all its dignity of form: we have made a laughing-stock of the ceremony and solemn gestures of reflection, and couldn’t stand an old-style wise man. We think too fast, while on our way somewhere, while walking or in the midst of all sorts of business, even when thinking of the most serious things; we need little preparation, not even much silence: it is as if we carried around in our heads an unstoppable machine that keeps working even under the most unfavorable circumstances. Formerly, one could tell just by looking at a person that he wanted to think - it was probably a rare occurrence! -, that he now wanted to become wiser and was preparing himself for a thought: one would set one’s face as for prayer and stop walking; yes, one stood still for hours on the street once the thought ‘arrived’ - on one or two legs. The dignity of the matter required it!

7

Something for the industrious. - Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things must be revealed! So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamor for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people’s experiences of living together - in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, businessmen, artists, artisans - have they found their thinkers? There is so much in them to think about! Everything that humans have viewed until now as the ‘conditions of their existence’ and all the reason, passion, and superstition that such a view involves - has this been researched exhaustively? To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate - that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral climates (‘why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and primary value-standard shine here - and another one there?’). Yet another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction - an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclops-buildings;{22} but the time for that will come, too.

8

Unconscious virtues.