Nietzsche

Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy

Translated by R. J. Hollingdale Introduction by
Richard Schacht
CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF
PHILOSOPHY
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Human, All Too Human
CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Series editors KARL AMERIKS Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre
Dame
DESMOND M. CLARKE
Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork
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For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book.
FRI EDRI CH NI ETZSCHE
Human, All Too Human
TRANSLATED BY
R. J. HOLLINGDALE
WI TH AN I NTRODUCTI ON BY
RICHARD SCHACHT
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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First published with introduction by Erich Heller 1986 This edition published with
introduction by Richard Schacht 1996 Ninth printing 2005
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
[Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. English]
Human, all too human / Friedrich Nietzsche; translated by R. J. Hollingdale; with an
introduction by Richard Schacht. p. cm. - (Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p. xxvi).
1. Man. 1. Hollingdale, R. J. 11. Title. 111. Series.
B3313.M52E5 1996b i28-dc20 96-10969 cip
isbn o 521 562007 hardback isbn o 521 567041 paper back
CP
Introduction page vii
Chronology xxiv
Further Reading xxvi
Human, All Too Human

Volume I X
Preface 5
1 Of First and Last Things 12
2 On the History of the Moral Sensations 31
3 The Religious Life 6o
4 From the Souls of Artists and Writers 8o
5 Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture 107
6 Man in Society 136
7 Woman and Child 150
8 A Glance at the State 161
9 Man Alone with Himself 179
Among Friends: An Epilogue 205
Volume II 207
Preface 209
Part One Assorted Opinions and Maxims 215
Part Two The Wanderer and His Shadow 301
Index 396
INTRODUCTION
'Human, All Too Human is the monument of a crisis.' With these apt
words Nietzsche began his own reflection, in his autobiographical Ecce
Homo (1888),
1
on this remarkable collection of almost 1,400 aphorisms
published in three instalments, the first of which had appeared in 1878, ten
years earlier. The crisis to which he refers was first and foremost a crisis of
multiple dimensions in his own life. Human, All Too Human was the
extended product of a period of devastating health problems that necessitated
Nietzsche's resignation in 1879 from his professorship in classical philology
at Basel University. These problems were to plague him for the remaining
decade of his brief productive life (which ended with his complete physical
and mental collapse in January 1889, at the age of 44, from which he never
recovered in the eleven years of marginal existence that remained to him
before his death in 1900). Human, All Too Human also marked Nietzsche's
transition from the philologist and cultural critic he had been into the kind of
philosopher and writer he came to be.
But the crisis was above all a crisis in Nietzsche's intellectual
development; and although it was very much his own, it presaged the larger
crisis toward which he came to see our entire culture and civilization moving,
and subsequently came to call 'the death of God'.
2
In his own case, this crisis
was precipitated not only by his deepening appreciation of the profound and
extensive consequences of the collapse of traditional ways of thinking, but
also - and more immediately - by his growing recognition of the insufficiency
of the resources of both the Enlightenment and the Romanticism to which he
had been so strongly attracted to fill the void. The three instalments of
Human, All Too Human are no less important for the insight they yield into
the kind of struggle in which Nietzsche was engaged than they are for the
many sparks that fly in the course of his efforts to find new ways to go on.
The world around Nietzsche did not appear to be a world headed for
crisis. The ordeals, horrors and dramatic changes of the century to come were
largely unimagined, and indeed unimaginable, even to Nietzsche, who was
far more prescient than most - even to the point of deeming the advent of air
travel to be inevitable (1:267). 1 1876, when he began working on the
material that was published two years later in what is now the first volume of
Human, All Too Human, Europe was again at (relative) peace. It had been ten
years since the Austro-Prussian War that had left Prussia dominant in Central
Europe; and it had been five years since the brief Franco-Prussian
vii
INTRODUCTION
War (in which Nietzsche had briefly served as a volunteer medical
orderly, with disastrous consequences for his health), which further enhanced
and extended Prussia's sway, this time at France's expense. German
unification under Prussian leadership had been achieved in 1871, and the new
Reich appeared to be thriving, with Wilhelm on the throne and (more
importantly) Otto von Bismarck at the helm.
Everything seemed to be coming along very nicely for Western
civilization in general, Europe in particular and Germany more specifically. It
was the heyday of European imperialism, with India recently incorporated
into the British Empire, and much of the rest of the non-Westem world
coming under European sway. The industrial revolution was sweeping all
before it, and capitalism was triumphant. New technologies and modes of
transportation and communication were transforming Western societies.
(Nietzsche himself must have been one of the very first philosophers to own
one of the newly invented typewriters, although it proved to be of little use to
him.) Despite the success of conservative elements of European societies in
retaining their social position and political power, forces preparing the way
for their eventual replacement by more popular forms of social, cultural,
economic and political organization - for better or for worse - were gathering.
The physical sciences were advancing spectacularly; and while the
influence of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud had yet to be felt, the social and
historical disciplines were maturing, and the biological sciences were coming
on strong. Charles Darwin already loomed large. His Origin of Species had
been published in 1859, and his Descent of Man in 1871. Germany, making
up for lost time, was emerging as an economic, political and technological
powerhouse, as well as the world's new leader in many of the sciences. It also
continued its century-long dominance in philosophy, with ever-mutating
forms of idealism, neo-Kantianism, naturalism and materialism competing in
the aftermath of Hegel. Religion, enjoying official state status in many
countries and the unquestioning allegiance of the vast majority of their
populations, seemed immune from serious challenge. The arts, literature and
music were flourishing as well, in Germany as elsewhere in Europe; and in
1876 the frenzy surrounding Richard Wagner - to which Nietzsche was no
stranger - rose to new heights, with the opening of Bayreuth, and the
performance of the first complete four-opera cycles of Wagner's monumental
Ring of the Nibulungs.
Yet Nietzsche was convinced that all was far from well. He was repelled
by the popular culture and brave new social, economic and political world
burgeoning around him, and could no longer take seriously the intellectual
and religious tradition associated with it. By 1876 he also found himself
increasingly estranged from the newly fashionable alternatives to the tradition
that its critics and rivals had been touting, including his erstwhile idols and
mentors Arthur Schopenhauer and Wagner. Everywhere he looked, even at
those things and thinkers supposedly representing the pride of our culture and
the zenith of humanity, what he saw was not only far from divine but all-too-
human.
Nietzsche had long yearned - and continued to yearn throughout his
productive life - for a higher humanity with a worth great enough to warrant
the affirmation of life even in the absence of any transcendently supplied
meaning. He now had come to the hard realization that the only possible way
to that higher humanity required an uncompromising examination of
everything human and all-too-human that at once stands in our way and is our
point of departure, and a sober stocktaking of what there is to work with in
undertaking what he was later to call the enhancement of human life. The
idea and ideal he seized upon at this juncture to guide and accompany him
was that of the 'free spirit', older and wiser heir of the Enlightenment.
Nietzsche paid explicit tribute to the ethos of this newly adopted lineage in
his dedication of the first edition of Human, All Too Human to Voltaire,
Enlightenment thinker par excellence, who had died exactly a century earlier,
and whose spirit he now embraced.
Human, All Too Human was Nietzsche's second book; and it was as far
removed from the kind of book professors of classical languages and
literatures were supposed to write as anything could be. His first book. The
Birth of Tragedy (1872), had been a scandal in the eyes of his scholarly
colleagues owing to its disregard of prevailing norms of scholarship and its
blatant advocacy of Wagner as the reincarnation of the spirit of the tragic
culture of the Greeks - but it at least had a recognizably classical literary
topic. Human, All Too Human, as initially published, was a volume of 638
aphorisms - that is, short observations and reflections ranging from one or
two sentences to a long paragraph, of a relatively self-contained nature. This
style was a radically new one for Nietzsche, reminiscent of the writings of
such observers of the human scene as Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld.
Nietzsche had long greatly admired their manner of thought and expression,
and found himself drawn to emulate them in his search for a voice that lent
itself both to his own changing temperament and circumstances and to the
decidedly unphilological tasks towards which he was turning.
The publication of Human, All Too Human completed Nietzsche's
estrangement from his erstwhile scholarly profession, from which he
officially retired shortly thereafter. It also completed his much more painful
estrangement from Wagner, whose devoted admirer, champion and intimate
younger friend Nietzsche had been. Nietzsche himself claimed to have begun
writing the book in reaction to the first Bayreuth production of Wagner's Ring
cycle, the entire social spectacle of which appalled him; and although he in
fact would appear to have begun work on it some months earlier, in the spring
of 1876, it certainly was written during a period in which his formerly close
relationship to Wagner had become severely strained. Nietzsche knew that
Wagner would loathe the book; and its dedication to Voltaire was
undoubtedly a very deliberate gesture of defiance and independence in
Wagner's direction. Eight years after its first publication, when Nietzsche
republished it, he dropped the dedication - perhaps because he no longer
wanted Voltaire to be taken as paradigmatic of his evolving conception of the
'free spirit', but perhaps also because Wagner by then had died, and such
gestures were no longer either needed or fitting.
In his discussion in Ecce Homo of the 'crisis' of which Human, All Too
Human was the 'monument', Nietzsche goes on to say of it: 'Here I liberated
myself from what in my nature did not belong to me.' He had given Human,
All Too Human the subtitle 'A Book for Free Spirits'; and he went on to
characterize the 'free spirit' in similar language, as 'a spirit that has become
free, that has again taken possession of itself.
3
Among die things he clearly
had in mind were his attachments to Schopenhauer and Wagner, who had
been at the centre of his intellectual life for the previous decade. They had
been the subjects of his last two major publications prior to Human, All Too
Human, in which he had lavished praise upon them even while privately
beginning to distance himself from them: Schopenhauer as Educator (1874)
and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), the final two essays of his four-part
Untimely Meditations.
A student of classical languages and literatures rather than of philosophy,
it had been Nietzsche's accidental discovery of Schopenhauer's magnum opus
The World as Will and Representation in 1865 that had introduced - and
seduced - him to philosophy. His spiritual seduction by Wagner three years
later (in 1868) influenced him even more profoundly. The spell cast upon him
by the two of them together is very apparent both in his thinking and
enthusiasms in The Birth of Tragedy and in the fact that he ventured to write
and publish such a book. Nietzsche's father had died when he was a young
child; and he in effect adopted Schopenhauer as his intellectual godfather and
Wagner as his emotional and spiritual father figure. It was for good reason
that it occurred to him to write in aphorism 381 of the first volume of Human,
All Too Human: 'Correcting nature. - If one does not have a good father one
should furnish oneself with one.' Yet by the time he wrote these words he was
well beyond this point, attempting to liberate himself from the fathers with
whom he had furnished himself.
It is well worth bearing in mind who the Nietzsche was who published
this book of aphorisms in 1878. Neither he nor anyone else had the slightest
idea of what he would go on to do and become. He was a 33-year-old
philology professor whose health and academic career were both failing
badly. His youthful vigour and promise were now but sadly faded memories
to his professional colleagues. His only book, published six years earlier, was
the scandalous Birth of Tragedy; and his only subsequent publications of any
significance were the two essays just mentioned and two previous 'untimely
meditations', David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer (1873) and On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874). His enthusiasm for and
association with Wagner had earned him a certain notoriety, but it had done
him no good academically; and he otherwise had little reputation at all,
except perhaps as a gamble that had appeared not to be working out. He was
not thought of as a philosopher, having had no philosophical training and
having published nothing resembling a conventional philosophical treatise.
He had written a short, ambitious but sketchy essay, 'On Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense', several years earlier; but it remained unfinished, and he
never did publish it. His thoughts had indeed begun to turn toward
philosophy, and he had even gone so far
INTRODUCTION
as to apply for the Chair in Philosophy at Basel when it became vacant;
but he was unsuccessful in this attempt to switch professions, for reasons that
are easy enough to understand.
Even if Human, All Too Human had been published by a professional
philosopher, it very probably would not have been regarded as a contribution
to the philosophical literature by academic philosophers either in Nietzsche's
own time or subsequently. Nor is it clear that it should be; for there is much
in it that does not seem to have much to do with philosophical matters. Even
the ideas on philosophical topics it addresses are seldom presented in
recognizably philosophical ways. More of it can be seen as having
philosophical relevance in retrospect, particularly if one looks back upon it
with Nietzsche's later writings in mind, and if one's idea of philosophical
relevance has been influenced by the impact of his thinking with respect to
the philosophical enterprise. Even so, however, all three instalments of the
work are very much the product of a mind in transition, moving in many
different directions and in many different ways, heedless of disciplinary
boundaries and norms, with only Nietzsche's interests and intellectual
conscience as his map and compass.
The aphoristic form Nietzsche adopted (and adapted to his purposes) in
Human, All Too Human had long been a favoured literary form of observers
of the human scene who preferred to comment incisively on many things,
rather than writing essays about a selected few. But this form may also have
been virtually necessitated by Nietzsche's increasingly severe and disabling
health problems, which frequently rendered him incapable of writing or even
thinking for extended periods of time. He had to make maximum use of the
short periods of respite that came to him between frequent and extended bouts
of misery. He struggled to surmount his wretched condition, and did so to
much greater effect than most people in his situation could; but it was a hard
and tortured struggle, giving poignant significance to his subsequent
emphasis upon 'hardness', self-mastery, self-discipline, and to his refusal to
become preoccupied and deterred by suffering. The flair he discovered in
himself for aphoristic writing at this time thus accorded well with necessity. It
would be unwarranted, however, to assume that Nietzsche's recourse to it is
indicative of the absence of any underlying unity and coherence of thought
and intention here and subsequently. So he himself observes in aphorism 128
of the second instalment, very much to this point: 'Against the shortsighted. -
Do you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and
have to give it to you) in fragments?'
Nietzsche had long been plagued by poor eyesight and eye pain that
would afflict him when he either read or wrote extensively, by migraine
headaches and by indigestion and other gastric problems that made him pay a
high price for departures from the blandest of diets. His problems were
compounded by a variety of ailments - dysentery and diphtheria among them
- he contracted while serving as an orderly during the Franco-Prussian War,
the effects of which continued to plague him. And the syphilis he seems
somehow to have acquired (despite leading a virtually celibate life), that was
the likely cause of his final collapse a dozen years later, may well have begun
INTRODUCTION
to contribute to the deterioration of his health during the gestation period
of Human, All Too Human.
So Nietzsche went from one health crisis to another, finding the rigours
and burdens of his academic position increasingly difficult to bear, despite
the fact that he rarely had as many as a dozen students attending his lectures.
He often was unable to read or write, and frequently was obliged to take
medical leaves from his teaching. His collapses were all too common, and at
times he was virtually an invalid. He visited clinics, spas and specialists,
whose diagnoses and prescriptions may often have only made things worse.
Alternating bouts of blinding headaches and wracking vomiting would last
for days; and his lecturing became ever more sporadic and difficult. Finally,
in the spring of 1879, he submitted his resignation, receiving a small pension
that was his sole income thereafter. He then left Basel and began the nomadic
life - moving from boarding-house to boarding-house in search of the right
climate and conditions - that he would lead for the decade of active life
remaining to him prior to his collapse.
It is miraculous that anyone with such severe problems and living such a
life could have written anything at all, let alone the series of brilliant books
that Nietzsche managed to complete in this period, beginning with the first
volume of Human, All Too Human. And to all of this must be added the
publication history of these books, which compounds the miracle. This
history was troubled by Nietzsche's often strained relations with his
publishers and printers, and plagued by such other all-too-human difficulties
as his eye problems, requiring him to resort to dictation much of the time, and
to reliance on the assistance of others to put his manuscripts together, as well
as making proof-reading a torment. But worst of all, Nietzsche's publication
history is a veritable chronicle of failure. A recent study by William Schaberg
makes all of this painfully clear, setting out the whole long and sorry story in
depressing detail.
4
The Birth of Tragedy sold modestly well, and attracted a
good deal of attention - even if much of it was hostile. But the same cannot be
said of any of Nietzsche's subsequent books, during his sentient lifetime.
Prior to his collapse, none of them sold more than a few hundred copies, and
few of them attracted any attention whatsoever.
Human, All Too Human is a vivid case in point. Of the 1,000 copies in
the first printing of the original version, only 120 were sold in 1878; and
more than half remained unsold in 1886, when Nietzsche reacquired them
and repackaged them with a new introduction as the first volume of the two-
volume second edition. The supplement he published in 1879 under the
subtitle 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims' sold even more poorly: of the 1,000
copies printed, only a third had been sold by 1886. The second supplement
The Wanderer and His Shadow, published a year later, fared even worse:
fewer than 200 of its initial 1,000 copies had been sold by 1886, when
Nietzsche acquired the rights to both supplements and republished them with
a new introduction, as the second volume of the second edition of Human, All
Too Human. There was no true reprinting of additional copies until 1893,
when another printing of 1,000 copies of the combined work was run; and its
xii
sales remained slow even after his later works began to receive more
attention.
Human, All Too Human attained greater circulation and availability as
part of the editions of his collected works that began to appear after
Nietzsche's death; but it was long eclipsed by The Birth of Tragedy before it
and by Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its sequels after it, both in Europe and in
the English- speaking world. The same is true of the other two works in
Nietzsche's 'free spirit' series. Daybreak and The Gay Science. The neglect of
Human, All Too Human in the English-speaking world is at least partly
owing to Walter Kaufmann's lack of interest in it. It was through his
translations and his widely read study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist,
Antichrist, first published in 1950, that many English-speaking readers after
World War II became interested in and acquainted with Nietzsche. Kaufmann
translated Nietzsche's first book. The Birth of Tragedy, and virtually
everything Nietzsche published from The Gay Science onward; but he never
got around to translating any of the things Nietzsche published in the interval,
during the crucial period in which he published not only the three instalments
of Human, All Too Human but also the four Untimely Meditations and
Daybreak, except for brief excerpts which he inserted in other volumes.
Indeed, even Kaufmann's translation of The Gay Science was something of
an afterthought, appearing long after most of his other translations.
5

Kaufmann can hardly be blamed for having the interests he did, and for
the things he did not choose to do; but they had consequences, since there
were no other readily available complete translations of Human, All Too
Human or Daybreak in English until the early 1980s, when Marion Faber
translated the first volume of Human, All Too Human (published by the
University of Nebraska Press) and Hollingdale's Cambridge University Press
translations appeared. Their long inaccessibility ensured that these works,
and Nietzsche's thinking during the period in which he wrote them, would
remain virtually unknown to English-speaking readers during the preceding
three decades. (They likewise had been virtually invisible previously, when
Nietzsche was known mainly second-hand in the English- speaking world,
and was commonly assumed to be the proto-Nazi he had been made out to be
by Nazi propaganda.)
The problem was compounded by Kaufmann's treatment of Human, All
Too Human (and Daybreak and The Gay Science as well) in his popular
intellectual-biographical study, which had little competition for nearly two
decades. This entire period, for Kaufmann, was a gestation period in
Nietzsche's thought, of little interest in its own right. He appears to have
deemed it deserving of comment at all chiefly for the anticipations to be
found in some aphorisms of ideas that became prominent in his later
thinking, and for the ammunition other aphorisms afford that were useful in
combating Nietzsche's Nazi misinterpretation. So Human, All Too Human is
relegated to a few pages, in a chapter entitled 'Discovery of the Will to
Power'. 'There would be little sense', Kaufmann wrote (without explanation),
'in trying here to sample the gems of Human, all-too-Human or [Daybreak].'
He restricted himself to asserting, with a few illustrations, that,
xiii
INTRODUCTION
'Proceeding quite unsystematically and considering each problem on its
own merits, without a theory to prove or an axe to grind, Nietzsche reverts
now and then to explanations in terms of what he was later to call a will to
power.'
6
The works of this period, for Kaufmann, were of significance
primarily as the record of Nietzsche's development from the author of The
Birth of Tragedy into a psychological thinker on a par with Freud, with his
further transformation into a philosopher coming somewhat later.
There certainly is some truth in this. Human, All Too Human undeniably
does show us Nietzsche as psychologist both under development and at work,
inventing a kind of psychologizing for which he found a wealth of
applications all around him - socially, culturally, behaviourally, intellectually,
even philosophically - and simultaneously inventing himself as a new kind of
thinker capable of employing this sort of analysis to fascinating and important
effect. He was not operating in a void. He had some brilliant aphoristic
predecessors, the inspiration of such Enlightenment exemplars as Voltaire,
and the benefit of reading his 'educator' and philosophical- psychological
mentor Schopenhauer. He also had the more immediate example and
encouragement of his newfound friend Paul Ree, who had just written a book
in a somewhat similar spirit entitled Psychological Observations. Ree's
influence was readily and profusely acknowledged by Nietzsche, who went
so far as to say that his own position at this time could be called 'Reealism';
and it was evident to all who knew him - including the Wagners, who bitterly
lamented it (all the more because Ree was Jewish).
But the results were much more than the sum of their influences even
here. And they also added up to something that was much more than
psychology as well. It is true enough that Nietzsche's thinking continued to
develop, even from one book to the next in this period, as well as over the
course of the next decade; and that, as Kaufmann maintained, Nietzsche's
philosophical maturity was yet some time off. Yet his accomplishment in the
three instalments of Human, All Too Human is remarkable in its own right,
and can stand on its own feet. If he had died without publishing another thing
(as might very well have happened), it would have been sufficient to earn him
an important place in the intellectual history of the past several centuries -
even if a somewhat different one than he has come to have.
The gulf that separates this work from Nietzsche's previous published
writings is wide. The enthusiasms, aspirations and assumptions that so
strikingly pervade and animate his earlier work are no longer in evidence. It
is a much more sober and analytical, colder and wiser thinker who is at work
here. Its author is still hopeful of finding both a diagnosis and a cure to what
ails our culture and threatens its future, and resists Schopenhauer's
pessimism; but he is as disillusioned now with Wagner, the new Reich and
other pied pipers of modem times as he earlier had been with traditional
religious consolations and their philosophical cousins. He has become
convinced that only something like a continuation and radicalization of
Enlightenment thinking, getting to the bottom of things and ruthlessly
exposing all false hopes and dangerous palliatives, can afford us at least the
possibility of a future worth having and a life worth living. Nietzsche's
xiv
INTRODUCTION
dedication to Voltaire was more than a slap at Wagner (although that it
surely was). It also was the announcement of a major intellectual
reorientation, placing him squarely in the often calumnied but courageous
tradition of Enlightenment thought and effort.
For the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human nothing is beyond criticism
- and there is a strong suspicion that (as he would later put it) all 'idols' of our
reverence will turn out to be hollow and all-too-human when subjected to
critical scrutiny. His new 'psychological' tools are brought to bear upon them,
with results that amply support this suspicion. But there is more to the
outlook and way of thinking that he is devising and putting into practice here
than this. In 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', some five years earlier,
Nietzsche had begun sketching a fundamentally and severely naturalistic
picture of our general human condition, in a world over which no benevolent
deity reigns and in which no beneficent rationality is at work. We are
depicted as alone and adrift in a godless universe, a mere cosmic accident, ill-
equipped either to comprehend what is going on or to do much about it; and
we are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise - although we seem almost
irresistibly drawn to do so. Can we live without such illusions? Nietzsche was
at first inclined to doubt it - as one sees in The Birth of Tragedy, written at
about the same time.
By the time of Human, All Too Human, he seems to have resolved to try.
The power of myths and illusions to sustain anyone possessed of an
uncompromising intellectual conscience is undermined when one sees
through them; and so one may have little other choice, if - as for Nietzsche -
Kierkegaardian leaps of faith are out of the question, and a Schopenhauerian
negation of life is repellent. Human, All Too Human is a work of cold
passion, in which nothing more is assumed about our humanity than the
picture sketched in the 'Truth and Lies' essay, and in which everything in
human life that might seem to be of loftier origins is called before the tribunal
of scrutiny, with humbling results. Yet the spirit of the investigation is
profoundly and pervasively affirmative; for the passion that drives it is not
only that of an honesty that will tolerate no nonsense or groundless wishful
thinking, but also of a desperate search for enough to work with and ways of
doing so to sustain ourselves despite all. To call this 'secular humanism'
would be to sell it short; for while Nietzsche's outlook is radically secular, he
is far from taking humanity either in general or as embodied in each and
every one of us to be the locus of meaning and value. But it is a kind of
tough- minded and yet doggedly affirmative naturalism, the upshot of which
is that our all-too-human humanity leaves a good deal to be desired, and yet
gives us something to work with that is not to be despised.
But if we are to make something worthwhile of ourselves, we have to
take a good hard look at ourselves. And this, for Nietzsche, means many
things. It means looking at ourselves in the light of everything we can learn
about the world and ourselves from the natural sciences - most emphatically
including evolutionary biology, physiology and even medical science. It also
means looking at ourselves in the light of everything we can learn about
human life from history, from the social sciences, from the study of arts.
xv
religions, languages, literatures, mores and other features of various
cultures. It further means attending closely to human conduct on different
levels of human interaction, to the relation between what people say and
seem to think about themselves and what they do, to their reactions in
different sorts of situations, and to everything else about them that affords
clues to what makes them tick. All of this, and more, is what Nietzsche is up
to in Human, All Too Human. He is at once developing and employing the
various perspectival techniques that seem to him to be relevant to the
understanding of what we have come to be and what we have it in us to
become. This involves gathering materials for a reinterpretation and
reassessment of human life, making tentative efforts along those lines and
then trying them out on other human phenomena both to put them to the test
and to see what further light can be shed by doing so.
This multi-perspectival and multi-directional method, which Nietzsche
employed with increasing dexterity and ingenuity throughout the remainder
of his productive life, finds its first extended trials and applications in
Human, All Too Human. The results are uneven, as one might expect - and
indeed as is always the case in Nietzsche's writings (or, for that matter, in the
case of anyone who engages in such a complex, uncertain and adventuresome
sort of interpretive enterprise). Distinguishing between genuine insights and
personal preferences, prejudices, over-generalizations, irresistible puns and
other such inspirations is not easy. It often can be done better by others than
by oneself - even if one's intellectual conscience is as alert and vigorous as
Nietzsche's, to whom the all-too-human was no stranger. But by precept and
example he invites us to subject him to the same sort of scrutiny to which he
subjects others; and that is something many will want to do. He only asks that
one be prepared to have one's very objections subjected in turn to the same
searching critical assessment - for they too may be questionable.
Nietzsche himself looked back on Human, All Too Human twice in print.
The final time was in his rather creatively and grandiosely self-interpretive
Ecce Homo, in 1888, in the course of a review of all of his main publications
under the characteristically immodest heading 'Why I Write Such Good
Books'. The occasion of his first subsequent retrospective - the reissuing of
all three instalments together in 1886 - may itself have had its all-too-human
motivations (not the least of which was Nietzsche's hope that by repackaging
them with new prefaces he might be able to sell more of them and attract
more attention to them). Nonetheless, the two new prefaces he wrote on this
occasion are of no little interest; and it is important for readers to bear in
mind that they were written long after the material they precede - eight years
after the first volume, and six and seven years after the two parts of the
second volume. Indeed, the prefaces themselves were written at-different
times and places - the former in Nice, on the French Mediterranean coast in
Spring 1886, and the latter in Sils Maria, in the mountainous Swiss Engadine
region, in September of that year. They both deserve dose reading, both
before and after one has made one's way through the maze of the 1,400
aphorisms.
In the first preface Nietzsche sees himself at the time of the first volume
as already burdened with the large and heavy questions that compelled him
toward philosophy, and also as struggling to achieve the intellectual and
spiritual freedom and resources needed to deal with them, which he feels he
had lacked in sufficient measure previously. He also sees himself as having
been in a precarious state of health both physically and intellectually, slowly
convalescing from the maladies of both sorts that had threatened to engulf
him. The same theme is sounded again in the second preface; and there he
makes it even clearer what the chief dangers were to which he had to develop
resistance and learn to overcome. He refers to these writings as 'a
continuation and redoubling of a spiritual cure, namely of the anti-romantic
self-treatment that my still healthy instinct had itself discovered and
prescribed for me against a temporary attack of the most dangerous form of
romanticism', and as the expressions of a 'courageous pessimism' that is the
'antithesis of all romantic mendacity' (II:P:2, 4).
As Nietzsche observes in the first preface, his determination to resist and
reject all such temptations (which for him could be summed up in a single
name: Wagner) was still immature here, and was not yet 'that mature freedom
of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits
access to many and contradictory modes of thought', and which he evidently
feels he subsequently had come to attain (I: P: 4). But he sees himself in
Human, All Too Human as having been on the way to it. And it is of no little
importance to the understanding of Nietzsche both to observe that he not only
places this interpretation upon the direction and outcome of his own
intellectual development, and to recognize what is fundamental to it: the
repudiation of 'all romantic mendacity
7
, and its replacement by the cultivation
of the intellectual conscience and analytical, critical and interpretive abilities
of the 'free spirit' he was attempting to become and conjure among his readers
by his own example.
Nietzsche thus saw himself here as having turned away from the
Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian Romanticism of The Birth of Tragedy (of which
he was explicitly critical along these very lines in a new preface to that work
also written in 1886, entitled 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism'). In doing so, and
partly as a way of doing so, he had turned with all the self-discipline and
intellect he could muster in an analytical direction, replacing art with science
as his new paradigm of high spirituality. Thus, in the preface to the second
volume, he refers to the various instalments of Human, All Too Human as
'precepts of health that may be recommended to the more spiritual natures of
the generation just coming up as a disciplina voluntatis [discipline of the
will]' (n:P:2). It is a discipline as much needed today as it was needed by
Nietzsche himself and by 'the generation just coming up' in his own time.
This in part answers the question of the intended audience of these
volumes. Nietzsche did not think of himself, either at this time or later, as
writing primarily for professional philosophers, or even for students in
philosophy courses. He clearly was moving in what he conceived to be a
philosophical direction; but he was writing first and foremost for inquiring
and adventuresome minds of sufficient sophistication to keep pace with him,
xvii
INTRODUCTION
whoever and wherever they may be - not only in academia but also
among the intelligent reading public. He hoped in particular to be able to
reach the better minds of the younger generation, who might be more
receptive than their elders to challenges to preconceived ideas and assumed
values. Yet he also had hopes of having the sort of wider impact Voltaire and
other firebrands of the Enlightenment had had a century earlier.
At the same time Nietzsche worried about what the likes of the Wagners
and the few colleagues who had not given up on him would think of it. For a
time he even considered publishing the first volume anonymously or under a
pseudonym. Human, All Too Human may not seem to us today to be
scandalously radical, however provocative it may be on some topics; but at
the time Nietzsche rightly feared that it would be deeply offensive to many of
its readers - not in the ways The Birth of Tragedy had been to his fellow
philologists, but in an almost opposite way. Now it was those who had been
enamoured of Nietzsche the romantic who were offended, by his
abandonment of Romanticism in favour of a coldly and severely analytical
Naturalism - for which he sought the widest possible audience. Beyond the
circle of those who already knew of him, however, Nietzsche need not have
worried about the scandalousness of his new venture - for, to his dismay, no
one else paid the slightest attention. Even today, few recognize it as the gold
mine it is, not only as an excellent way of becoming acquainted with his
thinking, but also for its wealth of ideas worth thinking about.
It does not do full justice to these ideas to characterize them as
'psychological', let alone as revolving around the 'discovery of the will to
power' (as Kaufmann suggests). Nietzsche himself, in his 1886 preface to the
first volume, observes that although he may not have realized it at the time, it
eventually dawned upon him that 'it is the problem of order of rank
1
- that is,
the problem of values and their revaluation and ordering - 'of which we may
say it is our problem'; and that, to position themselves to address this problem
adequately, 'we free spirits' first have to become 'adventurers and
circumnavigators of that inner world called "man", as surveyors and
[measurers] of that "higher" and "one [above] the other" that is likewise
called "man" - penetrating everywhere, almost [!] without fear, disdaining
nothing, losing nothing, asking everything, cleansing everything of what is
chance and accident in it and as it were thoroughly sifting it...' (i:P:7).
That is a fair characterization of what Nietzsche does in Human, All Too
Human-, and it is in that sense that the term 'psychological' applies to his task
and way of going about it. 'Psychology' in his time, after all, was not a
discipline in its own right, separate and distinct from philosophy, but rather
was conceived both loosely and strictly as a part of it; and in Nietzsche's
hands it retained this intimate connection with philosophy as he came to
understand and practice it. Philosophy for him revolves around the
exploration of things human, and is first and foremost the attempt to
comprehend them - even if that comprehension is not an end in itself. It
prepares the way for the further comprehension of the whole complex matter
of value, as it relates to issues of quality and worth in and about human life,
in the service of its enhancement. In Human, All Too Human
xviii
INTRODUCTION
Nietzsche took (and in his prefaces saw himself as taking) major steps in
that direction. He had yet to learn to temper his new enthusiasm for the
natural sciences, to figure out how to revisit the perspectives relating to the
arts and culture he had known so well without becoming captive once again
to them, to supplement both with yet others and to develop the ability to make
larger interpretive sense of our humanity in the light of this multiplicity of
perspectives upon it. But he was on his way.
This assessment of the place of Human, All Too Human in the context of
Nietzsche's larger intellectual development has the virtues of acknowledging
the great differences between it (and its companion volumes in the 'free spirit'
series) and his earlier writings, and also of coherently relating his later
writings to both. Many readers - and interpreters - make the mistake of
regarding these 'free spirit' works as a kind of interlude between The Birth of
Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and of reading them - if at all - from
the perspective of his later writings, in relation to which they are generally
found to pale by comparison, both rhetorically and philosophically. It would
make a good deal more sense to view his later writings in the perspective of
his 'free spirit' works, taking Human, All Too Human as one's point of
departure, and regarding Zarathustra as an interlude between the last of them
(the first four-part version of The Gay Science) and the continuation of
Nietzsche's aphoristic works, beginning with Beyond Good and Evil and the
expanded version of The Gay Science he published a year later. For the
continuities between them are strong, even if Nietzsche's arsenal of
perspectives grows, his philosophical sophistication increases, his rhetoric
sharpens and heats up, and his intellectual pendulum swings back from its
scientifically-oriented extreme point in the direction of his artistic and
cultural concerns and sensibility (moving subsequently in considerably
shorter arcs in the general vicinity of the centre of the spectrum they mark
out).
This even applies to the organization of Human, All Too Human and the
two later works that are not devoted to specific topics or figures. Beyond
Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols. Like both of them, the first version
of Human, All Too Human does have an organization, in the form of the
division of the volume into parts with headings. Interestingly enough, all
three have the same number of major parts - nine - plus an epilogue. And
there is a striking similarity among the headings as well. Each starts out with
sections on topics relating to philosophers and philosophy; each has a section
relating to morality, and another to religious and metaphysical matters; each
has a section on social and political matters, and another on cultural and
intellectual topics; and each, at some point, contains a collection of one-
liners on a variety of sensitive topics guaranteed to offend almost everyone.
To be sure, the parallels are not exact; but they are close enough to warrant
the suggestion of a continuity of form - and in content there are not only
significant differences but also remarkable similarities. One might well ask
oneself in what ways Nietzsche's thinking changed on these matters from his
initial discussions of them in Human, All Too Human to Beyond Good and
Evil to Twilight, what his reasons may have been (if he does not make them
explicit) - and whether the changes were invariably for the better.
INTRODUCTION
The two parts of the second volume of Human, All Too Human were not
supplied with the same sorts of headings, or indeed with any subheadings at
all. Most of the aphorisms in them can easily be assigned to one or another of
those Nietzsche uses in the first volume, however; for they chiefly range over
and fall into the same general topics. An examination of the list of these
topics makes it clear both that Human, All Too Human is far from being as
formless as it is often taken to be, and also that Nietzsche's interests include
but are not restricted to issues that are normally deemed 'philosophical'. The
first (appropriately enough), 'Of First and Last Things', deals with
metaphysical thinking - but in a curiously detached sort of way, more as a
phenomenon to be understood than a set of arguments to be engaged head on.
The same sort of approach is taken to morality in the second ('On the History
of Moral Sensations' - Nietzsche's first go at what he came to call the
'genealogy of morals'); to religion in the third ('The Religious Life'); and to art
in the fourth ('From the Souls of Artists and Writers'). In each case Nietzsche
is proposing that we make the experiment of looking at these seemingly
sublime things as human phenomena - experiences and activities of human
beings - asking what is going on when such things occur in human life, and
shifting the presumption from their sublimity to the suspicion that their
appearance of sublimity may well be deceiving.
In the next four sections Nietzsche turns his attention to the domain of
cultural, social and interpersonal relationships and types. There is more to
culture than art and literature; and he attempts to bring it into focus in the fifth
section ('Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture'). Social institutions and
relationships are the logical next stop, in the sixth section ('Man in Society'),
with family matters coming next ('Woman and Child'), followed by political
life ('A Glance at the State'). If in the first four sections he surveys things that
claim some sort of transcendent significance, of the sort Hegel sought to
express in his characterization of their domain as that of 'absolute spirituality',
here Nietzsche surveys those things that flesh out what Hegel had called 'the
life of a people' on the level of its 'objective spirituality'. These too are among
the chief sorts of things in terms of which our humanity and human meaning
and worth are commonly conceived. If one asks what it is that sets us apart
from and above other creatures whose existence is merely animal, and is not
permitted to give a quick religious or metaphysical answer appealing to
transcendent principles and powers, this is a fair inventory of possible
answers. That is the larger (and genuinely if unconventionally philosophical)
point of these collections of reflections, many of which might not appear to
have any philosophical significance whatsoever.
In the final section Nietzsche turns to what he considers to be left after
one has considered all of these other dimensions of human life: what we are
or can be on our own, as individuals, within or by ourselves ('Man Alone with
Himself'). Later he would add another item to the first four on the list,
belonging with them, but not yet as problematical in his eyes as he
subsequently recognized it to be: scientific thinking, of the very sort he had
become so enamoured of and reliant upon here. Like the glasses with which
one may be provided to deal with vision problems, and to which one may
become so
xx
INTRODUCTION
accustomed that one ceases to be aware of them, this sort of thinking can
come to be taken for granted beyond the point to which reliance upon it is
warranted. To his great credit, Nietzsche was far quicker than most to become
sensitive to the limitations of ways of thinking to which he was attracted - and
then, having done so, to get past his disappointment with them and ascertain
the best uses that might be made of them, their limitations notwithstanding. In
Human, All Too Human, however, his romance with the sciences was still
young, and this process had yet to run its course.
The expression Nietzsche adopted to characterize the kind of thinker and
human being he conceived himself to have become - or at any rate to have
been on the way to becoming - at the time of Human, All Too Human is that
which he features in its subtitle: 'free spirit', Freigeist. Human, All Too
Human is proclaimed in its subtitle to be 'A Book for Free Spirits'. Three
years after the publication of its first instalment, when Nietzsche published
the first version of The Gay Science, he had the following printed on the back
cover: 'This book marks the conclusion of a series of writings by
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE whose common goal it is to erect a new image
and ideal of the free spirit.' He then went on to list Human, All Too Human
and its supplements and sequels up to and including The Gay Science.
7

But this did not mark the end of Nietzsche's attachment to the idea of the
'free spirit'. It reappears very significantly in Beyond Good and Evil, as the
heading of the second part of the book in which, following his largely critical
first part 'On the Prejudices of Philosophers', he proceeds to set forth a variety
of his own ideas on a broad range of philosophical issues. And it reappears
again not only in his retrospective Ecce Homo, as one would expect, but also
in Twilight of the Idols, in a section bearing the heading 'My conception of
freedom'.
8
From first to last it is invoked to convey the double meaning of
both liberation from things that have tended to hinder and hobble one, and of
determination to undertake tasks requiring independence, strength, courage
and imagination. Nietzschean free spirits are not necessarily philosophers; but
Nietzschean philosophers are necessarily free spirits. Voltaire, for Nietzsche,
was an exemplary free spirit, as the original dedication of Human, All Too
Human indicated: 'To Voltaire's memory, in commemoration of the day of his
death, 30 May 1788.' His example would appear to have taught Nietzsche the
erstwhile devoted disciple of Wagner something he came to realize he badly
needed to learn.
The 'free spirit' is 'a spirit that has become free', as Nietzsche emphasizes
in his remarks on Human, All Too Human in Ecce Homo. In the things that
matter most, Rousseau was both right and wrong - right in observing that
people are 'everywhere in chains', but wrong in supposing them to be 'bom
free'. True freedom of the spirit is something that is acquired - if at all - with
difficulty, and only by a few. Indeed, in Nietzsche's 1886 preface to the first
volume he even goes so far as to allow that he was obliged to invent the 'free
spirits' to whom the book is addressed, since "'free spirits" of this kind do not
exist, did not exist' - although he says 'I had need of them', all the more so
because he lacked the kind of actual companionship and comradeship that
people of this sort could provide. 'That free spirits of this kind could one
day exist', on the other hand, and indeed that they will one day exist, he
does not doubt. 'I see them already coming', he optimistically asserts (i: P: 2);
and in any event the statement on the back cover of The Gay Science makes it
clear enough that he hoped and intended Human, All Too Human to speed the
day, by both precept and example.
But the same could be said for all of Nietzsche's aphoristic works, after
as well as before Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is perhaps less true of
Zarathustra itself, despite Zarathustra's repeated proclamations that he wants
no disciples and wants his companions to think for themselves; for it is hard
(though not impossible) to read and experience Zarathustra as a non-
tendentious work. And it likewise is perhaps less true of Nietzsche's
polemical later works - against Wagner, against Christianity and even (in On
the Genealogy of Morals) against the kind of morality he considered to have
come to prevail in the Western world. Polemics may have their place in the
liberation of fettered spirits from the shackles that bind them, and so in
making it possible for some people who might not otherwise do so to become
free spirits; but they are far from sufficient to complete the process, and can
easily subvert it - as the responses of many people to what they find in some
of Nietzsche illustrate well enough.
Unfortunately for Nietzsche's reception, his free-spirited side has all too
often been overshadowed and even eclipsed by the appearance of a much
more impassioned and seemingly dogmatic side, frightening some and
exciting others - for equally dubious reasons in either case. Neither the fact
that this appearance has been seen in markedly different (and incompatible)
ways, nor the objection that it is only an appearance rather than the dark side
of the reality of his thought, has sufficed to keep it from long impeding his
interpretation and assessment. The best remedy for this predicament is to
direct attention to those works in which Nietzsche is engaged in his free-
spirited labours, from Human, All Too Human to The Gay Science and
Beyond Good and Evil to Twilight of the Idols. This is not to expurgate him;
for there is plenty in each of these books to worry about and argue with, and
much that is all-too-human in him no less than in his targets. But in these
volumes he for the most part carries on in the manner of the kind of 'free
spirit' he seeks to evoke and encourage. If one would understand the sort of
thing he has in mind in speaking of philosophers and philosophy of the future
as he would have them be, one would do well to begin - as he did - with this
idea in mind, as the presupposition of anything further that a Nietzschean
kind of philosophy might involve.
There is no better commentary in Nietzsche on what free-spiritedness
meant to him, as the idea took shape in and beyond Human, All Too Human,
than the paragraph with which he concludes the part of Beyond Good and
Evil entitled 'The Free Spirit'. It deserves to be read together with the prefaces
to the two volumes of Human, All Too Human he shortly went on to write.
With them in mind one can turn to Human, All Too Human itself and see why
Nietzsche was not content to allow it to go unnoticed even after he had gone
on to publish a good many other things - and why there may be no better
introduction to his thought and thinking.
xxu
INTRODUCTION
At home, or at least having been guests, in many countries of the spirit; having
escaped again and again from the musty agreeable nooks into which preference
and prejudice, youth, origin, the accidents of people and books or even
exhaustion from wandering seemed to have banished us; full of malice against
the lures of dependence that lie hidden in honors, or money, or offices, or
enthusiasms of the senses; grateful even to need and vacillating sickness because
they always rid us from some rule and its 'prejudice/ grateful to god, devil, sheep,
and worm in us; curious to a vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with
uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable, with teeth and stomachs for the most
indigestible, ready for every feat that requires a sense of acuteness and acute
senses, ready for every venture, thanks to an excess of 'free will,' with fore- and
back-souls into whose ultimate intentions nobody can look so easily, with fore-
and backgrounds which no foot is likely to explore to the end; concealed under
cloaks of light, conquerors even if we look like heirs and prodigals, arrangers and
collectors from morning till late, misers of our riches and our crammed drawers,
economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemas, occasionally proud
of tables of categories, occasionally pedants, occasionally night owls of work
even in broad daylight; yes, when it is necessary even scarecrows - and today it is
necessary; namely, insofar as we are bom, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of
our own most profound, most midnightly, most middaily solitude; that is the type
of man we are, we free spirits! And perhaps you have something of this, too, you
that are coming? you new philosophers? -
9

Notes
1 On the Genealogy ofMorals/Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York, 1967), p. 283 ('Why I Write Such Good Books': Human, All Too Human, 71).
2 See, e.g.. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974),
108,125 and 343.
3 Ecce Homo, p. 283
4 The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (Chicago, 1995).
5 In 1974 (see note 2).
6 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th
edn. (Princeton, 1974), pp. 157,158.
7 The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, p. 30.
8 Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York, 1954), 'Skirmishes of an Untimely Man', 39.
9 Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1966), 44.
xxm
CHRONOLOGY
1844 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche bom on 15 October in Rocken, in the
Prussian province of Saxony
1849 His father dies (at the age of 36)
1858-64 Attends the classics-oriented boarding-school Schulpforta; plays the
piano and composes
1864 Enters Bonn University to study classical languages and literatures
1869 Associate professor of classical philology (before even completing
his Ph.D.) at the Swiss university at Basel
1870 Full professor at Basel; enlists as a medical orderly in the Franco-
Prussian War, contracting serious illnesses
1872 First book The Birth of Tragedy appears (and is met with scholarly
derision) - his only major classical studies publication
1873-4 Publishes the first three Untimely Meditations, including the essays
On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Schopenhauer as
Educator
1876 Writes a fourth Meditation in homage to Wagner, but his enthusiasm for
Wagner cools
1878 The first volume of Human, All Too Human (638 aphorisms)
appears; Wagner sends him Parsifal, and their estrangement deepens
1879 Resigns (with pension) from his position at Basel, incapacitated by
health problems; begins spending his summers in the Swiss Engadine
region, and his winters in northern Italy, living in boarding-houses
1879-80 Writes two sequels to Human, All Too Human, subsequently
published as the two parts of its second volume (another 758 aphorisms)
1881 Publishes Daybreak (575 aphorisms); alternative periods of
depression and exhilaration; first summer in Sils Maria, where the idea of
'eternal recurrence' comes to him
1882 The year of his intense but short-lived relationship with Lou
Salome, which ends badly; publishes the initial four-part version of The
Gay Science (342 aphorisms and reflections)
1883 The first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra are written and
published; estrangement from family and friends; depression; resolves
against living in Germany; Wagner dies
CHRONOLOGY
1884 Completes and publishes the third part of Zarathustra; breaks with
his sister Elizabeth, unable to endure her anti-Semitic, pro- 'Teutonic'
fiancee Bernard Forster (She marries him the next year, to Nietzsche's
disgust and distress, accompanying him to Paraguay where he sought to
found a Teutonic colony)
1885 The fourth part of Zarathustra is written, but is only privately
printed and circulated; condition worsens
1886 Beyond Good and Evil (296 aphorisms and reflections in nine
parts, plus a poem 'Aftersong') is published; new editions of most pre-
Zarathustra works are prepared and supplied with prefaces
1886-7 An expanded second edition of The Gay Science is prepared and
published, with a new preface and fifth part consisting of 41 additional
reflections, and an appendix of poetry', 'Songs of Prince Vogelfrei'
1887 On the Genealogy of Morals appears, consisting of a preface and
three 'essays' (of 17, 25 and 28 numbered sections, respectively);
completes orchestral score for Hymnus an das Leben; begins working on
magnus opus, to be called The Will to Power
1888 The Case of Wagner is published; and Twilight of the Idols, The
Antichrist, Nietzsche contra Wagner, Dionysian Dithyrambs (a collection
of poems) and Ecce Homo are all written; The Will to Power project is
dropped, in favour of a projected four-part Revaluation of All Values;
condition deteriorates
1889 Collapses in early January in Turin, at the age of 44 (never
recovers, living his final eleven years in invalid insanity in the care of his
mother and sister); Twilight of the Idols is published in January
1892 First public edition of the fourth part of Zarathustra appears
1893 Sister returns from Paraguay, and - under the name Elizabeth
Forster-Nietzsche - assists their mother in the management of her
brother's affairs
1895 The Antichrist and Nietzsche Contra Wagner are published
1897 Mother dies, leaving complete control of his care - and of his literary
estate - to Elizabeth, who exploits his growing fame and fosters the
assimilation of his thought to right-extremist political purposes during
the next four decades
1900 Nietzsche dies, on 25 August, in Weimar
1901 Sister publishes an arrangement of selections from his notebooks
of 1883-8 under the title The Will to Power, and in his name
1908 Ecce Homo is finally published
1910-11 First edition of Nietzsche's collected works is published under the
supervision of Elizabeth - including a greatly expanded edition of The
Will to Power
R.S.
FURTHER READING
Intellectual background
The history of philosophy has few chapters as rich and varied as that of
German (or Central European) philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche. A superb
survey of German philosophy up to and including Kant is Lewis White Beck's
Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, MA,
1969). The next chapters of the story are well told by Frederick C. Beiser in
The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge,
MA, 1987); G. A. Kelly in Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of
Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, 1969) and Herbert Schnadelbach in
Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933 (Cambridge, 1984).
Two classic studies of German philosophy in the nineteenth century,
both first published in 1941, are Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution:
Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston, i960) and Karl Lowith's From
Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New
York, 1964). More recent studies include Walter Kaufmann's From
Shakespeare to Existentialism (Garden City, NY, 1959), Maurice
Mandelbaum's History, Man and Reason (Baltimore, 1971), and Robert
Solomon's From Rationalism to Existentialism (New York, 1972).
The two most important figures in Nietzsche's intellectual life and
development were Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. Useful studies
of Schopenhauer include Patrick Gardiner's Schopenhauer (Baltimore, 1963),
D. W. Hamlyn's Schopenhauer (London, 1980) and Christopher Janaway's
Self and World in Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1989). On Wagner, see Ernest
Newman's four-volume biography The Life of Richard Wagner (New York,
1933-46), and Geoffrey Skelton's Wagner at Bayreuth (London and New
York, 1976). The many studies of the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship include
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's Wagner and Nietzsche (New York, 1976) and
Frederick Love's The Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience
(Chapel Hill, 1963). Roger Hollinrake discusses all three of them in
Nietzsche, Wagner and the Philosophy of Pessimism (London, 1982).
Nietzsche himself published essays on both Schopenhauer and Wagner,
shortly before Human, All Too Human, although they both reveal much more
about the Nietzsche of that period of his life than they do about Schopenhauer
and Wagner themselves. They are the third and fourth of his Untimely
Meditations (Cambridge, 1983), and bear the titles 'Schopenhauer as
Educator' and 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth'. Late in his productive life
xxvi
FURTHER READING
(though only fifteen years after the appearance of the latter essay),
Nietzsche also published two short books as polemically critical of Wagner as
his early essay had been appreciative: The Case of Wagner (New York, 1967)
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, included in Walter Kaufmann's The Portable
Nietzsche (New York, 1954).
Nietzsche's life
Perhaps the best recent biography of Nietzsche is Ronald Hayman's
Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York, 1980). Another useful and shorter
biography is R. J. Hollingdale's Nietzsche (London, 1965). Kaufmann's
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, 1950; Princeton,
1974), a kind of intellectual biography, is the book that rehabilitated
Nietzsche for the post-World War II generation in the English-speaking
world, and remains one of the most accessible introductions to his life and
thought.
Here again, Nietzsche himself has also supplied a contribution that
cannot go unmentioned, even if it is no more reliable and no less tendentious
than his writings on Schopenhauer and Wagner. It is his intellectual-
autobiographical Ecce Homo (New York, 1967), to which he gave the subtitle
'How One Becomes What One Is'. It is the last book he completed before his
collapse. Considered by some to be all too clearly indicative of his incipient
insanity, it is regarded by others as a work of profound significance. In any
event, it is well worth reading.
Nietzsche's writings
Most of Nietzsche's publications have been translated into English in a
number of versions, the best of which have long been generally considered to
be the translations made by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(sometimes in collaboration). A monumental critical edition of his writings in
German has been published by De Gruyter, edited by Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari; and a translation project intended to result in an English-
language counterpart has now begun, under the editorship of Ernst Behler, at
Stanford University Press.
Other writings of Nietzsche's that will be of particular interest to readers
of the present work certainly include the two similar works following it in
what Nietzsche came to think of and refer to as his 'free spirit' series:
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge, 1982), also
translated by Hollingdale; and The Gay Science (New York, 1974), translated
by Kaufmann. Nietzsche's earlier writings are well worth consulting as well,
for the indications they provide of the concerns which shaped the direction of
his thinking and efforts in this series of aphoristic volumes. Chief among
them are his first book (1872), The Birth of Tragedy (New York, 1967),
translated by Kaufmann, and a series of four essays (first published in the
years 1873-6) Nietzsche gathered together in 1886 under the title Untimely
Meditations (Cambridge, 1983), translated by Hollingdale. They also include
xxvu
a draft of an important early essay Nietzsche never finished or published,
which however reveals the starkly naturalistic picture of the human condition
that was a part of his point of departure: 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral
Sense' (1873), translated by Daniel Breazeale and included in his volume
Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979).
Following his 'free spirit' series, Nietzsche turned his attention to a very
different sort of project: his extraordinary four-part literary-philosophical
experiment and masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5), translated
(among others) by both Kaufmann (in The Portable Nietzsche) and
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1961). He then (1886) returned to the
publication of volumes of a somewhat aphoristic nature, beginning with
Beyond Good and Evil, which again has been translated by both Kaufmann
(New York, 1966) and Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1973), and an expanded
version of The Gay Science. His next book, On the Genealogy of Morals
(1887), translated by Kaufmann and Hollingdale together (New York, 1967),
joins his aphoristic style to a three-essay format with a more specific focus
than any of his previous aphoristic works (published in 1994, trans. Carol
Diethe, edited by Keith Ansell-Pierson). In the final year before his collapse
(1888) Nietzsche not only published the two polemics against Wagner and the
autobiographical Ecce Homo mentioned above, but also a polemical critique
of Christianity, The Antichrist, and a final volume of aphorisms more in the
tradition of Human, All Too Human, which (parodying Wagner's fourth Ring
opera) he called Gotzenddmmerung, or Twilight of the Idols. Both of these
last works have been translated by Kaufmann (in The Portable Nietzsche) and
also by Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1968).
Which of these many things should one read after Human, All Too
Human? That depends upon one's interests. If one is primarily interested in
matters relating to morality, one might look first at Daybreak, then at the fifth
and ninth parts of Beyond Good and Evil and then at On the Genealogy of
Morals. On religion, Daybreak again is a good sequel, together with the
sections of The Gay Science dealing with God and religion, the third part of
Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist. On the many philosophical topics
relating to knowledge, our world and ourselves, one might look back to the
early essay 'On Truth and Lies', and ahead to The Gay Science, the first two
parts of Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols; and one might also
take a look at the selections from Nietzsche's notebooks from the 1880s
published under the title The Will to Power, translated by Kaufmann and
Hollingdale (New York, 1967). And for an indication of Nietzsche's thinking
with respect to the enhancement of life and the possibility of a 'higher
humanity' he discerns along with the 'all too human' tendencies he examines
here and subsequently, one might look back to his essay 'Schopenhauer as
Educator' (the third of his Untimely Meditations) as well as to Thus Spoke
Zarathustra.
Nietzsche's thought
Nietzsche has been so influential in so many ways during the course of
the twentieth century, and has been so variously interpreted; that no one
xxviii
FURTHER READING
account can be considered authoritative. He has been claimed as
originator, anticipator, inspiration and kindred spirit by fascists and
humanists, existentialists and deconstructionists, critical theorists and
analytical philosophers, and by more artists, writers and composers than any
other figure in the history of philosophy (at least since Plato). Both his
admirers and his critics can make persuasive arguments for and against him;
but they all too often fail to take the trouble to read him thoroughly and
attentively enough to understand him - or at any rate to earn the right to make
their claims.
Walter Kaufmann's classic study Nietzsche (mentioned above) offers a
readable interpretation of Nietzsche's thought along humanistic existentialist
and pragmatist lines. Another early study of enduring value, which explores
Nietzsche's thought more systematically, is George Morgan's What Nietzsche
Means (Cambridge, MA, 1941; New York, 1965). Useful interpretations in
the analytic tradition include Arthur Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (New
York, 1965), Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge,
MA, 1985), Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1990), and Richard Schacht's Nietzsche (London and New York,
1983) and Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana and Chicago, 1995). A
sampling of interpretations along post-structuralist and deconstructionist lines
may be found in David Allison's collection The New Nietzsche:
Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York, 1977). Helpful recent
studies of various aspects of Nietzsche's thought relating to matters he
discusses in Human, All Too Human include Erich Heller's The Importance
of Nietzsche (Chicago, 1988), Peter Bergmann's Nietzsche: The Last
Antipolitical German (Bloomington, IN, 1987) and Lester Hunt's Nietzsche
and the Origin of Virtue (London, 1991).
R.S.
XXIX
VOLUME ONE
CONTENTS
PREFACE 5 1 OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS 12 2 ON THE
HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS 3 1 3 THE
RELI GI OUS LI FE 60
4 FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND
WRI TERS 80
5 TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
10 7
6 MAN I N SOCI ETY 1 36 7 WOMAN
AND CHI LD I 5 0 8 A GLANCE AT THE STATE l 6 l 9 MAN
ALONE WI TH HI MSELF 1 79 AMONG FRI ENDS: AN
EPI LOGUE 2 O5
3
PREFACE
1
I have been told often enough, and always with an expression of great
surprise, that all my writings, from the Birth of Tragedy* to the most recently
published Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,t have something that
distinguishes them and unites them together: they all of them, I have been
given to understand, contain snares and nets for unwary birds and in effect a
persistent invitation to the overturning of habitual evaluations and valued
habits. What? Everything only - human, all too human? It is with this sigh
that one emerges from my writings, not without a kind of reserve and mistrust
even in regard to morality, not a little tempted and emboldened, indeed, for
once to play the advocate of the worst things: as though they have perhaps
been only the worst slandered? My writings have been called a schooling in
suspicion, even more in contempt, but fortunately also in courage, indeed in
audacity. And in fact I myself do not believe that anyone has ever before
looked into the world with an equally profound degree of suspicion, and not
merely as an occasional devil's advocate, but, to speak theologically, just as
much as an enemy and indicter of God; and anyone who could divine
something of the consequences that lie in that profound suspiciousness,
something of the fears and frosts of the isolation to which that unconditional
disparity of view condemns him who is infected with it, will also understand
how often, in an effort to recover from myself, as it were to induce a
temporary self-forgetting, I have sought shelter in this or that - in some piece
of admiration or enmity or scientificality or frivolity or stupidity; and why,
where I could not find what I needed, I had artificially to enforce, falsify and
invent a suitable fiction for myself (- and what else have poets ever done? and
to what end does art exist in the world at all?). What I again and again needed
most for my cure and self-restoration, however, was the belief that I was not
thus isolated, not alone in seeing as I did - an enchanted surmising of
relatedness and identity in eye and desires, a reposing in a trust of friendship,
a blindness in concert with another without suspicion or question-marks, a
pleasure in foregrounds, surfaces, things close and closest, in everything
possessing colour, skin and apparitionality. Perhaps in this regard I might be
reproached with having employed a certain amount of 'art', a certain amount
of false-coinage: for
* Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche's first published book (1872)
t Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: the subtitle of Beyond Good and Boil, published in 1886
5
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
example, that I knowingly-willfully closed my eyes before
Schopenhauer's* blind will to morality at a time when I was already
sufficiently clearsighted about morality; likewise that I deceived myself over
Richard Wagner'st incurable romanticism, as though it were a beginning and
not an end; likewise over the Greeks, likewise over the Germans and their
future - and perhaps a whole long list could be made of such likewises? -
Supposing, however, that all this were true and that I was reproached with it
with good reason, what do you know, what could you know, of how much
cunning in self-preservation, how much reason and higher safeguarding, is
contained in such self-deception - or of how much falsity
1 shall require if I am to continue to permit myself the luxury of my
truthfulness? ... Enough, I am still living; and life is, after all, not a product of
morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception ... but there you are, I am
already off again, am I not, and doing what I have always done, old
immoralist and bird-catcher that I am - speaking unmorally, extra- morally,
'beyond good and evil'? -
2
-Thus when I needed to I once also invented for myself the 'free spirits'
to whom this melancholy-valiant book with the title Human, All Too Human
is dedicated: 'free spirits' of this kind do not exist, did not exist - but, as I have
said, I had need of them at that time if 1 was to keep in good spirits while
surrounded by ills (sickness, solitude, unfamiliar places, acedia, inactivity):
as brave companions and familiars with whom one can laugh and chatter
when one feels like laughing and chattering, and whom one can send to the
Devil when they become tedious - as compensation for the friends I lacked.
That free spirits of this kind could one day exist, that our Europe will have
such active and audacious fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the next
day, physically present and palpable and not, as in my case, merely phantoms
and hermit's phantasmagoria: I should wish to be the last to doubt it. I see
them already coming, slowly, slowly; and perhaps I shall do something to
speed their coming if I describe in advance under what vicissitudes, upon
what paths, I see them coming? - -
3
One may conjecture that a spirit in whom the type 'free spirit' will one
day become ripe and sweet to the point of perfection has had its decisive
experience in a great liberation and that previously it was all the more a
fettered spirit and seemed to be chained for ever to its pillar and corner. What
fetters the fastest? What bonds are all but unbreakable? In the case of men of
a high and select kind they will be their duties: that reverence proper to youth,
that reserve and delicacy before all that is honoured and
* Schopenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the philosopher, of whom Nietzsche
was in his youth a disciple (see the essay, 'Schopenhauer as Educator
1
in the Untimely
Meditations)
t Richard Wagner (1813-83), the composer and dramatist who was, like Schopenhauer, an
object of the youthful Nietzsche's veneration (see the essay 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in the
Untimely Meditations)
6
PREFACE
revered from of old, that gratitude for the soil out of which they have
grown, for the hand which led them, for the holy place where they learned to
worship - their supreme moments themselves will fetter them the fastest, lay
upon them the most enduring obligation. The great liberation comes for those
who are thus fettered suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: the youthful
soul is all at once convulsed, tom loose, tom away - it itself does not know
what is happening. A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command;
a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement
dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames and flickers in all its
senses. 'Better to die than to go on living here' - thus responds the imperious
voice and temptation: and this 'here', this 'at home' is everything it had
hitherto loved! A sudden terror and suspicion of what it loved, a lightning-
bolt of contempt for what it called 'duty', a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically
erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangements, coldness, soberness,
frost, a hatred of love, perhaps a desecrating blow and glance backwards to
where it formerly loved and worshipped, perhaps a hot blush of shame at
what it has just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it, a
drunken, inwardly exultant shudder which betrays that a victory has been won
- a victory? over what? over whom? an enigmatic, question- packed,
questionable victory, but the first victory nonetheless: such bad and painful
things are part of the history of the great liberation. It is at the same time a
sickness that can destroy the man who has it, this first outbreak of strength
and will to self-determination, to evaluating on one's own account, this will to
free will: and how much sickness is expressed in the wild experiments and
singularities through which the liberated prisoner now seeks to demonstrate
his mastery over things! He prowls cruelly around with an unslaked
lasciviousness; what he captures has to expiate the perilous tension of his
pride; what excites him he tears apart. With a wicked laugh he turns round
whatever he finds veiled and through some sense of shame or other spared
and pampered: he puts to the test what these things look like when they are
reversed. It is an act of willfulness, and pleasure in willfulness, if now he
perhaps bestows his favour on that which has hitherto had a bad reputation -
if, full of inquisitiveness and the desire to tempt and experiment, he creeps
around the things most forbidden. Behind all his toiling and weaving - for he
is restlessly and aimlessly on his way as if in a desert - stands the question-
mark of a more and more perilous curiosity. 'Can all values not be turned
round? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an invention and finesse of
the Devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false? And if we are
deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? must we not be
deceivers?' - such thoughts as these tempt him and lead him on, even further
away, even further down. Solitude encircles and embraces him, ever more
threatening, suffocating, heart-tightening, that terrible goddess and mater
saeva cupidinum* - but who today knows what solitude is?...
* mater saeva cupidinum: wild mother of the passions
7
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
4
From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of temptation
and experiment, it is still a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainty
and health which may not dispense even with wickedness, as a means and
fish-hook of knowledge, to that mature freedom of spirit which is equally
self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and
contradictory modes of thought - to that inner spaciousness and indulgence of
superabundance which excludes the danger that the spirit may even on its
own road perhaps lose itself and become infatuated and remain seated
intoxicated in some corner or other, to that superfluity of formative, curative,
moulding and restorative forces which is precisely the sign of great health,
that superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of
living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure: the
master's privilege of the free spirit! In between there may lie long years of
convalescence, years full of variegated, painfully magical transformations
ruled and led along by a tenacious will to health which often ventures to
clothe and disguise itself as health already achieved. There is a midway
condition which a man of such a destiny will not be able to recall without
emotion: it is characterized by a pale, subtle happiness of light and sunshine,
a feeling of birdlike freedom, bird-like altitude, bird-like exuberance, and a
third thing in which curiosity is united with a tender contempt. A 'free-spirit' -
this cool expression does one good in every condition, it is almost warming.
One lives no longer in the fetters of love and hatred, without yes, without no,
near or far as one wishes, preferably slipping away, evading, fluttering off,
gone again, again flying aloft; one is spoiled, as everyone is who has at some
time seen a tremendous number of things beneath him - and one becomes the
opposite of those who concern themselves with things which have nothing to
do with them. Indeed, the free spirit henceforth has to flo only with things -
and how many things! - with which he is no longer concerned...
5
A step further in convalescence: and the free spirit again draws near to
life - slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It again
grows warmer around him, yellower, as it were; feeling and feeling for others
acquire depth, warm breezes of all kind blow across him. It seems to him as if
his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. He is astonished and sits
silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they
seem! what bloom and magic they have acquired! He looks back gratefully -
grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and selfalienation, to his viewing of
far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights. What a good thing he had
not always stayed 'at home', stayed 'under his own roof' like a delicate
apathetic loafer! He had been beside himself: no doubt of that. Only now does
he see himself - and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What
unprecedented shudders!
8
PREFACE
What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of
the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in
the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness that comes in winter, the
spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world,
also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half turned
towards life: - there are some among them who allow no day to pass without
hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe. And, to speak
seriously: to become sick in the manner of these free spirits, to remain sick
for a long time and then, slowly, slowly, to become healthy, by which I mean
'healthier', is a fundamental cure for all pessimism (the cancerous sore and
inveterate vice, as is well known, of old idealists and inveterate liars). There
is wisdom, practical wisdom, in for a long time prescribing even health for
oneself only in small doses. -
6
At that time it may finally happen that, under the sudden illumination of
a still stressful, still changeable health, the free, ever freer spirit begins to
unveil the riddle of that great liberation which had until then waited dark,
questionable, almost untouchable in his memory. If he has for long hardly
dared to ask himself: 'why so apart? so alone? renouncing everything I once
reverenced? renouncing reverence itself? why this hardness, this
suspiciousness, this hatred for your own virtues?' - now he dares to ask it
aloud and hears in reply something like an answer. 'You shall become master
over yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly they were your
masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments.
You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first
one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal. You shall learn to
grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgement - the displacement,
distortion and merely apparent teleology of horizons and whatever else
pertains to perspectivism; also the quantum of stupidity that resides in
antitheses of values and the whole intellectual loss which every For, every
Against costs us. You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For
and Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the
sense of perspective and its injustice. You shall above all see with your own
eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its
smallest, narrowest, neediest, most incipient and yet cannot avoid taking itself
as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation
secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question
the higher, greater, richer - you shall see with your own eyes the problem of
order of rank, and how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow
into the heights together. You shall' - enough: from now on the free spirit
knows what 'you shall' he has obeyed, and he also knows what he now can,
what only now he - may do...
9
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
7
This is how the free spirit elucidates to himself that enigma of liberation,
and inasmuch as he generalizes his own case ends by adjudicating on what he
has experienced thus. 'What has happened to me', he says to himself, 'must
happen to everyone in whom a task wants to become incarnate and "come
into the world".' The secret force and necessity of this task will rule among
and in the individual facets of his destiny like an unconscious pregnancy -
long before he has caught sight of this task itself or knows its name. Our
vocation commands and disposes of us even when we do not yet know it; it is
the future that regulates our today. Given it is the problem of order of rank of
which we may say it is our problem, we free spirits: it is only now, at the
midday of our life, that we understand what preparations, bypaths,
experiments, temptations, disguises the problem had need of before it was
allowed to rise up before us, and how we first had to experience the most
manifold and contradictory states of joy and distress in soul and body, as
adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world called 'man', as
surveyors and guagers of that 'higher' and 'one upon the other' that is likewise
called 'man' - penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining
nothing, losing nothing, asking everything, cleansing everything of what is
chance and accident in it and as it were thoroughly sifting it - until at last we
had the right to say, we free spirits: 'Here - a new problem! Here a long ladder
upon whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed - which we ourselves
have at some time been] Here a higher, a deeper, a beneath-us, a tremendous
long ordering, an order of rank, which we see: here - our problem!' - -
8
- No psychologist or reader of signs will have a moment's difficulty in
recognizing to what stage in the evolution just described the present book
belongs (or has been placed -). But where today are there psychologists? In
France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; definitely not in Germany. There is no
lack of reasons as to why the Germans of today could even regard this fact as
redounding to their honour: an ill fate for one who in this matter is by nature
and attainment un-German! This German book, which has known how to find
its readers in a wide circle of lands and peoples - it has been on its way for
about ten years - and must be capable of some kind of music and flute-
player's art by which even coy foreign ears are seduced to listen - it is
precisely in Germany that this book has been read most carelessly and heard
the worst: why is that? - 'It demands too much', has been the reply, 'it
addresses itself to people who are not oppressed by uncouth duties, it wants
refined and experienced senses, it needs superfluity, superfluity of time, of
clarity in heart and sky, of otium1 in the most audacious sense: - all of them
good things that we Ger-
PREFACE
mans of today do not have and therefore also cannot give'. - After so
courteous a reply my philosophy advises me to keep silent and to ask no more
questions; especially as in certain cases, as the saying has it, one remains a
philosopher only by - keeping silent.
Nice
Spring 1886
11
1
OF FIRST AND LAST THINGS
1
Chemistry of concepts and sensations. - Almost all the problems of
philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two
thousand years ago: how can something originate in its opposite, for example
rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic,
disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in egoism,
truth in error? Metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this
difficulty by denying that the one originates in the other and assuming for the
more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of
the 'thing in itself'.* Historical philosophy, on the other hand, which can no
longer be separated from natural science, the youngest of all philosophical
methods, has discovered in individual cases (and this will probably be the
result in every case) that there are no opposites, except in the customary
exaggeration of popular or metaphysical interpretations, and that a mistake in
reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis: according to this explanation
there exists, strictly speaking, neither an unegoistic action nor completely
disinterested contemplation; both are only sublimations, in which the basic
element seems almost to have dispersed and reveals itself only under the most
painstaking observation. All we require, and what can be given us only now
the individual sciences have attained their present level, is a chemistry of the
moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the
agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse,
and indeed even when we are alone: what if this chemistry would end up by
revealing that in this domain too the most glorious colours are derived from
base, indeed from despised materials? Will there be many who desire to
pursue such researches? Mankind likes to put questions of origins and
beginnings out of its mind: must one not be almost inhuman to detect in
oneself a contrary inclination? -
2
Family failing of philosophers. - All philosophers have the common
failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their
goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of 'man' as an
aeterna veritas,t as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as
a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has
* thing-in-itself: Kant's term for objects as they are independently of our knowledge of them,
contrasted (see section 10) with 'appearances', objects considered as conforming to our modes of
knowing them
t aeterna veritas: something everlastingly true
12

1 otium: leisure, idleness; in Catullus' usage, it denotes a vice or condition of ennui.
10
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as
to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the
family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take
the most recent manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of
certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which
one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty
of cognition has become; while some of them would have it that the whole
world is spun out of this faculty of cognition. Now, everything essential in
the development of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the
four thousand years we more or less know about; during these years mankind
may well not have altered very much. But the philosopher here sees 'instincts'
in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of
mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the
world in general: the whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of the
man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things
in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But
everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute
truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing,
and with it the virtue of modesty.
3
Estimation of unpretentious truths. - It is the mark of a higher culture to
value the little unpretentious truths which have been discovered by means of
rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by metaphysical
and artistic ages and men, which blind us and make us happy. At first the
former are regarded with scorn, as though the two things could not possibly
be accorded equal rights: they stand there so modest, simple, sober, so
apparently discouraging, while the latter are so fair, splendid, intoxicating,
perhaps indeed enrapturing. Yet that which has been attained by laborious
struggle, the certain, enduring and thus of significance for any further
development of knowledge is nonetheless the higher; to adhere to it is manly
and demonstrates courage, simplicity and abstemiousness. Gradually not only
the individual but all mankind will be raised to this manliness, when they
have finally become accustomed to valuing viable, enduring knowledge more
highly and lost all faith in inspiration and the acquisition of knowledge by
miraculous means. - Worshippers of form, with their standards of the
beautiful and sublime, will, to be sure, at first have good ground for mockery
once estimation of unpretentious truths and the scientific spirit begins to
dominate: but only because either their eye has not yet discovered the charm
of the simplest form or because those raised in that spirit are as yet very far
from being thoroughly permeated by it, so that they still thoughtlessly imitate
old forms (and do so badly, as does everyone to whom a thing no longer
matters very much). Formerly the spirit was not engaged in rigorous thinking,
its serious occupation was the spinning out of forms and symbols. That has
now changed; serious occupation with the symbolic
13
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
has become a mark of a lower culture. As our arts themselves grow ever
more intellectual, our senses more spiritual, and as for example we now
adjudge what is pleasant sounding quite differently from the way we did a
hundred years ago: so the forms of our life will grow ever more spiritual,
perhaps to the eye of earlier ages uglier, but only because it is incapable of
seeing how the realm of inner, spiritual beauty is continually growing deeper
and wider, and to what extent we may all now accord the eye of insight
greater value than the fairest structure or the sublimest edifice.
4
Astrology and what is related to it. - It is probable that the objects of the
religious, moral and aesthetic sensations belong only to the surface of things,
while man likes to believe that here at least he is in touch with the world's
heart; the reason he deludes himself is that these things produce in him such
profound happiness and unhappiness, and thus he exhibits here the same
pride as in the case of astrology. For astrology believes the starry firmament
revolves around the fate of man; the moral man, however, supposes that what
he has essentially at heart must also constitute the essence and heart of things.
5
Misunderstanding of the dream. - The man of the ages of barbarous
primordial culture believed that in the dream he was getting to know a second
real world: here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the dream one
would have had no occasion to divide the world into two. The dissection into
soul and body is also connected with the oldest idea of the dream, likewise
the postulation of a life of the soul,2 thus the origin of all belief in spirits, and
probably also of the belief in gods. 'The dead live on, for they appear to the
living in dreams': that was the conclusion one formerly drew, throughout
many millennia.
6
The spirit of science rules its parts, not the whole. - The separate
smallest regions of science are treated purely objectively: the great universal
sciences, on the other hand, viewed as a whole pose the question - a very
unobjective question, to be sure - to what end? of what utility? On account of
this regard for utility they are as a whole treated less impersonally than they
are in their parts. And when it comes to philosophy, the summit of the entire
scientific pyramid, we find the question as to the utility of knowledge as such
involuntarily raised, and the unconscious intention of every philosophy is to
ascribe to it the highest utility. That is why there is in all philosophies so
much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered
by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of
knowledge for life has to appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the
antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The
latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible
profundity and signifi-
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
cance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further - and does
in fact acquire it. There has hitherto been no philosopher in whose hands
philosophy has not become an apologia for knowledge; on this point at least
each of them is an optimist, inasmuch as he believes that knowledge must be
in the highest degree useful. They are all tyrannized over by logic: and logic

2 life of the soul: Seelenscheinleib, Nietzsche's coinage
is by its nature optimism.
7
The mischief-maker in science. - Philosophy separated itself from
science when it posed the question: what kind of knowledge of the world and
life is it through which man can live happiest? This took place in the Socratic
schools: by having in view the objective of happiness one applied a ligature
to the arteries of scientific research - and does so still today.
8
Pneumatological elucidation of nature. - Metaphysics elucidates the
handwriting of nature as it were pneumatologically ,* as the church and its
scholars formerly did the Bible. It requires a great deal of understanding to
apply to nature the same kind of rigorous art of elucidation that philologists
have now fashioned for all books: with the intention of comprehending what
the text intends to say but without sensing, indeed presupposing, a second
meaning. But as even with regard to books the bad art of elucidation has by
no means been entirely overcome and one still continually encounters in the
best educated circles remnants of allegorical and mystical interpretations: so
it is also in respect to nature - where, indeed, it is even far worse.
9
Metaphysical world. - It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the
absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things
through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question
nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it
off. This is a purely scientific problem and one not very well calculated to
bother people overmuch; but all that has hitherto made metaphysical
assumptions valuable, terrible, delightful to them, all that has begotten these
assumptions, is passion, error and self-deception; the worst of all methods of
acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them. When
one has disclosed these methods as the foundation of all extant religions and
metaphysical systems, one has refuted them! Then that possibility still
remains over; but one can do absolutely nothing with it, not to speak of
letting happiness, salvation and life depend on the gossamer of such a
possibility. - For one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world
except that it was a being-other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being-
other; it would be a thing with negative qualities. - Even if the existence of
such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of
it would be the most useless of all
* pneumatologically: pneumatology is the 'science' of spirits and spiritual beings
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
knowledge: more useless even than knowledge of the chemical
composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.
10
Future inrtocuousness of metaphysics. - As soon as the origin of religion,
art and morality is so described that it can be perfectly understood without the
postulation of metaphysical interference at the commencement or in the
course of their progress, the greater part of our interest in the purely
theoretical problem of the 'thing in itself and 'appearance' ceases to exist. For
with religion, art and morality we do not touch upon the 'nature of the world
in itself; we are in the realm of ideas, no 'intuition' can take us any further.
The question of how our conception of the world could differ so widely from
the disclosed nature of the world will with perfect equanimity be relinquished
to the physiology and history of the evolution of organisms and concepts.
11
Language as putative science. - The significance of language for the
evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate
world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing
upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master
of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and
names of things as in aetemae veritates he has appropriated to himself that
pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in
language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was
not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he
conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of
things; language is, in fact, the first stage of the occupation with science.
Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the
mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later - only now - it
dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a
tremendous error.* Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which
depends on this belief, to be again put back. - Logic too depends on
presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for
example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same
thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into
existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the
real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have
come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in
nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.
12
Dream and culture. - The function of the brain that sleep encroaches
upon most is the memory: not that it ceases altogether - but it is reduced to a
condition of imperfection such as in the primeval ages of mankind may have
been normal by day and in waking. Confused and capricious as it is,
* Nietzsche had described this error in detail in Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-Moral
Sense (i873)-
16
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
it continually confuses one thing with another on the basis of the most
fleeting similarities: but it was with the same confusion and capriciousness
that the peoples composed their mythologies, and even today travellers
observe how much the savage is inclined to forgetfulness, how his mind
begins to reel and stumble after a brief exertion of the memory and he utters
lies and nonsense out of mere enervation. But in dreams we all resemble this
savage; failure to recognize correctly and erroneously supposing one thing to
be the same as another is the ground of the false conclusions of which we are
guilty in dreams; so that, when we clearly recall a dream, we are appalled to
discover so much folly in ourselves. - The perfect clarity of all the images we
see in dreams which is the precondition of our unquestioning belief in their
reality again reminds us of conditions pertaining to earlier mankind, in whom
hallucination was extraordinarily common and sometimes seized hold on
whole communities, whole peoples at the same time. Thus: in sleep and
dreams we repeat once again the curriculum of earlier mankind.*
*3
Logic of the dream. - In sleep our nervous system is continually agitated
by a multiplicity of inner events, almost all our organs are active, our blood
circulates vigorously, the position of the sleeper presses on individual limbs,
his bedcovers influence his sensibilities in various ways, his stomach digests
and its motions disturb other organs, his intestines are active, the position of
his head involves unusual muscular contortions, his feet, unshod and not
pressing against the floor, produce an unfamiliar feeling, as does the
difference in the way his whole body is clad - all this, through its unusualness
and to a differing degree each day, excites the entire system up to the
functioning of the brain; and so there are a hundred occasions for the mind to
be involved in puzzlement and to look for grounds for this excitation: the
dream is the seeking and positing of the causes of this excitement of the
sensibilities, that is to say the supposed causes. If, for example, you tie two
straps about your feet you may well dream that your feet are coiled round by
snakes: this is first a hypothesis, then a belief, with an accompanying pictorial
representation and the supposition: 'these snakes must be the causa of those
sensations that I, the sleeper, feel' - thus the sleeper's mind judges. The
immediate past he has thus inferred becomes through his aroused imagination
the present to him. Everyone knows from experience how quickly a dreamer
entwines with his dream a sound that strongly impinges upon him from
without, the ringing of bells or the firing of cannon, for example; that is to
say, he accounts for the sound in terms of the dream, so that he believes he
experiences the cause of the sound first, then the sound itself. - But how does
it come about that the dreamer's mind always blunders like this,
* In The Interpretation of Dreams, ch. VII (B), Freud writes: 'We can guess how much to
the point is Nietzsche's assertion that in dreams "some primeval relic of humanity is at work which
we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path"; and we may expect that the analysis of
dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man's archaic heritage, of what is psychologically innate in
him.'
17
when the same mind is accustomed to be so sober, cautious and so
sceptical with regard to hypotheses while it is awake? - so that the first
plausible hypothesis for explaining a sensation that occurs to him is at once
accepted as the truth? (For in dreams we believe in the dream as though it
were reality, that is to say we regard our hypothesis as completely proved.) -
In my opinion, the conclusions man still draws in dreams to the present day
for many millennia mankind also drew when awake: the first causa that
entered the mind as an explanation of anything that required explaining
satisfied it and was accounted truth. (According to travellers' tales savages
still do this today.) In the dream this piece of primeval humanity continues to
exercise itself, for it is the basis upon which higher rationality evolved and
continues to evolve in every human being: the dream takes us back again to
remote stages of human culture and provides us with a means of
understanding them better. We now find dream-thinking3 so easy because it
is in precisely this imaginative and agreeable form of explanation by means
of the first plausible idea that strikes us that we have been so well drilled over
such enormous periods of human evolution. To this extent the dream is a
relaxation for the brain, which has had enough of the strenuous demands in
the way of thinking such as are imposed by our higher culture during the day.
- A related occurrence which stands as portal and entrance-hall of the dream
can actually be observed in full wakefulness. If we close our eyes, the brain
produces a host of light-impressions and colours, probably as a kind of after-
play and echo of those effects of light which crowd in upon it during the day.
Now, however, the reason (in alliance with the imagination) at once
assembles these in themselves formless colour-impressions into definite
figures, shapes, landscapes, moving groups. What is actually occurring is
again a kind of inferring of the cause from the effect; the mind asks where
these light-impressions and colours come from and supposes these shapes
and figures are their causes: it regards them as occasioning these lights and
colours because, by day and with eyes open, it is accustomed to finding that
every colour, every light-impression does in fact have a cause that occasions
it. Here, then, the imagination is continually providing the mind with images
borrowed from the sight-impressions of the day, and this is precisely the way
in which it fashions the dream- fantasy: - that is to say, the supposed cause is
inferred from the effect and introduced after the effect: and all with
extraordinary rapidity, so that, as with a conjurer, a confusion of judgement
can here arise and successive events appear as simultaneous events or even
with the order of their occurrence reversed. - These facts show us how late
more rigorous logical thinking, a clear perception of the nature of cause and
effect, must have been evolved if our faculties of reason and understanding
even now involuntarily grasp at those primitive forms of conclusion and
inference and we still live about half of our life in this condition. - The poet
and the artist, too, foists upon his moods and states of mind causes which are
cer-
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
tainly not the true ones; to this extent he recalls an earlier humanity and
can aid us to an understanding of it.
H

3 dream-thinking: Traumdenken
Sympathetic resonance. - All stronger moods bring with them a
sympathetic resonance on the part of related sensations and moods: they as it
were root up the memory. Something in us is provoked to recollection and
becomes aware of similar states and their origins. Thus there come to be
constructed habitual rapid connections between feelings and thoughts which,
if they succeed one another with lightning speed, are in the end no longer
experienced as complexes but as unities. It is in this sense that one speaks of
the moral feelings, of the religious feelings, as though these were simple
unities: in truth, however, they are rivers with a hundred tributaries and
sources. Here too, as so often, the unity of the word is no guarantee of the
unity of the thing.
No inner and outer in the world. - As Democritus* transferred the
concepts Above and Below to infinite space, where they make no sense, so
philosophers in general transfer the concept 'inner and outer' to the essence
and phenomena of the world; they believe that profound feelings take one
deep into the interior, close to the heart of nature. But such feelings are
profound only insofar as when they occur certain complex groups of thoughts
which we call profound are, scarcely perceptibly, regularly aroused with
them; a feeling is profound because we regard the thoughts that accompany it
as profound. But a profound thought can nonetheless be very distant from the
truth, as, for example, every metaphysical thought is; if one deducts from the
profound feeling the element of thought mixed in with it, what remains is the
strong feeling, and this has nothing to do with knowledge as such, just as
strong belief demonstrates only its strength, not the truth of that which is
believed.
16
Appearance and thing in itself. - Philosophers are accustomed to station
themselves before life and experience - before that which they call the world
of appearance - as before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all
and unchangeably depicts the same scene: this scene, they believe, has to be
correctly interpreted, so as to draw a conclusion as to the nature of the being
that produced the picture: that is to say, as to the nature of the thing in itself,
which it is customary to regard as the sufficient reasont for the existence of
the world of appearance. As against this, more rigorous logicians, having
clearly identified the concept of the metaphysical as that of the
unconditioned, consequently also unconditioning, have disputed any
connection between the unconditioned (the metaphysical world) and the
world we know: so that what appears in
* Democritus (c. 460 to c. 370 BQ: Greek philosopher, one of the latest of the so-called 'pre-
Socratic' philosophers
t The principle of sufficient reason's various formulations include 'every existent has a
ground' and 'every event has a cause'; Schopenhauer discussed the history and justification of the
principle in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813).
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
appearance is precisely not the thing in itself, and no conclusion can be
drawn from the former as to the nature of the latter. Both parties, however,
overlook the possibility that this painting - that which we humans call life
and experience - has gradually become, is indeed still fully in course of
becoming, and should thus not be regarded as a fixed object on the basis of
which a conclusion as to the nature of its originator (the sufficient reason)
may either be drawn or pronounced undrawable. Because we have for
millennia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked
upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad
habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvellously
variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired colour - but we
have been the colourists: it is the human intellect that has made appearance
appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things. Late, very
late - it has reflected on all this: and now the world of experience and the
thing in itself seem to it so extraordinarily different from one another and
divided apart that it rejects the idea that the nature of one can be inferred
from the nature of the other - or invites us in a chillingly mysterious fashion
to abandon our intellect, our personal will: so as to attain to the real by
becoming real oneself. Others again have assembled all the characteristic
tTaits of our world of appearance - that is to say, the idea of the world spun
out of intellectual errors we have inherited - and, instead of indicting the
intellect as the guilty party, have charged the essence of things with being the
cause of the very uncanny character this world in fact possesses and have
preached redemption from being. - With all these conceptions the steady and
laborious process of science, which will one day celebrate its greatest
triumph in a history of the genesis of thought, will in the end decisively have
done; for the outcome of this history may well be the conclusion: That which
we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies which
have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of
the overall evolution of the organic being, and are now inherited by us as the
accumulated treasure of the entire past - as treasure: for the value of our
humanity depends upon it. Rigorous science is capable of detaching us from
this ideational world only to a limited extent - and more is certainly not to be
desired - inasmuch as it is incapable of making any essential inroad into the
power of habits of feeling acquired in primeval times: but it can, quite
gradually and step by step, illuminate the history of the genesis of this world
as idea - and, for brief periods at any rate, lift us up out of the entire
proceeding. Perhaps we shall then recognize that the thing in itself is worthy
of Homeric laughter: that it appeared to be so much, indeed everything, and
is actually empty, that is to say empty of significance.
17
Metaphysical explanations. - The young person values metaphysical
explanations because they reveal to him something in the highest degree
significant in things he found unpleasant or contemptible; and if he is
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
discontented with himself this feeling is alleviated when he comes to
recognize the innermost enigma or misery of the universe in that which he so
much condemns in himself. To feel more irresponsible and at the same time
to find things more interesting - that is the twofold benefit for which he
believes he has metaphysics to thank. Later on, to be sure, he acquires
mistrust of the whole metaphysical mode of explanation; then perhaps he sees
that the effects he has experienced are to be attained equally well and more
scientifically by another route; that physical and historical explanations
produce that feeling of irresponsibility at least as well, and that interest in life
and its problems is perhaps enflamed even more by
them.
18
Fundamental questions of metaphysics. - When one day the history of
the genesis of thought comes to be written, the following sentence by a
distinguished logician will also stand revealed in a new light: The primary
universal law of the knowing subject consists in the inner necessity of
recognizing every object in itself as being in its own essence something
identical with itself, thus self-existent and at bottom always the same and
unchanging, in short as a substance'. This law, too, which is here called
'primary', evolved: one day it will be shown how gradually, in the lower
organisms, this tendency comes into being: how the purblind mole's eyes of
this organization at first never see anything but the same thing; how
then, when the various pleasurable and unpleasurable stimuli
become more noticeable, various different substances are gradually
distinguished, but each of them with one attribute, that is to say a single
relationship with such an organism. - The first stage of the logical is the
judgement: and the essence of the judgement consists, according to the best
logicians, in belief. At the bottom of all belief there lies the sensation of the
pleasurable or painful in respect to the subject experiencing the sensation. A
new, third sensation as a product of two preceding single sensations is the
judgement in its lowest form. - In our primary condition, all that interests us
organic beings in any thing is its relationship to us in respect of pleasure and
pain. Between the moments in which we become conscious of this
relationship, the states of awareness of sensation, lie those of repose, of non-
sensation: then the world and every thing is devoid of interest to us, we notice
no alteration in it (just as now anyone absorbed with interest in something
will still not notice someone walking by him). To the plants all things are
usually in repose, eternal, every thing identical with itself. It is from the
period of the lower organisms that man has inherited the belief that there are
identical things (only knowledge educated in the highest scientificality
contradicts this proposition). It may even be that the original belief of
everything organic was from the very beginning that all the rest of the world
is one and unmoving. - What lies farthest from this primeval stage of the
logical is the notion of causality: even now, indeed, we believe at bottom that
all sensations and actions are acts of free will; when the sentient individuum
21
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
observes itself, it regards every sensation, every change, as something
isolated, that is to say unconditioned, disconnected: it emerges out of us
independently of anything earlier or later. We are hungry, but originally we
do not think that the organism wants to sustain itself; this feeling seems to be
asserting itself without cause or purpose, it isolates itself and considers itself
willful. Thus: belief in freedom of will is a primary error committed by
everything organic, as old as the impulse to the logical itself; belief in
unconditioned substances and in identical things is likewise a primary,
ancient error committed by everything organic. Insofar, however, as all
metaphysics has had principally to do with substance and freedom of will,
one may designate it the science that treats of the fundamental errors of
mankind - but does so as though they were fundamental truths.
19
Number. - The invention of the laws of numbers was made on the basis
of the error, dominant even from the earliest times, that there are identical
things (but in fact nothing is identical with anything else); at least that there
are things (but there is no 'thing'). The assumption of plurality always
presupposes the existence of something that occurs more than once: but
precisely here error already holds sway, here already we are fabricating
beings, unities which do not exist. - Our sensations of space and time are
false, for tested consistently they lead to logical contradictions. The
establishment of conclusions in science always unavoidably involves us in
calculating with certain false magnitudes: but because these magnitudes are at
least constant, as for example are our sensations of time and space, the
conclusions of science acquire a complete rigorousness and certainty in their
coherence with one another; one can build on them - up to that final stage at
which our erroneous basic assumptions, those constant errors, come to be
incompatible with our conclusions, for example in the theory of atoms. Here
we continue to feel ourselves compelled to assume the existence of a 'thing'
or material 'substratum' which is moved, while the whole procedure of
science has pursued the task of resolving everything thing-like (material) in
motions: here too our sensations divide that which moves from that which is
moved, and we cannot get out of this circle because our belief in the existence
of things has been tied up with our being from time immemorial. - When
Kant says 'the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes
them to nature', this is wholly true with regard to the concept of nature which
we are obliged to attach to nature (nature = world as idea, that is as error), but
which is the summation of a host of errors of the understanding. - To a world
which is not our idea the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are
valid only in the human world.
20
A few steps back. - One, certainly very high level of culture has been
attained when a man emerges from superstitious and religious concepts and
fears and no longer believes in angels, for example, or in original sin.
22
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
and has ceased to speak of the salvation of souls: if he is at this level of
liberation he now has, with the greatest exertion of mind, to overcome
metaphysics. Then, however, he needs to take a retrograde step: he has to
grasp the historical justification that resides in such ideas, likewise the
psychological; he has to recognize that they have been most responsible for
the advancement of mankind and that without such a retrograde step he will
deprive himself of the best that mankind has hitherto produced. - In regard to
philosophical metaphysics, I see more and more who are making for the
negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but still few who are
taking a few steps back; for one may well want to look out over the topmost
rung of the ladder, but one ought not to want to stand on it. The most
enlightened get only as far as liberating themselves from metaphysics and
looking back on it from above: whereas here too, as in the hippodrome, at the
end of the track it is necessary to turn the corner.
21
Probable victory of scepticism. - Let us for once accept the validity of
the sceptical point of departure: if there were no other, metaphysical world
and all explanations of the only world known to us drawn from metaphysics
were useless to us, in what light would we then regard men and things? This
question can be thought through, and it is valuable to do so, even if we do for
once ignore the question whether the existence of anything metaphysical has
been scientifically demonstrated by Kant and Schopenhauer. For the
historical probability is that one day mankind will very possibly become in
general and on the whole sceptical in this matter; thus the question becomes:
what shape will human society then assume under the influence of such an
attitude of mind? Perhaps the scientific demonstration of the existence of any
kind of metaphysical world is already so difficult that mankind will never
again be free of a mistrust of it. And if one has a mistrust of metaphysics the
results are by and large the same as if it had been directly refuted and one no
longer had the right to believe in it. The historical question in regard to an
unmetaphysical attitude of mind on the part of mankind remains the same in
both cases.
22
Disbelief in the 'monumentum aere perennius'. * - An essential
disadvantage which the cessation of the metaphysical outlook brings with it
lies in the fact that the attention of the individual is too firmly fixed on his
own brief span of life and receives no stronger impulse to work at the
construction of enduring institutions intended to last for centuries; he wants to
pluck the fruit himself from the tree he plants, and he is therefore no longer
interested in planting those trees which demand constant tending for a century
and are intended to provide shade for long successions of generations. For the
metaphysical outlook bestows the belief that it offers the last, ultimate
foundation upon which the whole future of mankind is then invited to
establish and construct itself; the individual is promoting
* 'monumentum aere perenniusa memorial longer lasting than bronze (Horace)
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
his salvation when, for example, he founds a church or a convent, he
thinks it will be accounted to his credit and rewarded in the eternal future life
of his soul, it is a contribution to the eternal salvation of the soul. - Can
science, too, awaken such faith in its conclusions? The fact is that science
needs doubt and distrust for its closest allies; nonetheless, the sum of
unimpeachable truths - truths, that is, which have survived all the assaults of
scepticism and disintegration - can in time become so great (in the dietetics of
health, for example) that on the basis of them one may resolve to embark on
'everlasting' works. In the meanwhile, the contrast between our agitated
ephemeral existence and the slow-breathing repose of metaphysical ages is
still too strong, because the two ages are still too close together; the
individual human being himself now runs through far too many inner and
outer evolutions for him to venture to establish himself securely and once and
for all even for so short a span as his own lifetime. A completely modern man
who wants, for example, to build himself a house has at the same time the
feeling he is proposing to immure himself alive in a mausoleum.
23
Age of comparison. - The less men are bound by tradition, the greater is
the fermentation of motivations within them, and the greater in consequence
their outward restlessness, their mingling together with one another, the
polyphony of their endeavours. Who is there who now still feels a strong
compulsion to attach himself and his posterity to a particular place? Who is
there who still feels any strong attachment at all? Just as in the arts all the
genres are imitated side by side, so are all the stages and genres of morality,
custom, culture. - Such an age acquires its significance through the fact that
in it the various different philosophies of life, customs, cultures can be
compared and experienced side by side; which in earlier ages, when, just as
all artistic genres were attached to a particular place and time, so every
culture still enjoyed only a localized domination, was not possible. Now an
enhanced aesthetic sensibility will come to a definitive decision between all
these forms offering themselves for comparison; most of them - namely all
those rejected by this sensibility - it will allow to die out. There is likewise
now taking place a selecting out among the forms and customs of higher
morality whose objective can only be the elimination of the lower moralities.
This is the age of comparison! It is the source of its pride - but, as is only
reasonable, also of its suffering. Let us not be afraid of this suffering! Let us
rather confront the task which the age sets us as boldly as we can: and then
posterity will bless us for it - a posterity that will know itself to be as much
beyond the self-enclosed original national cultures as it is beyond the culture
of comparison, but will look back upon both species of culture as upon
venerable antiquities.
24
Possibility of progress. - When a scholar of the old culture swears to
have nothing more to do with people who believe in progress he is right. For
the old culture has its goods and greatness behind it and history compels
24
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
one to admit that it can never be fresh again; one needs to be intolerably
stupid or fanatical to deny this. But men are capable of consciously resolving
to evolve themselves to a new culture, whereas formerly they did so
unconsciously and fortuitously; they can now create better conditions for the
propagation of men and for their nutrition, education and instruction, manage
the earth as a whole economically, balance and employ the powers of men in
general. This new, conscious culture destroys the old, which viewed as a
whole has led an unconscious animal- and plant-life; it also destroys mistrust
of progress - it is possible. It would, of course, be rash and almost
nonsensical to believe that progress must necessarily follow; but how could it
be denied that progress is possible? On the other hand, progress in the sense
and along the paths of the old culture is not even thinkable. If romantic
fantasizings still do designate their goals (e.g. self-contained original national
cultures) as 'progress', they nonetheless borrow their image of it from the
past: in this domain their thinking and imagining lacks all originality.
25
Private and public morality. - Since the belief has ceased that a God
broadly directs the destinies of the world and that, all the apparent twists and
turns in its path notwithstanding, is leading mankind gloriously upward, man
has to set himself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth. The former
morality, namely Kant's, demanded of the individual actions which one
desired of all men: that was a very naive thing; as if everyone knew without
further ado what mode of action would benefit the whole of mankind, that is,
what actions at all are desirable; it is a theory like that of free trade,
presupposing that universal harmony must result of itself in accordance with
innate laws of progress. Perhaps some future survey of the requirements of
mankind will show that it is absolutely not desirable that all men should act
in the same way, but rather that in the interest of ecumenical goals whole
tracts of mankind ought to have special, perhaps under certain circumstances
even evil tasks imposed upon them. - In any event, if mankind is not to
destroy itself through such conscious universal rule, it must first of all attain
to a hitherto altogether unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of
culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the
tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century.
26
Reaction as progress. - Sometimes there appear blunt and forceful
spirits capable of exciting great enthusiasm whose development is
nonetheless retarded, so that they conjure up again an earlier phase of
mankind: they serve to prove that the modern tendencies against which they
act are not yet strong enough, that there is something lacking in them:
otherwise the latter would be able to offer better resistance to these conjurers.
Thus Luther's Reformation, for example, witnesses that in his century all the
impulses to freedom of spirit were still uncertain, tender and youthful;
science was as yet unable to raise its head. The whole Renaissance,
25
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
indeed, seems like an early spring almost snowed away again. But in our
century, too, Schopenhauer's metaphysics demonstrates that even now the
scientific spirit is not yet sufficiently strong: so that, although all the dogmas
of Christianity have long since been demolished, the whole medieval
Christian conception of the world and of the nature of man could in
Schopenhauer's teaching celebrate a resurrection. Much science resounds in
his teaching, but what dominates it is not science but the old familiar
'metaphysical need'. One of the greatest, indeed quite invaluable advantages
we derive from Schopenhauer is that through him our sensibilities are for a
time compelled to return to older ways of contemplating the world and
mankind that once held sway which we would otherwise have no easy access
to. The gain for historical justice is very great: 1 believe that no one would
find it easy to do justice to Christianity and its Asiatic relations without
Schopenhauer's assistance: on the basis of present-day Christianity alone it
would be quite impossible. Only after this great triumph of justice, only after
we have corrected the mode of historical interpretation introduced by the Age
of Enlightenment on so essential a point as this, may we bear the banner of
the Enlightenment - the banner bearing the three names Petrach,* Erasmus, t
Voltaire - further onward. Out of reaction we have created progress.
27
Substitute for religion. - One believes one is commending a philosophy
when one presents it as a popular substitute for religion. The economy of the
spirit does indeed occasionally require transitional orders of ideas; thus the
passage from religion to a scientific mode of thought is a violent and perilous
leap, something to be advised against. To that extent this recommendation of
a philosophy is justified. But in the end one also has to understand that the
needs which religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy
are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for
example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over one's
inner depravity and care for one's salvation - all conceptions originating in
nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration.
A philosophy can be employed either to satisfy such needs or to set them
aside; for they are acquired, time-bound needs resting on presuppositions
that contradict those of science. To effect a transition here, to relieve the
heart overladen with feeling, it is much more useful to employ art; for those
conceptions we have spoken of will be nourished far less by art than they will
be by a metaphysical philosophy. From art it will then be easier to go over to
a truly liberating philosophical science.
28
Words in bad odour. - Away with those overused words optimism and
pessimism! We have had enough of them. Occasion for using them is
growing less day by day; it is only idle chatterers who still have such an
* Petrach: Francesco Petrach (1304-74): Italian poet and scholar
t Erasmus: Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536): Dutch humanist
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
indispensable need of them. For why in the world should anyone want to
be an optimist if he does not have to defend a God who has to have created
the best of worlds if he himself is goodness and perfection - but what thinker
still has need of the hypothesis of a God? - But any occasion for a pessimistic
creed is likewise lacking, unless one has an interest in provoking the
advocates of God, the theologians or the theologizing philosophers, and
forcefully asserting the opposite point of view: that evil reigns, that there
exists more pain than pleasure, that the world is an artifice, the apparition of
an evil will to live. But who still bothers about theologians - except other
theologians? - Disregarding theology and opposition to theology, it is quite
obvious that the world is neither good nor evil, let alone the best of all or the
worst of all worlds, and that these concepts 'good' and 'evil' possess meaning
only when applied to men, and perhaps even here are, as they are usually
employed, unjustified: in any event, we must cast off both that conception of
the world that inveighs against it and that which glorifies it.
29
Drunk with the odour of blossoms. - The ship of mankind has, one
believes, a deeper and deeper draught the more heavily it is laden; one
believes that the more profoundly a man thinks, the more tenderly he feels,
the more highly he rates himself, the greater the distance grows between him
and the other animals - the more he appears as the genius among animals -
the closer he will get to the true nature of the world and to a knowledge of it:
this he does in fact do through science, but he thinks he does so even more
through his arts and religions. These are, to be sure, a blossom of the world,
but they are certainly not closer to the roots of the world than the stem is:
they provide us with no better understanding of the nature of things at all,
although almost everyone believes they do. It is error that has made mankind
so profound, tender, inventive as to produce such a flower as the arts and
religions. Pure knowledge would have been incapable of it. Anyone who
unveiled to us the nature of the world would produce for all of us the most
unpleasant disappointment. It is not the world as thing in itself, it is the world
as idea (as error) that is so full of significance, profound, marvellous, and
bearing in its womb all happiness and unhappiness. This consequence leads
to a philosophy of logical world-denial: which can, however, be united with
a practical world- affirmation just as easily as with its opposite.
30
Bad habits in drawing conclusions. - The commonest erroneous
conclusions drawn by mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a
right to. Here the conclusion is from the capacity to live to the fitness to live,
from the fitness to live to the right to live. Then: an opinion makes happy,
therefore it is a true opinion, its effect is good, therefore it itself is good and
true. Here the effect is accorded the predicate beneficent, good, in the sense
of useful, and then the cause is furnished with the same predicate good, but
here in the sense of the logically valid. The reverse of these
27
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
propositions is: a thing cannot prevail, preserve itself, therefore it is
wrong; an opinion causes pain and agitation, therefore it is false. The free
spirit, who is all too often acquainted with the erroneousness of this kind of
reasoning and has to suffer from its consequences, often succumbs to the
temptation to draw the opposite conclusions, which are of course in general
equally erroneous: a thing cannot prevail, therefore it is good; an opinion
causes pain and distress, therefore it is true.
3i
The illogical necessary. - Among the things that can reduce a thinker to
despair is the knowledge that the illogical is a necessity for mankind, and that
much good proceeds from the illogical. It is implanted so firmly in the
passions, in language, in art, in religion, and in general in everything that
lends value to life, that one cannot pull it out of these fair things without
mortally injuring them. Only very naive people are capable of believing that
the nature of man could be transformed into a purely logical one; but if there
should be degrees of approximation to this objective, what would not have to
be lost if this course were taken! Even the most rational man from time to
time needs to recover nature, that is to say his illogical original relationship
with all things.
3*
Injustice necessary. - All judgements as to the value of life have evolved
illogically and are therefore unjust. The falsity of human judgement derives
firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely very
incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the
basis of this material, and thirdly bom the fact that every individual piece of
this material is in turn the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with
absolute necessity. Our experience of another person, for example, no matter
how close he stands to us, can never be complete, so that we would have a
logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature and
are bound to be. Finally, the standard by which we measure, our own being,
is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations,
and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly
to assess the relation between ourself and anything else whatever. Perhaps it
would follow from all this that one ought not to judge at all; if only it were
possible to live without evaluating, without having aversions and partialities!
- for all aversion is dependent on an evaluation, likewise all partiality. A
drive to something or away from something divorced from a feeling one is
desiring the beneficial or avoiding the harmful, a drive without some kind of
knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective, does not exist in man. We
are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can
recognize this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of
existence.
33
Error regarding life necessary to life. - Every belief in the value and
dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that
empa-
28
OF FI RST AND LAST THI NGS
thy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly
developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond
themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off
portions of it. If one knows how to keep the exceptions principally in view, I
mean the greatly gifted and pure of soul, takes their production for the goal
of world-evolution and rejoices in the effects they in turn produce, one may
believe in the value of life, because then one is overlooking all other men:
thinking falsely, that is to say. And likewise if, though one does keep in view
all mankind, one accords validity only to one species of drives, the less
egoistical, and justifies them in face of all the others, then again one can hope
for something of mankind as a whole and to this extent believe in the value
of life: thus, in this case too, through falsity of thinking. Whichever of these
attitudes one adopts, however, one is by adopting it an exception among men.
The great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe
in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists
for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do:
everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim
shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on
the fact that he regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great
lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way
into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes
and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them
would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing
and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would
collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and
the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any
support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has
before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own
eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not
merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the
individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. -
But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always
know how to console themselves.
34
In mitigation. - But will our philosophy not thus become a tragedy? Will
truth not become inimical to life, to the better man? A question seems to lie
heavily on our tongue and yet refuses to be uttered: whether one could
consciously reside in untruth? or, if one were obliged to, whether death
would not be preferable? For there is no longer any 'ought'; for morality,
insofar as it was an 'ought', has been just as much annihilated by our mode of
thinking as has religion. Knowledge can allow as motives only pleasure and
pain, utility and injury: but how will these motives come to terms with the
sense for truth? For they too are in contact with errors (insofar as inclination
and aversion and their very unjust assessments
29
are, as we said, the essential determinants of pleasure and pain). The
whole of human life is sunk deeply in untruth; the individual cannot draw it
up out of this well without thereby growing profoundly disillusioned about
his own past, without finding his present motives, such as that of honour,
absurd, and pouring mockery and contempt on the passions which reach out
to the future and promise happiness in it. Is it true, is all that remains a mode
of thought whose outcome on a personal level is despair and on a theoretical
level a philosophy of destruction? -1 believe that the nature of the after-effect
of knowledge is determined by a man's temperament: in addition to the after-
effect described I could just as easily imagine a different one, quite possible
in individual instances, by virtue of which a life could arise much simpler
and emotionally cleaner than our present life is; so that, though the old
motives of violent desire produced by inherited habit would still possess their
strength, they would gradually grow weaker under the influence of purifying
knowledge. In the end one would live among men and with oneself as in
nature, without praising, blaming, contending, gazing contentedly, as though
at a spectacle, upon many things for which one formerly felt only fear. One
would be free of emphasis, and no longer prodded by the idea that one is
only nature or more than nature. For this to happen one would, to be sure,
have to possess the requisite temperament, as has already been said: a firm,
mild and at bottom cheerful soul, a temper that does not need to be on its
guard against malice or sudden outbursts and in whose utterances there is
nothing of snarling and sullenness - those familiar tedious qualities of old
dogs and men who have long been kept on the leash. A man from whom the
ordinary fetters of life have fallen to such an extent that he continues to live
only so as to know better must, rather, without envy or vexation be able to
forgo much, indeed almost everything upon which other men place value;
that free, fearless hovering over men, customs, laws and the traditional
evaluations of things must suffice him as the condition he considers most
desirable. He is happy to communicate his joy in this condition, and he has,
perhaps, nothing else to communicate - which involves, to be sure, one more
privation and renunciation. If more is nonetheless desired of him, he will,
with a benevolent shake of the head, point to his brother, the free man of
action, and perhaps not conceal a certain mockery in doing so: for of his
'freedom' there is a curious tale still to be told.
3
2
ON THE HISTORY OF THE MORAL SENSATIONS
35
Advantages of psychological observation. - That reflection on the
human, all too human - or, as the learned expression has it: psychological
observation - is among the expedients by means of which one can alleviate
the burden of living, that practice in this art lends presence of mind in
difficult situations and entertainment in tedious circumstances, that one can,
indeed, pluck useful maxims from the thorniest and most disagreeable
stretches of one's own life and thereby feel a little better: that was believed,
that was known - in former centuries. Why has it been forgotten by this
century, in which, at least in Germany, indeed in all Europe, poverty in
psychological observation is apparent through a hundred signs? Not
especially in novels, novellas or philosophical writings - these are the work
of exceptional men; it is already more evident, however, in assessments
made of public events and personalities: but the art of psychological
dissection and computation is lacking above all in the social life of all
classes, in which, while there may be much talk about people, there is none
at all about man. But why is the richest and most inoffensive material for
conversation neglected in this way? Why does one not even read the great
masters of the psychological maxim any more? - for it can be said without
any exaggeration that it is hard to find any educated person in Europe who
has read Larochefoucauld* or those related to him in style and spirit, and
very much harder to find one who has read them and does not revile them.
Even this uncommon reader, however, will probably derive much less
pleasure from them than the form they employ ought to give him; for even
the most refined head is not in a position to appreciate the art of polishing
maxims as it ought to be appreciated if he himself is not drawn to it and has
not competed in it. In the absence of such practical instruction, one takes the
creation and shaping of maxims to be easier than it is, one does not feel
intensely enough the charm and sense of achievement in it. That is why
present-day readers of maxims find relatively little to satisfy them, indeed
hardly more than a mouthful of pleasantries; so that it is with them as it
usually is with observers of cameos: who praise because they cannot love,
and are quick to admire but even quicker to go away.
36
Objection. - Or is there a debit side to this proposition that psychological
* Larochefoucauld: Francois, Due de Larochefoucauld (1613-80): French writer and
aphorist.
31
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
observation is one of the means of bestowing charm on existence and
relieving and mollifying it? Ought one not to have been sufficiently
convinced of the unpleasant consequences of this art to want now deliberately
to direct the eyes of anyone in process of formation away from it? A certain
blind faith in the goodness of human nature, an innate aversion to the
dissection of human actions, a kind of modesty in regard to the nakedness of
the soul may indeed be more desirable things for the total happiness of an
individual than that psychological perspicacity which may be helpful in
particular cases; and perhaps belief in goodness, in virtuous men and actions,
in an abundance of impersonal benevolence in the world has in fact made men
better, inasmuch as it has made them less mistrustful. If one enthusiastically
imitates Plutarch's* heroes and feels a repugnance towards suspiciously
probing the motives of their actions, one may not be serving truth but one
may well be furthering the wellbeing of human society: psychological error
and insensibility in this domain in general promotes humanity, while
knowledge of truth perhaps gains for us one more hypothesis such as
Larochefoucauld placed before the first edition of his Sentences et maximes
morales: Ce que le monde nomme vertu n'est dordinaire quun fantdme
formi par nos passions a qui on donne un nom honnite pour faire impunement
ce quon veut.'i Larochefoucauld and the other French masters of psychical
examination (to whom there has lately been added a German, the author of the
Psychological Observations)$ are like skilful marksmen who again and again
hit the bullseye - but it is the bullseye of human nature. Their skill evokes
amazement, but in the end a spectator inspired not by the spirit of science but
that of philanthropy execrates an art that appears to implant a sense of
suspicion and reductionism into the souls of men.
37
Nevertheless. - However credit and debit balance may stand: at its
present state as a specific individual science the awakening of moral
observation has become necessary, and mankind can no longer be spared the
cruel sight of the moral dissecting table and its knives and forceps. For here
there rules that science which asks after the origin and history of the so- called
moral sensations and which as it progresses has to pose and solve the
sociological problems entangled with them: - the older philosophy knows
nothing of the latter and has, with paltry evasions, always avoided
investigation of the origin and history of the moral sensations. With what
consequences is now very clearly apparent, since it has been demonstrated in
many instances how the errors of the'greatest philosophers usually have their
point of departure in a false explanation of certain human actions and
sensations; how on the basis of an erroneous
* Plutarch: Greek biographer and essayist (c. 46 to c. 127); his Lives contain
characterizations of eminent Greeks and Romans.
t 'Ce que. .. qu'on veutThat which the world calls virtue is usually nothing but a phantom
formed by our passions to which we give an honest name so as to do what we wish with impunity.
t The author of the Psychological Observations: Paul R6e, with whom Nietzsche was closely
acquainted (the book appeared in 187;).
32
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
analysis, for example that of the so-called unegoistic actions, a false
ethics is erected, religion and mythological monsters are then in turn called
upon to buttress it, and the shadow of these dismal spirits in the end falls
across even physics and the entire perception of the world. If, however, it is
certain that superficiality in psychological observation has laid the most
dangerous traps for human judgement and reasoning and continues to lay
them, so now what is required is that perseverance in labour that does not
weary of heaping stone upon stone, brick upon brick, what is required is the
abstemious courage not to be ashamed of such modest labour and to defy
every attempt to disparage it. It is true that countless individual observations
regarding the human and all too human have first been discovered and
expressed in circles of society accustomed to sacrifice, not to scientific
knowledge, but to intellectual coquetry; and the odour of that ancient home of
the moral maxim - a very seductive odour - has continued to adhere almost
inextricably to the whole genre: so that on account of it the scientific man
involuntarily evidences a certain distrust of this genre and of its seriousness.
But it suffices to point to the consequences: for already it is becoming
apparent what results of the most serious description are emerging from the
ground of psychological observation. For what is the principle which one of
the boldest and coldest of thinkers, the author of the book On the Origin of the
Moral Sensations* arrived at by virtue of his incisive and penetrating analyses
of human action? 'Moral man', he says, 'stands no closer to the intelligible
(metaphysical) world than does physical man'. This proposition, hardened and
sharpened beneath the hammer-blow of historical knowledge, may perhaps at
some future time serve as the axe which is laid at the root of the 'metaphysical
need' of man - whether as more of a blessing than a curse to the general
wellbeing, who can say? - but in any event as a proposition with the
weightiest consequences; at once fruitful and fearful and looking out upon the
world with that Janus-face possessed by all great perceptions.
38
To what extent useful. - Thus: whether psychological observation is more
advantageous or disadvantageous to man may remain undecided; what is
certain, however, is that it is necessary, because science cannot dispense with
it. Science, however, knows no regard for final objectives, just as nature
knows nothing of it: but, as the latter occasionally brings into existence things
of the greatest appropriateness and usefulness without having willed them, so
genuine science, as the imitation of nature in concepts, will also occasionally,
indeed frequently promote the wellbeing of mankind and achieve what is
appropriate and useful - but likewise without having willed it.
He who finds the breath of such a way of thinking too wintry for him
perhaps has merely too little fire in him: if he cares to look around him,
* The author of the book On the Origin of the Moral Sensations: again Paul Ree; the book,
which is R6e's chief work, was written during 1876-7 in the house in Sorrento in which Nietzsche
was at the same time writing Human, All Too Human.
33
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
however, he will perceive illnesses that require icepacks, and people so
'compounded together' of fire and spirit they are hard put to it to find air cold
and cutting enough for them. Moreover: just as individuals and nations too
much given to seriousness have a need of frivolity, just as others too excitable
and emotional require from time to time the pressure of a heavy burden if they
are to stay healthy, ought we, the more spiritual men of an age which is
visibly becoming more and more ignited, not to seize hold on every means
there is of extinguishing and cooling, so that we can remain at least as steady,
inoffensive and moderate as we still are, and thus perhaps one day be able to
serve this age as its mirror and selfreflection? -
39
The fable of intelligible freedom.* - The principal stages in the history of
the sensations by virtue of which we make anyone accountable for his actions,
that is to say, of the moral sensations, are as follows. First of all, one calls
individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on
account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets
the origin of these designations and believes that the quality 'good' and 'evil' is
inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences: thus
committing the same error as that by which language designates the stone
itself as hard, the tree itself as green - that is to say, by taking for cause that
which is effect. Then one consigns the being good or being evil to the motives
and regards the deeds in themselves as morally ambiguous. One goes further
and accords the predicate good or evil no longer to the individual motive but
to the whole nature of a man out of whom the motive grows as the plant does
from the soil. Thus one successively makes men accountable for the effects
they produce, then for their actions, then for their motives, and finally for
their nature. Now one finally discovers that this nature, too, cannot be
accountable, inasmuch as it is altogether a necessary consequence and
assembled from the elements and influence of things past and present: that is
to say, that man can be made accountable for nothing, not for his nature, nor
for his motives, nor for his actions, nor for the effects he produces. One has
thereby attained to the knowledge that the history of the moral sensations is
the history of an error, the error of accountability, which rests on the error of
freedom of will. - Schopenhauer concluded otherwise, thus: because certain
actions bring after them a feeling of displeasure ('consciousness of guilt'),
there must exist a sense of accountability; for there would be no ground for
this feeling of displeasure if not only were all the actions of man determined
by necessity - which is in fact the case, a view also held by this philosopher -
but man himself acquired his entire nature with this same necessity - which
Schopenhauer denies. From the fact of that feeling of displeasure
Schopenhauer believes he can demonstrate a freedom which man must have
acquired somehow, not in
* Schopenhauer adhered to Kant's concept of intelligible freedom and defends it in On the
Basis of Morality, ch. 2 section 10.
34
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
respect of his actions but in respect to his nature: freedom to be thus or
thus, that is to say, not to act thus or thus. From the esse,* the sphere of
freedom and accountability, there follows in his opinion the operant - the
sphere of strict causality, necessity and unaccountability. That feeling of
displeasure appears to relate to the operari, to be sure - to that extent it is in
error - in truth, however, to the esse, which is the deed of the free will, the
basic cause of the existence of an individual: man becomes that which he
wills to become, his willing precedes his existence. - Here the erroneous
conclusion is drawn that from the fact of a feeling of displeasure there can be
inferred the justification, the rational admissibility of this feeling of
displeasure; and from this erroneous conclusion Schopenhauer arrives at his
fantastic concept of so-called intelligible freedom. But a feeling of displeasure
after a deed is absolutely not obliged to be rational; on the contrary, it cannot
be, since it rests precisely on the erroneous presupposition that that deed need
not have taken place of necessity. Thus: it is because man regards himself as
free, not because he is free, that he feels remorse and pangs of conscience. -
This feeling is, moreover, something one can disaccustom oneself to, and
many people do not feel it at all in respect of actions which evoke it in others.
It is a very changeable thing, tied to the evolution of morality and culture and
perhaps present in only a relatively brief span of world-history. - No one is
accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as
to be unjust. This also applies when the individual judges himself. The
proposition is as clear as daylight, and yet here everyone prefers to retreat
back into the shadows and untruth: from fear of the consequences.
40
The over-animal. - The beast in us wants to be lied to; morality is an
official lie told so that it shall not tear us to pieces. Without the errors that
repose in the assumptions of morality man would have remained animal. As it
is, he has taken himself for something higher and imposed sterner laws upon
himself. That is why he feels a hatred for the grades that have remained closer
to animality: which is the explanation of the contempt formerly felt for the
slave as a non-man, as a thing.
41
The unalterable character4 - That the character is unalterable is not in
the strict sense true; this favourite proposition means rather no more than that,
during the brief lifetime of a man, the effective motives are unable to scratch
deeply enough to erase the imprinted script of many millennia. If one
imagines a man of eighty-thousand years, however, one would have in him a
character totally alterable: so that an abundance of different individuals would
evolve out of him one after the other. The brevity of human life misleads us to
many erroneous assertions regarding the qualities of man.
* esse: being
t operari: action, manner of acting
| The view that character is unalterable was held insistently by Schopenhauer; see his Essay
on the Freedom of the Will, ch. 3.
35
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
42
The order of desirable things and morality. - The accepted order of rank
of desirable things, according to whether a low, higher or highest egoism
desires the one or the other, now determines whether one is moral or immoral.
To prefer a low-esteemed thing (sensual pleasure, for example) to a more
highly valued one (health, for example) counts as immoral; as does preferring
luxury to freedom. But the order of rank of desirable things is not firm and the
same at all times; if someone prefers revenge to justice, according to the
standard of an earlier culture he is moral, according to that of ours immoral.
'Immoral' therefore means that one is not yet, or not yet sufficiently sensible
of the higher, more refined, more spiritual motives which a new culture has
introduced: it designates one who is retarded, has remained behind, though
always it is only a matter of degree. - The order of rank of desirable things
itself is not erected or altered in accordance with moral considerations; but
once it has been established it then determines whether an action is moral or
immoral.
43
Cruel men as retarded men. - We have to regard men who are cruel as
stages of earlier cultures which have remained behind: the deeper formations
in the mountain of mankind which are otherwise hidden are here for once laid
open. They are retarded men whose brain has, through some chance or other
in the course of hereditary transmission, failed to develop in as sensitive and
multifarious a way as is normal. They show us what we all were, and fill us
with horror: but they themselves are as little accountable for it as a piece of
granite is for being granite. Just as certain human organs recall the stage of
evolution of the fish, so there must also be in our brain grooves and
convolutions that correspond to that cast of mind: but these grooves and
convolutions are no longer the riverbed along which the stream of our
sensibility runs.
44
Gratitude and revenge. - The reason the man of power is grateful is this.
His benefactor has, through the help he has given him, as it were laid hands
on the sphere of the man of power and intruded into it: now, by way of
requital, the man of power in turn lays hands on the sphere of his benefactor
through the act of gratitude. It is a milder form of revenge. If he did not have
the compensation of gratitude, the man of power would have appeared
unpowerful and thenceforth counted as such. That is why every community of
the good, that is to say originally the powerful, places gratitude among its first
duties. Swift suggested that men are grateful in the same degree as they are
revengeful.
45
Twofold prehistory of good and evil. - The concept good and evil has a
twofold prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who
has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually
36
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
practises requital - is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful - is called
good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad. As a good man
one belongs to the 'good', a community which has a sense of belonging
together because all the individuals in it are combined with one another
through the capacity for requital. As a bad man one belongs to the 'bad', to a
swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together.
The good are a caste, the bad a mass like grains of sand. Good.and bad is for a
long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other
hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer the
Trojan and the Greek are both good. It is not he who does us harm but he who
is contemptible who counts as bad. In the community of the good goodness is
inherited; it is impossible that a bad man could grow up out of such good soil.
If, however, one of the good should do something unworthy of the good, one
looks for excuses; one ascribes the guilt to a god, for example, by saying he
struck the good man with madness and rendered him blind. - Then in the soul
of the subjected, the powerless. Here every other man, whether he be noble or
base, counts as inimical, ruthless, cruel, cunning, ready to take advantage.
Evil is the characterizing expression for man, indeed for every living being
one supposes to exist, for a god, for example; human, divine mean the same
thing as diabolical, evil. Signs of goodness, benevolence, sympathy are
received fearfully as a trick, a prelude with a dreadful termination, a means of
confusing and outwitting, in short as refined wickedness. When this
disposition exists in the individual a community can hardly arise, at best the
most rudimentary form of community: so that wherever this conception of
good and evil reigns the downfall of such individuals, of their tribes and
races, is near. - Our present morality has grown up in the soil of the ruling
tribes and castes.
46
Sympathy more painful than suffering. - There are cases in which
sympathy for suffering is more painful than actual suffering. We find it more
painful, for example, when one of our friends makes himself guilty of
something shameful than when we do so ourselves. For we believe, firstly, in
the purity of his character more than he does: then, probably precisely on
account of this belief, our love for him is stronger than his own love for
himself. Even if his egoism really does suffer more than our egoism does,
inasmuch as he has to endure the evil consequences of his act more than we
do, nonetheless the unegoistic in us - this word is never to be taken in a strict
sense but only as a simplified form of expression - is affected more strongly
by his guilt than is the unegoistic in him.
47
Hypochondria. - There are people who out of empathy with and concern
for another person become hypochondriac; the species of sympathy that arises
in this case is nothing other than an Illness. Thus there is also a Christian
hypochondria such as overcomes those solitary, religiously
37
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
inclined people who have the suffering and death of Christ continually
before their eyes.
48
Economy of goodness. - Goodness and love as the most salutary medicine
in traffic between men are such precious inventions one could well wish they
might be employed as economically as possible: but this is impossible.
Economy of goodness is the dream of the boldest Utopians.
49
Benevolence. - Among the little but immeasurably frequent and thus very
influential things to which science ought to pay more attention than to the
great, rare things, benevolence too is to be reckoned; I mean those social
expressions of a friendly disposition, those smiles of the eyes, those
handclasps, that comfortable manner with which almost all human action is as
a rule encompassed. Every teacher, every official brings this addition to what
he does as a matter of duty; it is the continual occupation of humanity, as it
were its light-waves in which everything grows; especially within the
narrowest circle, within the family, is life made to flourish only through this
benevolence. Good-naturedness, friendliness, politeness of the heart are
never-failing emanations of the unegoistic drive and have played a far greater
role in the construction of culture than those much more celebrated
expressions of it called pity, compassion and self-sacrifice. But usually they
are neglected and undervalued; and there is, indeed, very little of the
unegoistic in them. The sum of these small doses is nonetheless enormous;
their collective force is among the mightiest of forces. - One can likewise
discover much more happiness in the world than clouded eyes can see: one
can do so if one calculates correctly and does not overlook all those moments
of pleasure in which every day of even the most afflicted human life is rich.
50
The desire to excite pity. - Larochefoucauld is certainly right when, in the
most noteworthy passage of his self-portrait (first printed 1658), he warns all
those who possess reason against pity, when he advises that it be left to those
people of the commonality who (because their actions are not determined by
reason) require the passions if they are to be brought to the point of aiding a
sufferer or energetically intervening in a case of misfortune; while pity, in his
(and Plato's) judgement, enfeebles the soul. One should, to be sure, manifest
pity, but take care not to possess it; for the unfortunate are so stupid that the
manifestation of pity constitutes for them the greatest good in the world. -
Perhaps one can warn even more strongly against this having pity if one
understands this need felt by the unfortunate, not precisely as stupidity and
intellectual deficiency, as a kind of mental disturbance that misfortune brings
with it (that, indeed, is how Larochefoucauld seems to conceive it), but as
something quite different and more suspicious. Observe children who weep
and wail in order that they shall be pitied, and therefore wait for the moment
when their condition will be noticed; live among invalids and the mentally
afflicted
38
and ask yourself whether their eloquent moaning and complaining, their
displaying of misfortune, does not fundamentally have the objective of
hurting those who are with them: the pity which these then express is a
consolation for the weak and suffering, inasmuch as it shows them that, all
their weakness notwithstanding, they possess at any rate one power: the
power to hurt. In this feeling of superiority of which the manifestation of pity
makes him conscious, the unfortunate man gains a sort of pleasure; in the
conceit of his imagination he is still of sufficient importance to cause
affliction in the world. The thirst for pity is thus a thirst for self-enjoyment,
and that at the expense of one's fellow men; it displays man in the whole
ruthlessness of his own dear self: but not precisely in his 'stupidity', as
Larochefoucauld thinks. - In the conversations of social life, three-quarters of
all questions are asked, three-quarters of all answers given, in order to cause
just a little pain to the other party; that is why many people have such a thirst
for social life: it makes them aware of their strength. In such countless but
very small doses in which malice makes itself felt it is a powerful stimulant
to life: just as benevolence, disseminated through the human world in the
same form, is the ever available medicine. - But will there be many honest
men prepared to admit that causing pain gives pleasure? that one not seldom
entertains oneself- and entertains oneself well - by mortifying other people,
at least in one's own mind, and by firing off at them the grapeshot of petty
malice? Most are too dishonest, and a few too good, to know anything of this
pudendum;* and they are welcome to deny if they like that Prosper Merimeet
is right when he says: 'Sachez aussi qu'il n'ya rien de plus commun que
defaire le mal pour le plaisir de lefaire.'X
5i
How appearance becomes being. - Even when in the deepest distress,
the actor ultimately cannot cease to think of the impression he and the whole
scenic effect is making, even for example at the burial of his own child; he
will weep over his own distress and the ways in which it expresses itself, as
his own audience. The hypocrite who always plays one and the same role
finally ceases to be a hypocrite; for example priests, who as young men are
usually conscious or unconscious hypocrites, finally become natural and then
really are priests without any affectation; or if the father fails to get that far
then perhaps the son does so, employing his father's start and inheriting his
habits. If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something
it is in the end hard for him to be anything else. The profession of almost
every man, even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation
from without, with a copying of what is most effective. He who is always
wearing a mask of a friendly countenance must finally acquire a power over
benevolent moods without which
* pudendum: shameful part
t Prosper Merime (1803-70): French writer, the author of Carmen
| 'Sachez aussi... dele faireKnow, too, that there is nothing more common than to do evil for
the pleasure of doing it.
39
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
the impression of friendliness cannot be obtained - and finally these
acquire power over him, he is benevolent.
52
The point of honesty in deception. - With all great deceivers there is a
noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of
deception, with all its preparations, its enthralling in voice, expression and
gesture, in the midst of the scenery designed to give it effect, they are
overcome by belief in themselves: it is this which then speaks so
miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them. The founders of
religions are distinguished from these great deceivers by the fact that they
never emerge from this state of self-deception: or very rarely they experience
for once that moment of clarity when doubt overcomes them; usually,
however, they comfort themselves by ascribing these moments of clarity to
the evil antagonist. Self-deception has to exist if a grand effect is to be
produced. For men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly
believed.
53
Supposed stages of truth. - One of the commonest false conclusions is
this: because someone is true and honest towards us, he speaks the truth.
Thus a child believes in the judgements of its parents, the Christian in the
assertions of the founder of the Church. There is likewise a disinclination to
admit that all that which men have defended in earlier centuries with sacrifice
of happiness and life were nothing but errors: perhaps one says they were
stages of truth. But what one thinks at bottom is that, if someone has honestly
believed in something and has fought and died for his belief, it would be
altogether too unfair if what had inspired him had actually been no more than
an error. Such an event seems to go against eternal justice; which is why the
heart of sensitive people again and again contradicts their head, and decrees:
there absolutely must exist a necessary connection between moral action and
intellectual insight. Unhappily it is otherwise; for there is no such thing as
eternal justice.
54
The lie. - Why do almost all people tell the truth in ordinary everyday
life? - Certainly not because a god has forbidden them to lie. The reason is,
firstly because it is easier; for lying demands invention, dissimulation and a
good memory. (Which is why Swift says that he who tells a lie seldom
realizes what a heavy burden he has assumed; for, in order to maintain a lie,
he has to invent twenty more.) Then because, in straightforward
relationships, it is advantageous to say: I want this, I have done that, and
things of that kind; because, that is to say, the route of authority and
compulsion is more certain than that of cunning. - If, however, a child should
have been brought up in complicated domestic circumstances, it is just as
natural for him to employ the lie and involuntarily always to say that which
serves his interests; a sense of truth, an aversion to lying as such, is quite
foreign and inaccessible to him, and thus he lies in all innocence.
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
55
Casting suspicion on morality on account of faith. - No power could
maintain itself if its advocates were nothing but hypocrites; however many
'worldly' elements it may possess, the strength of the Catholic Church rests
on those priestly natures, still very numerous, whose lives are hard and full of
meaning and whose glance and wasted bodies speak of night- watches,
fasting, fervent prayer, perhaps even of flagellation; these men deeply affect
other men and inspire them with fear: what if it were needful to live thus? -
that is the dreadful question the sight of them lays on the tongue. By
propagating this doubt they continually establish further pillars of their
power; even the free-thinkers do not dare to confront the man selfless in this
way with a harsh sense of truth and say to him: 'Deceived yourself, cease to
deceive!' - It is only difference in insight that divides them from him,
certainly no difference as regards goodness or badness; but what one does not
like one usually also treats unjustly. Thus one speaks of the cunning and
infamous arts of the Jesuits, but overlooks what self-overcoming every
individual Jesuit imposes upon himself and that the alleviated practice of life
preached by the Jesuit textbooks is intended for the benefit of the laity, not
for their own. One may ask, indeed, whether, given quite the same tactics and
organization, we children of the Enlightenment would be equally good
instruments or equally admirable in self-conquest, indefatigability or
devotedness.
56
Victory of knowledge over radical evil. - He who wants to become wise
will profit greatly from at some time having harboured the idea that mankind
is fundamentally evil and corrupt: it is a false idea, as is its opposite; but it
enjoyed dominance throughout whole ages of history, and its roots have
branched out even into us ourselves and our world. To understand our- selves
we must understand it; but if we are then ourselves to rise higher, we must
rise up above it. We then come to recognize that there is no such thing as sin
in the metaphysical sense; but, in the same sense, no such thing as virtue
either; that this whole domain of moral ideas is in a state of constant
fluctuation, that there exist higher and deeper conceptions of good and evil,
of moral and immoral. He who desires little more of things than knowledge
of them easily finds repose of soul and if he blunders (or, as the world puts it,
sins), it will at most be through ignorance but hardly out of covetousness. He
will no longer want to decry the desires as heretical and to exterminate them;
but the only goal which completely dominates him, at all times to know as
fully as possible, will make him cool and soothe everything savage in his
disposition. Moreover, he will have got free of a host of tormenting ideas, the
expressions 'pains of Hell', 'sinfulness', 'incapacity for good' will no longer
have any effect on him: he will recognize in them only the hovering
phantoms of false ways of viewing life and the world.
57

Morality as the self-division of man. - A good author whose heart is really in
41
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by
presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the
questions contained in it. A girl in love wishes the faithfulness and devotion
of her love could be tested by the faithlessness of the man she loves. A
soldier wishes he could fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland; for
his supreme desire is victor in the victory of his fatherland. A mother gives to
her child that of which she deprives herself, sleep, the best food, if need be
her health, her strength. - But are these all unego- istic states? Are these
deeds of morality miracles because they are, in Schopenhauer's words,
'impossible and yet real'? Is it not clear that in all these instances man loves
something of himself, an idea, a desire, an offspring, more than something
else of himself, that he thus divides his nature and sacrifices one part of it to
the other? Is it something essentially different from when some obstinate
man says: 'I would rather be shot down than move an inch out of that fellow's
way?' - The inclination for something (wish, impulse, desire) is present in all
the above-mentioned instances; to give in to it, with all the consequences, is
in any event not 'unegoistic'. - In morality man treats himself not as
individuum but as dividuum.4
58
What one can promise. - One can promise actions but not feelings; for
the latter are involuntary. He who promises someone he will always love him
or always hate him or always be faithful to him, promises something that
does not reside in his power; but he can certainly promise to perform actions
which, though they are usually the consequences of love, hatred, faithfulness,
can also derive from other motives: for several paths and motives can lead to
the same action. To promise always to love someone therefore means: for as
long as I love you I shall render to you the actions of love; if I cease to love
you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, though from
other motives: so that in the heads of our fellow men the appearance will
remain that love is still the same and unchanged. - One therefore promises
the continuation of the appearance of love when one swears to someone ever-
enduring love without self- deception.
59
Intellect and morality. - One has to have a good memory if one is to
keep a promise. One has to have a powerful imagination if one is to feel
sympathy. So closely is morality tied to the quality of the intellect.
60
Revenge and the desire to revenge. - To desire to revenge and then to
carry out revenge means to be the victim of a vehement attack of fever which
then, however, passes: but to desire to revenge without possessing the
strength and courage to carry out revenge means to carry about a chronic
illness, a poisoning of body and soul. Morality, which looks only at inten-

4 Terms of Scholastic philosophy: individuum: that which cannot be divided without
destroying its essence, dividuum: that which is composite and lacks an individual essence
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
tions, assesses both cases equally; in the ordinary way the former case is
assessed as being the worse (on account of the evil consequences which the
act of revenge will perhaps produce). Both evaluations are shortsighted.
61
The ability to wait. - Ability to wait is so difficult an accomplishment
that the greatest poets have not disdained to make inability to wait a motif of
their poems. Thus did Shakespeare in Othello, Sophocles in Ajax: if the latter
had only allowed his feelings to cool for one more day his suicide would no
longer have appeared necessary, as is indicated by the oracle; probably he
would have snapped his fingers at the horrible promptings of his wounded
vanity and said to himself: who in my situation would not have mistaken a
sheep for a hero? is it something so very terrible? On the contrary, it is
something anyone would do: Ajax could console himself with such a
reflection as that. Passion will not wait; the tragic element in the life of great
men often lies not in their conflicts with their age and with the lowness of
their fellow men, but in their inability to put off their work for a year or two
years; they cannot wait. - In all cases of duels, the seconds have the duty to
determine whether the contestants cannot wait: if they cannot then a duel is
reasonable, inasmuch as each of them says to himself: 'either I live on, in
which event he dies this instant, or the other way round'. In such a case
waiting would mean protracting the torments of wounded honour in the face
of him who has wounded it, and this can be more painful than life is worth.
62
Revelling in revenge. - Uncultivated people who feel insulted are
accustomed to set the degree of insultingness as high as possible and to
recount the cause of the insult in strongly exaggerated terms, so as to be able
really to revel in the feeling of hatred and revengefulness thus engendered.
63
Value of diminution. - There are not a few people (perhaps it is even
most people) who, in order to maintain in themselves a sense of self-respect
and a certain efficiency in action, are obliged to disparage and diminish in
their minds all the other people they know. Since, however, petty natures are
in the majority, and it matters very much whether they possess or lose this
efficiency, it follows -
64
The eager. - We should beware of someone raging at us as of one who
would like to take our life: for that we are still alive is due to the absence of
the power to kill; if looks sufficed it would long since have been all up with
us. It is a piece of a ruder stage of culture to reduce a person to silence by
making a visible presentation of physical savagery and thus inspiring fear in
him. - Likewise, that cold glance that the noble reserve for their servants is a
remnant of ancient caste-divisions between man
43
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and man, a piece of rude antiquity; women, the custodians of the ancient,
have preserved this relic too more faithfully.
65
Whither honesty can lead. - Someone had the bad habit of occasionally
examining the motives of his actions, which were as good and bad as the
motives of everyone else, and honestly saying what they were. He excited at
first revulsion, then suspicion, gradually became altogether proscribed and
declared an outlaw in society, until finally the law took notice of this
infamous being on occasions when usually it closed its eyes. Lack of ability
to keep silent about the universal secret, and the irresponsible tendency to see
what no one wants to see - himself - brought him to prison and a premature
death.
66
Punishable, never punished. - Our crime against criminals consists in the
fact that we treat them like scoundrels.
67
Sancta simplicitas of virtue.* - Every virtue has its privileges; for
example, that of bringing to a condemned man's stake its own little bundle of
wood.
68
Morality and success. - It is not only the spectators of an act who usually
assess its morality or immorality according to whether or not it is successful;
no, the performer himself does so. For the motives and intentions behind it
are seldom sufficiently clear and simple, and sometimes even the memory
seems to be muddled by the success of an act, so that one foists false motives
upon one's act oneself, or treats inessential motives as essential. Success often
bestows upon an act the whole honest lustre of the good conscience, a failure
casts the shadow of pangs of conscience over the most estimable deed. From
this there follows the familiar practice of the politician, who thinks: 'only give
me success: if I have success I shall also have brought every honest soul over
to my side - and made myself honest in my own eyes too'. - In a similar way,
success is supposed to be a substitute for greater validity. Even today many
educated people think that the victory of Christianity over Greek philosophy
is a proof of the superior truth of the former - although in this case it was only
the coarser and more violent that conquered the more spiritual and delicate.
So far as superior truth is concerned, it is enough to observe that the
awakening sciences have allied themselves point by point with the philosophy
of Epicurus but point by point rejected Christianity.t
69
Love and justice. - Why is love overestimated as compared with justice,
* sancta simplicitas: holy simplicity
t Epicurus (341-270 BC): Greek philosopher, the founder of the philosophy named after him
which shared with Stoicism the allegiance of the Graeco-Roman world during the centuries
preceding the rise of Christianity. See The Gay Science, book I, section 45, and Kauf- mann's
commentary (New York: Vintage Books, 1974, p. 110).
44
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
and the fairest things said of it, as though it were of a far higher nature
than the latter? For is it not obviously the stupider of the two? - Certainly, but
for precisely that reason so much more pleasant for everybody. It is stupid
and possesses a rich cornucopia; out of this it distributes its gifts, and does so
to everyone, even when he does not deserve them, indeed does not even thank
it for them. It is as impartial as the rain, which, according to the Bible and in
accordance too with experience, soaks not only the unjust man but, in certain
circumstances, also the just man to the skin.
70
Execution. - How is it that every execution offends us more than a
murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the
insight that here a human being is being used as a means of deterring others.
For it is not the guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in
educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer -1 mean the
circumstances that caused him to become one.
71
Hope. - Pandora brought the box containing the evils and opened it. It
was the gift of the gods to mankind, outwardly a fair, seductive gift and
named the 'box of good fortune'. Then all the evils, living winged creatures,
flew out: since then they have been hovering about doing harm to men by day
and night. A single evil had not yet slipped out of the box: then, by the will of
Zeus, Pandora shut the lid, and thus it remained within. Now man has the box
of good fortune forever in the house and is amazed at the treasure he
possesses in it; it stands at his service, he reaches for it when he desires to do
so; for he does not know that the box Pandora brought was the box of evil and
regards the evil that has remained behind as the greatest piece of good fortune
- it is hope. - For what Zeus wanted was that man, though never so tormented
by the other evils, should nonetheless not throw life away but continue to let
himself be tormented. To that end he gives men hope: it is in truth the worst
of all evils, because it protracts the torment of men.
72
Degree of moral inflammability unknown. - Whether or not our passions
glow red hot and direct the whole course of our life depends on whether or
not we have had certain painfully affecting sights and impressions - a father
unjustly condemned, killed or tortured, for example, an unfaithful wife, a
cruel attack by an enemy. No one knows whither circumstances, pity,
indignation may drive him, no one knows the degree of his inflammability.
Paltry little circumstances make one paltry oneself; it is usually not the
quality of his experiences but their quantity that distinguishes the lower from
the higher man, in both good and evil.
73
The unwilling martyr. - In a party there was a man who was too fearful and
45
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
cowardly ever to contradict his comrades: they employed him in every
kind of service, they demanded everything of him, because he was more
afraid of the ill opinion of his companions than he was of death; he was a
miserably feeble soul. They recognized this and on the basis of the qualities
mentioned made of him a hero and finally even a martyr. Although the
cowardly man inwardly always said No, with his lips he always said Yes,
even on the scaffold when he died for the views of his party: for beside him
there stood one of his old party comrades, who by word and glance so
tyrannized over him that he actually suffered death without flinching and has
since then been celebrated as a martyr and a man of great character.
74
Everyday standard. - One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme
actions to vanity, moderate ones to habit and petty ones to fear.
75
Misunderstanding of virtue. - He who has come to know unvirtue in
association with pleasure - such as he who has a dissolute youth behind him -
imagines that virtue must be associated with the unpleasurable. He, on the
contrary, who is much tormented by his passions and vices longs for peace
and happiness of soul in the practice of virtue. It is thus possible that two
virtuous people completely misunderstand one another.
76
The ascetic. - The ascetic makes of virtue a state of distress.
77
Honour transferred from the person to the thing. - Acts of love and self-
sacrifice for the good of one's neighbour are generally held in honour in
whatever circumstances they may be performed. In this way one augments
the value of the things which are loved in this fashion or for which someone
sacrifices himself: even though in themselves they may perhaps not be worth
very much. A brave army is a convincing argument for the cause for which it
fights.
78
Ambition a surrogate for moral feeling. - Moral feeling must not be
lacking in those natures that have no ambition. The ambitious contrive to get
on even without it, and with almost equal success. - That is why, if they
should ever lose moral feeling, the sons of modest families that know nothing
of ambition decline very rapidly into complete good-for- nothings.
79
Vanity enriches. - How poor the human spirit would be without vanity!
But for this reason it resembles a well-stocked and continually restocked
department store that entices customers of every kind: they can find
46
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
almost anything, have almost anything, provided they bring with them
the valid coin (admiration).
80
Old age and death. - Disregarding the demands made by religion one
might well ask: why should it be more laudable for an old man who senses
the decline of his powers to await his slow exhaustion and dissolution than in
full consciousness to set himself a limit? Suicide is in this case a wholly
natural and obvious action, which as a victory for reason ought fairly to
awaken reverence: and did awaken it in those ages when the heads of Greek
philosophy and the most upright Roman patriots were accustomed to die by
suicide. On the other hand, the desire to carry on existing from day to day,
anxiously consulting physicians and observing scrupulous rules of conduct,
without the strength to get any closer to the actual goal of one's life, is much
less respectworthy. - The religions are rich in excuses for evading the demand
of suicide: in this way they ingratiate themselves with those who are in love
with life.
81
Errors of the sufferer and the doer. - When a rich man takes a possession
from a poor one (for example, a prince robs a plebeian of his beloved) an
error arises in the poor man: he thinks the rich man must be utterly infamous
to take from him the little that he has. But the rich man does not feel nearly so
deeply the value of a single possession because he is used to having many:
thus he cannot transport himself into the soul of the poor man and has not
committed nearly so great an injustice as the latter supposes. Both have a
false idea of one another. The injustice of the powerful which arouses most
indignation in history is not nearly as great as it seems. The inherited sense of
being a higher type of creature with higher claims already makes such a man
fairly cold and leaves his conscience at rest: we all, indeed, lose all feeling of
injustice when the difference between ourselves and other creatures is very
great, and will kill a gnat, for example, without the slightest distress of
conscience. Thus it is no sign of baseness in Xerxes (whom even the Greeks
depict as being outstandingly noble) when he takes a son from his father and
has him dismembered because he has expressed fearful and ominous
misgivings about the whole campaign they are engaged on: in this instance
the individual is disposed of like an annoying insect: he is too lowly to be
allowed to go on upsetting a world-ruler. Indeed, no cruel man is so cruel as
he whom he has misused believes; the idea of pain is not the same thing as
the suffering of it. The same applies to the unjust judge, to the journalist who
misleads public opinion with petty untruths. Cause and effect are in all these
cases surrounded by quite different groups of thoughts and sensations; while
one involuntarily presupposes that doer and sufferer think and feel the same
and, in accordance with this presupposition, assesses the guilt of the one by
the pain of the other.
82
Skin of the soul. - Just as the bones, flesh, intestines and blood vessels are
47
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
enclosed in a skin that makes the sight of man endurable, so the
agitations and passions of the soul are enveloped in vanity: it is the skin of the
soul.
83
Sleep of virtue. - When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.
84
Refinement of shame. - Men are not ashamed of thinking something
dirty, but they are when they imagine they are credited with this dirty
thought.
85
Wickedness is rare. - Most people are much too much occupied with
themselves to be wicked.
86
The index of the scales. - We praise or blame according to whether the
one or the other offers a greater opportunity for our power of judgement to
shine out.
87
Luke 18, 14 improved* - He that humbleth himself wants to be exalted.
88
Prevention of suicide. - There exists a right by which we take a man's life
but none by which we take from him his death: this is mere cruelty.
89
Vanity. - We have an interest in the good opinion of others, firstly
because it is useful to us, then because we want to give them pleasure
(children their parents, pupils their teacher, and benevolent people all other
people in general). Only where the good opinion of others is important to
someone quite apart from advantage or the desire to give pleasure do we
speak of vanity. In this case a person wants to give pleasure to himself but at
the expense of his fellow men, inasmuch as he either seduces them to a false
opinion regarding himself or even aims at a degree of 'good opinion' that is
bound to be painful to others (through the arousal of envy). As a rule, the
individual wants through the opinion of others to confirm the opinion he has
of himself and to ratify himself in his own eyes; but our mighty habituation to
authority - a habituation that is as old as mankind itself - also impels many to
rely on authority for their belief in themself, that is to say to acquire it only at
the hands of others: they trust the judgement of others more than they do their
own. - Interest in oneself, the desire to feel pleasure, attains in the vain person
to such an intensity that he seduces others to a false, much too high
assessment of himself, yet then submits to the authority of these others: that is
to say, he induces error and then believes in this error. - One is therefore
bound to see that vain people desire to please not so much other people
* Luke 18, 14: 'for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth
himself shall be exalted'.
48
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
as themselves, and that they go so far as to neglect their own advantage
in doing so; for they are then obliged to arouse in their fellow men ill-will,
hostility and envy, simply so as to be able to take pleasure in themselves.
90
Boundary of philanthropy. - Anyone who has declared another to be an
idiot, an unpleasant fellow, is annoyed if in the end he demonstrates that he is
not one.
91
Moralite larmoyante* - How much entertainment morality provides!
Think only what an ocean of delicious tears has flowed, for instance, at the
telling of tales of noble, magnanimous deeds! - This embellishment of life
would disappear if belief in total unaccountability came to prevail.
92
Origin of justice. - Justice (fairness) originates between parties of
approximately equal power, as Thucydidest correctly grasped (in the terrible
colloquy between the Athenian and Melian ambassadors): where there is no
clearly recognizable superiority of force and a contest would result in mutual
injury producing no decisive outcome the idea arises of coming to an
understanding and negotiating over one another's demands: the characteristic
of exchange is the original characteristic of justice. Each satisfies the other,
inasmuch as each acquires what he values more than the other does. One
gives to the other what he wants to have, to be henceforth his own, and in
return receives what one oneself desires. Justice is thus requital and exchange
under the presupposition of an approximately equal power position: revenge
therefore belongs originally within the domain of justice, it is an exchange.
Gratitude likewise. - Justice goes back naturally to the viewpoint of an
enlightened self-preservation, thus to the egoism of the reflection: 'to what
end should I injure myself uselessly and perhaps even then not achieve my
goal?' - so much for the origin of justice. Since, in accordance with their
intellectual habit, men have forgotten the original purpose of so-called just
and fair actions, and especially because children have for millennia been
trained to admire and imitate such actions, it has gradually come to appear
that a just action is an unegoistic one: but it is on this appearance that the high
value accorded it depends; and this high value is, moreover, continually
increasing, as all valuations do: for something highly valued is striven for,
imitated, multiplied through sacrifice, and grows as the worth of the toil and
zeal expended by each individual is added to the worth of the valued thing. -
How little moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could
say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of the
temple of human dignity.
93
Of the rights of the weaker. - If someone, a besieged town for instance, *
moraliti larmoyante'. tearful morality
t Thucydides (c. 460-394 BC): Greek historian, principally of the Peloponnesian War
49
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
submits under conditions to a stronger force, the counter-condition is
that one is able to destroy oneself, burn the town down, and thus inflict a
great loss upon the stronger. For this reason there here arises a kind of
equalization on the basis of which rights can be established. The enemy
derives advantage from preserving them. - To this extent there also exist
rights as between slaves and masters, that is to say to precisely the extent that
the possession of the slave is useful and important to his master. Rights
originally extend just as far as one appears valuable, essential, unusable,
unconquerable and the like, to the other. In this respect the weaker too
possess rights, but more limited ones. Thence the celebrated unusquisque
tantum juris habet, quantum potentia valet (or more exactly: quantum
potentia valere creditur)*
94
The three phases of morality hitherto. - It is the first sign that animal has
become man when his actions are no longer directed to the procurement of
momentary wellbeing but to enduring wellbeing, that man has thus become
attuned to utility and purpose-, it is then that the free domination of reason
first breaks forth. An even higher stage is attained when he acts according to
the principle of honour; in accordance with this he orders himself with
regard to others, submits to common sensibilities, and that raises him high
above the phase in which he is diverted only by utility understood in a purely
personal sense: he accords others respect and wants them to accord respect to
him, that is to say: he conceives utility as being dependent on what he thinks
of others and what they think of him. Finally, at the highest stage of morality
hitherto, he acts in accordance with his own standard with regard to men and
things: he himself determines for himself and others what is honourable and
useful; he has become the lawgiver of opinion, in accordance with an ever
more highly evolving conception of usefulness and honourableness.
Knowledge qualifies him to prefer the most useful, that is to say general and
enduring utility, to personal utility, general and enduring honour and
recognition to momentary honour and recognition: he lives and acts as a
collective-individual.
95
Morality of the mature individual. - Hitherto the impersonal has been
regarded as the actual distinguishing mark of the moral action; and it has
been proved that at first it was on account of their general utility that
impersonal actions were universally commended and accorded distinction.
Ought a significant alteration in this point of view not to lie just ahead, now
when it is realized more and more that it is in precisely the most personal
possible considerations that the degree of utility is at its greatest also for the
generality: so that it is the strictly personal action that corresponds to the
current conception of morality (as general utility)? To make of oneself a
complete person, and in all that one does to have in view the highest
* unusquisque ... valet: each man has as much right as he has power; quantum ... creditur:
as he is believed to have power; Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, ch. 2, section 8.
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
good of this person - that gets us further than those pity-filled agitations
and actions for the sake of others. We all of us, to be sure, still suffer from
the all-too-little regard paid to the personal in us, it has been badly cultivated
- let us admit to ourselves that our minds have, rather, been drawn forcibly
away from it and offered as a sacrifice to the state, to science, to those in
need, as though what would have to be sacrificed was in any case what was
bad. Even now let us work for our fellow men, but only to the extent that we
discover our own highest advantage in this work: no more, no less. All that
remains is what it is one understands by one's advantage; precisely the
immature, undeveloped, crude individual will understand it most crudely.
96
Custom and what is in accordance with it. - To be moral, to act in
accordance with custom, to be ethical means to practise obedience towards a
law or tradition established from of old. Whether one subjects oneself with
effort or gladly and willingly makes no difference, it is enough that one does
it. He is called 'good' who does what is customary as if by nature, as a result
of a long inheritance, that is to say easily and gladly, and this is so whatever
what is customary may be (exacts revenge, for example, when exacting
revenge is part of good custom, as it was with the ancient Greeks). He is
called good because he is good 'for something'; since, however, benevolence,
sympathy and the like have throughout all the changes in customs always
been seen as 'good for something', as useful, it is now above all the
benevolent, the helpful who are called 'good'. To be evil is 'not to act in
accordance with custom', to practise things not sanctioned by custom, to
resist tradition, however rational or stupid that tradition may be; in all the
laws of custom of all times, however, doing injury to one's neighbour has
been seen as injurious above all else, so that now at the word 'evil' we think
especially of voluntarily doing injury to one's neighbour. 'Egoistic' and
'unegoistic' is not the fundamental antithesis which has led men to make the
distinction between 'in accordance with custom' and 'in defiance of custom',
between good and evil, but adherence to a tradition, a law, and severance
from it. How the tradition has arisen is here a matter of indifference, and has
in any event nothing to do with good and evil or with any kind of immanent
categorical imperative;* it is above all directed at the preservation of a
community, a people; every superstitious usage which has arisen on the basis
of some chance event mistakenly interpreted enforces a tradition which it is
in accordance with custom to follow; for to sever oneself from it is
dangerous, and even more injurious to the community than to the individual
(because the gods punish the community for misdeeds and for every violation
of their privileges and only to that extent punish the individual). Every
tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin
lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from
* Kant considered the categorical imperative - defined in the Groundwork for a Metaphysic
of Morals as 'Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal
natural law' - to derive from the nature of rationality.
5^
generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes
awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much
older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.
97
Pleasure in custom. - An important species of pleasure, and thus an
important source of custom, originates in habit. One does what is habitual
better and more easily and thus prefers to do it, one derives a sense of
pleasure from it and knows from experience that the habitual has proved
itself and is thus useful; a custom one can live with is demonstrated as
salutary, beneficial, in contrast to all novel experimentations that have not yet
proved themselves. Custom is consequently the union of the pleasant and the
useful, and in addition it demands no cogitation. As soon as man is in a
position to exercise compulsion he exercises it to introduce and impose his
customs, for to him they are demonstrated practical wisdom. A community of
individuals likewise compels each separate individual to observe the same
custom. Here there is the false conclusion: because one feels happy with a
custom, or at least can preserve one's existence by means of it, this custom is
necessary, for it counts as the sole condition under which one can feel happy;
a happy life seems to derive from this custom alone. This conception of the
customary as a condition of existence is conveyed into the minutest
particulars of custom: since insight into actual causality is very slight among
the lower peoples and cultures, one sees to it with superstitious fear that
everything continues on in the way it has always gone; even when custom is
hard, rigorous, burdensome, it is preserved on account of its apparent
supreme utility. One does not know that the same degree of wellbeing can
also exist under different customs or that even higher degrees are attainable.
But one does perceive that all customs, even the harshest, grow milder and
more pleasant in course of time, and that even the strictest mode of life can
become habitual and thus a source of pleasure.
98
Pleasure and social instinct. - From his relations with other men, man
adds a new species of pleasure to those pleasurable sensations he derives
from himself; whereby he significantly enlarges the domain of pleasurable
sensations in general. Perhaps he has already inherited much that has its place
here from the animals, who plainly feel pleasure when they play with one
another, especially the mothers with the young. Then consider sexual
relations, through which more or less every female appears interesting to
every male with regard to the prospect of pleasure, and the reverse. To feel
sensations of pleasure on the basis of human relations on the whole makes
men better; joy, pleasure, is enhanced when it is enjoyed together with others,
it gives the individual security, makes him good-natured, banishes distrust
and envy: for one feels a sense of wellbeing and sees that others are likewise
feeling a sense of wellbeing. Similar expressions of pleasure awaken the
fantasy of empathy, the feeling of being like something else: the same effect
is produced by common suffer-
52
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
ings, by experiencing bad weather, dangers, enemies in common. It is no
doubt upon this that the oldest form of alliance is based: the sense of which is
that to act together to ward off and dispose of a threatening displeasure is of
utility to each individual. And thus the social instinct grows out of the feeling
of pleasure.
99
The innocent element in so-called evil acts. - All 'evil' acts are motivated
by the drive to preservation or, more exactly, by the individual's intention of
procuring pleasure and avoiding displeasure; so motivated, however, they are
not evil. 'Procuring pain as such' does not exist, except in the brains of
philosophers, neither does 'procuring pleasure as such' (pity in the
Schopenhauerian sense). In conditions obtaining before the existence of the
state we kill the creature, be it ape or man, that seeks to deprive us of a fruit
of the tree if we happen to be hungry and are making for the tree ourself: as
we would still do to the animals even now if we were travelling in
inhospitable regions. - The evil acts at which we are now most indignant rest
on the error that he who perpetrates them against us possesses free will, that
is to say, that he could have chosen not to cause us this harm. It is this belief
in choice that engenders hatred, revengefulness, deceitfulness, all the
degrading our imagination undergoes, while we are far less censorious
towards an animal because we regard it as unaccountable. To do injury not
from the drive to preservation but as requital - is the consequence of a
mistaken judgement and therefore likewise innocent. In conditions obtaining
before the existence of the state the individual can act harshly and cruelly for
the purpose of frightening other creatures: to secure his existence through
such fear-inspiring tests of his power. Thus does the man of violence, of
power, the original founder of states, act when he subjugates the weaker. His
right to do so is the same as the state now relegates to itself; or rather, there
exists no right that can prevent this from happening. The ground for any kind
of morality can then be prepared only when a greater individual or a
collective- individuality, for example society, the state, subjugates all other
individuals, that is to say draws them out of their isolation and orders them
within a collective. Morality is preceded by compulsion, indeed it is for a
time itself still compulsion, to which one accommodates oneself for the
avoidance of what one regards as unpleasurable. Later it becomes custom,
later still voluntary obedience, finally almost instinct: then, like all that has
for a long time been habitual and natural, it is associated with pleasure - and
is now called virtue.
100
Shame. - Shame exists wherever there exists a 'mystery'; this, however,
is a religious concept which in earlier ages of human culture was of wide
compass. Everywhere there were enclosed domains to which divine right
denied entry except under certain conditions: in the first instance these were
simply areas of ground, inasmuch as certain places were not to be stepped
upon by the feet of the uninitiated, who were seized with fear
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and trembling when they approached them. This feeling was transferred
to many other regions, for example to that of sexual relations, from which, as
a privilege and adytum"' of maturity, the gaze of youth must for its own
advantage be directed away: relations for whose protection and the
preservation of whose sanctity many divinities were thought of as active and
set up as guardians of the marriage chamber. (That is why this chamber is
called in Turkish the harem, the 'sanctuary', the same word, that is to say,
normally used to designate the forecourt of a mosque.) Thus kinghood is, as
a centre from which power and glory radiate, a mystery full of shame and
secrecy to those subject to it: the force of which is still perceptible among
nations otherwise in no way noted for being ashamed and abashed. The
whole world of interior states, the so-called 'soul', is likewise still a mystery
to all non-philosophers; through endless ages it has been believed that the
'soul' was of divine origin and worthy of traffic with the gods: consequently
it is an adytum and evokes shame.
101
]udge not. - When considering earlier periods of history one must take
care not to fall into an unjust condemnation of them. The injustice involved
in slavery, the cruelty involved in the subjugation of persons and nations is
not to be measured by our own standards. For in those days the instinct for
justice had not yet been so far developed. Who dare reproach the Genevan
Calvin for having burned the physician Serveto?t It was a consistent action
that flowed from his convictions, and the Inquisition too was equally
justified; only the views that then predominated were false and led to
consequences that seem to us harsh because those views have become alien
to us. And what in any event is the burning of a single individual compared
with everlasting punishment in Hell for almost everybody! And yet this idea
dominated all the world at that time without its much greater horrors doing
any essential damage to the idea of a God. With us, too, political sectarians
are treated harshly and cruelly, but because one has learned to believe in the
necessity of the state one is not as sensible of the cruelty as one is in the
former case, where we repudiate the ideas behind it. The cruelty towards
animals exhibited by children and Italians is attributable to want of
understanding; the animal has, especially in the interest of ecclesiastical
teaching, been placed too far below man. - Much that is horrific and inhuman
in history in which one can hardly bear to believe is likewise ameliorated
when we consider that he who ordered it and he who carried it out are
different people: the former does not see it and his imagination therefore
receives no strong impression of it, the latter obeys one set above him and
does not feel responsible. From lack of imagination most princes and military
leaders can easily seem cruel and harsh without being so. - Egoism is not
evil, because the idea of one's 'neighbour' - the expression is of Christian
origin and does not correspond with truth - is very weak in us; and we feel
almost as
* adytum: innermost chamber of a temple, where oracles are delivered
t Miguel Serveto (1511-53): Spanish doctor and theologian. Calvin allegedly denounced
him to the Inquisition as a Unitarian; he was burned in Geneva.
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
free of responsibility for him as we do for plants and stones. That the
other suffers has to be learned-, and it can never be learned fully.
102
'Man's actions are always good.' - We do not accuse nature of
immorality when it sends us a thunderstorm and makes us wet: why do we
call the harmful man immoral? Because in the latter case we assume a
voluntarily commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this
distinction is an error. And than: we do not call even intentional harming
immoral under all circumstances; one unhesitatingly kills a fly intentionally,
for example, merely because one does not like its buzzing, one punishes the
criminal intentionally and does him harm so as to protect ourselves and
society. In the first instance it is the individual who, to preserve himself or
even merely to avoid displeasure, intentionally does harm; in the second it is
the state. All morality allows the intentional causing of harm in the case of
self-defence: that is, when it is a matter of self-preservation. But these two
points of view suffice to explain all evil acts perpetrated by men against men:
one desires pleasure or to ward off displeasure; it is always in some sense a
matter of self-preservation. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does
he always does the good, that is to say: that which seems to him good
(useful) according to the relative degree of his intellect, the measure of his
rationality.
103
The innocent element in wickedness. - Wickedness does not have the
suffering of another as such as its objective, but our own enjoyment, for
example the enjoyment of the feeling of revenge or of a powerful excitation
of the nerves. Even teasing demonstrates what pleasure it gives to vent our
power on others and to produce in ourselves the pleasurable feeling of
ascendancy. Is the immoral element, then, the deriving of pleasure from the
displeasure of others? Is Schadenfreude* devilish, as Schopenhauer says it
is? Well, in the midst of nature we procure pleasure for ourselves by breaking
off branches, loosening stones, fighting with wild animals, and do so in order
to become aware of our strength. Is it the knowledge that another suffers
because of us that is here supposed to make immoral the same thing in
respect of which we otherwise feel unaccountable? But if one did not know
this, one would also experience no pleasure in one's superiority, which can
reveal itself only in the suffering of the other, for example in the case of
teasing. Pleasure in oneself is neither good nor bad; whence is the stipulation
supposed to come that one may not excite displeasure in others in order to
have pleasure in oneself? Only from the point of view of utility, that is to say
with regard to the consequences, to the displeasure that may eventuate if the
person harmed, or in his place the state, should demand requital and revenge:
originally only this can have offered a reason for denying oneself such acts. -
Pity has the pleasure of the other as its objective just as little as wickedness
has the pain of the other as such. For it conceals within itself at least two
(perhaps many
* Schadenfreude: pl e a s u r e i n a n ot he r ' s s uf f e r i n g
55
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
more) elements of a personal pleasure and is to that extent
selfenjoyment: first as the pleasure of the emotion, which is the kind
represented by pity in tragedy, and then, when it eventuates in action, as the
pleasure of gratification in the exercise of power. If, in addition to this, a
suffering person is very close to us, we remove from ourselves the suffering
we ourselves feel by performing an act of pity. - With the exception of a few
philosophers, men have always placed pity fairly low in the order of rank of
the moral sensations: and rightly.
104
Self-defence. - If one is to allow that self-defence is morally justified,
then one must also allow that almost all expressions of so-called immoral
egoism are morally justified: one causes suffering, robs or kills, in order to
preserve or protect oneself, to ward off personal harm; one lies when cunning
and dissimulation is the proper means of self-preservation. To harm
intentionally when it is a question of our existence or security (preservation
of our wellbeing) is conceded as being morally justified; the state itself does
harm from this point of view when it imposes punishments. In unintentional
harm there can, of course, be nothing immoral, for here chance rules. Is there
then a species of intentional harm where our existence, the preservation of
our wellbeing, are not in question? Is there such a thing as doing harm out of
pure wickedness, for example in an act of cruelty? When one does not know
how much pain an act causes, it is not an act of wickedness; thus a child is
not wicked, not evil, with regard to an animal: it investigates and destroys it
as though it were a toy. But does one ever fully know how much pain an act
causes another? As far as our nervous system extends we guard ourselves
against pain: if it extended further, namely into our fellow men, we would
never do harm to another (except in such cases as when we do it to ourselves,
that is to say when we cut ourselves for the purpose of a cure, exert and
weary ourselves for the sake of our health). We conclude by analogy that
something causes someone pain, and through recollection and strength of
imagination we can ourselves suffer as a consequence. But what a difference
there nonetheless remains between a toothache and the ache (pity) that the
sight of a toothache evokes. Thus: in the case of doing harm out of so-called
wickedness the degree of pain produced is in any event unknown to us;
insofar, however, as the act is accompanied by pleasure (feeling of one's own
power, of one's own strong excitation), it occurs for the purpose of
preserving the wellbeing of the individual, and thus comes under a similar
heading to self-defence and lying under duress. Without pleasure no life; the
struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life. Whether an individual pursues
this struggle in such a way that people call him good, or in such a way that
they call him evil, is determined by the degree and quality of his intellect.
105
Justice that rewards. - He who has fully grasped the theory of total
unaccountability can no longer accommodate so-called justice that punishes
ON THE HI STORY OF THE MORAL SENSATI ONS
and rewards under the concept of justice at all: provided, that is, that this
consists in giving to each what is his own. For he who is punished does not
deserve the punishment: he is merely being employed as the means of
henceforth deterring others from certain actions; likewise, he who is
rewarded does not deserve this reward: for he could not have acted otherwise
than he did. Thus the reward possesses only the sense of an encouragement,
to him and others, and the provision of a motive for subsequent actions;
commendation is called out to the runner who is still on the track, not to him
who has reached the finishing-line. Neither punishment nor reward are
something due to a person as his; they are given him for reasons of utility
without his being able to lay any just claim to them. One thus has to say: 'the
wise man does not reward because a good deed has been done', just as one
has already said: 'the wise man does not punish because a bad deed has been
done but so that bad deeds shall not be done'. If punishment and reward were
abolished, the strongest motives for performing certain acts and not
performing certain acts would also be abolished; mankind's utility requires
their continuance; and insofar as punishment and reward, blame and praise,
operate most effectively upon vanity, this same utility also requires the
continuance of vanity.
106
By the waterfall. - At the sight of a waterfall we think we see in the
countless curvings, twistings and breakings of the waves capriciousness and
freedom of will; but everything here is necessary, every motion
mathematically calculable. So it is too in the case of human actions; if one
were all-knowing, one would be able to calculate every individual action,
likewise every advance in knowledge, every error, every piece of
wickedness. The actor himself, to be sure, is fixed in the illusion of free will;
if for one moment the wheel of the world were to stand still, and there were
an all-knowing, calculating intelligence there to make use of this pause, it
could narrate the future of every creature to the remotest ages and describe
every track along which this wheel had yet to roll. The actor's deception
regarding himself, the assumption of free-will, is itself part of the mechanism
it would have to compute.
107
Unaccountability and innocence. - The complete unaccountability of
man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest draught the man of
knowledge has to swallow if he has been accustomed to seeing in
accountability and duty the patent of his humanity. All his evaluations, all his
feelings of respect and antipathy have thereby become disvalued and false:
his pro- foundest sentiment, which he accorded to the sufferer, the hero,
rested upon an error; he may no longer praise, no longer censure, for it is
absurd to praise and censure nature and necessity. As he loves a fine work of
art but does not praise it since it can do nothing for itself, as he stands before
the plants, so must he stand before the actions of men and before his own. He
can admire their strength, beauty, fullness, but he may not find
57
any merit in them: the chemical process and the strife of the elements,
the torment of the sick man who yearns for an end to his sickness, are as little
merits as are those states of distress and psychic convulsions which arise
when we are torn back and forth by conflicting motives until we finally
choose the most powerful of them - as we put it (in truth, however, until the
most powerful motive chooses us). But all these motives, whatever exalted
names we may give them, have grown up out of the same roots as those we
believe evilly poisoned; between good and evil actions there is no difference
in kind, but at the most one of degree. Good actions are sublimated evil ones;
evil actions are coarsened, brutalized good ones. It is the individual's sole
desire for self-enjoyment (together with the fear of losing it) which gratifies
itself in every instance, let a man act as he can, that is to say as he must:
whether his deeds be those of vanity, revenge, pleasure, utility, malice,
cunning, or those of sacrifice, sympathy, knowledge. Degrees of intelligent
judgement decide whither each person will let his desire draw him; every
society, every individual always has present an order of rank of things
considered good, according to which he determines his own actions and
judges those of others. But this standard is continually changing, many
actions are called evil but are only stupid, because the degree of intelligence
which decided for them was very low. Indeed, in a certain sense all present
actions are stupid, for the highest degree of human intelligence which can
now be attained will certainly be exceeded in the future: and then all our
actions and judgements will seem in retrospect as circumscribed and
precipitate as the actions and judgements of still existing primitive peoples
now appear to us. To perceive all this can be very painful, but then comes a
consolation: such pains are birth-pangs. The butterfly wants to get out of its
cocoon, it tears at it, it breaks it open: then it is blinded and confused by the
unfamiliar light, the realm of freedom. It is in such men as are capable of
that suffering - how few they will be! - that the first attempt will be made to
see whether mankind could transform itself from a moral to a knowing
mankind. The sun of a new gospel is casting its first beam on the topmost
summits in the soul of every individual: there the mists are gathering more
thickly than ever, and the brightest glitter and the gloomiest twilight lie side
by side. Everything is necessity - thus says the new knowledge; and this
knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the
path to insight into this innocence. If pleasure, egoism, vanity are necessary
for the production of the moral phenomena and their finest flower, the sense
for truth and justice in knowledge; if error and aberration of the imagination
was the only means by which mankind was able gradually to raise itself to
this degree of self-enlightenment and self-redemption - who could venture to
denigrate those means? Who could be despondent when he becomes aware
of the goal to which those paths lead? It is true that everything in the domain
of morality has become and is changeable, unsteady, everything is in flux:
but everything is also flooding fonoard, and towards one goal. Even if the
inherited habit of erroneous evaluation, loving, hating does continue to rule
in us, under the influence of increas-
ing knowledge it will grow weaker: a new habit, that of comprehending,
not-loving, not-hating, surveying is gradually implanting itself in us on the
same soil and will in thousands of years' time perhaps be strong enough to
bestow on mankind the power of bringing forth the wise, innocent
(conscious of innocence) man as regularly as it now brings forth - not his
antithesis but necessary preliminary - the unwise, unjust, guiltconscious
man.
59
3
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
108
The twofold struggle against an ill. - When we are assailed by an ill we
can dispose of it either by getting rid of its cause or by changing the effect it
produces on our sensibilities: that is to say by reinterpreting the ill into a
good whose good effects will perhaps be perceptible only later. Religion and
art (and metaphysical philosophy too) endeavour to bring about a change of
sensibility, partly through changing our judgement as to the nature of our
experiences (for example with the aid of the proposition: 'whom God loveth
he chastiseth'), partly through awakening the ability to take pleasure in pain,
in emotion in general (from which the art of tragedy takes its starting-point).
The more a man inclines towards reinterpretation, the less attention he will
give to the cause of the ill and to doing away with it; the momentary
amelioration and narcoticizing, such as is normally employed for example in
a case of toothache, suffices him in the case of more serious sufferings too.
The more the domination of the religions and all the arts of narcosis declines,
the stricter attention men pay to the actual abolition of the ill: which is, to be
sure, a bad lookout for the writers of tragedies - for there is less and less
material for tragedy, because the realm of inexorable, implacable destiny is
growing narrower and narrower - but an even worse one for the priests: for
these have hitherto lived on the narcoticizing of human ills.
109
Sorrow is knowledge. - How one would like to exchange the false
assertions of the priests that there is a God who desires that we do good, is
the guardian and witness of every action, every moment, every thought, who
loves us and in every misfortune wants only what is best for us - how one
would like to exchange these for truths that would be as salutary, pacifying
and beneficial as those errors are! Yet such truths do not exist; the most
philosophy can do is to set against them other metaphysical plausibilities (at
bottom likewise untruths). The tragedy, however, lies in the fact that one
cannot believe these dogmas of religion and metaphysics if one has in one's
heart and head the rigorous methods of acquiring truth, while on the other
hand one has, through the development of humanity, grown so tender,
sensitive and afflicted one has need of means of cure and comfort of the most
potent description; from which there thus arises the danger that man may
bleed to death from knowledge of truth. This was expressed by Byron in
immortal verse:
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal
truth:
The tree of knowledge is not that of life.
For such cares there is no better antidote, at least for the worst hours and
eclipses of the soul, than to conjure up the solemn frivolity of Horace, and
with him to say to oneself:
quid aetemis minorem
consiliis animum fatigas?
cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu jacentes -t
What is certain, however, is that any degree of frivolity or melancholy is
better than a romantic return and desertion, an approach to Christianity in any
form: for, given the current state of knowledge, one can no longer have any
association with it without incurably dirtying one's intellectual conscience
and prostituting it before oneself and others. Those agonies may be painful
enough: but without agonies one cannot become a leader and educator of
mankind; and woe to him who wants to attempt it but no longer possesses
this clean conscience!
no
Truth in religion. - In the period of the Enlightenment the significance of
religion was not adequately appreciated, of that there can be no doubt: but it
is just as certain that in the reaction to the Enlightenment that followed it was
appreciated much too highly, inasmuch as the religions were treated with
love, almost amorously indeed, and were for example adjudged to possess a
profound, indeed the profoundest possible understanding of the world;
science had only to remove their dogmatic dress in order to possess the 'truth'
in mythical form. The religions were thus - such was the assertion of all
opponents of the Enlightenment - supposed to express sensu allegorico4
having regard to the understanding of the masses, that primeval wisdom
which was wisdom as such, inasmuch as all true science of modern times had
always led us towards it and not away from it: so that between the oldest
sages of mankind and all the most recent there reigned a harmony, indeed an
identity of insights, and a progress in knowledge - assuming one wished to
speak of such a thing - could apply, not to the nature of knowledge, but only
to the form in which it was communicated. This whole conception of religion
and science is erroneous through and through; and no one would still venture
to adhere to it if Schopenhauer's eloquence had not taken it under its
protection: an eloquence that rings loud and clear yet had to wait a generation
before it reached its audience. Certainly one can gain very much towards an
understanding of Christianity and other religions from
* Sorrow is ... that of life: from Byron's Manfred, Act I Scene I
t quid aetemis ... pinu jacentes: why torment your mind, which is unequal to it, with counsel
for eternity; why not come and lie under this tall plane tree, or this pine... ? (Horace: Odes II11).
$ sensu allegorico: with the sense of an allegorical representation
6i
Schopenhauer's religio-moral interpretation of men and the world; but it
is just as certain that he blundered over the value of religion with respect to
knowledge. In this he himself was an all too docile pupil of the scientific
teachers of his time, who one and all paid homage to romanticism and had
renounced the spirit of the Enlightenment; bom into our own time, he could
not possibly have spoken of the sensus allegoricus of religion; he would,
rather, have done honour to truth after his usual fashion with the words: a
religion has never yet, either directly or indirectly, either as dogma or as
parable, contained a truth. For every religion was bom out of fear and need,
it has crept into existence along paths of aberrations of reason; once, perhaps,
when imperilled by science, it lyingly introduced some philosophical
teaching or other into its system, so that later it could be discovered there:
but this is a theologian's artifice from the time when a religion is already
doubting itself. It is these artifices of theology - which in Christianity, as the
religion of a scholarly age saturated with philosophy, were, to be sure,
already being practised very early - that have led to that superstition of a
sensus allegoricus, but it has been even more the habit of philosophers (and
especially those half-creatures the poetizing philosophers and philosophizing
artists) of treating all the sensations they discovered in themselves as
fundamental qualities of mankind in general and therewith to permit their
own religious sensations too to exert a significant influence on the
intellectual structure of their systems. Because philosophers have frequently
philosophized within a religious tradition, or at least under the inherited
power of the celebrated 'metaphysical need', they have achieved hypotheses
which have in fact been very similar to Jewish or Christian or Indian
religious dogmas - similar, that is to say, in the way children are usually
similar to their mothers, except that in this case the fathers were not aware of
this fact of motherhood, a thing that does no doubt happen - yet have fabled
on in innocent astonishment of a family resemblance between all religion
and science. In reality there exists between religion and true science neither
affinity, nor friendship, nor even enmity: they dwell on different stars. Every
philosophy that exhibits a gleaming religious comet-tail in the darkness of its
ultimate conclusions thereby casts suspicion on everything in it that is
presented as science: all of that, too, is presumably likewise religion, even if
it is dressed up as science. - For the rest, even if all the peoples were in
agreement over certain religious matters, for example the existence of a God
(which, by the way, is not the case in regard to this particular point), this
would in fact be no more than a counter-argument against the thing asserted,
for example the existence of a God: the consensus gentium and hominum5 in
general can fairly be considered only a piece of folly. On the other hand,
there exists no consensus omnium sapientiumi whatever in regard to any
single thing, with the exception of that of which Goethe's lines speak:

5 consensus gentium and hominum: unanimous opinion of all mankind t consensus omnium
sapientium: unanimous opinion of all the wise
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
Alle die Weisesten aller der Zeiten Lacheln und winken und stimmen mit ein:
Toricht, auf Bessrung der Toren zu harren!
Kinder der Klugheit, o habet die Narren Eben zum Narren auch, wie sichs gehort!*
Expressed without metre and rhyme, and applied to our case: the
consensus sapientium is that the consensus gentium is a piece of folly, m
Origin of the religious cult. - If we transport ourselves back to the ages
in which the religious life flourished most vigorously we discover a
fundamental conviction which we no longer share and on account of which
we see the door to the religious life once and for all closed to us: it concerns
nature and our traffic with nature. In those ages one as yet knows nothing of
natural laws; neither earth nor sky are constrained by any compulsion; a
season, sunshine, rain can come or they can fail to come. Any conception of
natural causality is altogether lacking. When one rows it is not the rowing
which moves the ship: rowing is only a magical ceremony by means of
which one compels a demon to move the ship. All illness, death itself is the
result of magical influences. Becoming ill and dying never occur naturally;
the whole conception of a 'natural occurrence' is lacking - it first dawns with
the older Greeks, that is to say in a very late phase of mankind, in the
conception of a moiraf enthroned above the gods. When someone shoots with
the bow, there is still an irrational hand and force at work in it; if the wells
suddenly dry up, one thinks first of all of subterranean demons and their
knavery; it must be the arrow of a god through whose invisible action a man
suddenly sinks down. In India (according to Lubbock)!
a
carpenter is
accustomed to make sacrifices to his hammer, his axe and his other tools; a
Brahman treats the crayon with which he writes, a soldier the weapon he
employs in the field, a mason his trowel, a labourer his plough in the same
way. The whole of nature is in the conception of religious men a sum of
actions by conscious and volitional beings, a tremendous complex of
arbitrarinesses. In regard to everything external to us no conclusion can be
drawn that something will be thus or thus, must happen thus or thus; it is we
who are the more or less secure and calculable; man is the rule, nature is
irregularity - this proposition contains the fundamental conviction which
dominates rude, religiously productive primitive cultures. We men of today
feel precisely the opposite: the richer a man feels within himself, the more
polyphonic his subjectivity is, the more powerfully is he impressed by the
uniformity of nature; with Goethe, we all recognize in nature the great means
of composure for the modern soul, we listen to the beat of the pendulum of
this mightiest of clocks with a longing for rest, for becoming settled and still,
as though we could imbibe this uniformity into ourselves and thereby at
* 'All the wisest of every age are in agreement: it is foolish to wait for fools to be cured of
their folly! The proper thing to do is to make fools of the fools!' From Goethe's 'Kophtisches
Lied, lines 3-7.
t moira: fate
t Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913), English historian
63
last come to an enjoyment of ourselves. Formerly the reverse was the
case: if we think back to rude, primitive conditions of peoples, or if we look
closely at present-day savages, we find them determined in the strongest way
by the law, by tradition: the individual is tied to them almost automatically
and moved with the regularity of a pendulum. To him, nature -
uncomprehended, dreadful, mysterious nature - must seem the domain of
freedom, of caprice, of a higher power, indeed, as it were a superhuman stage
of existence, a god. But every individual living in such ages and conditions
feels how his existence, his happiness, that of the family and the state, the
success of any undertaking depends on these arbitrarinesses of nature: certain
natural events must occur at the right time, others fail to occur. How can one
exercise an influence over these terrible unknown powers, how can one fetter
the domain of freedom? thus he asked himself, thus he anxiously seeks: are
there then no means of regulating these powers through a tradition and law in
just the way you are regulated by them? - The believer in magic and miracles
reflects on how to impose a law on nature - : and, in brief, the religious cult
is the outcome of this reflection. The problem these men pose themselves is
intimately related to this one: how can the weaker tribe nonetheless dictate
laws to the stronger, dispose of it, regulate its actions (so far as they affect
the weaker)? One will think first of that mildest kind of constraint, that
constraint one exercises when one has gained the affection of someone. It is
thus also possible to exercise a constraint on the powers-of nature through
prayers and pleadings, through submission, through engaging regularly to
give presents and offerings, through flattering glorifications, inasmuch as by
doing so one obtains their affection: love binds and is bound. Then one can
conclude treaties under which both parties commit themselves to a certain
course of conduct, pledge securities and exchange oaths. But much more
important than this is a species of more violent constraint through magic and
sorcery. Just as man is able with the aid of the sorcerer to harm an enemy
stronger than himself, just as the sorcery of love can operate at a distance, so
the weaker man believes he can influence the mightier spirits of nature too.
The chief means employed by all sorcery is that of getting into one's power
something belonging to another: hair, nail, food from his table, even his
picture or his name. Thus equipped one can then practise sorcery; for the
basic presupposition is that to everything spiritual there pertains something
corporeal; with its aid one is able to bind, harm, destroy the spirit; the
corporeal provides the handle with which one can grasp the spiritual. So that,
as man thus influences other men, so he also influences some spirit of nature;
for the latter too has its corporeal aspect by which it can be grasped. The tree
and, compared with it, the seed from which it originated - this enigmatic
juxtaposition seems to demonstrate that one and the same spirit has
incorporated itself in both forms, one small, one big. A stone that suddenly
rolls away is the body in which a spirit is active; if a rock lies on a lonely
heath and it seems impossible that human strength could ever have sufficed
to take it there, it must have moved there itself, that is to say it must
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
harbour a spirit. Everything that has a body is accessible to sorcery, thus
the spirits of nature are so too. If a god is actually tied to his image then one
can also exercise quite direct constraint upon him (through denial of
sacrificial food, scourging, flattering and the like). To force from their god
the goodwill he is denying them, the common people in China wind ropes
around his image, pull it down, and drag it along the streets through the mud
and dung; 'you dog of a spirit', they say, 'we let you live in a splendid temple,
we covered you with gold, we fed you well, we sacrificed to you, and yet you
are so ungrateful'. Similar violent measures have been taken against images
of saints and of the Virgin in Catholic lands even in the present century when
they have refused to do their duty in times of pestilence or drought.
All these magical relationships with nature called countless ceremonies
into existence: and finally, when their confusion had grown too great, an
effort was made to order and systematize them; so that one came to believe
that the favourable progress of the whole course of nature, and especially of
the great succession of the seasons of the year, was guaranteed by a
corresponding progress of a system of procedures. The meaning of the
religious cult is to determine and constrain nature for the benefit of mankind,
that is to say to impress upon it a regularity and rule of law which it does not
at first possess; while in the present age one seeks to understand the laws of
nature so as to accommodate oneself to them. In brief, the religious cult rests
on the ideas of sorcery as between man and man; and the sorcerer is older
than the priest. But it likewise rests on other and nobler ideas; it presupposes
relations of sympathy between man and man, the existence of goodwill,
gratitude, the hearing of petitions, treaties between enemies, the bestowal of
pledges, the claim to protection of property. Even at very low stages of
culture man does not stand towards nature as its impotent slave, he is not
necessarily its will-less servant: at the stage of religion attained by the
Greeks, especially in relation to the gods of Olympus, it is even as though
two castes lived side by side, a nobler and mightier and one less noble; but
both somehow belong together in their origins and are of one species, they
have no need to be ashamed of one another. That is the element of nobility in
Greek religiosity.
112
On viewing certain antique sacrificial implements. - How many
sensations have been lost us can be seen, for example, in the union of the
farcical, even the obscene, with the religious feeling: our sense of the
possibility of this combination dwindles, we comprehend that it existed only
historically, in the festivals of Demeter and Dionysus, in the Christian Easter
and mystery plays: but we too still know the sublime in concert with the
burlesque and the like, the moving blended with the ludicrous: which a later
age will in turn perhaps no longer comprehend.
3
Christianity and antiquity. - When on a Sunday morning we hear the bells
65
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
ringing we ask ourselves: is it possible! this is going on because of a Jew
crucified 2000 years ago who said he was the son of God. The proof of such
an assertion is lacking. - In the context of our age the Christian religion is
certainly a piece of antiquity intruding out of distant ages past, and that the
above-mentioned assertion is believed - while one is otherwise so rigorous in
the testing of claims - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this inheritance. A
god who begets children on a mortal woman; a sage who calls upon us no
longer to work, no longer to sit in judgement, but to heed the signs of the
imminent end of the world; a justice which accepts an innocent man as a
substitute sacrifice; someone who bids his disciples drink his blood; prayers
for miraculous interventions; sin perpetrated against a god atoned for by a
god; fear of a Beyond to which death is the gateway; the figure of the Cross
as a symbol in an age which no longer knows the meaning and shame of the
Cross - how grue- somely all this is wafted to us, as if out of the grave of a
primeval past! Can one believe that things of this sort are still believed in?
114
The un-Hellenic in Christianity. - The Greeks did not see the Homeric
gods as set above them as masters, or themselves set beneath the gods as
servants, as the Jews did. They saw as it were only the reflection of the most
successful exemplars of their own caste, that is to say an ideal, not an
antithesis of their own nature. They felt inter-related with them, there existed
a mutual interest, a kind of symmetry. Man thinks of himself as noble when
he bestows upon himself such gods, and places himself in a relationship to
them such as exists between the lower aristocracy and the higher; while the
Italic peoples have a real peasant religion, with continual anxiety over evil
and capricious powers and tormenting spirits. Where the Olympian gods
failed to dominate, Greek life too was gloomier and more filled with anxiety.
- Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely and
buried him as though in mud: into a feeling of total depravity it then suddenly
shone a beam of divine mercy, so that, surprised and stupefied by this act of
grace, man gave vent to a cry of rapture and for a moment believed he bore
all heaven within him. It is upon this pathological excess of feeling, upon the
profound corruption of head and heart that was required for it, that all the
psychological sensations of Christianity operate: it desires to destroy, shatter,
stupefy, intoxicate, the one thing it does not desire is measure: and that is
why it is in the profoundest sense barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Hellenic.
5
Advantage of being religious. - There are sober and industrious people to
whom religion adheres like a bordering of higher humanity: such people do
well to remain religious, it beautifies them. - All men incapable of wielding
some kind of weapon or other - mouth and pen included as weapons - become
servile: for these Christianity is very useful, for within Christianity servility
assumes the appearance of a virtue and is quite
66
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
astonishingly beautified. - People whose daily life appears to them too
empty and monotonous easily become religious: this is understandable and
forgivable; only they have no right to demand religiosity of those whose daily
life is not empty and monotonous.
116
The everyday Christian. - If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God,
universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of everlasting
damnation were true, it would be a sign of weakmindedness and lack of
character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling,
to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of
one's eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume
that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts
a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who
precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be
punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.
117
Of the prudence of Christianity. - Among the artifices of Christianity is
that of proclaiming the complete unworthiness, sinfulness and despicableness
of man in general so loudly that to despise one's fellow man becomes
impossible. 'Let him sin as he may, he is nonetheless not essentially different
from me: it is I who am in every degree unworthy and despicable': thus says
the Christian to himself. But this feeling too has lost its sharpest sting,
because the Christian does not believe in his individual despicableness: he is
evil as a man as such and quietens his mind a little with the proposition: we
are all of one kind.
118
Change of cast. - As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its
opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
119
Destiny of Christianity. - Christianity came into existence in order to
lighten the heart; but now it has first to burden the heart so as afterwards to be
able to lighten it. Consequently it will perish.
120
Proof by pleasure. - The pleasant opinion is taken to be true: this is the
proof by pleasure (or, as the church puts it, the proof by power) of which all
religions are so proud, though they ought to be ashamed of it. If the belief did
not make blessed it would not be believed: how little, then, will it be worth!
121
Dangerous game. - Anyone who now again makes room for religious
sensibility within himself will then have to allow it to grow: he cannot do
otherwise. As a consequence his nature will gradually change, it will come to
prefer that which adheres to and dwells beside the religious
67
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
element, the entire horizon of his judgement and sensibility will be
clouded round and religious shadows will flit across it. Sensibility cannot
stand still; therefore let us take care.
122
Blind pupils. - As long as a man knows very well the strength and
weakness of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The
pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety
he feels towards him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a
religion, and so on, usually has for that reason more power than the master.
The influence of a man and his work has never yet grown great without his
blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to
unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces
the victory of the former.
Demolition of the churches. - There is not enough of religion in the
world even to destroy the religions.
124
Sinlessness of man. - When one has grasped how 'sin came into the
world', namely through errors of reason by virtue of which men mistake one
another - indeed, the individual man mistakes himself - to be much blacker
and more evil than is actually the case, then all one's feelings are very much
relieved and lightened, and man and world sometimes appear in a halo of
harmlessness the sight of which fills one with a thorough sense of wellbeing.
In the midst of nature man is always the child in itself. This child does once
dream a dismal, fear-inspiring dream it is true, but when it opens its eyes it
sees it is still in Paradise.
125
lrreligiosity of artists. - Homer is so much at home among his gods, and
as a poet takes such pleasure in them, that he at any rate must have been
profoundly unreligious; with that with which popular belief presented him - a
paltry, crude, in part horrible superstition - he trafficked as freely as a
sculptor with his clay, that is to say with the same ease and impartiality as
that possessed by Aeschylus and Aristophanes and which in more recent
times distinguishes the great artists of the Renaissance, as it does Shakespeare
and Goethe.
126
Art and force of false interpretation. - All the visions, terrors, states of
exhaustion and rapture experienced by the saint are familiar pathological
conditions which, on the basis of rooted religious and psychological errors, he
only interprets quite differently, that is to say not as illnesses. - Thus the
daemon of Socrates too was perhaps an ear-infection which, in accordance
with the moralizing manner of thinking that dominated him, he only
interpreted differently from how it would be interpreted now. It is not
otherwise with the madness and ravings of the prophets and oracular
68
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
priests; it is always the degree of knowledge, imagination, exertion,
morality in the head and heart of the interpreters that has made so much of
them. For those men called geniuses and saints to produce their greatest effect
they have to have constrained to their side interpreters who for the good of
mankind misunderstand them.
127
Reverence for madness. - Because it was noticed that a state of
excitement often made the head clearer and called up happy inspirations, it
was believed that through the extremest states of excitement one would
participate in the happiest of inspirations: and thus the mad were revered as
the wise and propounders of oracles. What lies at the bottom of this is a false
conclusion.
128
What science promises. - Modern science has as its goal: as little pain as
possible, as long life as possible - thus a kind of eternal bliss, though a very
modest kind in comparison with the promises of the religions.
129
Forbidden generosity. - There is not enough love and goodness in the
world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.
130
Continuance of the religious cult in the heart. - The Catholic Church,
and before it all the cults of antiquity, had command of the whole domain of
the means by which man is transported into unfamiliar states and robbed of
the ability to calculate coolly or to think clearly. A church trembling with
deep sounds; dull, regular, repressed calls from a company of priests who
involuntarily transmit their tension to the congregation and excite them to
listen almost in fear, as though a miracle were about to occur; the breath of
the architecture, which, as the abode of a divinity, reaches up into obscurity,
in the dark spaces of which the divinity may at any moment make evident his
dreaded presence - who would want mankind to experience such things again,
now that the presuppositions behind them are no longer believed in? But the
consequences of all this are nonetheless still present: the inner world of the
sublime, affected, tremulous, contrite, expectant states was born in man
principally through the religious cult; that of it which still remains in the soul
was, in the days of its germination and growth, tended and cultivated by it.
131
.
Religious after-pains. - However much one may believe one has weaned
oneself from religion, the weaning has not been so complete that one does not
enjoy encountering religious moods and sentiments without conceptual
content, for example in music; and when a philosophy demonstrates to us the
justification of metaphysical hopes and the profound peace of soul to be
attained through them, and speaks for example of 'the whole sure evangel in
the glance of Raphael's Madonna', we go
69
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
out to meet such assertions and expositions with particular warmth of
feeling; the philosopher here has an easier task of demonstration, for he here
encounters a heart eager to take what he has to offer. From this it is apparent
that the less thoughtful free spirits are really taking exception only to the
dogmas, but are very well acquainted with the magic of the religious
sensations; it hurts them to let the latter go on account of the former. -
Scientific philosophy has to be very much on its guard against smuggling in
errors on the basis of this need (a need that has come into existence and
consequently also a transient one): even logicians speak of 'presentiments' of
truth in morality and art (for example of the presentiment 'that the essence of
things is one'): which is something that should be forbidden them. Between
truths that are the outcome of cautious reasoning and these products of
'presentiment' there lies the unbridgable gulf created by the fact that we owe
the former to the intellect and the latter to a need. Hunger is no proof that the
food that would satisfy it exists, though it desires the food. 'Presentiment'
does not signify any degree of knowledge of the existence of a thing, it
signifies regarding it as possible, inasmuch as one desires or fears it:
'presentiment' does not advance a single step into the land of certainty. - One
involuntarily believes that the religiously coloured departments of a
philosophy are better established than the others; but at bottom the case is the
reverse; one only has the inner desire it may be so - that is to say, that what
makes happy should also be what is true. This desire misleads us into
purchasing bad reasons for good ones.
132
On the Christian need of redemption. - Careful reflection ought to be
able to yield an explanation of the occurrence in the soul of a Christian called
need of redemption which is free of mythology: that is to say, a purely
psychological explanation. It is true that psychological explanation of
religious states and occurrences has hitherto stood in a certain ill-repute,
insofar as a theology calling itself free has been pursuing its unprofitable
business in this domain: for its purpose was from the first, as the spirit of its
founder, Schleiermacher,* leads us to suppose, the preservation of the
Christian religion and the continuance of Christian theology; in which regard
psychological analysis of the 'facts' of religion was supposed to afford a new
anchorage and above all a new occupation. Undeterred by these events we
venture to offer the following interpretation of the said phenomenon. - Man is
conscious of certain actions which stand low in the customary order of rank
of actions; indeed, he discovers in himself a tendency to actions of this sort
which seems to him almost as immutable as his whole nature. How much he
would like to attempt that other species of actions which in the general
estimation are accounted the highest, how much he would like to feel full of
that good consciousness which is supposed to attend a selfless mode of
thought! Unhappily he
* Schleiermacher: Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the leading Protestant theologian
of his age
70
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
gets no further than desiring this: his discontent at his insufficiency is
added to all the other kinds of discontent which his lot in life in general or the
consequences of those other actions called wicked have engendered in him;
so that there arises a profound depression of spirits, together with a watching-
out for a physician who might be able to alleviate this condition and all its
causes. - This condition would not be felt so bitterly if man compared himself
only with other men: for then he would have no reason to be especially
discontented with himself, since he would see he was only bearing the
general burden of human dissatisfaction and imperfection. But he compares
himself with a being which alone is capable of those actions called unegoistic
and lives continually in the consciousness of a selfless mode of thought, with
God; it is because he looks into this brilliant mirror that his own nature seems
to him so dismal, so uncommonly distorted. Then again, the thought of this
same being makes him fearful insofar as it appears to his imagination as
chastising justice: in all possible experiences, great and small, he believes he
recognizes its anger and menaces, indeed that he feels already in advance the
whiplash of this judge and executioner. Who can help him in this peril,
which, inasmuch as the term of punishment is to be unending, exceeds in
horror anything else he can imagine?
i33
Before we go on to exhibit this condition in its further consequences let
us confess to ourselves that the man in this condition has got into it, not
through his 'guilt' and 'sin', but through a succession of errors of reason, that it
was the fault of the mirror if his nature appeared to him dark and hateful to
such a degree, and that this mirror was his work, the very imperfect work of
human imagination and judgement. Firstly, a being capable of nothing but
unegoistic actions is more fabulous than the phoenix; it cannot even be
imagined clearly, if only because under strict examination the whole concept
'unegoistic action' vanishes into thin air. No man has ever done anything that
was done wholly for others and with no personal motivation whatever; how,
indeed, should a man be able to do something that had no reference to
himself, that is to say lacked all inner compulsion (which would have its basis
in a personal need)? How could the ego act without the ego? - On the other
hand, a God who was wholly love, as is occasionally supposed, would be
incapable of a single unegoistic action: in connection with which one should
recall a thought of Lich- tenberg's, though it was, to be sure, taken from a
somewhat lower sphere: 'It is impossible, as is commonly said, for us to feel
for others; we feel only for ourselves. The proposition sounds hard, but is not
if it is correctly understood. One loves neither father, nor mother, nor wife,
nor child, one loves the pleasant sensations they produce in us', or as La
Rochefoucauld says: 'si on croit aimer sa maitresse pour I'amour d'elle, on
est bien trompi'.* As to why actions performed out of love are evaluated
more highly than others, namely not on account of their nature but on account
* 'if we believe we love our mistress for love of her we are very much mistaken'
71
of their utility, one should consult the investigations 'On the Origin of the
Moral Sensations' previously referred to. If, however, a man should wish to
be, like that God, wholly love, and to do and desire everything for others and
nothing for himself, then the latter is impossible simply "because he has to do
a great deal for himself if he is to be able to do anything whatever for the
sake of others. Moreover, such a thing presupposes that the other is
sufficiently egoistical to accept this sacrifice, this life lived for his sake, over
and over again: so that men of love and self- sacrifice would have to have an
interest in the continuance of the loveless egoist incapable of self-sacrifice,
and the highest morality would, if it was to continue to exist, have to
downright compel the existence of immorality (whereby it would, to be sure,
abolish itself). - Further: the idea of a God is disturbing and humiliating as
long as it is believed, but how it originated can at the present stage of
comparative ethnology no longer admit of doubt; and with the insight into this
origination that belief falls away. The Christian who compares his nature with
that of God is like Don Quixote, who under-estimated his own courage
because his head was filled with the miraculous deeds of the heroes of
chivalric romances: the standard of comparison applied in both cases belongs
in the domain of fable. But if the idea of God falls away, so does the feeling
of 'sin' as a transgression against divine precepts, as a blemish on a creature
consecrated to God. Then there probably still remains over that feeling of
depression which is very much entwined with and related to fear of
punishment by secular justice or the disapprobation of other men; the
depression caused by the pang of conscience, the sharpest sting in the feeling
of guilt, is nonetheless abolished when one sees that, although one may by
one's actions have offended against human tradition, human laws and
ordinances, one has not therewith endangered the 'eternal salvation of the
soul' and its relationship to the divinity. If a man is, finally, able to attain to
the philosophical conviction of the unconditional necessity of all actions and
their complete unaccountability and to make it part of his flesh and blood,
then that remainder of the pang of conscience also disappears.
i34
Now if, as has been said, the Christian has got into the feeling of
selfcontempt through certain errors, that is to say through a false, unscientific
interpretation of his actions and sensations, he also notices with the highest
astonishment that this condition of contempt, the pang of conscience,
displeasure in general, does not persist, but that occasionally there are hours
when all this is wafted away from his soul and he again feels free and valiant.
What has happened is that his pleasure in himself, his contentment at his own
strength, has, in concert with the weakening which every profound excitation
must necessarily undergo, carried off the victory: he loves himself again, he
feels it - but precisely this love, this new self-valuation seems to him
incredible, he can see in it only the wholly undeserved flowing down of a
radiance of mercy from on high. If he earlier believed he saw in every event
warnings, menaces, punish-
72
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
merits and every sort of sign of divine wrath, he now interprets divine
goodness into his experiences: this event appears to him to exhibit kindness,
that is like a helpful signpost, a third and especially the whole joyful mood he
is in seems to him proof that God is merciful. If he earlier in a condition of
depression interpreted his actions falsely, now he does the same with his
experiences; he conceives his mood of consolation as the effect upon him of
an external power, the love with which fundamentally he loves himself
appears as divine love; that which he calls mercy and the prelude to
redemption is in truth self-pardon, self-redemption.
135
Thus: a certain false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in the
interpretation of motives and experiences is the necessary presupposition for
becoming a Christian and for feeling the need of redemption. With the insight
into this aberration of reason and imagination one ceases to be a Christian.
136

Of Christian asceticism and holiness. - However much individual
thinkers have exerted themselves to represent those strange phenomena of
morality usually called asceticism and holiness as a marvel and miracle to
attempt a rational explanation of which is almost a sacrilege and profanation:
the urge to commit this sacrilege is, on the other hand, every bit as strong. A
mighty drive of nature has at all times prompted a protest against these
phenomena as such; science, insofar as it is, as aforesaid, an imitation of
nature, permits itself at least to register a protest against the alleged
inexplicability, indeed inapproachability, of the said phenomena. So far, to be
sure, it has done so in vain: they are still unexplained, a fact that gives great
satisfaction to the above-mentioned votaries of the morally miraculous. For,
speaking quite generally, the unexplained is to be altogether inexplicable, the
inexplicable altogether unnatural, supernatural, miraculous - thus sounds the
demand in the souls of all religious people and metaphysicians (in those of the
artists, too, when they are also thinkers); while the scientific man sees in this
demand the 'evil principle'. - The first general probability one arrives at when
reflecting on holiness and asceticism is that its nature is a complex one: for
almost everywhere, within the physical world as well as in the moral, the
supposedly marvellous has successfully been traced back to the complex, to
the multiply caused. Let us therefore venture first to isolate individual drives
in the soul of the saint and ascetic and then conclude by thinking of them
entwined together.
137
There is a defiance of oneself of which many forms of asceticism are
among the most sublimated expressions. For certain men feel so great a need
to exercise their strength and lust for power that, in default of other objects or
because their efforts in other directions have always miscarried, they at last
hit upon the idea of tyrannizing over certain parts of their own
73
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
nature, over, as it were, segments or stages of themselves. Thus some
thinkers confess to views which are plainly not calculated to increase or
improve their reputation; some downright call down the disrespect of others
upon themselves when by keeping silent they could easily have remained
respected men; others retract earlier opinions and are not afraid of henceforth
being called inconsistent: on the contrary, they strive to be called so, and
behave like high-spirited riders who like their steed best only when it has
grown savage, is covered with sweat, and is tamed. Thus a man climbs on
dangerous paths in the highest mountains so as to mock at his fears and
trembling knees; thus a philosopher adheres to views of asceticism, humility
and holiness in the light of which his own image becomes extremely ugly.
This division of oneself, this mockery of one's own nature, this spernere se
sperni6 of which the religions have made so much, is actually a very high
degree of vanity. The entire morality of the Sermon on the Mount belongs
here: man takes a real delight in oppressing himself with excessive claims
and afterwards idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in his soul.
In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that
he needs to diabolize the other part. -
138
Man is not equally moral all the time, that fact is well known: if one
judges his morality according to his capacity for great self-sacrificing
resolution and self-denial (which, protracted and grown to a habit, constitutes
holiness), then it is in his affects that he is most moral; higher excitation
presents him with quite novel motivations which, in his more usual cold and
sober state, he would perhaps not even believe himself capable of. How does
this come about? Probably through the proximity to one another of all great
and highly exciting things; once a man has been brought to a state of
extraordinary tension, he can resolve equally well to take a fearful revenge or
to break himself of his thirst for revenge. Under the influence of violent
emotion he desires in any event the great, tremendous, prodigious, and if he
happens to notice that the sacrifice of himself satisfies him as much as, or
even more than the sacrifice of another, he chooses it. All he is really
concerned with, therefore, is the discharge of his emotion; to relieve his state
of tension he seizes the spears of his enemies and buries them in his own
breast. That there is something great in self-denial, and not only in revenge,
must have been inculcated into man only through long habituation; a divinity
who sacrifices himself was the strongest, most effective symbol of this kind
of greatness. As the overcoming of the foe hardest to conquer, the sudden
mastering of an affect - that is how this denial appeared; and to this extent it
counted as the summit of the moral. In reality what is involved is the
exchange of one idea for another, with the feelings remaining at the same
level of elevation and flood. When they are grown sober again and are resting
from this affect, men no longer understand the morality of those moments,
but

6 spernere se sperni: answer contempt with contempt
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
the general admiration of all who also experienced it sustains and
supports them; pride is their consolation when the affect and an
understanding of their deed fades away. Thus: these acts of self-denial also
are at bottom not moral, insofar as they are not performed strictly for the sake
of others; the case, rather, is that the other only offers the highly tensed heart
an opportunity to relieve itself through this self-denial.
139
In many respects the ascetic too seeks to make life easier for himself:
and he does so as a rule by complete subordination to the will of another or to
a comprehensive law and ritual; somewhat in the way in which the Brahman
decides nothing whatever for himself but is guided every moment by holy
writ. This subordination is a powerful means of becoming master of oneself;
one is occupied and thus not bored, and yet one's own willfulness and
passions are not in any way involved; after one has acted there is no feeling
of responsibility and therefore no pangs of remorse. One has renounced one's
own will once and for all, and this is easier than renouncing it only now and
again; just as it is easier to relinquish a desire altogether than to enjoy it in
moderation. If we recall the relationship between man and state now
obtaining, we discover that there too unconditional obedience is more
comfortable than conditional. The saint thus makes his life easier through this
complete surrender of his personality, and one deceives oneself if one
admires in this phenomenon the supreme heroic feat of morality. It is in any
event harder to maintain one's personality without vacillation or dissimulation
than it is to free oneself of it in the way described; and it demands, moreover,
a lot more spirit and reflection.
140
After having discovered in many actions more difficult to explain that
pleasure in emotion as such, I would also recognize in regard to the
selfcontempt which is one of the characteristics of saintliness, and likewise in
acts of self-torture (through hunger and ilagillation, dislocation of limbs,
simulation of madness), a means by which these natures combat the general
enervation of their will to live (their nerves): they employ the most painful
stimulants and cruelties so as, at least for a time, to emerge out of that
boredom and torpor into which their great spiritual indolence and their
subordination to the will of another just described so often plunges them.
141
The most usual means the ascetic and saint employs to make his life
nonetheless endurable and enjoyable consists in occasionally waging war and
in the alternation of victory and defeat. To this end he requires an opponent,
and he finds him in the so-called 'enemy within'. He exploits especially his
tendency to vanity, to a thirst for honours and domination, then his sensual
desires, in an attempt to see his life as a continual battle and himself as a
battlefield upon which good and evil spirits wrestle with
75
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
alternating success. It is well known that sensual fantasy is moderated,
indeed almost suppressed, by regularity in sexual intercourse, while it is on
the other hand unfettered and dissolute when such intercourse is disorderly or
does not take place at all. The fantasy of many Christian saints has been dirty
to an uncommon degree; by virtue of the theory that these desires are actually
demons raging within them they do not feel any very great sense of
responsibility for this state of things; it is to this feeling that we owe the
instructive candidness of their self-confessions. It has been in their interest
that this struggle should be in progress all the time to some degree, since, as
already said, it provides entertainment for their tedious life. But so that this
struggle should seem sufficiently momentous to excite the continuing interest
and admiration of the non-saints, sensuality had to be more and more
stigmatized as heretical, indeed the danger of everlasting damnation was
associated so closely with these things that it is highly probable that
throughout whole ages Christians even begot children with a bad conscience;
whereby a great injury has certainly been done to mankind. And yet here
truth is stood completely on its head: which is in the case of truth particularly
unbecoming. Christianity had indeed said: every man is conceived and bom
in sin; and in the insupportable superlative Christianity of Calderon* this idea
was again knotted and wound together, so that he ventured on the most
perverse paradox there is in the well-known lines:
the greatest guilt of man
is that he was born.
In all pessimistic religions the act of procreation is felt as being bad in
itself, but this feeling is by no means common to all mankind and even the
pessimists are not unanimous in the matter. Empedocles,t for example,
knows nothing whatever of the disgraceful, diabolical, sinful in erotic things;
on the contrary, he sees upon the great field of misfortune only one
apparition that promises hope and salvation. Aphrodite; to him she is a
guarantee that strife will not rule for ever but will one day hand over the
sceptre to a gentler daemon. The Christian practical pessimists had, as
aforesaid, an interest in seeing that a different opinion remained dominant;
they required for the solitude and the spiritual wasteland of their life an
enemy always on the alert: and an enemy, moreover, that was universally
recognized through the combating and overcoming of whom they could
repeatedly appear to the non-saints as half incomprehensible, supernatural
beings. If, as a consequence of their mode of life and the ruination of their
health, this enemy finally took flight for ever, they at once knew how to see
their inner world populated by new demons. The rise and fall of the scales
called pride and humility entertained their brooding heads just as well as did
the alternation of desire and repose of soul. In those days psychology served
the end, not only of casting suspicion on everything human, but of
oppressing, scourging
* Calderdn: Pedro Calderdn de la Barca (1600-81): Spanish dramatist
t Empedocles (d.c. 433 BC): 'pre-Socratic' philosopher
THE RELI GI OUS LI FE
and crucifying it; one wanted to believe oneself as bad and evil as
possible, one sought fear for the salvation of one's soul, despair of one's own
strength. Everything natural to which one attaches the idea of the bad and
sinful (as for example is done even now in regard to the erotic) oppresses the
imagination and makes it gloomy, because frightening to look upon, causes
men to haggle with themselves and deprives them of security and trust; even
their dreams acquire a flavour of tormented conscience. And yet this
suffering from the natural in the reality of things is completely groundless: it
is only the consequence of opinions about things. It is easy to see how
designating the ineluctably natural as bad, and then invariably finding it so,
makes men themselves worse than they need be. The artifice practised by
religion and by those metaphysicians who will have man evil and sinful by
nature is to make him suspicious of nature and thus make him himself bad:
this being a consequence of his inability to divest himself of nature's garb. If
he lives long in this natural dress he gradually comes to feel weighed down
by such a burden of sins that supernatural powers are needed to lift it; and
with that the need for redemption we have already discussed steps upon the
scene, answering to no actual but only to an imaginary sinfulness. Go
through the moral demands exhibited in the documents of Christianity one by
one and you will find that in every case they are exaggerated, so that man
could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should becotne more
moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find
this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and
adhered to it for so long? Just as in the world of antiquity an immeasurable
quantity of spirit and inventiveness had been expended on augmenting joy in
life through festive cults, so in the era of Christianity an immeasurable
amount of spirit has likewise been sacrificed to another endeavour: man was
by every means to be made to feel sinful and thereby become excited,
animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price- is
that not the watchword of an enervated, over-ripe, over-cultivated age? The
circle of all natural sensations had been run through a hundred times, the soul
had grown tired of them: thereupon the saint and the ascetic invented a new
species of stimulant. They presented themselves before all eyes, not really so
that many might imitate them, but as a frightful and yet delightful spectacle,
performed on that borderline between world and over-world where in those
days everyone believed they beheld now rays of heavenly light, now uncanny
tongues of flame flickering up from the depths. The eye of the saint, directed
upon the dreadful significance of the brevity of earthly life, upon the
proximity of the final decision in regard to endless new vistas of life, this
burning eye in a body half destroyed, made the men of the ancient world
tremble in their very depths; to gaze at him, suddenly to look away, to feel
again the attraction of the spectacle, to surrender to it, to satiate oneself with
it until the soul was convulsed with fire and icy fevers - this was the last
pleasure antiquity invented after it had grown apathetic even to the sight of
animal and human combats.
77
142
To summarize what has been said: that condition of the soul in which
the saint or one becoming a saint rejoices is composed of elements with
which we are all very familiar; except that in the light of other conceptions
than the religious they appear in other colours and then they usually incur the
censure of mankind as surely as, garnished with religion and the ultimate
meaning of existence, they can count on admiration or, indeed, worship - or
at least could count on them in earlier ages. Now the saint practises that
defiance of oneself that is a close relation of lust for power and bestows the
feeling of power even upon the hermit; now his distended sensibility leaps
out of the desire to allow his passions free rein over into the desire to break
them like wild horses under the mighty impress of a proud soul; now he
desires a complete cessation of sensations of a disturbing, tormenting,
stimulating kind, a waking sleep, a lasting repose in the womb of a dull,
beast- and plant-like indolence; now he seeks conflict and ignites it in
himself, because boredom has shown him its yawning face: he scourges his
self-idolatry with self-contempt and cruelty, he rejoices in the wild riot of his
desires, in the sharp sting of sin, indeed in the idea that he is lost, he knows
how to lay a trap for his affects, for example that of the extremest lust for
power, so that he passes over into the extremest abasement and his hunted
soul is wrenched utterly out of joint by this contrast; and when, finally, he
comes to thirst for visions, for colloquies with the dead or divine beings, it is
at bottom a rare kind of voluptuousness he desires, but perhaps that
voluptuousness within which all other kinds are knotted together. Novalis,
one of the authorities in questions of saintliness by experience and instinct,
once blurted out the whole secret with naive rapture: 'It is sufficiently
marvellous that not long ago the association of voluptuousness, religion and
cruelty called the attention of men to their inner relatedness and common
tendency.'
143
It is not what the saint is, but what he signifies in the eyes of the
nonsaints, that gives him his world-historic value. Because he was mistaken
for what he was not, because his psychological states were interpreted falsely
and he was set as far apart as possible from everyone else as though he were
something altogether incomparable, strange and supra- human: that is how he
acquired the extraordinary power with which he was able to dominate the
imagination of whole nations and whole ages. He himself did not know
himself; he himself deciphered the characters of his moods, inclinations and
actions by means of an art of interpretation that was as exaggerated and
artificial as the pneumatical interpretation of the Bible. What was perverse
and pathological in his nature, with its coupling together of spiritual poverty,
deficient knowledge, ruined health and over-exdted nerves, was concealed
from his own sight just as it was from that of his spectators. He was not an
especially good man, even less an especially wise one: but he signified
something that exceeded
the ordinary human portion of goodness and wisdom. Belief in him lent
support to belief in the divine and miraculous, in a religious meaning of
existence, in an imminent Day of Judgement. In the evening glow of the sun
of the coming end of the world that shone over all Christian peoples the
shadow of the saint grew to monstrous size: to such a height, indeed, that
even in our own age, which no longer believes in God, there are still thinkers
who believe in the saints.
144
It goes without saying that this depiction of the saint, which is sketched
after the average profile of the whole species, can be countered by many
depictions which might evoke more pleasant feelings. Individual exceptions
stand apart from the species in general, either through great gentleness and
philanthropy or through the charm of an uncommon degree of energy; others
are in the highest degree attractive because their whole being is flooded with
the light of certain delusions: as for example was the case with the celebrated
founder of Christianity, who regarded himself as the innate son of God and as
a consequence felt himself to be sinless; so that, through this conceit - which
ought not to be judged too harshly, since the whole of antiquity swarmed
with sons of gods - he attained the same goal, the feeling of complete
sinlessness, complete unaccountability, which nowadays everyone can
acquire through scientific study. - I have likewise taken no account of the
Indian saints, who occupy an inter- medite position between the Christian
saint and the Greek philosopher and to this extent do not represent a pure
type: knowledge, science - insofar as there was any - elevation above other
men through logical discipline and schooling have been demanded by the
Buddhists as a sign of sainthood to the same extent as these qualities are
rejected and denounced as signs of unholiness in the Christian world.
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145
What is perfect is supposed not to have become. - In the case of
everything perfect we are accustomed to abstain from asking how it became:
we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic.
Here we are probably still standing under the after-effect of a primeval
mythological invention. We still almost feel (for example in a Greek temple
such as that at Paestum) that a god must one morning have playfully
constructed his dwelling out of these tremendous weights: at other times that
a stone suddenly acquired by magic a soul that is now trying to speak out of
it. The artist knows that his work produces its full effect when it excites a
belief in an improvisation, a belief that it came into being with a miraculous
suddenness; and so he may assist this illusion and introduce those elements
of rapturous restlessness, of blindly groping disorder, of attentive reverie that
attend the beginning of creation into his art as a means of deceiving the soul
of the spectator or auditor into a mood in which he believes that the complete
and perfect has suddenly emerged instantaneously. - The science of art has, it
goes without saying, most definitely to counter this illusion and to display the
bad habits and false conclusions of the intellect by virtue of which it allows
the artist to ensnare it.
146
The artist's sense of truth. - In regard to knowledge of truths, the artist
possesses a weaker morality than the thinker; he does not wish to be deprived
of the glittering, profound interpretations of life and guards against simple
and sober methods and results. He appears to be fighting on behalf of the
greater dignity and significance of man; in reality he refuses to give up the
presuppositions which are most efficacious for his art, that is to say the
fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolical, the over-
estimation of the person, the belief in something miraculous in genius: he
thus considers the perpetuation of his mode of creation more important than
scientific devotion to the true in any form, however plainly this may appear.
147
Art as necromancer. - Among the subsidiary duties of art is that of
conserving, and no doubt also of taking extinguished, faded ideas and
restoring to them a little colour: when it performs this task it winds a band
around different ages and makes the spirits that inform them return. It is only
a phantom life that here arises, to be sure, such as appears about graves or
like the return of the beloved dead in dreams; but the old emotions are
FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
again aroused, if only for a few moments, and the heart beats to a rhythm
it had forgotten. On account of this useful function of art one must overlook it
in the artist himself if he does not stand in the foremost ranks of the
Enlightenment and the progressive masculinization of man: he has remained a
child or a youth all his life, stuck at the point at which he was first assailed by
his drive to artistic production; feelings belonging to the first stages of life
are, however, admitted to be closer to those of earlier times than to those of
the present century. Without his knowing it, his task becomes that of making
mankind childlike; this is his glory and his limitation.
148
Poets as alleviators of life. - Insofar as they want to alleviate the life of
men, poets either turn their eyes away from the toilsome present or they
procure for the present new colours through a light which they direct upon it
from the past. To be able to do this, they themselves have to be in many
respects backward-looking creatures: so that they can be employed as bridges
to quite distant ages and conceptions, to dead or dying religions and cultures.
They are, in fact, always and necessarily epigones. There are, to be sure,
several things to be said against their means of alleviating life: they soothe
and heal only provisionally, only for a moment; they even hinder men from
working for a real improvement in their conditions by suspending and
discharging in a palliative way the very passion which impels the
discontented to action.
149
The slow arrow of beauty. - The noblest kind of beauty is not that which
suddenly transports us, which makes a violent and intoxicating assault upon
us (such beauty can easily excite disgust), but that which slowly infiltrates us,
which we bear away with us almost without noticing and encounter again in
dreams, but which finally, after having for long lain modestly in our heart,
takes total possession of us, filling our eyes with tears and our heart with
longing. - What is it we long for at the sight of beauty? To be beautiful
ourself: we imagine we would be very happy if we were beautiful. - But that
is an error.
150
Animation of art. - Art raises its head where the religions relax their
hold. It takes over a host of moods and feelings engendered by religion, lays
them to its heart and itself grows more profound and soulful, so that it is now
capable of communicating exultation and enthusiasm as it formerly could not.
The wealth of religious feelings, swollen to a torrent, breaks forth again and
again and seeks to conquer new regions: but the growth of the Enlightenment
undermined the dogmas of religion and inspired a fundamental distrust of
them: so that the feelings expelled from the sphere of religion by the
Enlightenment throw themselves into art; in individual cases into political life
as well, indeed even straight into the sciences. Wherever we perceive human
endeavours to be tinted with a
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higher, gloomier colouring, we can assume that dread of spirits, the
odour of incense and the shadows of churches are still adhering to them.
How metre beautifies. - Metre lays a veil over reality: it effectuates a
certain artificiality of speech and unclarity of thinking; by means of the
shadows it throws over thoughts it now conceals, now brings into
prominence. As beautification requires shadows, so clarification requires
'vagueness'. - Art makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of
unclear thinking.
152
Art of the ugly soul. - One imposes far too narrow limitations on art
when one demands that only well-ordered, morally balanced souls may
express themselves in it. As in the plastic arts, so in music and poetry too
there is an art of the ugly soul beside the art of the beautiful soul; and the
mightiest effects of art, that which tames souls, moves stones and humanizes
the beast, have perhaps been mostly achieved by precisely that art.
153
Art makes the thinker's heart heavy. - How strong the metaphysical need
is, and how hard nature makes it to bid it a final farewell, can be seen from
the fact that even when the free spirit has divested himself of everything
metaphysical the highest effects of art can easily set the metaphysical strings,
which have long been silent or indeed snapped apart, vibrating in sympathy;
so it can happen, for example, that a passage in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
will make him feel he is hovering above the earth in a dome of stars with the
dream of immortality in his heart: all the stars seem to glitter around him and
the earth seems to sink farther and farther away. - If he becomes aware of
being in this condition he feels a profound stab in the heart and sighs for the
man who will lead him back to his lost love, whether she be called religion or
metaphysics. It is in such moments that his intellectual probity is put to the
test.
154
Playing with life. - The facility and frivolity of the Homeric fantasy was
necessary for soothing the immoderately passionate disposition and over-
subtle intellect of the Greeks and temporarily banishing them. When their
intellect speaks, how cruel and bitter life appears! They do not deceive
themselves, but they deliberately and playfully embellish life with lies.
Simonides* advised his compatriots to take life as a game; they were only
too familiar with its painful seriousness (for the misery of mankind is among
the favourite themes for song among the gods), and they knew that even
misery could become a source of enjoyment solely through art. As a
punishment for this insight, however, they were so plagued by a delight in
telling stories that it was hard for them to desist from lies and deception in
the course of everyday life - just as all poetical * Simonides (c. 556 to c. 468 BC),
Greek poet
FROM THE SOULS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS
people take a delight in lying, a delight that is moreover quite innocent.
The neighbouring nations were no doubt sometimes reduced to despair by it.
155
Belief in inspiration. - Artists have an interest in the existence of a belief
in the sudden occurrence of ideas, in so-called inspirations; as though the idea
of a work of art, a poem, the basic proposition of a philosophy flashed down
from heaven like a ray of divine grace. In reality, the imagination of a good
artist or thinker is productive continually, of good, mediocre and bad things,
but his power of judgement, sharpened and practised to the highest degree,
rejects, selects, knots together; as we can now see from Beethoven's
notebooks how the most glorious melodies were put together gradually and as
it were culled out of many beginnings. He who selects less rigorously and
likes to give himself up to his imitative memory can, under the right
circumstances, become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation is
something very inferior in relation to the serious and carefully fashioned
artistic idea. All the great artists have been great workers, inexhaustible not
only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.
156
Inspiration again. - If productive power has been blocked for a time and
prevented from flowing out by an obstruction, there occurs in the end an
effusion so sudden it appears that an immediate inspiration without any
preliminary labour, that is to say a miracle, has taken place. This constitutes
the familiar deception with whose continuance the interest of all artists is, as
aforesaid, a little too much involved. The capital has only been accumulated,
it did not fall from the sky all at once. Similar apparent inspiration is also to
be found in other domains, for example in that of goodness, virtue, vice.
157
The sufferings of genius and their value. - The artistic genius wants to
give pleasure, but if he stands on a very high level there can easily be a lack
of others to enjoy it; he offers food but no one wants it. This sometimes
bestows upon him a moving and ludicrous pathos; for fundamentally he has
no right to compel people to enjoy themselves. He sounds his pipe but no one
wants to dance: can that be tragic? - Perhaps it can. After all, he has, as a
compensation for this privation, more enjoyment in creating than other
people have in any other species of activity. His sufferings are felt to be
exaggerated because the sound of his lamentations is louder, his mouth more
persuasive; and sometimes his sufferings really are great, but only because his
ambition and envy are so great. The genius of knowledge, such as Kepler and
Spinoza, is usually not so covetous and does not make such a commotion
over his sufferings and privations, which are actually greater. He can be more
certain of posterity and divest himself of the present; whereas an artist who
does this is always playing a desperate
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game which must fill him with trepidation. In very rare cases - when the
genius of ability and of knowledge is amalgamated with moral genius in the
same individual - there is added to the sufferings referred to a species of
suffering that one must take to be the most singular exception in the world:
an extra- and supra-personal sensibility attuned to a nation, to mankind, to a
whole culture, to all suffering existence: which acquires its value through its
connection with very difficult and remote forms of knowledge (pity in itself
is of little value). - But by what standard, on what scales can we measure
whether or not it is genuine? Is it not almost obligatory to mistrust all who
speak of possessing sensibilities of this sort?
158
Fatality of greatness. - Every great phenomenon is succeeded by
degeneration, especially in the domain of art. The example of greatness
incites all vainer natures to extreme imitation or attempts to outdo; in
addition to which, all great talents have the fatal property of suppressing
many weaker shoots and forces and as it were laying nature waste all around
them. The most fortunate thing that can happen in the evolution of an art is
that several geniuses appear together and keep one another in bounds; in the
course of this struggle the weaker and tenderer natures too will usually be
granted light and air.
159
Art dangerous to the artist. - When art seizes violently on an individual
it draws him back to the conceptions of those ages in which art flourished
most mightily, and then it effects a retrogression in him. The artist acquires
increasing reverence for sudden excitations, believes in gods and demons,
instils a soul into nature, hates the sciences, becomes changeable of mood as
were the men of antiquity and longs for an overthrowing of everything
unfavourable to art, and he does this with all the vehemence and
unreasonableness of a child. The artist is in himself already a retarded being,
inasmuch as he has halted at games that pertain to youth and childhood: to
this there is now added his gradual retrogression to earlier times. Thus there
at last arises a violent antagonism between him and the men of his period, of
his own age, and his end is gloomy; just as, according to the tales told in
antiquity, Homer and Aeschylus at last lived and died in melancholia.
160
Created people. - When we say the dramatist (and the artist in general)
actually creates characters, this is a nice piece of deception and exaggeration
in the existence and dissemination of which art celebrates one of its
unintentional and as it were superfluous triumphs. In reality we understand
very little of an actual living person and generalize very superficially when
we attribute to him this or that character: well, the poet adopts the same very
imperfect posture towards man as we do, in that his sketches of men are just
as superficial as is our knowledge of men. There is much illusion involved in
these created characters of the artists; they are
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FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
in no way living products of nature, but, like painted people, a little too
thin, they cannot endure inspection from close to. And if one should even
venture to say that the character of the ordinary living man is often self-
contradictory and that created by the dramatist the ideal that hovered dimly
before the eye of nature, this would be quite wrong. An actual human being is
something altogether necessary (even in those so- called contradictions), but
we do not always recognize this necessity. The invented human being, the
phantasm, desires to signify something necessary, but only in the eyes of
those who comprehend even an actual human being only in a crude, unnatural
simplification: so that a couple of striking, often repeated characteristics, with
a great deal of light on them and a great deal of shadow and twilight around
them, suffice to meet all their demands. They are thus quite ready to treat
phantasms as actual, necessary human beings because they are accustomed
when dealing with actual human beings to take a phantasm, a silhouette, an
arbitrary abridgement for the whole. - That the painter and the sculptor, of all
people, give expression to the 'idea' of the human being is mere fantasizing
and sense-deception: one is being tyrannized over by the eye when one says
such a thing, since this sees even of the human body only the surface, the
skin; the inner body, however, is just as much part of the idea. Plastic art
wants to make characters visible on the outside; the art of speech employs the
word to the same end, it delineates the character in sounds. Art begins from
the natural ignorance of mankind as to his interior (both bodily and as
regards character): it does not exist for physicists or philosophers.
161
Self-overestimation in the belief in artists and philosophers. - We all
think that a work of art, an artist, is proved to be of high quality if it seizes
hold on us and profoundly moves us. But for this to be so our own high
quality in judgement and sensibility would first have to have been proved:
which is not the case. Who in the realm of the plastic arts has moved and
enraptured more than Bernini, who has produced a mightier effect than that
post-Demosthenes rhetor* who introduced the Asiatic style and caused it to
predominate for two centuries? Such a predomination over entire centuries
proves nothing in regard to the quality or lasting validity of a style; that is
why one should never be too firm in one's faith in any artist: for such a faith
is not only faith in the veracity of our sensibility but also in the infallibility of
our judgement, while our judgement or sensibility, or both of them, can
themselves be too coarse or too refined, exaggerated or gross. The blessings
and raptures conferred by a philosophy or a religion likewise prove nothing
in regard to their truth: just as little as the happiness the madman enjoys from
his idee fixe proves anything in regard to its rationality.
162
Cult of the genius out of vanity. - Because we think well of ourselves, but *
Hegesias of Magnesia (c. 250 BC), of the school of Cyrenaic philosophers
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nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting
like one of Raphael's or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare's, we
convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily
marvellous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously
inclined, a mercy from on high. Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the
cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us,
as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us (even Goethe, who was without
envy, called Shakespeare his star of the most distant heights; in regard to
which one might recall the line: 'the stars, these we do not desire'). But, aside
from these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no
way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines,
the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics. All these activities
are explicable if one pictures to oneself people whose thinking is active in
one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously
observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere
models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means
available to them. Genius too does nothing except learn first how to lay
bricks then how to build, except continually seek for material and continually
form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not
only that of the genius: but none is a 'miracle'. - Whence, then, the belief that
genius exists only in the artist, orator and philosopher? that only they have
'intuition'? (Whereby they are supposed to possess a kind of miraculous
eyeglass with which they can see directly into 'the essence of the thing'!) It is
clear that people speak of genius only where the effects of the great intellect
are most pleasant to them and where they have no desire to feel envious. To
call someone 'divine' means: 'here there is no need for us to compete'. Then,
everything finished and complete is regarded with admiration, everything
still becoming is under-valued. But no one can see in the work of the artist
how it has become; that is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of
becoming one grows somewhat cool. The finished and perfect art of
representation repulses all thinking as to how it has become; it tyrannizes as
present completeness and perfection. That is why the masters of the art of
representation count above all as gifted with genius and why men of science
do not. In reality, this evaluation of the former and undervaluation of the
latter is only a piece of childishness in the realm of reason.
163
The serious workman. - Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One
can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired
greatness, became 'geniuses' (as we put it), through qualities the lack of
which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed
that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the
parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed
themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little,
secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling
FROM THE SOULS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS
whole. The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example, is easy to
give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook
when one says 'I do not have enough talent.' One has only to make a hundred
or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness
that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each
day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective
form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and
characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others
relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those
present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one
should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will
produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect
on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about
them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue
in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the
workshop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. - What, however, do
most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Perhaps
they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike
worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons. - Sometimes, when the
character and intellect needed to formulate such a life-plan are lacking, fate
and need take their place and lead the future master step by step through all
the stipulations of his trade.
164
Peril and profit in the cult of the genius. - The belief in great, superior,
fruitful spirits is not necessarily, yet nonetheless is very frequently associated
with that religious or semi-religious superstition that these spirits are of
supra-human origin and possess certain miraculous abilities by virtue of
which they acquire their knowledge by quite other means than the rest of
mankind. One ascribes to them, it seems, a direct view of the nature of the
world, as it were a hole in the cloak of appearance, and believes that, by
virtue of this miraculous seer's vision, they are able to communicate
something conclusive and decisive about man and the world without the toil
and rigorousness required by science. As long as there continue to be those
who believe in the miraculous in the domain of knowledge one can perhaps
concede that these people themselves derive some benefit from their belief,
inasmuch as through their unconditional subjection to the great spirits they
create for their own spirit during its time of development the finest form of
discipline and schooling. On the other hand, it is at least questionable
whether the superstitious belief in genius, in its privileges and special
abilities, is of benefit to the genius himself if it takes root in him. It is in any
event a dangerous sign when a man is assailed by awe of himself, whether it
be the celebrated Caesar's awe of Caesar or the awe of one's own genius now
under consideration; when the sacrificial incense which is properly rendered
only to a god penetrates the brain of the genius, so that his head begins to
swim and he comes to regard
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
himself as something supra-human. The consequences that slowly result
are: the feeling of irresponsibility, of exceptional rights, the belief that he
confers a favour by his mere presence, insane rage when anyone attempts
even to compare him with others, let alone to rate him beneath them, or to
draw attention to lapses in his work. Because he ceases to practise criticism
of himself, at last one pinion after the other falls out of his plumage: that
superstitious belief eats at the roots of his powers and perhaps even turns him
into a hypocrite after his powers have fled from him. For the great spirits
themselves it is therefore probably more beneficial if they acquire an insight
into the nature and origin of their powers, if they grasp, that is to say, what
purely human qualities have come together in them and what fortunate
circumstances attended them: in the first place undiminishing energy,
resolute application to individual goals, great personal courage, then the good
fortune to receive an upbringing which offered in the early years the finest
teachers, models and methods. To be sure, when their goal is the production
of the greatest possible effect, unclarity with regard to oneself and that
semiinsanity superadded to it has always achieved much; for what has been
admired and envied at all times has been that power in them by virtue of
which they render men will-less and sweep them away into the delusion that
the leaders they are following are supra-natural. Indeed, it elevates and
inspires men to believe that someone is in possession of supra- natural
powers: to this extent Plato was right to say that madness has brought the
greatest of blessings upon mankind. - In rare individual cases this portion of
madness may, indeed, actually have been the means by which such a nature,
excessive in all directions, was held firmly together: in the life of individuals,
too, illusions that are in themselves poisons often play the role of healers; yet,
in the end, in the case of every 'genius' who believes in his own divinity the
poison shows itself to the same degree as his 'genius' grows old: one may
recall, for example, the case of Napoleon, whose nature certainly grew into
the mighty unity that sets him apart from all men of modern times precisely
through his belief in himself and his star and through the contempt for men
that flowed from it; until in the end, however, this same belief went over into
an almost insane fatalism, robbed him of his acuteness and swiftness of
perception, and became the cause of his destruction.
165
Genius and nullity. - It is precisely the original heads among the artists,
those who draw on resources that are their own, who can sometimes produce
the empty and hollow, while the more dependent natures, the so- called
talents, full of recollections of everything imaginable are able even when
they are at their weakest to produce something tolerable. If the originals are
deserted by themselves recollection renders them no aid: they become empty.
166
The public. - The people really demands of tragedy no more than to be
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FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
thoroughly moved so as for once to have a good cry; the artist who sees
a new tragedy, on the other hand, takes pleasure in the ingenious technical
inventions and artifices, in the handling and apportionment of the material, in
the new application of old motifs and old ideas. - His attitude is the aesthetic
attitude to the work of art, that of the creator; the one first described, which
pays attention only to the material, is that of the people. Of the man between
them there is nothing to be said; he is neither people nor artist and does not
know what he wants: thus his pleasure, too, is obscure and slight.
167
Artistic education of the public. - If the same motif has not been treated
in a hundred different ways by various masters, the public never learns to get
beyond interest in the material alone; but once it has come to be familiar with
the motif from numerous versions of it, and thus no longer feels the charm of
novelty and anticipation, it will then be able to grasp and enjoy the nuances
and subtle new inventions in the way it is treated.
168
The artist and his following must keep in step. - Progress from one
stylistic level to the next must proceed so slowly that not only the artists but
the auditors and spectators too can participate in this progress and know
exactly what is going on. Otherwise there suddenly appears that great gulf
between the artist creating his works on a remote height and the public
which, no longer able to attain to that height, at length disconsolately climbs
back down again deeper than before. For when the artist no longer raises his
public up, it swiftly sinks downwards, and it plunges the deeper and more
perilously the higher a genius has borne it, like the eagle from whose claws
the tortoise it has carried up into the clouds falls to its death.
169
Origin of the comic. - If one considers that man was for many hundreds
of thousands of years an animal in the highest degree accessible to fear and
that everything sudden and unexpected bade him prepare to fight and perhaps
to die; that even later on, indeed, in social relationships all security depended
on the expected and traditional in opinion and action; then one cannot be
surprised if whenever something sudden and unexpected in word and deed
happens without occasioning danger or injury man becomes wanton, passes
over into the opposite of fear: the anxious, crouching creature springs up,
greatly expands - man laughs. This transition from momentary anxiety to
short-lived exuberance is called the comic. In the phenomenon of the tragic,
on the other hand, man passes swiftly from great, enduring wantonness and
high spirits into great fear and anguish; since, however, great, enduring
wantonness and high spirits is much rarer among mortals than occasions for
fear, there is much more of the comic than the tragic in the world; we laugh
much more often than we are profoundly shaken.
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170
Artist's ambition. - The Greek artists, the tragedians for example,
poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from
contest: Hesiod's good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this
ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest
excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say,
without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what
constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides
were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of
art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid
down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they
understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgement, they want
actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to
their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own
judgement. To aspire to honour here means: 'to make oneself superior and to
wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged'. If the former is lacking
and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is
lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.
171
The necessary in a work of art. - Those who talk so much of the
necessary in a work of art exaggerate, if they are artists, in majorem artis
gloriam.i or, if they are laity, out of ignorance. The forms of a work of art
which express the ideas contained in it, its mode of speech that is to say,
always have something easy-going about them, like all forms of speech. The
sculptor can add many little details or leave them out: the performer likewise,
whether he be an actor or, in the realm of music, a virtuoso or conductor.
These many little details and elaborations today appeal to him, tomorrow not;
they exist for the sake of the artist rather than for that of the art, for he too,
given the rigorousness and self-constraint the representation of his principal
idea demands of him, occasionally requires sweetmeats and playthings if he
is not to grow sullen and morose.
172
Causing the master to be forgotten. - The pianist who performs the work
of a master will have played best when he makes his listeners forget the
master, when it seems as though he is relating a tale from his own life or is
experiencing something at that very moment. To be sure, if he himself is
nothing of consequence his listeners will execrate the loquacity with which
he tells us about himself. He thus has to know how to engage the imagination
of his listeners on his own behalf. Conversely, it is this which accounts for all
the weaknesses and follies of 'the virtuoso'.
173
Corriger la fortune.X Evil chances occur in the lives of great artists such as
* Hesiod (c. 800 BC), Greek poet, distinguishes Eris as a goddess of peaceable competition
from 'terrible Eris', bringer of war and strife. Also referred to in 'The wanderer and his shadow',
section 29.
t in majorem artis gloriam: to the greater glory of art
t Corriger la fortune', to compensate for the deliverances of fate
FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
compel a painter, for instance, to leave his finest picture in the form of
mere hurried sketches, or which compelled Beethoven, for example, to leave
behind to us in many great sonatas (as in the case of the great B major)* only
an unsatisfactory piano arrangement of a symphony. Here the artist coming
after ought to try posthumously to amend the life of the master: which is what
he would do, for example, who, as a master of orchestration, should waken to
life for us that symphony now lying in the death-trance of the piano.
174
Diminution. - There are many things, events or people which cannot
endure being reduced in scale. The Laokoon groupt cannot be reduced to a
trinket; it needs to be large. But it is much rarer for something small by
nature to be able to endure enlargement; which is why biographers will
always have better success in diminishing the size of a great man than in
enlarging that of a small one.
1
75
Sensuality in contemporary art. - Artists nowadays often go wrong when
they labour to make their works of art produce a sensual effect; for their
spectators or auditors are no longer in possession of a full sensuality and the
effect which, quite contrary to his intention, the artist's work produces upon
them is a feeling of 'saintliness' closely related to boredom. - Their sensuality
perhaps commences just where the artist's ceases; thus they encounter one
another at one point at the most.
176
Shakespeare as moralist. - Shakespeare reflected a great deal on the
passions and from his temperament probably had very intimate access to
many of them (dramatists are in general somewhat wicked men). But, unlike
Montaigne4 he was incapable of discoursing on them; instead of which he
placed observations about the passions into the mouths of impassioned
characters: a practice which, though counter to nature, makes his plays so full
of ideas they make all others seem empty and can easily arouse in us a
repugnance to them. - The maxims of Schiller (which are almost always
based on ideas either false or trite) are designed purely for the theatre, and as
such they are extremely effective: while Shakespeare's do honour to his
model, Montaigne, and contain entirely serious ideas in a polished form, but
are for that reason too remote and subtle for the theatre public and thus
ineffective.
177
Getting oneself heard well. - One has to know, not only how to play well.
* Beethoven's piano sonata no. 29 in B flat major. Op. 106, 'Hammerklavier' t Laokoon
group: Hellenistic statue, from the Golden House of Nero, representing the Trojan priest Laokoon
and his two sons being crushed by giant serpents % Montaigne: Michel de Montaigne (1533-92):
French essayist Schiller: Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805): German poet, dramatist and
historian
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
but also how to get oneself heard well. The violin in the hands of the
greatest master will emit only a chirp if the room is too big; and then the
master sounds no better than any bungler.
178
The effectiveness of the incomplete. - Just as figures in relief produce so
strong an impression on the imagination because they are as it were on the
point of stepping out of the wall but have suddenly been brought to a halt, so
the relief-like, incomplete presentation of an idea, of a whole philosophy, is
sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization: more is left for the
beholder to do, he is impelled to continue working on that which appears
before him so strongly etched in light and shadow, to think it through to the
end, and to overcome even that constraint which has hitherto prevented it
from stepping forth fully formed.
179
Against originality. - When art dresses itself in the most worn-out
material it is most easily recognized as art.
180
Collective spirit. - A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but
also the spirit of his friends.
181
Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and
easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little
effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the
obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he
has in fact gained from his own zeal.
182
Relationship to science. - They lack a true interest in a science who
begin to become enthusiastic about it only when they themselves have made
discoveries in it.
183
The key. - A man of significance may set great store by an idea and all
the insignificant laugh and mock at him for it: to him it is a key to hidden
treasure-chambers, while to them it is no more than a piece of old iron.
184
Untranslatable. - It is neither the best nor the worst in a book that is
untranslatable in it.
185
Authors paradoxes. - The so-called paradoxes of an author to which a
reader takes exception very often stand not at all in the author's book but in
the reader's head.
186
Wit. - The wittiest authors evoke the least perceptible smile.
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187
The antithesis. - The antithesis is the narrow gateway through which
error most likes to creep into truth.
188
Thinkers as stylists. - Most thinkers write badly because they
communicate to us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of their
thoughts.
189
Thought in poetry. - The poet conducts his thoughts along festively, in
the carriage of rhythm: usually because they are incapable of walking on
foot.
190
Sin against the spirit of the reader. - If the author denies his talent
merely so as to place himself on a level with his reader, he commits the only
mortal sin the latter will never forgive him - supposing, that is, he notices it.
One may say anything ill of a man one likes: but in the way one says it one
must know how to restore his vanity again.
191
Limit of honesty. - Even the most honest writer lets fall a word too many
when he wants to round off a period.
192
The best author. - The best author will be he who is ashamed to become
a writer.
193
Draconian law against writers. - Writers ought to be treated as
malefactors who deserve to be freed or pardoned only in the rarest cases: this
would be a way of preventing the proliferation of books.
194
The licensed fools of modern culture. - The licensed fools of the courts
of the Middle Ages have their counterpart in our feuilletonists:* they are the
same species of man, half-rational, witty, extravagant, silly, sometimes in
attendance only to ameliorate heaviness of mood and to drown down the all
too weighty solemn clangour of great events; formerly in the service of
princes and the nobility, now in the service of the parties (just as a good deal
of the ancient submissiveness of the people in their commerce with princes
still lives on in party feeling and party discipline). The whole modem literary
world, however, stands very near to the feuilletonists; they are the 'licensed
fools of modem culture', who are judged more gently when they are taken to
be not wholly of sound mind. To regard writing as a lifetime's profession
ought fairly to be considered a kind of folly.
195
After the Greeks. - Knowledge is at present very much obstructed by the
fact that all words have, through centuries of exaggerated feeling, * feuilletonists:
wr i t e r s of pieces of light literature and criticism for French newspapers
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
become vaporous and inflated. The higher level of culture that places
itself under the domination (if not indeed under the tyranny) of knowledge
has need of a great sobriety of feeling and a strong concentration of all
words; in which matter the Greeks of the age of Demosthenes have preceded
us.7 All modern writing is characterized by exaggeratedness; and even when
it is written simply the words it contains are felt too eccentrically. Rigorous
reflection, terseness, coldness, simplicity, deliberately pursued even to their
limit, self-containment of the feelings and silence in general - that alone can
help us. - Moreover, this cold manner of writing and feeling is now, as a
contrast, very stimulating; and in that there lies, to be sure, a great danger.
For biting coldness is just as much a stimulant as a high degree of warmth.
196
Good narrators, bad explainers. - Many good storytellers possess an
admirable psychological certainty and consistency so long as it applies itself
to the actions of their characters, in a downright ludicrous contrast to the
ineptitude of their psychological thinking: so that the degree of their culture
seems at one moment exceptionally high and the next regrettably low. It
happens all too often that the explanations they give of their heroes and their
actions are palpably false- there can be no doubt about it, however
improbable it may sound. Perhaps the greatest pianist has reflected very little
on technical matters and the particular virtue, vice, utility and educability of
each finger (dactylic ethics), and blunders badly whenever he speaks of such
things.
197
Writings of acquaintances and their readers. - We read the writings of
our acquaintances (friends and foes) in a twofold sense, inasmuch as our
knowledge continually whispers to us: 'this is by him, a sign of his inner
nature, his experiences, his talent', while another kind of knowledge at the
same time seeks to determine what his work is worth in itself, what
evaluation it deserves apart from its author, what enrichment of knowledge it
brings with it. As goes without saying, these two kinds of reading and
evaluating disturb one another. Even a conversation with a friend will bring
the fruits of knowledge to maturity only if both finally think only of the
matter in hand and forget they are friends.
198
Sacrifice of rhythm. - Good writers alter the rhythm of many periods
merely because they do not acknowledge in the ordinary reader the capacity
to grasp the measure followed by the period in its first version: they make it
easier for him by giving preference to the more familiar rhythms. - This
consideration for the rhythmic incapacity of the present- day reader has
already evoked many a sigh, for much has already been sacrificed to it. - Is
something similar not perhaps happening to good musicians?

7 Demosthenes (385-322 BC): Greek orator
FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
199
The incomplete as artistic stimulant. - The incomplete is often more
effective than completeness, especially in the case of the eulogy: the aim of
which requires precisely an enticing incompleteness as an irrational element
which presents to the hearer's imagination the illusion of a dazzling sea and
obscures the coast on the other side, that is to say the limitations of the object
to be eulogized, as though in a fog. When one refers to the known merits of a
man and does so in detail and at length, it always gives rise to the suspicion
that these are his only merits. The complete eulogist sets himself above the
person eulogized, he appears to survey him. That is why the complete
produces a diminishing effect.
200
Warning to writers and teachers. - He who has once written, and feels in
himself the passion of writing, acquires from almost all he does and
experiences only that which can be communicated through writing. He no
longer thinks of himself but of the writer and his public: he desires insight,
but not for his own private use. He who is a teacher is usually incapable of
any longer doing anything for his own benefit, he always thinks of the benefit
of his pupils, and he takes pleasure in knowledge of any kind only insofar as
he can teach it. He regards himself in the end as a thoroughfare of knowledge
and as a means and instrument in general, so that he has ceased to be serious
with regard to himself.
201
Bad writers necessary. - There will always have to be bad writers, for
they answer to the taste of the immature, undeveloped age-group; these have
their requirements as well as do the mature. If human life were longer, the
number of mature individuals would preponderate or at least be equal to that
of the immature; as things are, however, most by far die too young, that is to
say there are always many more undeveloped intellects with bad taste. These,
moreover, desire that their requirements be satisfied with the greater
vehemence of youth, and they demand bad authors and get them.
202
Too near and too far. - The reader and the author often fail to understand
one another because the author knows his theme too well and almost finds it
boring, so that he dispenses with the examples and illustrations of which he
knows hundreds; the reader, however, is unfamiliar with the subject and can
easily find it ill-established if examples and illustrations are withheld from
him.
203
A vanished preparation for art. - Of all the grammar school did, the most
valuable thing was the practice it afforded in Latin style: for this was a
practice in art, whereas all its other undertakings had only knowledge as their
objective. To accord German composition a premier position is barbarism, for
we have no model German style evolved out of public
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eloquence; if one wants to promote practice in thinking through German
composition, however, it is certainly better for the time being to forget about
style altogether, to discriminate, that is to say, between practice in thinking
and practice in presentation. The latter ought to apply itself to the production
of manifold versions of a given content and not to the invention of this
content itself. The mere presentation of a given content was the task of Latin
style, for which the teachers of antiquity possessed a subtlety of hearing
which has long since been lost. Formerly whoever learned to write well in a
modern language had this practice to thank for it (now one is compelled to
send oneself to school with the older French writers); but even more: he
acquired an idea of elevated and difficult form and was prepared for art in the
only proper way, through practice.
204
Dark and too bright side by side. - Writers who in general are unable to
express their thoughts with clarity will in individual instances take pleasure in
employing the strongest, most exaggerated designations and superlatives:
thus producing a light-effect like torches flaring on confused forest pathways.
205
Painting in writing. - An object of significance will be best represented
if, like a chemist, one takes the colours for the painting from the object itself,
and then employs them like a painter: so that the outline is allowed to grow
out of the boundaries and shadings of the colours. Thus the painting will
acquire something of the ravishing element of nature which makes the object
itself significant.
206
Books which teach one to dance. - There are writers who, by
representing the impossible as possible and speaking of morality and genius
as though both were merely a matter of wanting them, a mere whim and
caprice, evoke a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as though man were
standing on tiptoe and compelled to dance for sheer joy.
207
Uncompleted thoughts. - Just as it is not only adulthood but youth and
childhood too that possess value in themselves and not merely as bridges and
thoroughfares, so incomplete thoughts also have their value. That is why one
must not torment a poet with subtle exegesis but content oneself with the
uncertainty of his horizon, as though the way to many thoughts still lay open.
Let one stand on the threshold; let one wait as at the excavation of a treasure:
it is as though a lucky find of profound import were about to be made. The
poet anticipates something of the joy of the thinker at the discovery of a vital
idea and makes us desire it, so that we snatch at it; he, however, flutters by
past our heads, displaying the loveliest butterfly-wings - and yet he eludes us.
208
The book become almost human. - Every writer is surprised anew how, once
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FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
a book has detached himself from him, it goes on to live a life of its own;
it is to him as though a part of an insect had come free and was now going its
own way. Perhaps he almost forgets it, perhaps he raises himself above the
views he has set down in it, perhaps he no longer even understands it and has
lost those wings upon which he flew when he thought out that book: during
which time it seeks out its readers, enkindles life, makes happy, terrifies,
engenders new works, becomes the soul of new designs and undertakings - in
short, it lives like a being furnished with soul and spirit and is yet not human.
- That author has drawn the happiest lot who as an old man can say that all of
life-engendering, strengthening, elevating, enlightening thought and feeling
that was in him lives on in his writings, and that he himself is now nothing
but the grey ashes, while the fire has everywhere been rescued and borne
forward. - If one now goes on to consider that, not only a book, but every
action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other
actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably
knotted to everything that will happen, one comes to recognize the existence
of an actual immortality, that of motion: what has once moved is enclosed
and eternalized in the total union of all being like an insect in amber.
209
]oy in age. - The thinker, and the artist likewise, whose better self has
taken refuge in his work, feels an almost malicious joy when he sees how his
body and his spirit are being slowly broken down and destroyed by time: it is
as though he observed from a corner a thief working away at his money-
chest, while knowing that the chest is empty and all the treasure it contained
safe.
210
Quiet fruitfulness. - The born aristocrats of the spirit are not too zealous:
their creations appear and fall from the tree on a quiet autumn evening
unprecipitately, in due time, not quickly pushed aside by something new. The
desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If
one is something one really does not need to make anything - and one
nonetheless does very much. There exists above the 'productive' man a yet
higher species.
211
Achilles and Homer. - It is always as between Achilles and Homer: the
one has the experience, the sensation, the other describes it. A true writer
only bestows words on the emotions and experiences of others, he is an artist
so as to divine much from the little he himself has felt. Artists are by no
means men of great passion but they often pretend to be, in the unconscious
feeling that their painted passions will seem more believable if their own life
speaks for their experience in this field. One has only to let oneself go, to
abandon self-control, to give rein to one's anger or desires:
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
at once all the world cries: how passionate he is! But deep-rooted
passion, passion which gnaws at the individual and often consumes him, is a
thing of some consequence: he who experiences such passion certainly does
not describe it in dramas, music or novels. Artists are often unbridled
individuals to the extent that they are not artists: but that is something else.
212
Old doubts over the effect of art. - Are fear and pity really discharged by
tragedy, as Aristotle has it, so that the auditor goes home colder and more
placid? Do ghost stories make one less fearful and superstitious? It is true in
the case of certain physical events, the enjoyment of love for example, that
with the satisfaction of a need an alleviation and temporary relaxation of the
drive occurs. But fear and pity are not in this sense needs of definite organs
which want to be relieved. And in the long run a drive is, through practice in
satisfying it, intensified, its periodical alleviation notwithstanding. It is
possible that in each individual instance fear and pity are mitigated and
discharged: they could nonetheless grow greater as a whole through the
tragic effect in general, and Plato could still be right when he says that
through tragedy one becomes generally more fearful and emotional. The
tragic poet himself would then necessarily acquire a gloomy, disheartened
view of the world and a soft, susceptible, tearful soul, and it would likewise
accord with Plato's opinion of the matter if the tragic poet and with him
whole city communities which take especial delight in him should degenerate
to ever greater unbridledness and immoderation. - But what right has our age
to offer an answer to Plato's great question concerning the moral influence of
art at all? Even if we possessed art - what influence of any kind does art
exercise among us?
213
Pleasure in nonsense. - How can man take pleasure in nonsense? For
wherever in the world there is laughter this is the case; one can say, indeed,
that almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense. The
overturning of experience into its opposite, of the purposive into the
purposeless, of the necessary into the arbitrary, but in such a way that this
event causes no harm and is imagined as occasioned by high spirits, delights
us, for it momentarily liberates us from the constraint of the necessary, the
purposive and that which corresponds to our experience, which we usually
see as our inexorable masters; we play and laugh when the expected (which
usually makes us fearful and tense) discharges itself harmlessly. It is the
pleasure of the slave at the Saturnalia.
214
Ennoblement of reality. - The fact that men saw in the aphrodisiac drive
a divinity, and felt its operation within them with reverential gratitude, has
over the course of time saturated that affect with a series of exalted notions
and actually very greatly ennobled it. In the same way, several nations have
by virtue of this art of idealization created for themselves
FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
mighty aids to culture out of sicknesses: for example the Greeks, who in
earlier centuries suffered from great nervous epidemics (in the form of
epilepsy and St Vitus' dance) and fashioned from them the glorious type of
the bacchante. - For the Greeks were certainly not possessed of a square and
solid healthiness; - their secret was to honour even sickness as a god if only it
had power.
215
Music. - Music is, of and in itself, not so significant for our inner world,
nor so profoundly exciting, that it can be said to count as the immediate
language of feeling; but its primeval union with poetry has deposited so much
symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of
musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world
and to come from the inner world. Dramatic music becomes possible only
when the tonal art has conquered an enormous domain of symbolic means,
through song, opera and a hundred experiments in tone-painting. 'Absolute
music' is either form in itself, at a primitive stage of music in which sounds
made in tempo and at varying volume gave pleasure as such, or symbolism of
form speaking to the understanding without poetry after both arts had been
united over a long course of evolution and the musical form had finally
become entirely enmeshed in threads of feeling and concepts. Men who have
remained behind in the evolution of music can understand in a purely
formalistic way the same piece of music as the more advanced understand
wholly symbolically. In itself, no music is profound or significant, it does not
speak of the 'will' or of the 'thing in itself'; the intellect could suppose such a
thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire
compass of the inner life. It was the intellect itself which first introduced this
significance into sounds: just as, in the case of architecture, it likewise
introduced a significance into the relations between lines and masses which is
in itself quite unknown to the laws of mechanics.
216
Gesture and language. - Older than language is the mimicking of
gestures, which takes place involuntarily and is even now, when the language
of gesture is universally restrained and control of the muscles has been
achieved, so strong that we cannot see a mobile face without an innervation of
our own face (one can observe that feigned yawning will evoke real yawning
in one who sees it). The imitated gesture leads him who imitates it back to the
sensation which it expressed in the face or body of the person imitated. That
is how people learned to understand one another: that is how a child still
leams to understand its mother. In general, painful sensations may well also
be expressed by gestures which in turn occasion pain (for example by pulling
hair out, beating the breast, violent distortions and strainings of the facial
muscles). Conversely, gestures of pleasure were themselves pleasurable and
could thus easily convey their meaning (laughter as an expression of being
tickled, which is pleasurable, again served as an expression of other
pleasurable sensations). - As
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soon as the meaning of gestures was understood, a symbolism of gestures
could arise: I mean a sign-language of sounds could be so agreed that at first
one produced sound and gesture (to which it was symbolically joined), later
only the sound. - It appears here that in earlier ages there often occurred that
which now takes place before our eyes and ears in the evolution of music,
especially of dramatic music: while music was at first empty noise without
explanatory dance and mime (gesture-language), the ear was, through long
habituation to the juxtaposition of music and movement, schooled to an
instantaneous interpretation of the total figurations and has at last attained to a
height of rapid understanding at which it no longer has any need of the visible
movement and understands the tone-poet without it. One then speaks of
absolute music, that is to say of music in which everything is at once
understood symbolically without further assistance.
217
The desensualization of higher art. - By virtue of the extraordinary
exercise the intellect has undergone through the artistic evolution of modem
music, our ears have grown more and more intellectual. We can now endure a
much greater volume, much more 'noise', than our forefathers could because
we are much more practised in listening for the reason in it than they were.
Because they at once inquire after the reason, the 'meaning', and are no longer
content to know that a thing 'is', all our senses have in fact become somewhat
blunted: a fact betrayed by, for example, the complete dominance of the well-
tempered tonal system; for ears that can still hear the subtle distinction
between for example C sharp and D flat are now exceptional. In this matter
our ears have become coarser. Then, the ugly side of the world, the side
originally hostile to the senses, has now been conquered for music; its sphere
of power especially in the domain of the sublime, dreadful and mysterious has
therewith increased astonishingly: our music now brings to utterance things
which formerly had no tongue. In a similar way, some of our painters have
made our eyes more intellectual and have gone far beyond that which was
formerly called pleasure in form and colour. Here too the side of the world
that originally counted as ugly has been conquered by artistic reason. - What
will be the consequence of all this? The more capable of thought eye and ear
become, the closer they approach the point at which they become unsen- sual:
pleasure is transferred to the brain, the sense-organs themselves grow blunt
and feeble, the symbolic increasingly replaces the simple being - and along
this path we thus attain to barbarism as certainly as along any other. For the
moment we still believe: the world is uglier than ever, but it signifies a more
beautiful world than there has ever been. But the more attenuated the fragrant
odour of 'significance' becomes, the fewer there will be still able to perceive
it: and the rest will finally be left with the ugly, which they will try to enjoy
directly - an endeavour in which they are bound to fail. Thus there is in
Germany a twofold current of musical evolution: on the one hand a host of
ten thousand with ever
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higher, more refined demands, listening ever more intently for the
'meaning', and on the other the enormous majority growing every year more
and more incapable of comprehending the meaningful even in the form of the
sensually ugly and therefore learning to seize with greater and greater
contentment the ugly and disgusting in itself, that is to say the basely sensual,
in music.
218
Stone is more stony than it used to be. - In general we no longer
understand architecture; at least we do not do so nearly as well as we
understand music. We have grown out of the symbolism of lines and figures,
just as we have weaned ourselves from the sound-effects of rhetoric, and no
longer imbibe this kind of cultural mother's milk from the first moment of our
lives. Everything in a Greek or Christian building originally signified
something, and indeed something of a higher order of things: this feeling of
inexhaustible significance lay about the building like a magical veil. Beauty
entered this sytem only incidentally, without essentially encroaching upon the
fundamental sense of the uncanny and exalted, of consecration by magic and
the proximity of the divine; at most beauty mitigated the dread - but this
dread was everywhere the presupposition. - What is the beauty of a building
to us today? The same thing as the beautiful face of a mindless woman:
something mask-like.
219
Religious origin of modern music. - Music of feeling comes into being
within the restored Catholicism that followed the Council of Trent,* through
Palestrina,t who assisted the newly awakened spirit to find utterance; later,
with Bach, it extended to Protestantism too, insofar as Protestantism had been
deepened by the Pietists}: and detached from its original dogmaticism. The
presupposition and necessary preliminary for both developments is the
occupation with music such as was practised during the Renaissance and
before it, and especially that scholarly concern with it, at bottom scientific,
that takes pleasure in the artifices of harmony and counterpoint. On the other
hand, opera was also a necessary preliminary. for in opera the laity
promulgated its protest against a cold music grown too learned and sought to
restore to Polyhymnia her soul. - Without that profoundly religious
conversion, without that resounding of the deeply agitated heart, music would
have remained scholarly or operatic; the spirit of the Counter-reformation is
the spirit of modem music (for that Pietism in Bach's music is also a kind of
Counterreformation). This is how profoundly indebted we are to the religious
* Council of Trent: opened in 1545, it produced the reform of the Roman church known as
the Counter-reformation.
t Palestrina (1525-94): Italian composer of nearly a hundred masses who eventually entered
the priesthood, in Pfitzner's opera, Palestrina, he is represented as divinely inspired to write a mass
that persuaded the Council of Trent not to ban polyphonic music.
t Pietists: Lutheran followers of Phillip Jakob Spener, whose movement began in Frankfurt
in about 1670 and accorded to the individual immediate experience of the divine.
Polyhymnia: the muse of vocal music
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life. - Music was the Counter-renaissance in the domain of art; to it
belongs the later painting of Murillo,* perhaps the Baroque style does too:
more so, at any rate, than the architecture of the Renaissance or of antiquity.
And now one may go on to ask: if our modern music could move stones,
would it set them together in the manner of the architecture of antiquity?
I doubt very much that it would. For that which reigns in music, the
affect, joy in enhanced, wide-ranging moods, the desire for liveliness at any
cost, the rapid change of sensations, strong relief-effects in light and shadow,
the juxtaposition of the ecstatic and the naive - all this reigned once before in
the plastic arts and created new stylistic laws: - but it was neither in antiquity
nor in the time of the Renaissance.
220
The Beyond in art. - It is not without profound sorrow that one admits to
oneself that in their highest flights the artists of all ages have raised to
heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions which we now recognize
as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of
mankind, and they could not have been so without believing in the absolute
truth of these errors. If belief in such truth declines in general, if the rainbow-
colours at the extreme limits of human knowledge and supposition grow pale,
that species of art can never flourish again which, like the Divina Commedia,
the pictures of Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals,
presupposes not only a cosmic but also a metaphysical significance in the
objects of art. A moving tale will one day be told how there once existed such
an art, such an artist's faith.
221
The revolution in poetry. - The stern constraint the French dramatists
imposed upon themselves in regard to unity of action, of place and of time, to
style, to construction of verse and sentence, to choice of words and ideas, was
as vital a schooling as that of counterpoint and fugue in the development of
modem music or as the Gorgian tropes in Greek rhetoric. To fetter oneself in
this way can seem absurd; nonetheless there is no way of getting free of
naturalization than that of first limiting oneself to what is most severe
(perhaps also most capricious). Thus one gradually learns to walk with poise
even upon narrow bridges spanning dizzying abysses and brings the highest
suppleness of movement home as booty: as has been demonstrated to the eyes
of everyone now living by the history of music. Here we see how the fetters
grow looser step by step, until in the end it can appear as though they have
been wholly thrown off: this appearance is the supreme outcome of a
necessary evolution in art. No such gradual emergence out of self-imposed
fetters has occurred in the case of modern poetry. Lessing made French form,t
that is to say the only modern artistic form, into a laughing-stock in Germany
and pointed to Shakespeare, and thus we forewent the steady continuity of
that unfettering and made a leap into naturalism - that is to say, back to
* Murillo: Bartolom6 Murillo (1618-82): Spanish painter
t Lessing: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81): German dramatist, critic and aesthetician
102
the beginnings of art. Goethe attempted to rescue himself from this
situation through his ability again and again to impose differing kinds of
constraint upon himself; but even the most gifted can achieve only a
continual experimentation once the thread of evolution has been broken.
Schiller owed his relative firmness of form to having modelled himself on
French tragedy, which, though he repudiated, he involuntarily respected, and
maintained a degree of independence of Lessing (whose dramatic
experiments he is known to have rejected). After Voltaire the French
themselves were suddenly lacking in the great talents who could have led the
evolution of tragedy out of constraint on to that appearance of freedom; later
they too copied the Germans and made the leap into a kind of Rousseauesque
state of nature in art and experimented. One only has to read Voltaire's
Mahomet from time to time to bring clearly before one's soul what European
culture has lost once and for all through this breach with tradition. Voltaire
was the last great dramatist to subdue through Greek moderation a soul
many-formed and equal to the mightiest thunderstorms of tragedy - he was
able to do what no German has yet been able to do because the nature of the
Frenchman is much more closely related to the Greek than is the nature of
the German - just as he was also the last great writer to possess a Greek ear,
Greek artistic conscientiousness, Greek charm and simplicity in the treatment
of prose speech; just as he was, indeed, one of the last men able to unite in
himself the highest freedom of spirit and an altogether unrevolutionary
disposition without being inconsistent and cowardly. Since his time the
modern spirit, with its restlessness, its hatred for bounds and moderation, has
come to dominate in every domain, at first let loose by the fever of revolution
and then, when assailed by fear and horror of itself, again laying constraints
upon itself - but the constraints of logic, no longer those of artistic
moderation, it is true that for a time this unfettering enables us to enjoy the
poetry of all peoples, all that has grown up in hidden places, the primitive,
wild-blooming, strangely beautiful and gigantically irregular, from the
folksong up to the 'great barbarian' Shakespeare; we taste the joys of local
colour and costumes such as all artistic nations have hitherto been strangers
to; we make abundant employment of the 'barbaric advantages' of our age
that Goethe urged against Schiller's objections so as to set the formlessness
of his Faust in the most favourable light. But for how much longer? The
inbreaking flood of poetry of all styles of all peoples must gradually sweep
away the soil in which a quiet, hidden growth would still have been possible;
all poets must become experimenting imitators and foolhardy copiers,
however great their powers may have been at first; the public, finally, which
has forgotten how to see in the harnessing of the powers of representation, in
the mastering of all the expedients of art and their organization, the actual
artistic deed, must increasingly value artistic power for its own sake, indeed
colour for its own sake, the idea for its own sake, inspiration for its own sake,
will consequently no longer enjoy the elements and terms of the work of art
if not in isolation, and in the long run make the natural
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demand that the artist must also present them to it in isolation. One has
indeed thrown off the 'unreasonable' fetters of Franco-Hellenic art, but
without noticing it has accustomed oneself to finding all fetters, all limitation
unreasonble; and thus art moves towards its dissolution and in doing so
ranges - which is extremely instructive, to be sure - through all the phases of
its beginnings, its childhood, its imperfection, its former hazardous
enterprises and extravagances: in going down to destruction it interprets its
birth and becoming. One of the great upon whose instinct one can no doubt
rely and whose theory lacked nothing except thirty years more of practice -
Lord Byron once said: 'So far as poetry is concerned, the more I reflect on it,
the more firmly am I convinced that we are all on the wrong path, every one
of us. We all pursue a revolutionary system inwardly false - our own or the
next generation will arrive at the same conviction.' It is this same Byron who
says: 'I regard Shakespeare as the worst of models, even though the most
extraordinary of poets.' And does the mature artistic insight that Goethe
achieved in the second half of his life not at bottom say exactly the same
thing? - that insight with which he gained such a start of a whole series of
generations that one can assert that on the whole Goethe has not yet produced
any effect at all and that his time is still to come? It is precisely because his
nature held him for a long time on the path of the poetical revolution,
precisely because he savoured most thoroughly all that had been discovered
in the way of new inventions, views and expedients through that breach with
tradition and as it were dug out from beneath the ruins of art, that his later
transformation and conversion carries so much weight: it signifies that he felt
the profoundest desire to regain the traditional ways of art and to bestow upon
the ruins and colonnades of the temple that still remained their ancient
wholeness and perfection at any rate with the eye of imagination if strength of
arm should prove too weak to construct where such tremendous forces were
needed even to destroy. Thus he lived in art as in recollection of true art: his
writing had become an aid to recollection, to an understanding of ancient,
long since vanished artistic epochs. His demands were, to be sure, having
regard to the powers possessed by the modern age unfulfillable; the pain he
felt at that fact was, however, amply counterbalanced by the joy of knowing
that they once had been fulfilled and that we too can still participate in this
fulfilment. Not individuals, but more or less idealized masks; no actuality, but
an allegorical universalization; contemporary characters, local colour
evaporated almost to invisibility and rendered mythical; present-day
sensibility and the problems of present-day society compressed to the
simplest forms, divested of their stimulating, enthralling, pathological
qualities and rendered ineffectual in every sense but the artistic; no novel
material or characters, but the ancient and long-familiar continually
reanimated and transformed: this is art as Goethe later understood it, as the
Greeks and, yes, the French practised it.
FROM THE SOULS OF ARTI STS AND WRI TERS
222
What is left of art. - It is true, certain metaphysical presuppositions
bestow much greater value upon art, for example when it is believed that the
character is unalterable and that all characters and actions are a continual
expression of the nature of the world: then the work of the artist becomes an
image of the everlastingly steadfast, while with our conceptions the artist can
bestow upon his images validity only for a time, because man as a whole has
become and is changeable and even the individual man is not something firm
and steadfast. - The same would be so in the case of another metaphysical
presupposition: supposing our visible world were only appearance, as the
metaphysicians assume, then art would come to stand quite close to the real
world, for there would then be only too much similarity between the world of
appearance and the illusory world of the artist; and the difference remaining
would even elevate the significance of art above the significance of nature,
because art would represent the uniform, the types and prototypes of nature. -
These presuppositions are, however, false: after this knowledge what place
still remains for art? Above all, it has taught us for thousands of years to look
upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our
sensibilities so far that we at last cry: 'life, however it may be, is good!'8 This
teaching imparted by art to take pleasure in life and to regard the human life
as a piece of nature, as the object of regular evolution, without being too
violently involved in it - this teaching has been absorbed into us, and it now
reemerges as an almighty requirement of knowledge. One could give up art,
but would not thereby relinquish the capacity one has learned from it: just as
one has given up religion but not the enhancement of feeling and exaltations
one has acquired from it. As the plastic arts and music are the measure of the
wealth of feelings we have actually gained and obtained through religion, so
if art disappeared the intensity and multifariousness of the joy in life it has
implanted would still continue to demand satisfaction. The scientific man is
the further evolution of the artistic.
223
Evening twilight of art. - Just as in old age one remembers one's youth
and celebrates festivals of remembrance, so will mankind soon stand in
relation to art: it will be a moving recollection of the joys of youth. Perhaps
art has never before been comprehended so profoundly or with so much
feeling as it is now, when the magic of death seems to play around it. Recall
that Greek city in south Italy which on one day of the year continued to
celebrate their Greek festival and did so with tears and sadness at the fact that
foreign barbarism was triumphing more and more over the customs they had
brought with them; it is to be doubted whether the Hellenic has ever been so
greatly savoured, or its golden nectar imbibed with so much relish, as it was
among these declining Hellenes. The artist will soon be regarded as a glorious
relic, and we shall bestow upon him, as a

8 The closing line of Goethe's 'Der Brautigam': 'Wie es auch sei, das Leben, es ist gut.'
marvellous stranger upon whose strength and beauty the happiness of
former ages depended, honours such as we do not grant to others of our own
kind. The best in us has perhaps been inherited from the sensibilities of
earlier ages to which we hardly any longer have access by direct paths; the
sun has already set, but the sky of our life still glows with its light, even
though we no longer see it.
106
5
TOKENS OF HIGHER AND LOWER CULTURE
224
Ennoblement through degeneration. - History teaches that the branch of
a nation that preserves itself best is the one in which most men have, as a
consequence of sharing habitual and undiscussable principles, that is to say as
a consequence of their common belief, a living sense of community. Here
good, sound custom grows strong, here the subordination of the individual is
learned and firmness imparted to character as a gift at birth and subsequently
augmented. The danger facing these strong communities founded on
similarly constituted, firm-charactered individuals is that of the gradually
increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow. It is
the more unfettered, uncertain and morally weaker individuals upon whom
spiritual progress depends in such communities: it is the men who attempt
new things and, in general, many things. Countless numbers of this kind
perish on account of their weakness without producing any very visible
effect; but in general, and especially when they leave posterity, they effect a
loosening up and from time to time inflict an injury on the stable element of a
community. It is precisely at this injured and weakened spot that the whole
body is as it were innoculated with something new; its strength must,
however, be as a whole sufficient to receive this new thing into its blood and
to assimilate it. Degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever
progress is to be effected. Every progress of the whole has to be preceded by
a partial weakening. The strongest natures preserve the type, the weaker help
it to evolve. - Something similar occurs in the case of the individual human
being; rarely is a degeneration, a mutilation, even a vice and physical or
moral damage in general without an advantage in some other direction. The
more sickly man, for example, will if he belongs to a warlike and restless
race perhaps have more inducement to stay by himself and thereby acquire
more repose and wisdom, the one-eyed will have one stronger eye, the blind
will see more deeply within themselves and in any event possess sharper
hearing. To this extent the celebrated struggle for existence does not seem to
me to be the only theory by which the progress or strengthening of a man or a
race can be explained. Two things, rather, must come together: firstly the
augmentation of the stabilizing force through the union of minds in belief and
communal feeling; then the possibility of the attainment of higher goals
through the occurrence of degenerate natures and, as a consequence of them,
partial weakenings and injurings of the stabilizing force; it is precisely the
weaker nature, as the tenderer and more refined, that makes any progress
possible at all. A people that becomes somewhere weak and fragile but is as a
whole still
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strong and healthy is capable of absorbing the infection of the new and
incorporating it to its own advantage. In the case of the individual human
being, the task of education is to imbue him with such firmness and certainty
he can no longer as a whole be in any way deflected from his path. Then,
however, the educator has to inflict injuries upon him, or employ the injuries
inflicted on him by fate, and when he has thus come to experience pain and
distress something new and noble can be innoculated into the injured places.
It will be taken up into the totality of his nature, and later the traces of its
nobility will be perceptible in the fruits of his nature. - So far as the state is
concerned, Macchiavelli says that 'the form of government signifies very
little, even though semi-educated people think otherwise. The great goal of
statecraft should be duration, which outweighs everything else, inasmuch as
it is much more valuable than freedom.' Only when there is securely founded
and guaranteed long duration is a steady evolution and ennobling
innoculation at all possible: though the dangerous companion of all duration,
established authority, will, to be sure, usually resist it.
225
Free spirit a relative concept. - He is called a free spirit who thinks
differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and
profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been
expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule; the
latter reproach him that his free principles either originate in a desire to shock
and offend or eventuate in free actions, that is to say in actions incompatible
with sound morals. Occasionally it is also said that this or that free principle
is to be attributed to perversity and mental overexcitation; but this is merely
the voice of malice, which does not believe what it says but desires only to
wound: for the superior quality and sharpness of his intellct is usually written
on the face of the free spirit in characters clear enough even for the fettered
spirit to read. But the two other derivations of free spiritedness are honestly
meant; and many free spirits do in fact come to be what they are in one or
other of these ways. But the principles they arrive at along these paths could
nonetheless be truer and more reliable than those favoured by the fettered
spirits. In the case of the knowledge of truth the point is whether or not one
possesses it, not from what motives one sought it or along what paths one
found it. If the free spirits are right, the fettered spirits are wrong, regardless
of whether the former have arrived at the truth by way of immorality or the
latter have hitherto cleaved to untruth out of morality. - In any event,
however, what characterizes the free spirit is not that his opinions are the
more correct but that he has liberated himself from tradition, whether the
outcome has been successful or a failure. As a rule, though, he will
nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth:
he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.
226
Origin of faith. - The fettered spirit takes up his position, not for reasons.
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER C ULTURE
but out of habit; he is a Christian, for example, not because he has
knowledge of the various religions and has chosen between them; he is an
Englishman, not because he has decided in favour of England: he
encountered Christianity and Englishness and adopted them without reasons,
as a man born in wine-producing country becomes a wine- drinker. Later,
when he was a Christian and Englishman, he may perhaps have also devised
a couple of reasons favourable to his habits; but if one refutes these reasons
one does not therewith refute him in his general position. Oblige a fettered
spirit to present his reasons for opposing bigamy, for example, and you will
discover whether his holy zeal for monogamy rests on reasons or on acquired
habit. Acquired habituation to spiritual principles without reasons is called
faith.
227
Reasons judged a posteriori on the basis of consequences. - All states
and orderings within society - classes, marriage, education, law - all these
derive their force and endurance solely from the faith the fettered spirits have
in them: that is to say in the absence of reasons, or at least in the warding off
of the demand for reasons. The fettered spirits are unwilling to admit this:
they recognize that it constitutes a pudendum Christianity, which was very
innocent in its intellectual notions, noticed nothing of this pudendum,
demanded faith and nothing but faith and passionately repulsed the desire for
reasons; it pointed to the success enjoyed by faith: you will soon see the
advantage to be derived from faith, it intimated, it shall make you blessed.
The state in fact does the same thing, and every father raises his son in the
same fashion: only regard this as true, he says, and you will see how much
good it will do you. What this means, however, is that the personal utility of
an opinion is supposed to demonstrate its truth, the advantageousness of a
theory is supposed to guarantee its intellectual soundness and well-
foundedness. It is as though a defendant said to the court: my counsel is
telling the whole truth, for just see what follows from what he says: I shall be
acquitted. - Because the fettered spirits harbour their principles on account of
their utility, they suppose that the views of the free spirit are likewise held for
utilitarian ends and that he regards as true only that which profits him. Since,
however, this seems to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their
country or class, they assume that the principles of the free spirit are
dangerous to them; they say, or sense: he must not be right, for he is harmful
to us.
228
The good, strong character. - Narrowness of views, through habit
become instinct, conducts to what is called strength of character. When
someone acts from a few but always the same motives, his actions attain to a
great degree of energy; if those actions are in accord with the principles held
by the fettered spirits they receive recognition and produce in him who does
them the sensation of the good conscience. Few motives, energetic action and
good conscience constitute what is called strength of character. The
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man of strong character lacks knowledge of how many possibilities of
action there are and how many directions it can take; his intellect is unfree,
fettered, because in any given case it presents to him perhaps only two
possibilities; between these he must, in accordance with his whole nature,
necessarily make a selection, and he does so easily and quickly because he
does not have fifty possibilities to choose from. The environment in which he
is educated seeks to make every man unfree, inasmuch as it presents to him
the smallest range of possibilities. The individual is treated by his educators
as though, granted he is something new, what he ought to become is a
repetition. If a man at first appears as something unfamiliar, never before
existent, he is to be made into something familiar, often before existent. A
child is said to have a good character when it is visibly narrowly determined
by what is already existent; by placing itself on the side of the fettered spirits
the child first proclaims its awakening sense of community; it is on the basis
of this sense of community, however, that it will later be useful to its state or
its class.
229
The fettered spirits' measure of things. - Of four species of things the
fettered spirits say they are in the right. Firstly: all things that possess
duration are in the right; secondly: all things that do not inconvenience us are
in the right, thirdly: all things that bring us advantage are in the right;
fourthly: all things for which we have made a sacrifice are in the right. This
last explains why, for example, a war started against the will of the nation is
carried on with enthusiasm once sacrifices have beep made. - The free spirits
who urge their cause before the forum of the fettered spirits have to
demonstrate that there have always been free spirits, that is to say that free
spiritedness possesses duration, then that they do not desire to inconvenience,
and finally that on the whole they bring advantage to the fettered spirits; but
because they cannot convince the fettered spirits of this last it is of no use to
them to have demonstrated the first and second points.
230
Esprit fort. - Compared with him who has tradition on his side and
requires no reasons for his actions, the free spirit is always weak, especially
in actions; for he is aware of too many motives and points of view and
therefore possesses an uncertain and unpractised hand. What means are there
of nonetheless rendering him relatively strong, so that he shall at least make
his way and not ineffectually perish? How does the strong spirit (esprit fort)
come into being? This is in the individual case the question how genius is
produced. Whence comes the energy, the inflexible strength, the endurance
with which the individual thinks, in opposition to tradition, to attain to a
wholly individual perception of the world?
231
The origin of genius. - The way in which a prisoner uses his wits in the
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TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
search for a means of escape, the most cold-blooded and tedious
employment of every little advantage, can teach us what instrument nature
sometimes makes use of to bring into existence genius - a word I ask to be
understood without any flavour of the mythological or religious: it takes it
and shuts it in a prison and excites in it the greatest possible desire to free
itself. - Or, to employ a different image: someone who has completely lost his
way in a forest but strives with uncommon energy to get out of it again
sometimes discovers a new path which no one knows: that is how those
geniuses come about who are famed for originality. - It has already been
remarked that a mutilation, crippling, a serious deficiency in an organ offers
the occasion for an uncommonly successful development of another organ,
the reason being that it has to discharge not only its own function but another
as well. It is in this way one can suppose many a glittering talent to have
originated. - Now apply these general indications as to the origin of genius to
the specific case of the origin of the perfect free spirit.
232
Conjecture as to the origin of free spiritedness. - Just as the glaciers
increase when in the equatorial regions the sun burns down upon the sea with
greater heat than before, so it may be that a very strong and aggressive free
spiritedness is evidence that somewhere the heat of sensibility has sustained
an extraordinary increase.
233
The voice of history. - In general history seems to furnish the following
instruction regarding the production of genius: mistreat and torment men -
thus it cries to the passions of envy, hatred and contest - drive them to the
limit, one against the other, nation against nation, and do it for centuries on
end; then perhaps, a spark as it were thrown off by the fearful energy thus
ignited, the light of genius will suddenly flare up; the will, made wild like a
horse under the rider's spur, will then break out and leap over into another
domain. - He who became aware of how genius is produced, and desired to
proceed in the manner in which nature usually does in this matter, would
have to be exactly as evil and ruthless as nature is. - But perhaps we have
misheard.
234
Value of the middle of the way. - Perhaps the production of genius is
reserved to only a limited period in the life of mankind. For one cannot
expect of the future of mankind that it will produce all at the same time things
which required for their production quite definite conditions belonging to
some period or other of the past; we cannot, for example, expect to see the
astonishing effects of the religious feeling. This itself has had its time and
many very good things can never thrive again because it was only out of it
they could grow. Thus there will never again be a life and culture bounded by
a religiously determined horizon. Perhaps even the type of the saint is
possible only with a certain narrowness of intellect
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
which, as it seems, is now done with for all future time. And thus the
high point of intelligence has perhaps been reserved for a single age of
mankind: it appeared - and continues to appear, for we are still living in this
age - when an extraordinary, long accumulated energy of will exceptionally
transferred itself through inheritance to spiritual goals. This high point will
be past when that wildness and energy have ceased to be cultivated. Perhaps
mankind will approach closer to its actual goals at the middle of its way, in
the mid-period of its existence, than at its end. Forces such as condition the
production of art, for example, could simply die out; delight in lying, in the
vague, in the symbolic, in intoxication, in ecstasy could fall into disrepute.
Indeed, if life were ever to be ordered within the perfect state, there would no
longer exist in the present any motive whatever for poetry and fiction, and it
would be only the retarded who still had a desire for poetical unreality. These
would in any case look back in longing to the times of the imperfect state, of
society still half barbaric, to our times.
235
Genius incompatible with the ideal state. - The Socialists desire to create
a comfortable life for as many as possible. If the enduring homeland of this
comfortable life, the perfect state, were really to be attained, then this
comfortable life would destroy the soil out of which great intellect and the
powerful individual in general grows: by which I mean great energy. If this
state is achieved mankind would have become too feeble still to be able to
produce the genius. Ought one therefore not to desire that life should retain
its violent character and savage forces and energies continue to be called up
again and again? The warm, sympathizing heart will, of course, desire
precisely the abolition of that savage and violent character of life, and the
warmest heart one can imagine would long for it the most passionately: and
yet precisely this passion would nonetheless have derived its fire, its warmth,
indeed its very existence from that savage and violent character of life; the
warmest heart thus desires the abolition of its own foundation, the destruction
of itself, which is to say it desires something illogical, it lacks intelligence.
The highest intelligence and the warmest heart cannot coexist in the same
person, and the sage who pronounces judgement on life places himself above
goodness as well and regards it only as something to be taken into account
together with everything else in the total assessment of life. The sage has to
resist these extravagant desires of unintelligent goodness, because his
concern is the continuance of his type and the eventual creation of the
supreme intellect; at the least he will refrain from promoting the foundation
of the 'perfect state', inasmuch as only enfeebled individuals can have any
place in it. Christ, on the contrary, whom we may think of as possessing the
warmest heart, promoted the stupidifying of man, placed himself on the side
of the poor in spirit and retarded the production of the supreme intellect: and
in this he was consistent. His antithesis, the perfect sage - this one may
venture to prophesy - will just as necessarily obstruct the
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production of a Christ. - The state is a prudent institution for the
protection of individuals against one another: if it is completed and perfected
too far it will in the end enfeeble the individual and, indeed, dissolve him -
that is to say, thwart the original purpose of the state in the most thorough
way possible.
236
The zones of culture. - One can say metaphorically that the ages of
culture correspond to the various climatic belts, except that they are ranged
one after the other and not, as in the case of the geographic zones, side by
side. In comparison with the temperate zone of culture into which it is our
task to pass over, that of the past produces, taken as a whole, the impression
of a tropical climate. Violent antitheses, the abrupt transition of day to night
and night to day, heat and vivid colour, reverence for everything sudden,
mysterious, terrible, the swiftness with which a storm breaks, everywhere a
prodigal overflowing of the cornucopias of nature: and, on the other hand, in
our culture a bright yet not radiant sky, a clear, more or less unchanging air,
sharp, occasionally cold: thus are the two zones distinguished one from
another. When we behold in that other zone how the most raging passions are
brought down and destroyed by the uncanny force of metaphysical
conceptions, we feel as though we were witnessing the crushing of tropical
tigers in the coils of monstrous serpents; such events are lacking in our
spiritual climate, our imagination has been quietened; even in dreams we do
not experience what earlier peoples beheld while awake. But should we not
be permitted to rejoice at this change, even allowing that the artists have
suffered badly through the disappearance of tropical culture and find us non-
artists a little too sober? To this extent artists are no doubt right to deny that
there has been any 'progress', for it is at least open to doubt whether the past
three millennia evidence a course of progress in the arts, while a
metaphysical philosopher such as Schopenhauer would likewise have no
cause to recognize any progress if he surveyed the past four millennia with
regard to metaphysical philosophy and religion. - To us, however, the very
existence of the temperate zone of culture counts as progress.
237
Renaissance and Reformation. - The Italian Renaissance contained
within it all the positive forces to which we owe modem culture: liberation of
thought, disrespect for authorities, victory of education over the arrogance of
ancestry, enthusiasm for science and the scientific past of mankind,
unfettering of the individual, a passion for truthfulness and an aversion to
appearance and mere effect (which passion blazed forth in a whole host of
artistic characters who, in an access of moral rectitude, demanded of
themselves perfection in their work and nothing but perfection); indeed, the
Renaissance possessed positive forces which have up to now never
reappeared in our modern culture with such power as they had then. All its
blemishes and vices notwithstanding, it was the golden age of this
millennium. In contrast to it there stands the German
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
Reformation: an energetic protest by retarded spirits who had by no
means had enough of the world-outlook of the Middle Ages and greeted the
signs of its dissolution, the extraordinary transformation of the religious life
into something shallow and merely external, not with rejoicing, as would
have been appropriate, but with profound ill-humour. With their stiff-necked
northern forcefulness they reversed the direction in which men were going,
with a violence appropriate to a state of siege they compelled the Counter-
reformation, that is to say a Catholic Christianity of self-defence, and, just as
they delayed the complete awakening and hegemony of the sciences for two
or three hundred years, so they perhaps rendered the complete growing-
together of the spirit of antiquity and the modern spirit impossible for ever.
The great task of the Renaissance could not be brought to completion, the
protestation of German nature grown retarded (for in the Middle Ages it had
had sufficient sense to cross over the Alps again and again for the sake of its
salvation) prevented it. It was an extraordinary chance political constellation
that preserved Luther and lent force to that protestation: for the Emperor
protected him so as to employ his innovation as an instrument of pressure
against the Pope, while the Pope likewise secretely befriended him so as to
employ the Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire as a counterweight
to the Emperor. Without this curious combination of motives Luther would
have been burned like Huss* - and the Enlightenment perhaps have dawned
somewhat sooner than it did and with a fairer lustre than we can now even
imagine.
238
Justice towards the evolving god. - When the entire history of culture
opens up before our gaze as a confusion of evil and noble, true and false
conceptions, and at the sight of this surging of the waves we come to feel
almost seasick, we are then able to grasp what comfort there lies in the idea
of an evolving god: the transformations and destinies of mankind are,
according to this idea, the ever increasing self-revelation of this god, it is not
all a blind mechanism, a senseless, purposeless confused play of forces. The
deification of becoming is a metaphysical outlook - as though from a
lighthouse down on to the sea of history - in which a generation of scholars
too much given to historicizing found their consolation; one ought not to get
annoyed at it, however erroneous that idea may be. Only he who, like
Schopenhauer, denies the fact of evolution, will likewise feel nothing of the
wretchedness of this surging of the waves of history, and because he knows
and feels nothing of that evolving god or of the need to suppose his existence
may fairly give vent to his mockery.
239
Fruit out of season. - That better future which one wishes for mankind
must necessarily be in some respects a worse future: for it is folly to believe
that a new higher stage of mankind will unite in itself all the excellences of
earlier stages and be obliged, for example, to include the highest * John Huss,
religious teacher condemned for heresy and burned at Constance in 1415.
114
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
phase of art. What is the case, rather, is that every season has its own
particular charm and excellencies and excludes those of the other seasons.
That which grew up out of religion and in proximity to it cannot grow again
if this is destroyed; at the most, stray, late-sprouting shoots can put in a
deceptive appearance, as can brief outbreaks of recollection of the art of
former times: a condition which may well betray a sense of loss and
deprivation, but which is no evidence of the existence of any force out of
which a new art could be born.
240
The world's increasing severity. - The higher a man's culture ascends,
the less space there is for humour and mockery. Voltaire was grateful to
heaven from his very heart for the invention of marriage and the church: it
showed how well amusement had been taken care of. But he and his age, and
before him the sixteenth century, mocked these themes to exhaustion; in
these domains all witticism is now belated and above all too cheap to attract
the buyer's curiosity. Nowadays one asks after causes: it is the age of
seriousness. Who is now interested in seeing the differences between reality
and presumptuous appearance, between what a man is and what he seeks to
represent, in a humorous light? The feeling evoked by this contrast produces
a quite different effect as soon as one looks for the reasons. The more
profoundly anyone understands life the less he will give vent to mockery,
unless perhaps he comes at last to mock at the 'profundity of his
understanding'.
241
Genius of culture. - If anyone wanted to imagine a genius of culture,
what would the latter be like? He would manipulate falsehood, force, the
most ruthless self-interest as his instruments so skilfully he could only be
called an evil, demonic being; but his objectives, which here and there shine
through, would be great and good. He would be a centaur, half beast, half
man, and with angel's wings attached to his head in addition.
242
Miraculous education. - Interest in education will become genuinely
intense only from the moment when belief in a God and his loving care is
abandoned: just as the art of medicine could begin to flourish only when
belief in miraculous cures ceased. To the present day, however, all the world
continues to believe in miraculous education: for the greatest disorder,
confusion of objectives, unfavourable circumstances have succeeded in
producing the most fruitful and capable men, and how could there not be
something uncanny in that? - Soon these cases too will be examined more
closely and tested more carefully: no miracles will ever be discovered. Under
the same circumstances countless men continually perish, the single
individual who has been saved usually grows stronger as a consequence
because, by virtue of an inborn, indestructible strength, he has endured these
ill circumstances and in doing so exercised and augmented this strength: that
is the explanation of the miracle. An education
115
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
that no longer believes in miracles will have to pay attention to three
things: firstly, how much energy is inherited? secondly, how can new energy
be ignited? thirdly, how can the individual be adapted to the enormously
diversified demands of culture without being distracted by them and his
individuality dispersed - in short, how can the individual be set in place
within the counterpoint of private and public culture, how can he play the
main theme and at the same time the subordinate theme as well?
243

The future of the physician. - There is at present no profession capable of
being so greatly advanced as is that of the physician; especially now that the
spiritual physicians, the so-called curers of souls, may no longer carry on
their sorceries to the sound of public approval and are avoided by all
educated people. A physician has not now attained the highest degree of
training of which he is capable when he knows the best and most recent
remedies and is practised in applying them, and can draw those quick
conclusions from effects to causes that make the celebrated diagnostician: he
also has to possess an eloquence adapted to every individual and calculated to
touch him to the very heart, a manliness at the sight of which all timorousness
(the wormrot that undermines all invalids) takes flight, a diplomat's flexibility
in mediating between those who require joy if they are to become well and
those who for reasons of health must (and can) make others joyful, the
subtlety of an agent of police or an advocate in comprehending the secrets of
a soul without betraying them - in short, a good physician now needs the
artifices and privileges of all the other professions; thus equipped he is then
in a position to become a benefactor to the whole of society through the
augmentation of good works, spiritual joy and fruitfulness, through the
prevention of evil thoughts, intentions, acts of roguery (whose revolting
source is so often the belly), through the production of a spiritual-physical
aristocracy (as promoter and preventer of marriages), through the benevolent
amputation of all so-called torments of soul and pangs of conscience: only
thus will he cease to be a 'medicine-man' and become a saviour, to which end
he will nonetheless require no miracles, nor will he need to have himself
crucified.
244
In the proximity of madness. - The sum of sensations, items of
knowledge, experiences, the whole burden of culture, that is to say, has
become so great that an over-excitation of the nervous and thinking powers is
now a universal danger; indeed, the cultivated classes of Europe have in fact
become altogether neurotic, and almost every one of its great families has
come close to lunacy in any rate one of its branches. It is true that health is
nowadays sought by all available means; but what is chiefly needed is an
abatement of that tension of feeling, that crushing cultural burden which,
even if it has to be purchased at a heavy cost, nonetheless gives ground for
high hopes of a new Renaissance. We have Christianity, the philosophers,
poets, musicians to thank for an abundance of profound sen-
116
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
sations: if these are not to stifle us we must conjure up the spirit of
science, which on the whole makes one somewhat colder and more sceptical
and in especial cools down the fiery stream of belief in ultimate definitive
truths; it is principally through Christianity that this stream has grown so
turbulent.
245
Bell-founding of culture. - Culture is fashioned as a bell is, inside a
casing of coarser, commoner stuff: untruth, violence, unlimited expansion of
every individual ego, of every individual nation, have been this casing. Has
the time now come to remove it? Has what was molten become solid, have
the good, advantageous drives, the habits of the nobler disposition, grown so
secure and general that there is no longer any need to lean on metaphysics
and the errors of the religions, acts of severity and violence are no longer the
strongest cement binding man to man and nation to nation? - There is no
longer a god to aid us in answering this question: our own insight must here
decide. Man himself has to take in hand the rule of man over the earth, it is
his 'omniscience' that has to watch over the destiny of culture with a sharp
eye in future.
246
The cyclops of culture. - When we behold those deeply-furrowed
hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time
will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread
itself upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most
savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was
nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its
house. The frightful energies - those which are called evil - are the cyclopean
architects and road-makers of humanity.
247
Circular orbit of humanity. - Perhaps the whole of humanity is no more
than a stage in the evolution of a certain species of animal of limited
duration: so that man has emerged from the ape and will return to the ape,
while there will be no one present to take any sort of interest in this strange
comic conclusion. Just as, with the decline of Roman culture and its principal
cause, the spread of Christianity, a general uglification of man prevailed
within the Roman Empire, so an eventual decline of the general culture of the
earth could also introduce a much greater uglification and in the end
animalization of man to the point of apelikeness. - Precisely because we are
able to visualize this prospect we are perhaps in a position to prevent it from
occurring.
248
Words of consolation of a progress grown desperate. - Our age gives the
impression of being an interim state; the old ways of thinking, the old
cultures are still partly with us, the new not yet secure and habitual and thus
lacking in decisiveness and consistency. It looks as though everything is
becoming chaotic, the old becoming lost to us, the new proving useless
117
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and growing ever feebler. But the same thing is experienced by the
soldier learning to march: for a time he is more insecure and awkward than
ever, because he is moving his muscles now according to the old method,
now according to the new, and as yet neither has carried off the victory. We
are faltering, but we must not let it make us afraid and perhaps surrender the
new things we have gained. Moreover, we cannot return to the old, we have
burned our boats; all that remains is for us to be brave, let happen what may.
- Let us only go forward, let us only make a move! Perhaps what we do will
present the aspect of progress; but if not, let us heed the words of Friedrich
the Great and take consolation from them: 'Ah, mon cher Sulzer, vous ne
connaissez pas assez cette race maudite, a laquelle nous appartenons.'*
249
Suffering from the cultural past. - He who has come to a clear
understanding of the problem of culture suffers from a feeling similar to that
suffered by one who has inherited a fortune dishonestly acquired or by a
prince who reigns by virtue of an act of violence on the part of his forebears.
He thinks with sorrow of his origins and is often ashamed, often sensitive
about them. The whole sum of the energy, will and joy he expends on his
property is often balanced by a profound weariness: he cannot forget his
origins. He gazes sadly into the future: he knows in advance that his posterity
will suffer from the past as he does.
250
Manners. - Good manners disappear in proportion to the slackening of
the influence of the court and of a closed aristocracy: one can clearly observe
this decline from decade to decade if one keeps an eye on public behaviour,
which is plainly growing more and more plebeian. The art of flattering and
paying homage in a witty and elegant way has been entirely lost; from this
emerges the ludicrous fact that in cases where homage has to be paid today
(for example to a great statesman or artist) people borrow the language of
deep feeling, of honest, true-hearted probity - out of embarrassment and lack
of wit and elegance. Thus it is that formal public encounters between men
seem ever more awkward but more sincere and honest without, however,
being so. - But must manners continue to go downhill for ever? It seems to
me, rather, that manners are describing a curve and that we are approaching
its nadir. Once society has grown more certain of its objectives and
principles, so that they act constructively (whereas now the manners we have
acquired, constructed as they were by circumstances that have ceased to exist,
are being acquired and inherited ever more feebly), manners and deportment
in social intercourse will necessarily be as natural and simple as these
objectives and principles are. An improvement in the division of time and
work, gymnastic exercise transformed into an accompaniment to leisure, a
power of reflection augmented and grown more rigorous that
* 'Ah, my dear Sulzer, you have too little understanding of this wicked race to which we
belong.'
Il8
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
bestows prudence and flexibility even upon the body, will bring all this
with it. - Here, to be sure, one might pause to wonder whether our men of
learning, who desire to be the forerunners of this new culture, are in fact
distinguished by the quality of their manners? They are not, of course: though
their spirit may be willing enough, their flesh is weak. The past still lives too
powerfully in their muscles: they still stand in a constricted posture, and are
half worldly clerics, half the dependent tutors of the nobility, and in addition
to this crippled and enervated by pedantry and antiquated procedures. They
are thus, at any rate as regards their body and often also as regards three-
quarters of their mind, still the court servants of an old, indeed senile culture,
and as such themselves senile; the new spirit that can occasionally be heard
buffeting about in these ancient containers for the present serves only to
make them more fearful and insecure. Within them there walk the ghosts of
the past as well as the ghosts of the future: is it any wonder if they fail to
produce the most pleasing possible impression?
251
Future of science. - Science bestows upon him who labours and
experiments in it much satisfaction, upon him who learns its results very
little. As all the important truths of science must gradually become common
and everyday, however, even this little satisfaction will cease: just as we have
long since ceased to take pleasure in learning the admirable two- times-table.
But if science provides us with less and less pleasure, and deprives us of
more and more pleasure through casting suspicion on the consolations of
metaphysics, religion and art, then that mightiest source of joy to which
mankind owes almost all its humanity will become impoverished. For this
reason a higher culture must give to man a double-brain, as it were two brain-
ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-
science: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable
of being shut off; this is a demand of health. In one domain lies the power-
source, in the other the regulator: it must be heated with illusions,
onesidednesses, passions, the evil and perilous consequences of overheating
must be obviated with the aid of the knowledge furnished by science. - If this
demand of higher culture is not met, then the future course of human
evolution can be foretold almost with certainty: interest in truth will cease the
less pleasure it gives: because they are associated with pleasure, illusion,
error and fantasy will regain step by step the ground they formerly held: the
ruination of science, a sinking back into barbarism, will be the immediate
consequence; mankind will have to begin again at the weaving of its tapestry,
after having, like Penelope, unwoven it at night. But who can guarantee to us
that it will always find the strength for it?
252
Pleasure in knowledge. - Why is knowledge, the element of the scholar
and philosopher, associated with pleasure? Firstly and above all, because one
here becomes conscious of one's strength; for the same reason, that is to
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
say, that gymnastic exercises are pleasurable even when there are no
spectators. Secondly, because in the course of acquiring knowledge one goes
beyond former conceptions and their advocates and is victor over them, or at
least believes oneself to be. Thirdly, because through a new piece of
knowledge, however small, we become superior to all and feel ourselves as
the only ones who in this matter know aright. These three causes of pleasure
are the most important, though there are many other subsidiary causes,
according to the nature of the man who acquires knowledge. - A
comprehensive catalogue of these is offered, in a place where it would hardly
be expected, in my parenthetic essay on Schopenhauer:* with this exhibition
any experienced servant of knowledge can rest content, though he may
deprecate the trace of irony that seems to lie on these pages. For if it is true
that, if the scholar is to come into existence 'a host of very human drives,
great and small, have to be moulded together', that the scholar, though a very
noble metal, is not a pure one and 'consists of a tangled network of very
various motives and stimuli', the same likewise applies to the artist, the
philosopher, the moral genius - and whatever the great names glorified in
that essay are called. Everything human deserves to be viewed ironically so
far as its origin is concerned: that is why irony is so superfluous in the world.
253
Loyalty as proof of soundness. - It is sound evidence for the validity of a
theory if its originator remains true to it for forty years; but I assert that there
has never yet been a philosopher who has not in the end looked down on the
philosophy of his youth with contempt, or at the least with mistrust. -
Perhaps, however, he has never spoken publicly of this change of heart, out
of a care for his reputation or - as is more likely in the case of nobler natures
- out of a tender regard for his adherents.
254
Increasing interest. - During the course of a man's higher education
everything becomes interesting to him, he knows how to discover the
instructive side of a subject quickly and to specify the point where it will fill
a gap in his thinking or an idea can be confirmed by it. Boredom vanishes
more and more, as does excessive excitability of feeling. In the end he goes
among men as a naturalist does among plants, and perceives even himself as
a phenomenon that stimulates strongly only his drive to knowledge.
255
Superstition in simultaneity. - Things that happen simultaneously are
connected with one another - that is the general opinion. A distant relation
dies, at the same time we dream of him - there you are! But countless
relations die without our dreaming of them. It is as with the shipwrecked who
take vows: the votive tablets of those who perished are not afterwards
observed in the temple. - A man dies, an owl hoots, a clock stops,
* The third of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations: 'Schopenhauer as educator' (1874).
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
all in the same night hour: must there not be a connection? So intimate a
relationship with nature as is assumed in this supposition is also encountered
in a more refined form among historians and depicters of culture, who
usually suffer from a kind of hydrophobia in regard to all the meaningless
juxtapositions in which the life of the individual and of nations is nonetheless
so rich.
256
Science furthers ability, not knowledge. - The value of having for a time
rigorously pursued a rigorous science does not derive precisely from the
results obtained from it: for in relation to the ocean of things worth knowing
these will be a mere vanishing droplet. But there will eventuate an increase in
energy, in reasoning capacity, in toughness of endurance; one will have
learned how to achieve an objective by the appropriate means. To this extent
it is invaluable, with regard to everything one will afterwards do, once to
have been a man of science.
2 57
Youthful charm of science. - The search for truth still possesses the
charm of standing everywhere in stark contrast to grey and tedious error; but
this charm is in continual decline. Now, to be sure, we are still living in
truth's youthful era and are accustomed to pursue truth as though she were a
beautiful girl; but what of that day when she shall have become a scowling
old woman? In almost every science the fundamental insight is either
discovered in its earliest years or it continues to be sought; how different a
charm it then exerts from when everything essential has been discovered and
only a pitiful late remainder is left for the seeker to cull (a sensation one can
experience in certain historical disciplines).
258
The statue of humanity. - The genius of culture does as Cellini* did
when he cast his statue of Perseus: the liquefied mass seemed to be
insufficient, but he was determind to produce enough: so he threw into it
keys and plates and whatever else came to hand. And just so does that genius
throw in errors, vices, hopes, delusions and other things of baser as well as
nobler metal, for the statue of humanity must emerge and be completed; what
does it matter if here and there inferior material is employed?
259
A masculine culture. - Greek culture of the classical era is a masculine
culture. As regards women, Pericles says it all in the funeral oration with the
words: they are at their best when men talk about them as little as possible. -
The erotic relationship of the men with the youths was, to a degree we can no
longer comprehend, the sole and necessary presupposition of all male
education (somewhat in the way in which with us all higher education was
for a long time introduced to women only through love-affairs and marriage);
all the practical idealism of the Hellenic nature threw itself
* Cellini: Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71): Italian sculptor and goldsmith
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
upon this relationship, and young people have probably never since been
treated with so much attention and kindness or so completely with a view to
enhancing their best qualities (virtus) as they were in the sixth and fifth
centuries - in accordance, that is, with Holderlin's* fine maxim 'for the mortal
gives of his best when loving', t The greater the regard paid to this
relationship, the less was paid to commerce with woman: considerations of
child-begetting and sensual pleasure - that was all that counted here; there
was no spiritual commerce, not even an actual love-affair. When one further
considers that they were excluded from contests and spectacles of every kind,
only the religious cults are left as the sole form of higher entertainment for
women. - If the figures of Electra and Antigone were nonetheless presented
on the tragic stage, this was endurable in art, though in life one would not
want it: just as we now could not bear in life all the pathos we are happy
enough to witness in art. - The women had no other task than to bring forth
handsome, powerful bodies in which the character of the father lived on as
uninterruptedly as possible and therewith to counteract the nervous over-
excitation that was gaining the upper hand in so highly developed a culture.
It was this that kept Greek culture young for so relatively long a time; for in
the Greek mothers the Greek genius again and again returned to nature.
260
The prejudice in favour of bigness. - It is plain that men overvalue
everything big and conspicuous. This originates in the conscious or
unconscious insight that they find it very useful if one throws all one's force
into one domain and makes of oneself as it were one monstrous organ. For
the individual himself a uniform development of his powers is certainly more
useful and productive of happiness; for every talent is a vampire that sucks
blood and strength from the other powers, and an exaggerated production can
reduce even the most gifted man almost to madness. In the arts, too, the
extreme natures attract much too much attention; but one must also have a
much lower culture to allow oneself to be captivated by them. Men subject
themselves from habit to everything that wants power.
261
The tyrants of the spirit. - Only where the radiance of the myth falls is
the life of the Greeks bright; elsewhere it is gloomy. Now, the Greek
philosophers deprived themselves of precisely this myth: is it not as if they
wanted to move out of the sunshine into shadows and gloom? But no plant
avoids the light; fundamentally these philosophers were only seeking a
brighter sun, the myth was not pure, not lucid enough for them. They
discovered this light in their knowledge, in that which each of them called his
'truth'. But in those days knowledge still possessed a greater lustre; it was
still young and as yet knew little of the perils and difficulties of its path; it
could still hope to reach the midpoint of being with a single
* Friedrich Holderin (1770-1843): German poet
t From Der Tod des Empedokles, first version, lines 1569-70
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
leap and thence solve the riddle of the universe. These philosophers
possessed a firm belief in themselves and their 'truth' and with it they
overthrew all their contemporaries and predecessors; each of them was a
warlike brutal tyrant. Perhaps happiness in the belief that one was in
possession of the truth has never been greater in the history of the world, but
nor, likewise, has the severity, arrogance, tyrannical and evil in such a belief.
They were tyrants, that is to say that which every Greek wanted to be and
what everyone was when he could be. Perhaps Solon9 alone constitutes an
exception; he says in his poems how he disdained personal tyranny. But he
did it for love of his work, of his lawgiving; and to be a lawgiver is a more
sublimated form of tyranny. Parmenides also gave laws, Pythagoras and

9 Solon (638-558 BC): Athenian lawgiver
t Parmenides (b.c. 510 BC), Pythagoras (c. 582-500 BC), Anaximander (611-547 BC): pre-
Socratic philosophers. Nietzsche discusses the pre-Socratics in his early Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Creeks, trans. M. Cowan (Chicago: Gateway, 1962).
Empedocles probably did so; Anaximander founded a city.t Plato was the
incarnate desire to become the supreme philosophical lawgiver and founder
of states; he appears to have suffered terribly from the non-fulfilment of his
nature, and towards the end of his life his soul became full of the blackest
gall. The more the power of the Greek philosophers declined, the more they
inwardly suffered from this bitterness and vituperativeness; when the various
sects came to the point of battling for their truths in the open street the souls
of all these wooers of truth were totally choked with jealousy and spleen, the
tyrannical element now raged as poison through their own bodies. These
many petty tyrants would have liked to have eaten one another raw; not a
spark of love was left in them, and all too little joy in their own knowledge. -
In general, the rule that tyrants are usually murdered and that their posterity
has but a brief existence also applies to the tyrants of the spirit. Their history
is brief and violent, their posthumous influence ceases abruptly. Of almost all
the great Hellenes it can be said that they seem to have come too late: such is
the case with Aeschylus, with Pindar, with Demosthenes, with Thucydides;
one further generation - and it is all over. This is what is uncanny and violent
about Greek history. Nowadays, to be sure, we adhere to the gospel of the
tortoise. To think historically today is almost to believe that at all times
history has been made according to the principle: 'as little as possible in the
longest possible time!' Alas, Greek history moves so fast! Life has never
since been lived so prodigally, so exorbitantly. I cannot convince myself that
the history of the Greeks pursued that natural course for which it is so
celebrated. They were much too multifariously gifted to have proceeded
gradually in the step-by-step manner of the tortoise in its race with Achilles:
and that is what is meant by natural evolution. With the Greeks everything
goes quickly forwards, but it likewise goes quickly downwards; the
movement of the whole machine is so accelerated that a single stone thrown
into its wheels makes it fly to pieces. Socrates, for example, was such a
stone; in a single night the evolution of philosophical science, hitherto so
wonderfully
regular if all too rapid, was destroyed. It is no idle question whether, if
he had not come under the spell of Socrates, Plato might not have discovered
an even higher type of philosophical man who is now lost to us for ever. We
gaze into the ages that preceded him as into a sculptor's workshop of such
types. The sixth and fifth centuries seem, however, to promise even more and
higher things than they actually brought forth; it remained only a promise
and proclamation. And yet there can hardly be a more grievous loss than the
loss of a type, of a new, hitherto undiscovered highest possibility of the
philosophical life. Even the older realized types have mostly come down to
us ill-defined; all the philosophers from Thales to Democritus seem to me
extraordinarily hard to discern; but whoever succeeded in recreating these
figures would move among forms of the mightiest and purest type. This
capacity is rare, to be sure; even the later Greeks who took notice of the older
philosophy lacked it; Aristotle especially seems to have no eyes in his head
whenever he stands before those we have named. And so it seems as though
these glorious philosophers had lived in vain, or as though their only function
had been to prepare the way for the quarrelsome and loquacious hordes of
the Socratic schools. Here, as aforesaid, there is a gap, a breach in evolution;
some great disaster must have occurred and the only statue from which we
could have perceived the purpose and meaning of that great preparatory
exercise in sculpting have miscarried or been shattered: what actually
happened must for ever remain a secret of the workshop. - That which
eventuated among the Greeks - every great thinker, in the belief that he was
the possessor of absolute truth, became a tyrant, so that in the case of the
Greeks the history of the spirit exhibits the same violent, precipitate and
perilous character as does their political history - this kind of event was not
therewith exhausted: many things of the same sort have occurred right up to
the most recent times, though they have gradually grown rarer and can hardly
occur now with the same naive clarity of conscience as they did among the
philosophers of Greece. For on the whole contradiction and scepticism now
speak too powerfully and too loudly. The period of the tyrants of the spirit is
past. In the spheres of higher culture there will always have to be a sovereign
authority, to be sure - but this sovereign authority will hereafter lie in the
hands of the oligarchs of the spirit. Their spatial and political division
notwithstanding, they constitute a close-knit society whose members know
and recognize one another, a thing which public opinion and the judgements
of the writers for the popular papers may circulate as expressions of favour
and disfavour. The spiritual superiority which formerly divided and created
hostility now tends to unite: how could the individual keep himself aloft and,
against every current, swim along his own course through life if he did not
see here and there others of his own kind living under the same conditions
and take them by the hand, in struggle against both the ochlocratic character
of the half-spirited and the half-educated and the attempts that occasionally
occur to erect a tyranny with the aid of the masses? The oligarchs have need
of one another, they have joy in one another, they
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
understand the signs of one another - but each of them is nonetheless
free, he fights and conquers in his own place, and would rather perish than
submit.
262
Homer. - The greatest fact in the cultivation of Greece remains that
Homer became pan-Hellenic so early. All the spiritual and human freedom
the Greeks attained to goes back to this fact. But it was also the actual fatality
of Greek cultivation, for Homer by centralizing made everything level and
dissolved the more serious instincts for independence. From time to time a
resistance to Homer arose from out of the deepest foundations of the
Hellenic; but he was always victorious. All great spiritual forces exercise
beside their liberating effect also a repressive one; but it makes a difference,
to be sure, whether it is Homer or the Bible or science that tyrannizes over
mankind.
263
Talent. - In as highly developed a humanity as ours now is everyone
acquires from nature access to many talents. Everyone possesses inborn
talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness,
endurance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become
what he is: which means to discharge it in works and actions.
264
The gifted either over-valued or under-valued. - Men who are gifted but
unscientific value every token of spirit, whether it is on the right track or not;
they desire above all that the man who has commerce with them should
entertain them with his spiritual capacities, should spur them on, inflame
them, carry them away into undertakings serious and jesting, and in any
event protect them as the mightiest amulet against boredom. Scientific
natures, on the other hand, know that the talent for having ideas of all kinds
must be rigorously curbed by the spirit of science; not that which glitters,
shines, excites, but often insignificant seeming truth is the fruit he wishes to
shake down from the tree of knowledge. Like Aristotle, he may not draw a
distinction between 'boring' and 'gifted', his daemon leads him through the
desert as well as through tropical vegetation, so that he may everywhere take
pleasure only in the real, valid, genuine. - This is why insignificant scholars
harbour a distrust and suspicion of giftedness in general, and why, on the
other hand, gifted people frequently harbour an aversion to science: as do, for
example, almost all artists.
265
Reason in school. - The school has no more important task than to teach
rigorous thinking, cautious judgement and consistent reasoning; therefore it
has to avoid all those things that are of no use for these operations, for
example religion. For it can be sure that, if the bow of thought has been
stretched too tight, human unclarity, habit and need will afterwards relax it
again. But so long as it exerts influence it ought to extort that which
125
distinguishes and is the essence of man: 'reason and science, the
supremest powers of man' - as Goethe at least judges. - The great naturalist
von Baer* sees the superiority of all Europeans when compared with
Asiatics to lie in their inculcated ability to give reasons for what they
believe, an ability the latter totally lack. Europe has attended the school of
consistent and critical thinking, Asia still does not know how to distinguish
between truth and fiction and is unaware whether its convictions stem from
observation and correct thinking or from fantasies. - Reason in school has
made Europe Europe: in the Middle Ages it was on the way to becoming
again a piece and appendage of Asia - that is to say losing the scientific sense
which it owed to the Greeks.
266
Under-valued effect of grammar-school teaching. - The value of the
grammar school is seldom sought in the things that are actually learned and
safely brought home there, but in those that are taught but which the pupil
acquires only with reluctance and shakes off again as quickly as he dares.
The reading of the classics - every educated person admits this - is, wherever
it is carried on, a monstrous procedure: before young people who are in no
way whatever ripe for it, by teachers whose every word, often whose mere
appearance, lays a blight on a good writer. But herein lies the value that
usually goes unrecognized - that these teachers speak the abstract language
of higher culture, ponderous and hard to understand but nonetheless a higher
gymnastics for the head; that concepts, technical terms, methods, allusions
continually occur in their language such as young people almost never hear
in the conversation of their relations or in the street. If the pupils merely
listen, their intellect will be involuntarily prepared for a scientific mode of
thinking. It is not possible for them to emerge from this discipline as a pure
child of nature quite untouched by the power of abstraction.
267
Learning many languages. - Learning many languages fills the memory
with words instead of facts and ideas, while the memory is a receptacle
which in the case of each man can take only a certain limited content. Then
the learning of many languages is harmful insofar as it invites belief that one
is in possession of complete accomplishments, and in fact also lends one a
certain seductive esteem in social intercourse; it is also harmful indirectly in
that it stands in the way of the acquisition of thorough knowledge and any
ambition to deserve the respect of others by honest means. Finally, it is the
axe that is laid at the roots of a feeling for the nuances of one's own mother
tongue: it incurably injures and destroys any such feeling. The two nations
which produced the greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, learned no
foreign languages. - Because, however, commerce between men is bound to
grow ever more cosmopolitan and an efficient merchant in London, for
example, already has to make himself understood, in speech and writing, in
eight languages, the * Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876)
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learning of many languages is, to be sure, a necessary evil; but it is one
for which mankind will sooner or later be compelled to find a cure: and at
some distant future there will be a new language for all - first as a
commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in
general - just as surely as there will one day be air travel. To what other end
has the science of language studied the laws of language for the past hundred
years and determined what is necessary, valuable and successful in each
individual language!
268
On the war history of the individual. - In an individual human life which
passes through several cultures we find compressed together the conflict
which is otherwise played out between two generations, between father and
son: the closeness of the relationship aggravates this conflict, because each
of the parties pitilessly draws into it the inner self of the other party that it
knows so well; and this conflict will thus be fought most bitterly within the
single individual; here each new phase will trample over the earlier with
cruel injustice and lack of understanding of its capacities and objectives.
269
A quarter-of-an-hour earlier. - Occasionally we discover someone
whose views are in advance of their time, but only to the extent that he
anticipates the commonplace views of the next decade. He adheres to public
opinion before it is public, that is to say he has fallen into the arms of a view
that deserves to become trivial a quarter-of-an-hour earlier than others have.
His fame, however, usually tends to be much noisier than the fame of the
truly great and superior.
270
The art of reading. - Every strong course is onesided; it approaches the
course of a straight line and like this is exclusive; that is to say, it does not
touch many other courses, as weak parties and natures do in their wavelike
swayings back and forth: one must thus forgive the philologists too for being
onesided. Production and preservation of texts, together with their
elucidation, pursued in a guild for centuries, has now finally discovered the
correct methods; the entire Middle Ages was profoundly incapable of a strict
philological elucidation, that is to say of a simple 4esire to understand what
the author is saying - to have discovered these methods was an achievement,
let no one undervalue it! It was only when the art of correct reading, that is to
say philology, arrived at its summit that science of any kind acquired
continuity and constancy.
271
The art of drawing conclusions. - The greatest advance mankind has
made lies in its having learned to draw correct conclusions. This is by no
means so natural an accomplishment as Schopenhauer assumes when he
says: 'all are capable of drawing conclusions, few of judging'; on the
contrary, it was learned late and has even now not yet attained to dominance.
The
127
drawing of false conclusions was in earlier ages the rule: and the
mythologies of all nations, their magic and their superstition, their religious
cults, their law are inexhaustible sources of proof of this proposition.
272
Annual rings of individual culture. - The strengths and weaknesses of
spiritual productivity depend far less on inherited talent than they do on the
power of expansion bestowed with it. Most educated young people of thirty
go back at around this early solstice of their lives and are from then on
disinclined to make new spiritual changes. That is why an ongrowing culture
at once needs for its salvation another new generation, which in its turn,
however, does not get very far: for to overtake the culture of his father the
son must consume almost all the inherited energy the father himself
possessed at the stage of life at which he begot his son; it is with the little bit
left over that he goes past him (for, because the path is here being traversed a
second time, progress is a little quicker; the son does not need to expend
quite as much strength on learning what the father has learned). Men
possessed of great power of expansion, such as Goethe for example, traverse
as much as four successive generations would hardly be able to equal; for
that reason, however, they advance ahead too quickly, so that other men
overtake them only in the next century, and perhaps do not even completely
overtake them, because the chain of culture, the smooth consistency of its
evolution, is frequently weakened and interrupted. - The ordinary phases of
spiritual culture attained to in the course of history are overtaken more and
more speedily. Men at present begin by entering the realm of culture as
children affected religiously and these sensations are at their liveliest in
perhaps their tenth year, then pass over into feebler forms (pantheism) while
at the same time drawing closer to science; they put God, immortality and
the like quite behind them but fall prey to the charms of a metaphysical
philosophy. At last they find this, too, unbelievable; art, on the other hand,
seems to promise them more and more, so that for a time metaphysics
continues just to survive transformed into art or as a mood of artistic
transfiguration. But the scientific sense grows more and more imperious and
leads the man away to natural science and history and especially to the most
rigorous methods of acquiring knowledge, while art is accorded an ever
gentler and more modest significance. All this nowadays usually takes place
within a man's first thirty years. It is the recapitulation of a curriculum at
which mankind has been labouring for perhaps thirty thousand years.
273
Retrogressed, not retarded. - He who nowadays still commences his
evolution from religious sensations, and perhaps after that lives for a time in
metaphysics and art, has in any event gone back quite a distance and begins
his race with other modern men under unfavourable circumstances: he
appears to be at a disadvantage as regards both space and time. But because
he has sojourned in those regions where heat and
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
energy are unchained and power flows continually as a volcanic stream
out of inexhaustible wells, provided he quits these domains at the proper time
he moves forward all the faster, his feet have wings, his breast has learned to
breathe more placidly, with longer and more enduring breath. - He went back
only so as to have sufficient ground for his leap: thus there can be even
something fearful and threatening in this retrogression.
274
A segment of our self as artistic object. - It is a sign of superior culture
consciously to retain certain phases of development which lesser men live
through almost without thinking and then wipe from the tablet of their soul,
and to draft a faithful picture of it: for this is the higher species of the art of
painting which only a few understand. To this end it will be necessary
artificially to isolate those phases. Historical studies cultivate the ability for
this painting, for they constantly challenge us, when faced with a piece of
history, of the life of a nation or of a man, to conjure up a quite distinct
horizon of ideas, a distinct strength of sensations, the predomination of this,
the stepping-back of that. It is in this ability rapidly to reconstruct such
systems of ideas and sensations on any given occasion, as for example the
impression of a temple on the basis of a few pillars and pieces of wall that
chance to remain standing, that the historical sense consists. The first result
of it is that we comprehend our fellow men as being determined by such
systems and representatives of different cultures, that is to say as necessary,
but as alterable. And conversely, that we are able to segregate parts of our
own development and exhibit them in isolation.
2 75
Cynic and Epicurean. - The Cynic recognizes the connection between
the augmented and enhanced sufferings of the more highly cultivated man
and the abundance of his needs; he grasps, that is to say, that the host of
opinions that exists as regards the beautiful, appropriate, becoming,
pleasurable must give rise not only to sources of enjoyment but also of
repugnance. In accordance with this insight he reverses his development,
inasmuch as he gives up many of these opinions and evades certain of the
demands of culture; he therewith gains a feeling of freedom and invigoration,
and, once habit has rendered his mode of life endurable to him, he gradually
in fact comes to feel sensations of repugnance less often and less acutely and
to approach the condition of the domestic animal; in addition, however, he
feels all that lies in the charm of contrast and can in any event scold and
grumble to his heart's content: so that in this way he again raises himself high
above the world of sensations of the animal. - The Epicurean has the same
viewpoint as the Cynic; between the two there usually exists only a
difference of temperament. The Epicurean likewise employs his higher
culture to make himself independent of dominating opinions; only he lifts
himself above them, while the Cynic remains at the stage of negation. It is as
though he wanders along still,
129
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
sheltered, twilight pathways, while above him the tops of the trees whirl
about in the wind and betray to him how violently buffetted the world outside
is. In the case of the Cynic, on the other hand, it is as though he walks abroad
naked in the teeth of the wind and hardens himself to the point of feeling
nothing.
276
Microcosm and macrocosm of culture. - The finest discoveries
concerning culture are made by the individual man within himself when he
finds two heterogeneous powers ruling there. Supposing someone is as much
in love with the plastic arts or music as he is enraptured by the spirit of
science and he regards it as impossible to resolve this contradiction by
annihilating the one and giving the other free rein, the only thing for him to
do is to turn himself into so large a hall of culture that both powers can be
accommodated within it, even if at opposite ends, while between them there
reside mediating powers with the strength and authority to settle any
contention that might break out. Such a hall of culture within the single
individual would, however, bear the strongest resemblance to the cultural
structure of entire epochs and provide continual instruction regarding them
by means of analogy. For wherever grand cultural architecture has
developed, its purpose has been to effect a harmony and concord between
contending powers through the agency of an overwhelming assemblage of
the other powers, but without the need to suppress them or clap them in irons.
277
Happiness and culture. - The sight of the surroundings of our childhood
moves us deeply: the garden-house, the church with the graveyard, the pond
and the wood - we see all these with a sense of suffering. We are seized with
pity for ourselves, for what have we not gone through since those days! And
here everything is still standing there so motionless and eternal: it is only we
who are so different, so affected; we even rediscover certain people upon
whom time has whetted its teeth as little as it has on an oaktree: peasants,
fishermen, forest-dwellers - they are the same. - To be moved and to feel
self-pity in face of lower culture is a sign of a higher culture; from which it
follows that happiness at any rate has not been augmented by the latter. He
who wants to harvest happiness and contentment from life has only to avoid
acquiring a higher culture.
278
Parable of the dance. - Nowadays it is to be regarded as the decisive
sign of greater culture when anyone possesses sufficient strength and
flexibility to be as clear and rigorous in the domain of knowledge as at other
times he is capable of as it were giving poetry, religion and metaphysics a
hundred paces advantage and entering into their power and beauty. Such a
situation between two so different demands is very hard to maintain, for
science presses for the absolute dominance of its methods, and if this
pressure is not relaxed there arises the other danger of a feeble vacil-
130
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
lation back and forth between different drives. To indicate the way
towards a resolution of this difficulty, however, if only by means of a
parable, one might recall that the dance is not the same thing as a languid
reeling back and forth between different drives. High culture will resemble
an audacious dance: which is, as aforesaid, why one needs a great deal of
strength and suppleness.
279
On the alleviation of life. - A principal means of alleviating one's life is
to idealize everything that occurs in it; but first, however, one has to make
clear to oneself from the art of painting what idealizing means. The painter
desires that the viewer shall not observe too precisely, too sharply, he
compels him to retreat a certain distance and view the painting from there; he
is obliged to presuppose that the viewer will be some quite definite distance
from the picture; he must, indeed, even assume an equally definite degree of
sharpness of eyesight in his viewer! He must be in no way irresolute in such
matters. Everyone who wants to idealize his life must therefore not desire to
see it too precisely, he must always banish his view of it back to a certain
distance away. This artifice was understood by, for example, Goethe.
280
Aggravation as alleviation and the reverse. - Much that is aggravation of
life to a certain level of mankind serves a higher level as alleviation, because
such men have become acquainted with sterner aggravations of life. The
reverse likewise occurs: thus religion, for example, has a double face,
according to whether a man gazes up to it so that it may take from him his
burdens and distress, or looks down on it as on the fetters fastened to him so
that he may not rise too high into the air.
281
Higher culture is necessarily misunderstood. - He who has furnished his
instrument with only two strings - like the scholars, who apart from the drive
to knowledge have only an acquired religious drive - cannot understand those
men who are able to play on more strings than two. It lies in the nature of
higher, many-stringed culture that it should always be falsely interpreted by
the lower; as happens, for example, when art is counted a disguised form of
religiousness. Indeed, people who are only religious understand even science
as a seeking on the part of the religious feeling, just as the deaf-and-dumb do
not know what music is if it is not visible movement.
282
Lamentation. - It is perhaps the advantages of our age that bring with
them a decline in and occasionally an undervaluation of the vita contem-
plativa.* But one has to admit to oneself that our age is poor in great
moralists, that Pascal, Epictetus, Seneca and Plutarcht are little read now, that
* vita contemplative: contemplative life
t Pascal (1623-62), Epictetus (c. 55-135), Seneca (4 BC to AD 65), Plutarch (c. 46-120)
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
work and industry - formerly adherents of the great goddess health -
sometimes seem to rage like an epidemic. Because time for thinking and
quietness in thinking are lacking, one no longer ponders deviant views: one
contents oneself with hating them. With the tremendous acceleration of life
mind and eye have become accustomed to seeing and judging partially or
inaccurately, and everyone is like the traveller who gets to know a land and
its people from a railway carriage. An independent and cautious attitude
towards knowledge is disparaged almost as a kind of derangement, the free
spirit is brought into disrepute, especially by scholars, who miss in his art of
reflecting on things their own thoroughness and antlike industry and would
dearly love to banish him to a solitary corner of science: whereas he has the
quite different and higher task of commanding from a lonely position the
whole militia of scientific and learned men and showing them the paths to
and goals of culture. - Such a lament as has just been sung will probably one
day have had its time and, when the genius of meditation makes a mighty
reappearance, fall silent of its own volition.
283
Principal deficiency of active men. - Active men are generally wanting
in the higher activity: I mean that of the individual. They are active as
officials, businessmen, scholars, that is to say as generic creatures, but not as
distinct individual and unique human beings; in this regard they are lazy. - It
is the misfortune of the active that their activity is always a little irrational.
One ought not to ask the cash-amassing banker, for example, what the
purpose of his restless activity is: it is irrational. The active roll as the stone
rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics. - As at all times,
so now too, men are divided into the slaves and the free; for he who does not
have two-thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may
otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar.
284
In favour of the idle. - One sign that the valuation of the contemplative
life has declined is that scholars now compete with men of action in a kind of
precipitate pleasure, so that they seem to value this kind of pleasure more
highly than that to which they are really entitled and which is in fact much
more pleasurable. Scholars are ashamed of otium* But there is something
noble about leisure and idleness. - If idleness really is the beginning of all
vice, then it is at any rate in the closest proximity to all virtue; the idle man is
always a better man than the active. - But when I speak of leisure and
idleness, you do not think I am alluding to you, do you, you sluggards? -
285
Modern restlessness. - Modern agitatedness grows greater the farther
west we go, so that to the Americans the inhabitants of Europe seem one and
* otium: see Preface, section 8, and note
TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
all ease-loving and epicurean creatures, though in fact they are swarming
among one another like bees and wasps. This agitatedness is growing so great
that higher culture can no longer allow its fruits to mature; it is as though the
seasons were following upon one another too quickly. From lack of repose
our civilization is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active,
that is to say the restless, counted for more. That is why one of the most
necessary corrections to the character of mankind that have to be taken in
hand is a considerable strengthening of the contemplative element in it. Yet
even now every individual who is calm and steady in head and heart has the
right to believe not only that he has a good temperament but also that he is in
possession of a universally useful virtue and even that, by preserving this
virtue, he is fulfilling a higher task.
286
The extent to which the man of action is lazy. - I believe that everyone
must have his own individual opinion concerning everything about which an
opinion is possible, because he himself is an individual, unique thing which
adopts a new posture towards all other things such as has never been adopted
before. But the laziness that lies in the depths of the soul of the man of action
prevents man from drawing the water up from his own well. - Freedom of
opinion is like health: both are individual, from neither can a universally valid
concept be set up. That which one individual needs for his health is to another
a cause of sickness, and many ways and means to freedom of spirit may to
more highly developed natures count as ways and means to unfreedom.
287
Censor vitae.*- For a long time the inner condition of a man who wants
to exercise his own unfettered judgement regarding life is characterized by
the alternation of love and hate; he forgets nothing and keeps a faithful
account of all things, good and evil. Finally, when the tablet of his soul is
wholly written over with experiences, he will not hate and despise existence,
but neither will he love it: he will hover above it, now with the eye of joy,
now with that of sorrow, and, like nature itself, be now in a summery, now in
an autumnal mood.
288
Incidental success. - He who seriously wants to become free will at the
same time unconstrainedly lose any tendency to faults and vices; he will
likewise be assailed by annoyance and ill-humour less and less often. For his
will will desire nothing more earnestly than knowledge and the rileans to it,
that is to say the enduring condition in which he is at his most efficient in
acquiring knowledge.
289
Value of illness. - The man who lies ill in bed sometimes discovers that
what he is ill from is usually his office, his business or his society and that
* Censor vitae: c e n s or of l i f e
1
33
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
through them he has lost all circumspection with regard to himself: he
acquires this wisdom from the leisure to which his illness has compelled him.
290
Country sensibility. - If a man has not drawn firm, restful lines along the
horizon of his life, like the lines drawn by mountain and forest, his innermost
will itself grows restless, distracted and covetous, as is the nature of the city-
dweller: he has no happiness himself and bestows none on others.
291
Prudence of free spirits. - The liberal minded, men who live for the sake
of knowledge alone, will find they soon attain the external goal of their life,
their definitive position in relation to society and the state, and will easily be
content with, for example, a minor office or an income that just enables them
to live; for they will organize their life in such a way that a great
transformation of external circumstances, even an overturning of the political
order, does not overturn their life with it. Upon all these things they expend
as little energy as possible, so that they may dive down into the element of
knowledge with all their accumulated strength and as it were with a deep
breath. Thus they may hope to dive deep and perhaps get a view of the
ground at the bottom. - Of whatever happens to him such a spirit will want to
appropriate only the tip; he has no love for things in their entirety, in all the
breadth and prolixity of their convolutions, for he has no wish to get himself
entangled with them. - He too knows the weekdays of unfreedom, of
dependence, of servitude. But from time to time he has to have a Sunday of
freedom, or he will find life unendurable. - It is probable that even his love
for other people will be prudent and somewhat short-breathed, for he wants to
become involved with the world of affection and blindness only insofar as it
is necessary for acquiring knowledge. He must trust that the genius of justice
will put in a word on behalf of his disciple and protege if accusing voices
should call him poor in love. - There is in his way of living and thinking a
refined heroism which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the great
masses, as his coarser brother does, and tends to go silently through the world
and out of the world. Whatever labyrinths he may stray through, among
whatever rocks his stream may make its tortuous way - if he emerges into the
open air he will travel his road bright, light and almost soundlessly and let the
sunshine play down into his very depths.
292
Forward. - And with that, forward on the path of wisdom with a bold
step and full of confidence! However you may be, serve yourself as your own
source of experience! Throw off discontent with your nature, forgive yourself
your own ego, for in any event you possess in yourself a ladder with a
hundred rungs upon which you can climb to knowledge. The age in which
with regret you feel yourself thrown counts you happy on
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TOKENS OF HI GHER AND LOWER CULTURE
account of this good fortune; it calls to you to participate in experiences
that men of a later age will perhaps have to forgo. Do not underestimate the
value of having been religious; discover all the reasons by virtue of which
you have still had a genuine access to art. Can you not, precisely with aid of
these experiences, follow with greater understanding tremendous stretches of
the paths taken by earlier mankind? Is it not on precisely this soil, which you
sometimes find so displeasing, the soil of unclear thinking, that many of the
most splendid fruits of more ancient cultures grew up? One must have loved
religion and art like mother and nurse - otherwise one cannot grow wise. But
one must be able to see beyond them, outgrow them; if one remains under
their spell, one does not understand them. You must likewise be on familiar
terms with history and with playing the cautious game with the scales 'on one
hand - on the other hand'. Turn back and trace the footsteps of mankind as it
made its great sorrowful way through the desert of the past: thus you will
learn in the surest way whither all later mankind can and may not go again.
And by your desiring with all your strength to see ahead how the knot of the
future is going to be tied, your own life will acquire the value of an
instrument and means of knowledge. You have it in your hands to achieve the
absorption of all you experience - your experiments, errors, faults, delusions,
passions, your love and your hope - into your goal without remainder. This
goal is yourself to become a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this
necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in
general. When your gaze has become strong enough to see to the bottom of
the dark well of your nature and your knowledge, perhaps you will also
behold in its mirror the distant constellations of future cultures. Do you
believe that such a life with such a goal is too laborious, too much lacking in
everything pleasant? Then you have not yet learned that no honey is sweeter
than that of knowledge, or that the clouds of affliction hovering over you will
yet have to serve you as udders from which you will milk the milk for your
refreshment. Only when you grow old will you come to realize how you have
given ear to the voice of nature, that nature which rules the whole world
through joy: the same life that has its apex in old age also has its apex in
wisdom, in that gentle sunshine of a constant spiritual joyousness; both of
them, old age and wisdom, you will encounter on the same mountain ridge of
life: so did nature will it. Then it is time, and no cause for anger, that the
mists of death should approach. Towards the light - your last motion; a joyful
shout of knowledge - your last sound.
135
6
MAN
IN
SOCIETY
293
Benevolent dissimulation. - When trafficking with men we often need to
practise a benevolent dissimulation; we have to pretend we do not see
through the motives of their actions.
294
Copies. - We quite often encounter copies of significant men; and, as
also in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.
295
The speaker. - One can speak very much to the purpose and yet in such a
way that all the world cries out the opposite: that happens when one is not
speaking to all the world.
296
Lack of confidence. - Lack of confidence among friends is a fault that
cannot be reprimanded without becoming incurable.
29 7
On the art of giving. - To be obliged to decline a gift simply because it
was not offered in the proper way incenses one against the giver.
298 '
The most dangerous party member. - In every party there is one who
through his all too credulous avowal of the party's principles incites the others
to apostasy.
299
Adviser of an invalid. - He who offers his advice to an invalid acquires a
feeling of superiority over him, whether his advice is accepted or rejected.
That is why proud and sensitive invalids hate advisers even more than they do
their illness.
300
Two kinds of equality. - The thirst for equality can express itself either as
a desire to draw everyone down to oneself (through diminishing them, spying
on them, tripping them up) or to raise oneself and everyone else up (through
recognizing their virtues, helping them, rejoicing in their success).
301
Against embarrassment. - The best means of coming to the aid of people
136
MAN I N SOCI ETY
who suffer greatly from embarrassment and of calming them down is to
single them out for praise.
302
Preference for specific virtues. - We do not place especial value on the
possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.
303
Why we contradict. - We often contradict an opinion for no other reason
than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.
304
Trust and intimacy. - He who deliberately seeks to establish an intimacy
with another person is usually in doubt as to whether he possesses his trust.
He who is sure he is trusted sets little value on intimacy.
35
Equilibrium of friendship. - Sometimes in our relations with another
person the right equilibrium of friendship is restored when we place in our
own balance of the scales a few grains of injustice.
306
The most dangerous physicians. - The most dangerous physicians are
those who, as born actors, employ a perfect art of deception to imitate the
born physician.
307
When paradoxes are in order. - One sometimes needs witty people so as
to win them over to a proposition so that they may exhibit it only in the form
of a tremendous paradox.
308
How brave people are won over. - One can persuade brave people to
participate in an action by representing it as being more dangerous than it is.
309
Civilities. - Acts of civility towards us by people we do not like we
account offences on their part.
310
Keeping waiting. - A sure means of irritating people and putting evil
thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time. To have this
happen makes one immoral.
3U
Against the trusting. - People who give us their complete trust believe
they have thus acquired a right to ours. This is a false conclusion; gifts
procure no rights.
312
Means of compensation. - When we have done a person harm, it often
provides him with sufficient satisfaction - makes him, indeed, well disposed
137
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
towards us - if we offer him an opportunity to make us the subject of a
witticism.
313
Vanity of the tongue. - Whether a man conceals his bad qualities and
vices or openly admits them, in both cases his vanity is seeking its advantage:
one has only to observe how subtly he distinguishes before whom he conceals
these qualities, before whom he is honest and open-hearted.
314
Considerate. - To desire to offend no one and injure no one can be the
mark of a just disposition as well as of a timorous one.
315
Requisite for disputing. - He who does not know how to put his thoughts
on ice ought not to enter into the heat of battle.
316
Society and arrogance. - One unlearns arrogance when one knows one is
always among deserving people; being alone implants presumptuousness.
Young people are arrogant, for they live in the society of their own kind, who
are all nothing but like to seem much.
317
Motive of attack. - One attacks someone not only so as to harm him or to
overpower him but perhaps only so as to learn how strong he is.
318
Flattery. - Persons who wish to deaden our caution when we associate
with them by flattering us are employing a dangerous expedient: it is like a
sleeping-draught which, if it does not put us to sleep, only keeps us more
wakeful.
319
Good letter-writers. - He who does not write books, thinks a great deal
and lives in inadequate company will usually be a good letter-writer.
320
The ugliest. - It is to be doubted whether a traveller will find anywhere in
the world regions uglier than the human face.
321
Sympathizers. - Natures full of sympathy and always ready to assist in
misfortune are rarely at the same time willing to join in rejoicing: when
others are fortunate they have nothing to do, are superfluous, feel they have
lost their position of superiority and thus can easily exhibit displeasure.
322
A suicide's relatives. - The relatives of a suicide hold it against him that
out of regard for their reputation he did not remain alive.
138
MAN I N SOCI ETY
323
Ingratitude to be expected. - He who bestows something great receives
no gratitude; for the recipient is already overburdened by the act of taking.
324
In company lacking esprit. - No one is grateful for the politeness the man
of esprit exhibits when he accommodates himself to a company in which it is
not polite to exhibit esprit.
325
Presence of witnesses. - One is twice as glad to leap after a man who has
fallen into the water when there are people present who dare not do so.
326
Silence. - The way of replying to a polemical attack the most unpleasant
for both parties is to get annoyed and stay silent: for the attacker usually
interprets the silence as a sign of contempt.
327
A friend's secret. - There will be few who, when they are in want of
matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.
328
Humanity. - The humanity of celebrities of the spirit when they traffic
with those who are not celebrated consists in being courteously in the wrong.
329
The embarrassed. - People who do not feel secure in society employ
every opportunity afforded by the presence of someone to whom they are
superior of publicly exhibiting this superiority at his expense before the
company, for example by teasing.
330
Obligation. - It oppresses a refined soul to know that anyone is under an
obligation, a coarse one to be under an obligation to anyone.
331
Sign of estrangement. - The most obvious token of an estrangement of
views between two men is that both inject a certain irony into their remarks
but neither feels the irony of it.
332
Arrogance of the meritorious. - Arrogance on the part of the meritorious
is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for
merit itself is offensive.
333

The danger in our own voice. - Sometimes in the course of conversation
the sound of our own voice disconcerts us and misleads us into making
assertions which in no way correspond to our opinions.
1
39
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
334
In conversation. - Whether in conversation one generally acknowledges
or denies that another is in the right is altogether a matter of what one is
accustomed to: both make good sense.
335
Fear of one's neighbour. - We fear the hostility of our neighbour because
we are apprehensive that through such a mood he will get to know our private
secrets.
336
To distinguish through reprimanding. - Very prominent persons
apportion even their reprimands as though they were distinguishing us by
them. The warmth with which they concern themselves with us ought to put
us on our guard. We completely misunderstand them if we take their
reprimands objectively and defend ourselves against them; we annoy them
and estrange them from us if we do so.
337
Vexation at anothers goodwill. - We are mistaken as to the degree to
which we believe ourselves hated or feared: we ourselves may know very
well the degree to which we differ from a person, tendency, party, but others
know us only very superficially and therefore hate us only superficially. We
often encounter goodwill that we find inexplicable; when we understand it,
however, it offends us, because it shows we are not being taken with
sufficient seriousness.
338
Clashing vanities. - When two people who are equally vain meet they
afterwards retain a poor impression of one another, because each was so
much concerned with the impression he wished to make on the other that the
other made no impression on him; both eventually come to realize their
efforts are in vain, and each puts the blame on the other.
339
Bad manners as a good sign. - The superior spirit takes pleasure in the
acts of tactlessness, arrogance, even hostility perpetrated against him by
ambitious youths; they are the bad manners of fiery steeds who have as yet
carried no rider and yet will before long be so proud to carry one.
340
When it is advisable to be in the wrong. - We do well to tolerate
accusations against us without refuting them even when we are wronged by
them, when it is the case that our accuser would consider us even more in the
wrong if we contradicted him, let alone refuted him. It is true, of course, that
in this way a man can be always in the wrong and always appear to be in the
right, and in the end become with the clearest conscience in the world the
most unendurable tyrant and bore; and what applies to the individual can also
apply to entire classes of society.
140
MAN I N SOCI ETY
341
Too little honoured. - Very conceited people who have received less
consideration than they expected to receive try hard to mislead themselves
and others on the matter and become ingenious psychologists in their efforts
to make out that they have in fact been sufficiently honoured: if they fail to
obtain their objective, if the veil of deception is rent, they abandon
themselves to all the greater ill-humour.
342
Echoes of primal conditions in speech. - In the way in which men now
advance assertions in society one often recognizes an echo of the ages when
they knew how to handle weapons better than they knew anything else: they
wield their assertions like marksmen taking aim, or we seem to hear the
ringing and whistling of blades; and with some men an assertion comes
battering down like a club. - Women, on the other hand, speak like creatures
who have for millennia sat at the loom, or plied the needle, or been childish
with children.
343
The narrator. - He who narrates something soon reveals whether he is
doing so because the subject interests him or whether by doing so he hopes to
arouse interest. In the latter case he will exaggerate, employ superlatives and
the like. He will then usually narrate badly, because he is thinking not so
much of the subject as of himself.
344
The reciter. - He who recites dramatic poems in public makes
discoveries about his character: he finds that his voice is more naturally
suited to certain moods and scenes, for example to pathos or scurrility, while
perhaps in everyday life he had simply had no opportunity of exhibiting
pathos or scurrility.
345
A scene of comedy that happens in real life. - Someone devises a witty
opinion on a subject in order to utter it in social company. Now, in a comedy
we would listen to him and see how he would try to sail full ahead and to
transport the company to the point at which he can make his remark: how he
continually nudges the conversation towards one goal, occasionally loses his
direction, recovers it, at last attains the vital moment: his breath almost fails
him - and then someone else in the company takes the remark out of his
mouth. What will he do? Oppose his own opinion?
346
Involuntarily impolite. - If someone involuntarily treats another
impolitely, for example fails to greet him because he does not recognize him,
he is vexed by the fact, even though he is unable to reproach himself for it; he
grieves at the ill-opinion of him he has aroused in the other, or he fears the
consequences of any discord that may follow, or it pains him to have
141
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
offended the other - vanity, fear or pity can be set in motion, that is to
say, and perhaps all of them together.
347
Betrayer's masterpiece. - To express to a fellow conspirator the grievous
suspicion that one is going to be betrayed by him, and to do so at precisely
the moment one is oneself engaged in betrayal, is a masterpiece of malice,
because it keeps the other occupied with himself and compels him for a time
to behave very openly and unsuspiciously, thus giving the actual betrayer full
freedom of action.
348
To offend and to be offended. - It is much more pleasant to offend and
later ask forgiveness than to be offended and forgive. He who does the
former gives a token of power and afterwards of quality of character. The
latter, if he does not wish to be thought inhumane, has to forgive; pleasure in
the humbling of the other is, on account of this constraint, slight.
349
In a disputation. - When one contradicts another opinion and at the
same time develops one's own, continual consideration of that other opinion
usually disturbs the natural posture of one's own: it appears more deliberate,
more rigorous, perhaps a little exaggerated.
350
Artifice. - He who wants to demand something hard of another must not
conceive the matter as any kind of problem but simply present his plan as
though it were the only possibility; if objection or contradiction begin to
dawn in the eye of his opponent, he must know how to break off quickly and
allow him no time to develop them.
351
Pangs of conscience after social gatherings. - Why after the usual sort
of social gatherings do we suffer from pangs of conscience? Because we
have taken important things lightly, because in discussing people we have
spoken without complete loyalty or because we have kept silent when we
should have spoken, because occasionally we have not leaped up and run off,
in short because we have behaved in society as though we belonged to it.
352
One is judged falsely. - Whoever listens to how he is being judged is
always vexed. For even those who stand closest to us ('know us best') judge
us falsely. Even good friends sometimes give vent to their ill-feeling in an
ill- judged word; and would they be our friends if they knew us well? - The
judgements of those who are indifferent to us are very painful, because they
sound so unprejudiced and almost objective. But if we notice that someone
who is hostile to us knows us on some point we have kept secret as well as
we know it ourselves, how great is our chagrin then!
MAN I N SOCI ETY
353
Tyranny of the portrait. - Artists and statesmen who speedily put
together a complete picture of a man or an event out of a few individual traits
are usually unjust inasmuch as they afterwards demand that the event or the
man must actually be as they have painted it or him; they demand, in fact,
that one shall be as talented, as cunning, as unjust as one is in their
representation.
354
The relative as the best friend. - The Greeks, who knew so well what a
friend is - of all peoples they alone often and repeatedly ventilated the subject
of friendship, so that they were the first, and so far the last, to whom the
friend has appeared a problem worth solving - these same Greeks designated
relatives by an expression which is the superlative of the word 'friend'. I find
this inexplicable.
355
Misunderstood honesty. - When in conversation someone quotes himself
('as I said then', 'as 1 usually say'), this gives an impression of
presumptuousness, whereas it often arises from the opposite source, or at
least from honesty, which does not wish to deck and embellish the moment
with ideas that rightly belong to an earlier one.
356
The parasite. - It indicates a complete lack of nobility of disposition
when someone prefers to live in dependency, at the expense of others, merely
so as not to have to work and usually with a secret animosity towards those
he is dependent on. - Such a disposition is much more frequent among
women than among men, also much more excusable (for historical reasons).
357
On the altar of reconciliation. - There are circumstances under which
one can obtain something from a man by offending and falling out with him:
the feeling of having an enemy so torments him that he employs the first sign
of a softening of hostility to effect a reconciliation and sacrifices on the altar
of this reconciliation that thing on which he at first set such store he refused
to relinquish it at any price.
358
Demanding pity as a sign of presumption. - There are people who, when
they fly into a rage and offend others, demand firstly that it should not be
held against them, and secondly that they should be pitied for being subject to
such violent paroxysms. Such is the extent of human presumption.
359
Bait. - 'Everyone has his price' - this is not true. But there surely exists
for everyone a bait he cannot help taking. Thus to win many people over to a
cause one needs only to put on it a gloss of philanthropy, nobility.
143
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
charitableness, self-sacrifice - and on to what cause can one not put it?-:
these are the sweetmeats and dainties for their soul; others have others.
360
Attitude towards praise. - When good friends praise a talented nature he
will often exhibit pleasure at it, though he does so out of politeness and
benevolence: in truth he is indifferent to it. His real being is quite languid in
its presence and it cannot drag him a single step out of the sunshine or
shadow in which he lies; but men want to give pleasure when they praise and
one would grieve them if one did not rejoice at their praise.
361
The experience of Socrates. - If one has become a master in one thing
one usually for that very reason remains a complete bungler in most other
things; but one thinks precisely the opposite, a fact experienced already by
Socrates. This is the drawback that makes association with masters
unpleasant.
362
Means of brutalizing. - To fight against stupidity in the long run makes
even the fairest and gentlest men brutal. Perhaps this means they are on the
right path to their own self-defence, for the just argument against a stupid
head is a clenched fist. But because, as aforesaid, they are gentle and fair of
character, the suffering they inflict on others through this means of defence is
less than the suffering they inflict on themselves.
363
Curiosity. - If there were no curiosity little would be done to further the
wellbeing of one's neighbour. But curiosity creeps into the house of the
unfortunate and needy under the name of duty or pity. - Perhaps even much
lauded mother-love contains a goodly portion of curiosity.
364
Miscalculation in society. - This one wishes to arouse interest through
his judgements, that through his inclinations and disinclinations, a third
through his acquaintanceships, a fourth through his isolation - and they all
miscalculate. For he before whom the spectacle is enacted himself believes he
is the only spectacle that comes into consideration.
365
Duel. - In favour of all affairs of honour and duels it can be said that, if
someone has so susceptible a sensibility that he cannot endure to live if this
or that person says or thinks this or that about him, he has a right to make the
matter an issue of life or death for one or the other. That he is in fact so
susceptible must be considered outside the domain of dispute: it is part of our
inheritance from the past, whose greatness could never have existed without
its excesses. If, however, there has been created a code of honour which
admits blood in place of death, so that the heart is lightened after a duel
fought according to rules, this is a great blessing, since otherwise many
human lives would be placed in danger. - Such an insti-
144
MAN I N SOCI ETY
tution, moreover, educates men into being cautious about what they say
and makes it possible to associate with them.
366
Nobility and gratitude. - A noble soul will be glad to feel obligated to
gratitude and will not anxiously avoid those occasions on which such
obligation arises; it will likewise also subsequently be composed in the
expression of gratitude; whereas baser souls resist all becoming obligated or
are afterwards excessive and all too sedulous in their expressions of gratitude.
The latter is also to be found in people of baser origin or lowly position: a
favour shown to them seems to them a miracle of grace.
367
Hours of eloquence. - In order to speak well, one man needs someone
who is decidedly and recognizedly his superior, another can find full freedom
of eloquence and happy turns of phrase only before someone he excels: the
reason is the same in both cases; each of them speaks well only when he
speaks sans gene* the one because before the more elevated person he feels
no urge to contest and competition, the other likewise in face of the person
more lowly. - Now, there exists a quite different species of men who speak
well only when they speak in contest with the intention of winning. Which of
these two species is the more ambitious: he who speaks well out of thirst for
honour or he who, if he speaks with that motive in view, speaks badly or not
at all?
368
The talent for friendship. - Among men who possess a particular gift for
friendship two types predominate. One is in a state of continual ascent and for
each phase of his development finds a friend precisely appropriate to it. The
succession of friends he acquires in this way are seldom at one with one
another and sometimes in dissonance and discord: which is quite in accord
with the fact that the later phases of his development abolish or infringe upon
the earlier. Such a man may be jocularly called a ladder. - The other type is
represented by him who exercises an attraction on very various characters and
talents, so that he gains a whole circle of friends; they, however, establish
friendly relations between one another, their differences notwithstanding, on
account of being his friend. One can call such a man a circle: for in him this
solidarity between such different natures and dispositions must in some way
be prefigured. - For the rest, the gift of having good friends is in many men
much greater than the gift of being a good friend.
369
Tactics in conversation. - After a conversation with anyone one is best
placed to speak of the partner in the conversation if one has had the
opportunity of displaying one's wit and amiability before him in all their
splendour. It is a tactic that has been employed by shrewd people who wanted
to prejudice someone in their favour and did so by offering him * sans gene:
without shame or inhibition
145
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
the opportunity for a good witticism and the like. A merry conversation
could be imagined between two very shrewd people each of whom wanted to
prejudice the other in his favour and to this end tossed the fairest
opportunities back and forth while neither accepted them: so that the
conversation would be on the whole unwitty and unamiable because each
assigned the opportunity for wit and amiability to the other.
370
Discharge of ill-humour. - The man who experiences failure prefers to
attribute this failure to the ill-will of another rather than to chance. His
incensed feelings are relieved if he imagines a person, and not a thing, to be
the cause of his failure; for one can revenge oneself on people, while the
iniquities of chance must be swallowed down. That is why, when a prince
experiences a failure, his attendance is accustomed to point out one sole man
as the supposed cause and to sacrifice him in the interest of the whole court;
for, since he can take no revenge on the goddess of destiny herself, the
prince's displeasure would otherwise be visited on them all.
371

Receiving the colour of the environment. - Why are inclination and
aversion so contagious that it is hard to live in the proximity of a person of
strong feelings without being filled like a barrel with his For and Against?
Firstly, it is very hard for us wholly to refrain from exercising judgement;
sometimes, indeed, our vanity finds it altogether unendurable to do so; it here
wears the same colours as poverty of thought and feeling or timidity and
unmanliness: and thus we are at last impelled to take sides, perhaps against
the tendency of our environment if this posture is more satisfying to our
pride. Usually, however - this is the second point - our transition from
indifference to inclination or aversion is in no way conscious; we gradually
accustom ourself to the sensibility of our environment, and because
sympathetic agreement and accommodation is so pleasant we soon bear all
the marks and party colours of this environment.
372
Irony. - Irony is in place only as a pedagogic tool, employed by a teacher
in dealing with any kind of pupil: its objective is humiliation, making
ashamed, but of that salutary sort which awakens good resolutions and
inspires respect and gratitude towards him who treats us thus of the kind we
feel for a physician. The ironist poses as unknowing, and does so so well that
the pupils in discussion with him are deceived, grow bold in their belief they
know better and expose themselves in every way; they abandon
circumspection and reveal themselves as they are - up to the moment when
the lamp they have been holding up to the face of the teacher sends its beams
very humiliatingly back on to them themselves. - Where such a relationship
as that between teacher and pupil does not obtain, irony is ill-breeding, a
vulgar affectation. All ironical writers depend on the foolish species of men
who together with the author would like to feel themselves superior to all
others and who regard the
146
MAN I N SOCI ETY
author as the mouthpiece of their presumption. - Habituation to irony,
moreover, like habituation to sarcasm, spoils the character, to which it
gradually lends the quality of a malicious and jeering superiority: in the end
one comes to resemble a snapping dog which has learned how to laugh but
forgotten how to bite.
373
Presumptuousness. - One should guard against nothing more than
against the efflorescence of that weed which is called presumptuousness and
which ruins in us every good harvest, for there is a presumptuousness in
cordiality, in respectfulness, in benevolent familiarity, in endearment, in
friendly advice, in the admission of error, in sympathy for others, and all
these fair things excite aversion when that weed flourishes among them. The
presumptuous person, that is to say the person who wants to signify more
than he is or counts for, always makes a false calculation. He enjoys a
momentary success, it is true, inasmuch as the people before whom he is
presumptuous usually mete out to him the measure of respect he demands,
out of fear or because it is the easiest thing to do; but they take a vile revenge
for it, inasmuch as they subtract the excess measure he has demanded from
the value they previously accorded him. There is nothing for which men
demand higher payment than humiliation. The presumptuous person can
make his actual merits, which may be great, seem so suspect and small in the
eyes of others that they are trampled in the dust. - One should permit oneself
even a proud demeanour only where one can be quite sure one will not be
misunderstood and regarded as presumptuous, for example in the presence of
friends and wives. For in traffic with men there is no greater folly than to
acquire a reputation for presumptuousness; it is worse than having failed to
learn how to tell polite lies.
374
Dialogue. - The dialogue is the perfect conversation, because everything
one of the parties says acquires its particular colour, its sound, its
accompanying gestures strictly with reference to the other to whom he is
speaking, and thus resembles a correspondence in which the forms of
expression vary according to whom the correspondent is writing to. In a
dialogue there is only a single refraction of the thought: this is produced by
the partner in the dialogue, as the mirror in which we desire to see our
thoughts reflected as perfectly as possible. But what happens when there are
two, three or more fellow participants? The conversation necessarily loses its
subtle individuality, different intentions clash with and disrupt one another; a
turn of phrase that appeals to one offends the disposition of another. That is
why in converse with several people one will be compelled to draw back into
oneself, to present the facts as they are but to deduct from the subjects of
converse that opalescent ether of humanity that makes of a conversation one
of the pleasantest things in the world. One has only to listen to the tone men
tend to adopt when speaking to whole groups of men; it is as though the
fundamental note of all speech
147
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
were: 'this is what / am, this is what I say, you can make of it what you
will!' This is the reason intelligent women usually leave behind on him who
has encountered them in society an alienating, painful, forbidding
impression: it is speaking to many, before many, that robs her of all
intellectual amiability and throws a harsh light only on her conscious concern
with herself, her tactics and her objective of a public victory: whereas the
same women become female again and rediscover their intellectual charm in
a dialogue for two.
375
Posthumous fame. - To hope for the recognition of a distant future
makes sense if one assumes that mankind will remain essentially unchanged
and that all greatness is bound to be felt as great not only in a single age but
in all ages. This, however, is an error; mankind undergoes great
transformations in its feeling for and judgement of what is good and
beautiful; it is fantasizing to believe of oneself that one is a mile further on in
advance and that all mankind is going along our road. In addition: a scholar
who fails to gain recognition may be quite sure that his discovery will also be
made by others and that at the best some future historian will acknowledge
that he already knew this or that but was not able to obtain general
acquiescence in the matter. Failure to gain recognition will always be
interpreted by posterity as lack of vigour. - In short, one should not be too
ready to speak up for proud isolation. There are of course exceptions; but as a
rule it is our faults, weaknesses and follies that hinder recognition of our
great qualities.
376
Of friends. - Only reflect to yourself how various are the feelings, how
divided the opinions, even among your closest acquaintances, how even the
same opinions are of a quite different rank or intensity in the heads of your
friends than they are in yours; how manifold are the occasions for
misunderstanding, for hostility and rupture. After reflecting on all this you
must tell yourself: how uncertain is the ground upon which all our alliances
and friendships rest, how close at hand are icy downpours or stormy weather,
how isolated each man is! When one realizes this, and realizes in addition
that all the opinions of one's fellow men, of whatever kind they are and with
whatever intensity they are held, are just as necessary and unaccountable as
their actions; if one comes to understand this inner necessity of opinions
originating in the inextricable interweaving of character, occupation, talent,
environment - perhaps one will then get free of that bitterness of feeling with
which the sage cried: 'Friends, there are no friends!' One will, rather, avow to
oneself: yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself
that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order
to remain your friend; for such human relationships almost always depend
upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as
touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship
follows after them and shatters. Are there not people who would be mort-
ally wounded if they discovered what their dearest friends actually know
about them? - Through knowing ourselves, and regarding our own nature as a
moving sphere of moods and opinions, and thus learning to despise ourself a
little, we restore our proper equilibrium with others. It is true we have good
reason to think little of each of our acquaintances, even the greatest of them;
but equally good reason to direct this feeling back on to ourself. - And so,
since we can endure ourself, let us also endure other people; and perhaps to
each of us there will come the more joyful hour when we exclaim:
'Friends, there are no friends!' thus said the dying sage;
'Foes, there are no foes!' say 1, the living fool.
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7
WOMAN
AND
CHILD
377
The perfect woman. - T he perfect woman is a higher type of human
being than the perfect man: also something much rarer. - The natural science
of the animals offers a means of demonstrating the truth of this proposition.
378
Friendship and marriage. - The best friend will probably acquire the
best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.
379
Continuance of the parents. - The unresolved dissonances between the
characters and dispositions of the parents continue to resound in the nature of
the child and constitute the history of his inner sufferings.
380
From the mother. - Everyone bears within him a picture of woman
derived from his mother: it is this which determines whether, in his dealings
with women, he respects them or despises them or is in general indifferent to
them.
381
Correcting nature. - If one does not have a good father one should
furnish oneself with one.
382
Fathers and sons, - Fathers have much to do to make amends for having
sons.
383
Error of noble women. - Noble women think that a thing does not exist
if it is not possible to speak about it in company.
384
A male sickness. - For the male sickness of self-contempt the surest cure
is to be loved by a clever woman.
385
A kind of jealousy. - Mothers are easily jealous of the friends of their
sons when these enjoy particular success. Usually a mother loves herself in
her son more than she does her actual son.
386
Rational irrationality. - In the maturity of his life and understanding a
man is overcome by the feeling his father was wrong to beget him.
150
WOMAN AND CHI LD
387
Motherly goodness. - Some mothers need happy, respected children,
others unhappy ones: otherwise she has no chance to exhibit her goodness as
a mother.
388
Diverse sighs. - Some men have sighed over the abduction of their
wives, most however over the fact that no one wanted to abduct them.
389
Love-matches. - Marriages contracted from love (so-called love-
matches) have error for their father and need for their mother.
390
Friendship with women. - Women are quite able to make friends with a
man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance
of a slight physical antipathy.
391
Boredom. - Many people, especially women, never feel boredom
because they have never learned to work properly.
392
An element of love. - In every kind of womanly love there also appears
something of motherly love.
393
Unity of place and action. - If married couples did not live together good
marriages would be more common.
394
Usual consequences of marriage. - All society that does not elevate one
draws one down, and conversely; that is why men usually sink a little when
they take wives, while their wives are elevated a little. Men who are too
intellectual have great need of marriage, though they resist it as they would a
foul-tasting medicine.
395
Teaching to command. - Children of modest families need to be taught
how to command as other children need to be taught obedience.
396
The desire to become loved. - Engaged people who have been brought
together by convenience often strive to become loved, so as to do away with
the reproach of acting out of cold, calculating utility. Those who have
adopted Christianity for the sake of advantage likewise strive to become
genuinely devout; it makes the religious pantomime easier for them.
397
No standstill in love. - A musician who loves slow tempo will take a piece of
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
music more and more slowly. In the same way there is no standstill in
any kind of love.
398
Modesty. - Generally speaking, the more beautiful a woman is the more
modest she is.
399
Marriage with stability. - A marriage in which each of the parties seeks
to achieve an individual goal through the other will stand up well; for
example when the wife seeks to become famous through the husband, the
husband liked through the wife.
400
Proteus nature. - Women in love come to be just as they are in the
image that the men by whom they are loved have of them.
401
Love and possession. - Women mostly love a man of consequence as
though they want to have him for themselves alone. They would gladly keep
him under lock and key if their vanity did not dissuade them: for this desires
him to appear of consequence before others as well.
402
Test of a good marriage. - A marriage proves itself a good marriage by
being able to endure an occasional 'exception'.
403
Means of getting anyone to do anything. - Anyone can be so fatigued
and weakened by agitation, fears, overloading with work and thinking that he
will no longer resist anything that appears complicated but yield to it - a fact
known to diplomats and to women.
404
Respectability and honesty. - Every girl who thinks to employ her
youthful charms alone to provide for her entire life, and whose cunning is in
addition prompted by a wise mother, has precisely the same objective as a
courtesan, only she pursues it more shrewdly and less honestly.
405
Masks. - There are women who, however you may search them, prove to
have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such
almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with,
yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most
strongly: he seeks for her soul - and goes on seeking.
406
Marriage as a long conversation. - When entering into a marriage one
ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this
woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but
most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.
WOMAN AND CHI LD
407
Girlish dreams. - Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the idea
that it stands within their power to make a man happy; later on they learn that
to assume that all that is required to make a man happy is a girl is really to
despise him. - The vanity of women demands that a man should be more than
a happy husband.
408
Faust and Gretchen dying out. - As a very discerning scholar has
remarked, the educated men of present-day Germany resemble a cross
between Mephistopheles and Wagner, but certainly do not resemble Fausts,
whom their grandfathers (in their youth at least) felt rumbling within them.*
For two reasons, therefore - to continue this proposition - Gret- chens are no
longer suited to them. And because they are no longer desired they are, it
seems, dying out.
409
Girls as grammar-school pupils. - For heaven's sake don't let us transmit
our grammar-school education to girls! An education that so often takes
spirited, knowledge-thirsty, passionate young people and makes of them -
images of their teachers!
410
Without competitors. - Women can easily tell whether or not a man's
soul has already been taken possession of; they want to be loved without
competitors and resent the objects of his ambition, his political activities, his
arts and sciences, if he has a passion for such things. Except, that is, if he
shines on account of them - in that case they hope that a love-union with him
will increase the amount they shine; if this is how things are, they encourage
their lover.
411
The female intellect. - The intellect of women reveals itself as complete
control and presence of mind and the utilization of every advantage. She
bestows it on her children as her fundamental quality, and the father adds the
darker background of the will. His influence determines as it were the rhythm
and harmony with which the new life is to be played; but its melody comes
from the woman. - Expressed for those who know how to interpret: women
possess reason, men temperament and passion. This is not contradicted by
the fact that men in fact make so much better use of their reason: they
possess deeper, more powerful drives; it is these that carry their reason,
which is in itself something passive, so far. Women often secretly wonder at
the great respect men pay to the female temperament. If, in the choice of their
marriage partner, men seek above all a deep nature full of feeling, while
women seek a shrewd, lively minded and brilliant nature, it is clear that at
bottom the man is seeking an idealized man, the woman an idealized woman
- what they are seeking, * Faust, Gretchen, Mephistopheles, Wagner: characters in Goethe's
Faust
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
that is to say, is not a complement but a perfecting of their own best
qualities.
412
A judgement of Hesiods confirmed.10 - It is a sign of the shrewdness of
women that almost everywhere they have known how to get themselves fed,
like drones in the beehive. One should consider, however, what that fact
means originally, and why men do not have themselves fed by women. It is
certainly because male vanity and respect are greater than female
shrewdness; for women have known how through subordination to secure for
themselves the preponderant advantage, even indeed the dominion. Even the
tending of children could originally have been employed by the shrewdness
of women as a pretext for avoiding work as much as possible. And even now
when they are genuinely occupied, for example as housekeepers, they know
how to make such a mind- confusing to-do about it that men usually
overestimate the value of their activity tenfold.
413
The shortsighted are in love. - Sometimes it requires only a stronger pair
of spectacles to cure the lover, and he who had the imagination to picture a
face, a figure twenty years older would perhaps pass through life very
undisturbed.
414
Women in hate. - In a state of hatred women are more dangerous than
men; first and foremost because, once their hostility has been aroused, they
are hampered by no considerations of fairness but allow their hatred to grow
undisturbed to its ultimate consequences; then because they are practised in
discovering the wounded places everyone, every party possesses and striking
at them: to which end their dagger-pointed intellect renders them excellent
service (whereas at the sight of wounds men become restrained and often
inclined to reconciliation and generosity).
415
Love. - The idolization of love practised by women is fundamentally and
originally an invention of their shrewdness, inasmuch as it enhances their
power and makes them seem ever more desirable in the eyes of men. But
through centuries-long habituation to this exaggerated evaluation of love it
has come to pass that they have become entangled in their own net and
forgotten how it originated. They themselves are now more deceived than
men are and consequently suffer more from the disillusionment that is almost
certain to come into the life of every woman - insofar as she has sufficient
intelligence and imagination to be deceived and disillusioned at all.
416
On the emancipation of women. - Are women able to be just at all, since they

10 Hesiod: Greek epic poet of the eighth century BC
WOMAN AND CHI LD
are so accustomed to loving, to at once taking sides for or against? That
too is why they are less interested in causes, more interested in persons: if
they are interested in a cause, however, they at once become its vehement
advocates and thereby spoil the purity of its influence. There is thus no little
danger in entrusting politics or certain kinds of science (for example history)
to them. For what could be rarer than a woman who really knew what science
is? The best of them even harbour in their bosom a secret contempt for it, as
though they were in some way superior to it. Perhaps all this may change, but
for the present that is how things are.
417
Inspiration in female judgement. - Those sudden decisions for or against
that women are accustomed to take, the lightning-quick illumination of
personal relationships through the inclinations and aversions that break forth
from them, in short the demonstrations of female injustice, have been
invested with a lustre by enamoured men, as though all women had
inspirations of wisdom even without the Delphic cauldron and the band of
laurel: and their declarations are interpreted and explained for long afterwards
as though they were sibylline oracles. If you reflect, however, that there is
something to be said for every person and every cause but also something to
be said against them, that all things have not only two sides but three or four,
it becomes almost impossible for such sudden decisions to be completely
erroneous; one could even go so far as to say that the nature of things is so
constructed that women are always in the right.
418
Letting oneself be loved. - Because one party in a loving couple is
usually the one who loves and the other the one who is loved, the belief has
arisen that in every love affair there exists a fixed quantity of love: the more
one party seizes for himself the less is left for the other. In exceptional cases
it happens that the vanity of each of the parties persuades him that he is the
one who must be loved; so that both want to let themselves be loved: a state
of things which, especially in marriage, produces many a halfcomic, half-
absurd situation.
419
Contradictions in female heads. - Because women are so much more
personal than objective, tendencies that logically contradict one another are
capable of getting on together within their circle of ideas: for they are
accustomed to become enthusiastic for the representatives of these tendencies
one after the other and to adopt their systems wholesale; but they do so in
such a way that there is always an unemployed spot where a new personality
later gains ascendancy. It does perhaps happen that all the philosophy in the
head of an elderly woman consists of nothing but such unemployed spots.
420
Who suffers more? - After a quarrel between a man and a woman, one
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
suffers most at the idea of having hurt the other, while the other suffers
most at the idea of not having hurt the other enough, from which follow the
tears, sobs and distracted mien through which the heart of the other is to be
made heavy even after the quarrel is over.
421
Opportunity for female generosity. - If one sets aside the demands of
custom for a moment, one might very well consider whether nature and
reason do not dictate that a man ought to have two marriages, perhaps in the
following form. At first, at the age of twenty-two, he would marry a girl older
than him who is intellectually and morally his superior and who can lead him
through the perils of the twenties (ambition, hatred, selfcontempt, passions of
all kinds). Later, her love would pass over wholly into the motherly, and she
would not merely endure it but actively encourage it if, in his thirties, the man
should enter into an alliance with a young girl whose education he would
himself take in hand. - For the twenties marriage is a necessary institution, for
the thirties a useful but not a necessary one: in later life it is often harmful and
promotes the spiritual retrogression of the man.
422
Tragedy of childhood. - It is perhaps no rare occurrence that noble-
minded and aspiring people have to undergo their severest trials in their
childhood: perhaps through having to assert themselves against a low-
minded father absorbed in appearance and deception, or, like Lord Byron, to
live in continual conflict with a childish and irritable mother. If one has
experienced such a thing one will, one's whole life long, never get over the
knowledge of who one's greatest and most dangerous foe has actually been.
423
Parental folly. - When it comes to assessing the quality of a person, the
greatest errors are made by his parents: this is a fact, but how shall one
explain it? Do the parents have too much experience of the child and are they
no longer capable of bringing all these experiences together into a unity? It
has been remarked that travellers among strange peoples correctly grasp the
general distinguishing features of a people only during the earliest period of
their sojourn with them; the better they get to know them, the less capable
they are of seeing what is typical and distinguishing in them. As soon as they
become near-sighted, their eyes cease to be far-sighted. Do the parents judge
the child mistakenly because they have never stood far enough away from
him? - A quite different explanation would be the following: men are
accustomed to cease to reflect on those things which surround them most
closely and simply to accept them. Perhaps the habitual thoughtlessness of
parents is the reason why, when they are for once compelled to judge their
children, they judge them so badly.
156
WOMAN AND CHI LD
424
From the future of marriage. - Those noble, free-thinking women who
set themselves the task of the education and elevation of the female sex ought
not to overlook one consideration: the higher conception of marriage as the
soul-friendship of two people of differing sex - a conception it is hoped the
future will realize - contracted for the purpose of begetting and educating a
new generation: such a marriage, which employs the sensual as it were only
as a rare, occasional means to a greater end, will, it is to be anticipated,
probably require a natural assistant, namely concubinage. For if, for reasons
of the health of the husband, the wife alone is to serve to satisfy his sexual
needs, then in the choice of a wife the decisive consideration will be one
hostile to the objectives of the marriage just indicated: the nature of its
offspring will be left to chance and the likelihood of their being properly
educated remote. A good wife who is supposed to be a friend, assistant,
mother, family head and housekeeper, and may indeed have to run her own
business or job quite apart from that of her husband - such a wife cannot at
the same time be a concubine: it would be too much to demand of her. Thus
in the future a state of affairs might arise which would be the opposite of that
which obtained in Pericles' Athens: the men, to whom in those days wives
were little more than concubines, turned in addition to the Aspasias,* because
they desired that head- and heart-satisfying companionship such as only the
charm and intellectual flexibility of women can create. All human institutions
such as marriage permit only a moderate degree of practical idealization,
failing which crude remedies have at once to be effected.
425
Storm-and-stress period of women. - In the three or four civilized
countries of Europe women can through a few centuries of education be made
into anything, even into men: not in the sexual sense, to be sure, but in every
other sense. Under such a regimen they will one day have acquired all the
male strengths and virtues, though they will also of course have had to accept
all their weaknesses and vices into the bargain: thus much can, as aforesaid,
be extorted. But how shall we endure the intermediate stage, which may itself
last a couple of centuries, during which the primeval properties of women,
their follies and injustices, are still asserting themselves over what has been
newly learned and acquired? This will be the age in which the actual
masculine affect will be anger: anger at the fact that all the arts and sciences
have been choked and deluged by an unheard-of dilettantism, philosophy
talked to death by mind- bewildering babble, politics more fantastic and
partisan than ever, society in full dissolution, because the custodians of
ancient morality and custom have become ludicrous to themselves and are
striving to stand outside morality and custom in every respect. For if women
possessed their greatest power in morality and custom, for what will they
have to grasp to regain a comparable abundance of power once they have
abandoned morality and custom?
* Aspasia: an Athenian courtesan, the mistress of Pericles
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
426
Marriage and the free spirit. - Will free spirits live with women? In
general I believe that, like the prophetic birds of antiquity, as present-day
representatives of true thinking and truth-telling they must prefer to fly alone.
427
A happy marriage. - Everything habitual draws around us an ever firmer
net of spider-webs; and soon we notice that the threads have become cords
and that we ourself are sitting in the middle as the spider who has caught
himself and has to live on his own blood. That is why the free spirit hates all
habituation and rules, everything enduring and definitive, that is why he
sorrowfully again and again rends apart the net that surrounds him; even
though he will as a consequence suffer numerous great and small wounds -
for he has to rend those threads from himself, from his own body and soul. He
has to learn to love where he formerly hated, and the reverse. Nothing,
indeed, may be impossible to him, he must sow dragon's teeth in the same
field upon which he formerly poured out the cornucopias of his benevolence.
- From all this it may be inferred whether he is created for a happy marriage.
428
Too close. - If we live together with another person too closely, what
happens is similar to when we repeatedly handle a good engraving with our
bare hands; one day all we have left is a piece of dirty paper. The soul of a
human being too can finally become tattered by being handled continually;
and that is how it finally appears to us - we never see the beauty of its
original design again. - One always loses by too familiar association with
friends and women; and sometimes what one loses is the pearl of one's life.
429
The golden cradle. - The free spirit will always breathe a sigh of relief
when he has finally resolved to shake off that motherly watching and warding
with which women govern him. For what harm is there in the raw air that has
so anxiously been kept from him, what does one real disadvantage, loss,
mischance, sickness, debt, befooling more or less in life mean, compared with
the unfreedom of the golden cradle, peacock-tail fan and the oppressive
feeling that he must in addition be grateful because he is waited on and
spoiled like an infant? That is why the milk offered him by the women who
surround him can so easily turn to gall.
430
Voluntary sacrifice. - Women of consequence alleviate the life of their
men, when they happen to be great and famous, by nothing so much as by
becoming as it were the receptacle of the general disfavour and occasional ill-
humour of the rest of mankind. Contemporaries tend to forgive their great
men many blunders and follies, indeed many crude acts of injustice, if only
they can find someone whom, to relieve their feelings.
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WOMAN AND CHI LD
they may mishandle and slaughter as a sacrificial beast. It is no rare thing
for a woman to discover in herself the ambition to offer herself to this
sacrifice, and then the man can feel very contented - assuming, that is, that he
is enough of an egoist to endure the proximity of such a voluntary lightning-,
storm- and rain-conductor.
43
1

Pleasing adversary. - The natural tendency of women towards a quiet,
calm, happily harmonious existence, the way they pour soothing oil on the
sea of life, unwittingly works against the heroic impulse in the heart of the
free spirit. Without realizing it, women behave as one would do who removed
the stones from the path of a wandering mineralogist so that his foot should
not strike against them - whereas he has gone forth so that his foot shall strike
against them.
432
Disharmony of concords. - Women want to serve and in that they
discover their happiness: and the free spirit wants not to be served and in that
he discovers his happiness.
433
Xantippe. - Socrates found the kind of wife he needed - but even he
would not have sought her if he had known her well enough: the heroism of
even this free spirit would not have extended to that. For Xantippe in fact
propelled him deeper and deeper into his own proper profession, inasmuch as
she made his house and home uncomfortable and unhomely to him: she
taught him to live in the street and everywhere where one could chatter and
be idle, and thus fashioned him into the greatest Athenian street-dialectician:
so that in the end he had to compare himself to an importunate gadfly which a
god had placed on the neck of the beautiful steed Athens that it might never
be allowed any rest.
434
Near-sighted. - Just as mothers can really see and feel only the visible
and palpable troubles of their children, so the wives of aspiring men cannot
bring themselves to see their husbands suffering, in want or despised - while
all this is perhaps not merely a sign they have chosen their life's course truly
but actually a guarantee that their great goals must at some time or other be
attained. Wives always secretly intrigue against the higher being of their
husbands; they desire to deprive them of their future for the sake of a quiet,
comfortable present.
435
Power and freedom. - However much women may honour their
husbands, they nonetheless honour the recognized authorities and conceptions
of society even more: for millennia they have been accustomed to stand
before everything dominant with head bowed and arms folded across the
chest, and they disapprove of all rebellion against the established power. For
this reason they attach themselves - without even intending to do so
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
but rather as though by instinct - to the wheels of a free-spirited,
independent endeavour as a brake on them, and sometimes try the patience of
their husbands beyond all measure, especially when the latter persuade
themselves that what at bottom drives women to this behaviour is love. To
disapprove of the methods of women and magnanimously to honour the
motivation behind these methods - that is the way of men and often enough
their despair.
436
Ceterum censeo* - It is laughable when a society of the penniless decrees
the abolition of the right of inheritance, and it is no less laughable when the
childless participate in a country's practical lawgiving: - for they have
insufficient ballast in their ship to be able safely to set sail into the ocean of
the future. But it appears equally absurd when he who has chosen for his task
the most universal knowledge and the evaluation of the totality of existence
burdens himself with personal considerations of family, nutrition, security,
care of wife and child, and extends before his telescope that dark veil through
which scarcely a ray from the distant firmament is able to penetrate. Thus I
too arrive at the proposition that in affairs of the highest philosophical kind all
married men are suspect.
437
Finally. - There are many kinds of hemlock, and fate usually finds an
opportunity of setting a cup of this poison draught to the lips of the free spirit
- so as to 'punish' him, as all the world then says. What will the women
around him then do? They will lament and cry out and perhaps disturb the
repose of the thinker's sunset hours: as they did in the prison at Athens. 'O
Criton, do tell someone to take those women away!', Socrates finally said.
* Ceterum censeo: It is my opinion, moreover
160
8
A GLANCE AT THE STATE
438
Permission to speak! - The demagogic character and the intention to
appeal to the masses is at present common to all political parties: on account
of this intention they are all compelled to transform their principles into great
al fresco stupidities and thus to paint them on the wall. This is no longer
alterable, indeed it would be pointless to raise so much as a finger against it;
for in this domain there apply the words of Voltaire: quand la populace se
mele de raisonner, tout est perdu.* Since this has happened one has to
accommodate oneself to the new conditions as one accommodates oneself
when an earthquake has displaced the former boundaries and contours of the
ground and altered the value of one's property. Moreover, if the purpose of all
politics really is to make life endurable for as many as possible, then these as-
many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an
endurable life; if they trust to their intellect also to discover the right means of
attaining this goal, what good is there in doubting it? They want for once to
forge for themselves their own fortunes and misfortunes; and if this feeling of
self-determination, pride in the five or six ideas their head contains and brings
forth, in fact renders their life so pleasant to them they are happy to bear the
calamitous consequences of their narrow-mindedness, there is little to be
objected to, always presupposing that this narrow-mindedness does not go so
far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that
everyone should live and work according to such a standard. For a few must
first of all be allowed, now more than ever, to refrain from politics and to step
a little aside: they too are prompted to this by pleasure in self- determination;
and there may also be a degree of pride attached to staying silent when too
many, or even just many, are speaking. Then these few must be forgiven if
they fail to take the happiness of the many, whether by the many one
understands nations or social classes, so very seriously and are now and then
guilty of an ironic posture; for their seriousness is located elsewhere, their
happiness is something quite different, their goal is not to be encompassed by
any clumsy hand that has only five fingers. Finally, from time to time there
comes to them - what it will certainly be hardest to concede to them but must
be conceded to them nonetheless - a moment when they emerge from their
silent solitude and again try the power of their lungs: for then they call to one
another like those gone astray in a wood in order to locate and encourage one
another; whereby much becomes audible, to be sure, that sounds ill * quand ...
perdu: when the mob joins in and adds its voice, all is lost.
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
to ears for which it is not intended. - Soon afterwards, though, it is again
still in the wood, so still that the buzzing, humming and fluttering of the
countless insects that live in, above and beneath it can again clearly be heard.
439
Culture and caste. - A higher culture can come into existence only where
there are two different castes in society: that of the workers and that of the
idle, of those capable of true leisure; or, expressed more vigorously: the caste
compelled to work and the caste that works if it wants to. Differences in good
fortune and happiness are not the essential element when it comes to the
production of a higher culture; in any event, however, the caste of the idle is
the more capable of suffering and suffers more, its enjoyment of existence is
less, its task heavier. If an exchange between these two castes should take
place, moreover, so that more obtuse, less spiritual families and individuals
are demoted from the higher to the lower caste and the more liberated in the
latter obtain entry into the higher, then a state is attained beyond which there
can be seen only the open sea of indeterminate desires. - Thus speaks to us
the fading voice of ages past; but where are there still ears to hear it?
440
Of the nobility. - That in which men and women of the nobility excel
others and which gives them an undoubted right to be rated higher consists in
two arts ever more enhanced through inheritance: the art of commanding and
the art of proud obedience. - Now wherever commanding is part of the
business of the day (as in the great mercantile and industrial world) there
arises something similar to those families 'of the nobility', but they lack
nobility in obedience, which is in the former an inheritance from the feudal
ages and will no longer grow in our present cultural climate.
441
Subordination. - Subordination, which is so highly rated in the military
and bureaucratic state, will soon become as unbelievable to us as the closed
tactics of the Jesuits already are; and when this subordination is no longer
possible a host of the most astonishing operations will no longer be capable of
achievement and the world will be the poorer. It is bound to disappear
because its foundation is disappearing: belief in unconditional authority, in
definitive truth; even in military states it cannot be generated even by
physical compulsion, for its origin is the inherited adoration of the princely as
of something suprahuman. - In freer circumstances people subordinate
themselves only under conditions, as the result of a mutual compact, thus
without prejudice to their own interests.
442
Conscript armies. - The greatest disadvantage of the conscript armies so
much extolled nowadays is the squandering of men of the highest civilization
they involve; it is only by the grace of circumstances that they exist
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A GLANCE AT THE STATE
at all - how thrifty and cautious we ought therefore to be with them,
since it requires a great space of time to create the chance conditions for the
production of such delicately organized brains! But as the Greeks once waded
in Greek blood, so Europeans now do in European blood: and it is always the
most highly cultivated, those who guarantee a good and abundant posterity,
who are sacrificed in relatively the largest numbers: for they stand in the van
of the battle as the commanders and on account of their superior ambition
expose themselves most to danger. - Now, when quite different and higher
missions than patria and honor demand to be done, crude Roman patriotism
is either something dishonest or a sign of retardedness.
443
Hope and presumption. - Our social order will slowly melt away, as all
previous orders have done, as soon as the suns of novel opinions shine out
over mankind with a new heat. One can desire this melting away only if one
harbours hope: and one may reasonably harbour hope only if one credits
oneself and one's kind with more power in head and heart than is possessed
by the representatives of what at present exists. Usually, therefore, this hope
will be a piece of presumption and an overvaluation.
444
War. - Against war it can be said: it makes the victor stupid, the defeated
malicious. In favour of war: through producing these two effects it barbarizes
and therefore makes more natural; it is the winter or hibernation time of
culture, mankind emerges from it stronger for good and evil.
445
In the service of the prince. - To be able to act with complete
ruthlessness, a statesman will do best to perform his work not on his own
behalf but on behalf of a prince. The glitter of this general disinterestedness
will dazzle the eye of the beholder, so that he will fail to see the knavery and
harshness involved in the work of the statesman.
446
A question of power, not of justice. - To men who with regard to every
cause keep in view its higher utility, socialism, assuming it is really the
rebellion of those who have been oppressed and held down for millennia
against their oppressors, represents not a problem of justice (with its
ludicrous, feeble question: 'how far ought one to give in to its demands?') but
only a problem of power ('how far can one exploit its demands?'); the
situation is the same as in the case of a force of nature, for example steam,
which is either pressed into service by man as god of the machine or, if the
machine is faulty, if that is to say human calculation in its construction is
faulty, blows the machine and man with it to pieces. To solve this question of
power one has to know how strong socialism is, with what modification it can
still be employed as a mighty lever within the existing play of political forces;
under certain circumstances one would even have to do all one could to
strengthen it. Whenever a great force exists - even
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
though it be the most dangerous - mankind has to consider how to make
of it an instrument for the attainment of its objectives. - Socialism will
acquire rights only if war appears to be imminent between the two powers,
the representatives of the old and the new, but prudent calculation of possible
advantage and preservation gives rise to the desire on the part of both parties
for a compact. Without a compact no rights. Up to now, however, there has in
the said domain been neither war nor compacts, and thus no rights, no 'ought',
either.
447
Making use of petty dishonesty. - The power of the press resides in the
fact that the individual who works for it feels very little sense of duty or
obligation. Usually he expresses his opinion, but sometimes, in the service of
his party or the policy of his country or in the service of himself, he does not
express it. Such little lapses into dishonesty, or perhaps merely a dishonest
reticence, are not hard for the individual to bear, but their consequences are
extraordinary because these little lapses on the part of many are perpetrated
simultaneously. Each of them says to himself: 'In exchange for such slight
services I shall have a better time of it; if I refuse such little acts of discretion
I shall make myself impossible'. Because it seems almost a matter of
indifference morally whether one writes one more line or fails to write it,
perhaps moreover without one's name being attached to it, anyone possessing
money and influence can transform any opinion into public opinion. He who
knows that most people are weak in small matters and desires to attain to his
goal by means of them is thus always a dangerous man.
448
Complaining too loudly. - When abuses (for example defects in an
administration, corruption and arbitrary favouritism in political or learned
bodies) are painted in greatly exaggerated colours, the representation may fail
in its effect among the knowledgeable but will produce all the stronger an
effect upon the unknowledgeable (who would have remained indifferent to a
cautious, sober representation). Since these are markedly in the majority,
however, and harbour within them stronger willpower and a more impetuous
desire for action, that exaggeration will lead to investigations, punishments,
undertakings, reorganizations. - To this extent it is useful to paint abuses in
exaggerated colours.
449
The apparent weather-makers of politics. - Just as the people secretly
assume that he who understands the weather and can forecast it a day ahead
actually makes the weather, so, with a display of superstitious faith, even the
learned and cultivated attribute to great statesmen all the important changes
and turns of events that take place during their term of office as being their
own work, provided it is apparent that they knew something about them
before others did and calculated accordingly: thus they too
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A GLANCE AT THE STATE
are taken for weather-makers - and this faith is not the least effective
instrument of their power.
450
New and old conception of government. - To distinguish between
government and people as though there were here two distinct spheres of
power, a stronger and higher and a weaker and lower, which treated and came
to an understanding with one another, is a piece of inherited political
sensibility which even now corresponds exactly to the historical settlement of
the power situation in most states. When, for example, Bismarck describes the
constitutional form as a compromise between government and people, he
speaks in accordance with a principle whose rationality lies in history (and for
just that reason, to be sure, also an admixture of irrationality, without which
nothing human can exist). On the other hand, one is now supposed to learn -
in accordance with a principle that has emerged purely from the head and is
supposed to make history - that government is nothing but an organ of the
people and not a provident, venerable 'above' in relation to a diffident 'below'.
Before one accepts this hitherto unhistorical and arbitrary, if nonetheless
more logical assertion of the concept government, one might be advised to
consider the consequences: for the relationship between people and
government is the most pervasive ideal relationship upon which commerce
between teacher and pupil, lord and servants, father and family, general and
soldier, master and apprentice have unconsciously been modelled. All these
relationships are now, under the influence of the dominant constitutional form
of government, altering their shape a little: they are becoming compromises.
But how greatly they will change and be displaced, exchange their name and
nature, when that latest concept has conquered minds everywhere! - for
which, however, it may well take another century. In this matter nothing is
more desirable than caution and slow evolution.
451
Justice as party call-notes. - Noble (if not particularly judicious)
representatives of the ruling class can by all means vow. let us treat men as
equals, concede to them equal rights. To this extent a socialist mode of
thought resting on justice is possible; but, as aforesaid, only within the ruling
class, which in this case practises justice with sacrifices and self-denials. To
demand equality of rights, on the other hand, as the socialists of the subject
caste do, is never an emanation of justice but of greed. - If one holds up
bleeding chunks of meat to an animal and takes them away again until it
finally roars: do you think this roaring has anything to do with justice?
452
Property and justice. - When the socialists show that the division of
property among present-day mankind is the outcome of countless acts of
injustice and violence, and in summa repudiate any obligation towards
something having so unjust a foundation, they are seeing only one aspect of
the matter. The entire past of the old culture was erected upon force.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
slavery, deception, error; but we, the heirs and inheritors of all these past
things, cannot decree our own abolition and may not wish away a single part
of them. The disposition to injustice inhabits the souls of the non- possessers
too, they are no better than the possessers and have no moral prerogative over
them, for their own ancestors were at some time or other possessers. What is
needed is not a forcible redistribution but a gradual transformation of mind:
the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone, the instinct for violence
weaker.
453
The steersman of the passions. - The statesman excites public passions so
as to profit from the counter-passions thereby aroused. To take an example:
any German statesman knows well that the Catholic Church will never form
an alliance with Russia, but would indeed rather form one even with the
Turks; he likewise knows that an alliance between France and Russia would
spell nothing but danger for Germany. If, therefore, he is able to make of
France the hearth and home of the Catholic Church he will have abolished
this danger for a long time to come. Consequently he has an interest in
exhibiting hatred towards the Catholics and, through hostile acts of all kinds,
transforming those who acknowledge the authority of the Pope into a
passionate political power which, hostile to German policy, will naturally ally
itself with France as the opponent of Germany: his goal is just as necessarily
the Catholicization of France as Mirabeau's* was its decatholicization. - One
state thus desires the darkening of millions of minds of another state so as to
derive advantage from this darkening. It is the same disposition as that which
favours the republican form of government of the neighbouring state - le
desordre organise, as Merimee calls it - for the sole reason that it assumes
this form of government will make the people feebler, more divided and less
capable of war.
454
Those who are dangerous among the revolutionary spirits. - Those who
are deliberating the revolutionary overthrow of society should be divided into
those who want to achieve something for themselves and those who want to
achieve something for their children and grandchildren. The latter are the
more dangerous; for they believe they are disinterested and possess the good
conscience that goes with that belief. The others can be bought off: the ruling
orders are still rich and prudent enough for that. The danger begins as soon as
the goals become impersonal; the revolutionary from impersonal interests can
regard the defenders of the existing system as personally interested and thus
feel superior to them.
455
Political value of fatherhood. - If a man has no sons he lacks full right to
a voice in discussion of public affairs. One has to have staked, with the
others, that which one loves best: that alone ties one firmly to the state; to
* Honor* Gabriel de Riqueti, Conte de Mirabeau (1749-91): French statesman
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A GLANCE AT THE STATE
possess a just and natural interest in the fate of institutions one has to
have in view the happiness of one's posterity, and thus of course to possess
posterity. The evolution of a higher morality in a person depends upon his
having sons; the fact makes him unegoistic, or, more correctly, it broadens his
egoism in respect of duration and enables him seriously to pursue objectives
that transcend his individual lifespan.
456
Pride of ancestry. - One has a right to be proud of a line of good
ancestors up to ones father - but not of a line as such, for everyone has this.
Origin in good ancestors constitutes nobility of birth; a single break in that
chain, that is to say one bad forefather, annuls nobility of birth. One ought to
ask of anyone who boasts of his noblity: have you no violent, covetous,
dissolute, wicked, cruel men among your forefathers? If he is able to answer
No to that question knowledgeably and with a clear conscience one should
sue for his friendship.
457
Slaves and workers. - That we place more value on satisfaction of vanity
than on any other form of well-being (security, accommodation, pleasure of
all kinds) is demonstrated to a ludicrous degree in the fact that, quite apart
from any political reasons, everyone desires the abolition of slavery and
abominates the idea of reducing people to this condition: whereas everyone
must at the same time realize that slaves live in every respect more happily
and in greater security than the modern worker, and that the work done by
slaves is very little work compared with that done by the 'worker'. One
protests in the name of 'human dignity': but that, expressed more simply, is
that precious vanity which feels being unequal, being publicly rated lower, as
the hardest lot. - The Cynic thinks differently, because he despises honour: -
and thus Diogenes was for a time a slave and private tutor.
458
Leading spirits and their instruments. - We see great statesmen, and in
general all those who need to employ many people in the execution of their
designs, acting in one of two ways: either they select those who are suited to
their designs with great care and subtlety and then leave them relatively great
freedom of movement because they know that the nature of these select
people will take them where they themselves want them to be; or they select
at random, taking indeed what happens to lie at hand, but shape out of this
clay something that will serve their purpose. This latter kind is the more
violent and desires more easily subjugated instruments; his knowledge of
people is much less, his contempt for them greater than in the case of the
first-named spirits, but the machine he constructs commonly works better
than does the machine from the former's workshop.
459
Arbitrary law necessary. - Jurists dispute as to whether the law that
167
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
triumphs in a nation ought to be that which has been most thoroughly
thought out or that which is easiest to understand. The former, the supreme
model of which is the Roman, seems to the layman incomprehensible and
consequently not an expression of his sense of law. Popular codes of law, for
example the Germanic, have been crude, superstitious, illogical and in part
stupid, but they corresponded to quite definite, inherited and indigenous
custom and feelings. - Where, however, law is no longer tradition, as is the
case with us, it can only be commanded, imposed by constraint; none of us
any longer possesses a traditional sense of law, so we have to put up with
arbitrary law, which is the expression of the necessity of the fact that there
has to be law. The most logical is in this event the most acceptable, because it
is the most impartial: even admitting that in every case the smallest unit of
measurement in the relationship between crime and punishment is fixed
arbitrarily.
460
The great man of the masses. - The recipe for that which the masses call
a great man is easy to give. Under all circumstances one must procure for
them something they find very pleasant, or first put it into their heads that this
or that would be very pleasant and then give it to them. But at no price do it
immediately; one has to gain it by the greatest exertion and struggle, or seem
to do so. The masses must receive the impression that a mighty, indeed
invincible force of will is present; at the least it must seem to be present.
Everyone admires strength of will because no one has it and everyone tells
himself that if he did have it he and his egoism would no longer know any
limitations. If it now appears that such a strong will, instead of listening to the
dictates of its own desires, performs something the masses find very pleasant,
everyone marvels on two accounts and congratulates himself. For the rest, the
great man possesses all the quali- ties.of the masses: thus are they all the less
embarrassed in his presence, thus is he all the more popular. He is violent,
envious, exploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to
circumstances.
461
Prince and god. - Men traffic with their princes in much the same way as
they do with their god, as indeed the prince has been to a great degree the
representative of the god, or at least his high priest. This almost uncanny
mood of reverence and fear and shame has grown and is growing much
feebler, but occasionally it flares up and attaches itself to powerful persons in
general. The cult of the genius is an echo of this reverence for gods and
princes. Wherever there is a striving to exalt individual men into the
suprahuman, there also appears the tendency to imagine whole classes of the
people as being coarser and lower than they really are.
462
My utopia. - In a better ordering of society the heavy work and
exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a
consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by
step up to him
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A GLANCE AT THE STATE
who is most sensitive to the most highly sublimated species of suffering
and who therefore suffers even when life is alleviated to the greatest degree
possible.
463
A delusion in the theory of revolution. - There are political and social
fantasists who with fiery eloquence invite a revolutionary overturning of all
social orders in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity will then
at once rise up as though of its own accord. In these perilous dreams there is
still an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous
primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the
blame for this burying to the institutions of culture in the form of society,
state and education. The experiences of history have taught us, unfortunately,
that every such revolution brings about the resurrection of the most savage
energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the
most distant ages: that a revolution can thus be a source of energy in a
mankind grown feeble but never a regulator, architect, artist, perfector of
human nature. - It is not Voltaire's moderate nature, inclined as it was to
ordering, purifying and reconstructing, but Rousseau's passionate follies and
half-lies that called forth the optimistic spirit of the Revolution against which
I cry: 'Ecrasez Iinfame!' It is this spirit that has for a long time banished the
spirit of the Enlightenment and of progressive evolution: let us see - each of
us within himself - whether it is possible to call it back!
464
Moderation. - When thought and inquiry have become decisive - when,
that is to say, free-spiritedness has become a quality of the character - action
tends to moderation: for thought and inquiry weaken covetousness, draw
much of the available energy to themselves for the promotion of spiritual
objectives, and reveal the merely half-usefulness or the total uselessness and
perilousness of all sudden changes.
465
Resurrection of the spirit. - A nation usually rejuvenates itself on the
political sickbed and rediscovers its spirit, which it gradually lost in its
seeking for and assertion of power. Culture owes this above all to the ages of
political weakness.
466
New opinions in an old house. - The overturning of opinions does not
immediately follow upon the overturning of institutions: the novel opinions
continue, rather, to live on for a long time in the deserted and by now
uncomfortable house of their predecessors, and even keep it in good
condition because they have nowhere else to live.
467
Schooling. - In great cities the schooling will always be at the best
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
mediocre, for the same reason that in great kitchens the cooking will be
at best mediocre.
468
Innocent corruption. - In all institutions that are not open to the biting air
of public criticism an innocent corruption flourishes like a fungus (as, for
example, in learned bodies and senates).
469
Scholars as politicians. - Scholars who become politicians are usually
allotted the comic role of being the good conscience of a party's policy.
470
The wolf behind the sheep. - Almost every politician has at some time or
other such need of an honest man that he breaks into a sheepstall like a
ravenous wolf: not, however, so as then to eat the ram he has stolen, but so as
to hide himself behind its woolly back.
471
Ages of happiness. - An age of happiness is quite impossible, because
men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who
experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude.
The destiny of man is designed for happy moments - every life has them - but
not for happy ages. Nonetheless they will remain fixed in the imagination of
man as 'the other side of the hill' because they have been inherited from ages
past: for the concept of the age of happiness was no doubt acquired in
primeval times from that condition in which, after violent exertion in hunting
and warfare, man gives himself up to repose, stretches his limbs and hears the
pinions of sleep rustling about him. It is a false conclusion if, in accordance
with that ancient familiar experience, man imagines that, after whole ages of
toil and deprivation, he can then partake of that condition of happiness
correspondingly enhanced and protracted.
472
Religion and government. - As long as the state, or, more clearly, the
government knows itself appointed as guardian for the benefit of the masses
not yet of age, and on their behalf considers the question whether religion is
to be preserved or abolished, it is very highly probable that it will always
decide for the preservation of religion. For religion quietens the heart of the
individual in times of loss, deprivation, fear, distrust, in those instances, that
is to say, in which the government feels unable to do anything towards
alleviating the psychical sufferings of the private person: even in the case of
universal, unavoidable and in the immediate prospect inevitable evils
(famines, financial crises, wars), indeed, religion guarantees a calm, patient,
trusting disposition among the masses. Wherever the chance or inevitable
shortcomings of the state government or the perilous consequences of
dynastic interests force themselves upon the attention of the knowledgeable
man and put him in a refractory mood, the unknowledgeable will think they
see the hand of God and
170
patiently submit to instructions from above (in which concept divine and
human government are usually fused): thus internal civil peace and
continuity of development is ensured. The power that lies in unity of popular
sentiment, in the fact that everyone holds the same opinions and has the same
objectives, is sealed and protected by religion, apart from in those rare cases
in which a priesthood cannot agree with the authorities as to the price of its
services and enters into conflict with them. As a rule the state will know how
to win the priests over to itself because it needs their concealed and intimate
education of souls and knows how to value servants who appear outwardly to
represent a quite different interest. Without the assistance of the priests even
now no power can become 'legitimate': as Napoleon grasped. - Thus absolute
tutelary government and the careful preservation of religion necessarily go
together. In this it has to be presupposed that the governing persons and
classes are enlightened as to the advantages accruing to them from religion
and thus feel to a certain extent superior to it, inasmuch as they employ it as
an instrument; which is why free-spiritedness has its origin here. - But what
if that quite different conception of government such as is taught in
democratic states begins to prevail? If it is regarded as nothing but the
instrument of the popular will, not as an Above in relation to a Below but
merely as a function of the sole sovereign power, the people? Here the
attitude towards religion adopted by the government can only be the same as
that adopted towards it by the people; every dissemination of enlightenment
must find its echo in their representatives, and an employment and
exploitation of the religious drives and consolations for political ends will no
longer be so easy (unless it happens that powerful party leaders for a time
exercise an influence similar to that of enlightened despotism). But if the
state is no longer free to profit from religion itself or the people come to hold
far too diverse opinions on religious matters for the government to be
permitted any single unified policy regarding religious measures - then the
way out will necessarily be to treat religion as a private affair and to hand it
over to the conscience and customs of every individual. The first
consequence of this will be an apparent strengthening of religious feeling,
inasmuch as suppressed and concealed manifestations of it to which the state
involuntarily or deliberately gave no breathing space now break forth and
proceed to excesses and extremes; later religion will be overrun with sects,
and it will become plain that at the moment religion was made a private affair
an abundance of dragon's teeth were sown. The sight of this conflict, the
malignant exposure of all the weaknesses of the religious confessions, will
finally admit of no other way out than that every better and better gifted man
will make irreligion his private affair: which disposition will then come to
dominate the minds of those in government and, almost against their will,
give to the measures they take a character hostile to religion. As soon as this
happens the mood of those still moved by religion, who formerly adored the
state as something half or wholly sacred, will be transformed into one
decidedly hostile to the state', they will lie in wait for the measures taken by
the government, seek to
171
obstruct, to cross, to disrupt as much as they can, and through the heat of
their opposition drive the counter-party into an almost fanatical enthusiasm
for the state; in which development they are secretly aided by the fact that,
since their sundering from religion, hearts in these circles have felt a sense of
emptiness which they are seeking provisionally to fill with a kind of
substitute in the form of devotion to the state. After these transitional
struggles, which may well last a long time, it will at length be decided
whether the religious parties are still strong enough to revive the past and
turn back the wheel: in which case the state will unavoidably fall into the
hands of enlightened despotism (perhaps less enlightened and more troubled
by fear than formerly) - or whether the anti-religious parties will prevail and,
perhaps through schooling and education, in the course of generations
undermine the propagation of their opponents and finally render it
impossible. Then, however, they too will experience a slackening of their
enthusiasm for the state: it will grow ever clearer that, together with that
religious adoration to which the state is a sacred mystery, a supraterrestrial
institution, the attitude of veneration and piety towards it has also been
undermined. Henceforth the individual will see only that side of it that
promises to be useful or threatens to be harmful to him, and will bend all his
efforts to acquiring influence upon it. But this competition will soon become
too great, men and parties alternate too quickly, hurl one another too fiercely
down from the hill after barely having attained the top. None of the measures
effected by a government will be guaranteed continuity; everyone will draw
back from undertakings that require quiet tending for decades or centuries if
their fruits are to mature. No one will feel towards a law any greater
obligation than that of bowing for the moment to the force which backs up
the law: one will then at once set to work to subvert it with a new force, the
creation of a new majority. Finally - one can say this with certainty - distrust
of all government, insight into the uselessness and destructiveness of these
short-winded struggles will impel men to a quite novel resolve: the resolve to
do away with the concept of the state, to the abolition of the distinction
between private and public. Private companies will step by step absorb the
business of the state: even the most resistant remainder of what was formerly
the work of government (for example its activities designed to protect the
private person from the private person) will in the long run be taken care of
by private contractors. Disregard for and the decline and death of the state,
the liberation of the private person (I take care not to say: of the individual),
is the consequence of the democratic conception of the state; it is in this that
its mission lies. When it has performed its task - which like everything
human bears much rationality and irrationality in its womb - when every
relapse into the old sickness has been overcome, a new page will be turned in
the storybook of humanity in which there will be many strange tales to read
and perhaps some of them good ones. - To repeat in brief what has just been
said: the interests of tutelary government and the interests of religion go hand
in hand together, so that when the latter begins to die out the foundations
172
of the state too are undermined. The belief in a divine order in the realm
of politics, in a sacred mystery in the existence of the state, is of religious
origin: if religion disappears the state will unavoidably lose its ancient Isis
veil and cease to excite reverence. Viewed from close to, the sovereignty of
the people serves then to banish the last remnant of magic and superstition
from this realm of feeling; modem democracy is the historical form of the
decay of the state.- The prospect presented by this certain decay is, however,
not in every respect an unhappy one: the pmdence and self- interest of men
are of all their qualities the best developed; if the state is no longer equal to
the demands of these forces then the last thing that will ensue is chaos: an
invention more suited to their purpose than the state was will gain victory
over the state. How many an organizing power has mankind not seen die out:
for example that of the racial clan, which was for millennia far mightier than
that of the family and indeed ruled and regulated long before the family
existed. We ourselves have seen the idea of familial rights and power which
once ruled as far as the Roman world extended grow ever paler and more
impotent. Thus a later generation will see the state too shrink to
insignificance in various parts of the earth - a notion many people of the
present can hardly contemplate without fear and revulsion. To work for the
dissemination and realization of this notion is another thing, to be sure: one
has to have a very presumptuous idea of one's own intelligence and scarcely
half an understanding of history to set one's hand to the plough already -
while no one can yet show what seedcom is afterwards to be scattered on the
riven soil. Let us therefore put our trust in 'the prudence and self-interest of
men' to preserve the existence of the state for some time yet and to repulse
the destructive experiments of the precipitate and the over-zealous!
473
Socialism with regard to its means. - Socialism is the fanciful younger
brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its
endeavours are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. For it desires an
abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it
outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the
annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury
of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community. On
account of its close relationship to them it always appears in the proximity of
all excessive deployments of power, as the typical old socialist Plato did at
the court of the Sicilian tyrant; it desires (and sometimes promotes) the
Caesarian despotic state of the present century because, as aforesaid, it would
like to be its heir. But even this inheritance would be inadequate to its
purposes: it requires a more complete subservience of the citizen to the
absolute state than has ever existed before; and since it can no longer even
count on the ancient religious piety towards the state but has, rather,
involuntarily to work ceaselessly for its abolition - because, that is, it works
for the abolition of all existing states - socialism itself can hope to exist only
for brief periods here and
173
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For
this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving
the word 'justice' into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as
to rob them of their reason (after this said reason has already greatly suffered
from exposure to their half-education) and to create in them a good
conscience for the evil game they are to play. - Socialism can serve to teach,
in a truly brutal and impressive fashion, what danger there lies in all
accumulations of state power, and to that extent to implant mistrust of the
state itself. When its harsh voice takes up the watchword 'as much state as
possible' it thereby at first sounds noisier than ever: but soon the opposite cry
comes through with all the greater force: 'as little state as possible'.
474
The evolution of the spirit feared by the state. - Like every organizing
political power, the Greek polis was mistrustful of the growth of culture and
sought almost exclusively to paralyse and inhibit it. It wanted to admit no
history, no development in this realm; the education sanctioned by state law
was intended to be imposed upon every generation and to rivet it to one stage
of development. The same thing was later desired by Plato too for his ideal
state. This culture evolved in spite of the polis: it assisted indirectly and
against its will, to be sure, because the individual's thirst for honour was
incited to the highest degree in the polis, so that, once entered upon the path
of spiritual cultivation, he continued along it as far as he could go. On the
other hand, one should not invoke the glorifi- catory speech of Pericles: for it
is no more than a grand, optimistic illusion as to the supposedly necessary
connection between the polis and Athenian culture; immediately before night
descends on Athens (the plague and the rupture of tradition), Thucydides
makes it rise resplendent once again, like a transfiguring evening glow in
whose light the evil day that preceded it could be forgotten.
475
European man and the abolition of nations. - Trade and industry, the
post and the book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid
changing of home and scene, the nomadic life now lived by all who do not
own land - these circumstances are necessarily bringing with them a
weakening and finally an abolition of nations, at least the European: so that
as a consequence of continual crossing a muted race, that of European man,
must come into being out of them. This goal is at present being worked
against, consciously or unconsciously, by the separation of nations through
the production of national hostilities, yet this mixing will nonetheless go
slowly forward in spite of that temporary counter- current: this artificial
nationalism is in any case as perilous as artificial Catholicism used to be, for
it is in its essence a forcibly imposed state of siege and self-defence inflicted
on the many by the few and requires cunning, force and falsehood to
maintain a front of respectability. It is not the interests of the many (the
peoples), as is no doubt claimed, but above all
174
the interests of certain princely dynasties and of certain classes of
business and society, that impel to this nationalism; once one has recognized
this fact, one should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply a good
European and actively to work for the amalgamation of nations: wherein the
Germans are, through their ancient and tested quality of being the interpreter
and mediator between peoples, able to be of assistance. - Incidentally: the
entire problem of the jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as it is
here that their energy and higher intelligence, their capital in will and spirit
accumulated from generation to generation in a long school of suffering,
must come to preponderate to a degree calculated to arouse envy and hatred,
so that in almost every nation - and the more so the more nationalist a posture
the nation is again adopting - there is gaining ground the literary indecency of
leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter as scapegoats for every possible
public or private misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a question of the
conserving of nations but of the production of the strongest possible
European mixed race, the Jew will be just as usable and desirable as an
ingredient of it as any other national residue. Every nation, every man,
possesses unpleasant, indeed dangerous qualities: it is cruel to demand that
the Jew should constitute an exception. In him these qualities may even be
dangerous and repellent to an exceptional degree; and perhaps the youthful
stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention of the entire human race.
Nonetheless I should like to know how much must, in a total accounting, be
forgiven a people who, not without us all being to blame, have had the most
griefladen history of any people and whom we have to thank for the noblest
human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the
most efficacious moral code in the world. Moreover: in the darkest periods of
the Middle Ages, when the cloudbanks of Asia had settled low over Europe,
it was the Jewish freethinkers, scholars and physicians who, under the
harshest personal constraint, held firmly to the banner of enlightenment and
intellectual independence and defended Europe against Asia; it is thanks not
least to their efforts that a more natural, rational and in any event unmythical
elucidation of the world could at last again obtain victory and the ring of
culture that now unites us with the enlightenment of Graeco-Roman antiquity
remain unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the
Occident, Judaism has always played an essential part in occidentalizing it
again: which in a certain sense means making of Europe's mission and history
a continuation of the Greek.
476
Apparent superiority of the Middle Ages. - The Middle Ages exhibit in
the church an institution possessing a universal goal embracing all mankind,
and one that is supposedly concerned with mankind's highest interests:
contrasted with this, the goals of the states and nations exhibited by modem
history produce an oppressive impression; they appear petty, mean,
materialistic and spatially limited. But these varying impressions
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
upon the imagination must certainly not be allowed to determine our
judgement; for that universal institution was designed to meet artificial needs
reposing on fictions which, where they did not yet exist, it was obliged to
invent (need of redemption); the modem institutions supply remedies for real
states of distress; and the time is coming when institutions will come into
being to serve the true needs of all men and to cast their fantastic archetype,
the Catholic Church, into shadow and oblivion.
4 77
War indispensable. - It is vain reverie and beautiful-soulism to expect
much more (let alone only then to expect much) of mankind when it has
unlearned how to wage war. For the present we know of no other means by
which that rude energy that characterizes the camp, that profound impersonal
hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that
common fire in the destruction of the enemy, that proud indifference to great
losses, to one's own existence and that of one's friends, that inarticulate,
earthquake-like shuddering of the soul, could be communicated more surely
or strongly than every great war communicates them: the streams and
currents that here break forth, though they carry with them rocks and rubbish
of every kind and ruin the pastures of tenderer cultures, will later under
favourable circumstances turn the wheels in the workshops of the spirit with
newfound energy. Culture can in no way do without passions, vices and acts
of wickedness. - When the Romans of the imperial era had grown a little tired
of war they tried to gain new energy through animal-baiting, gladiatorial
combats and the persecution of Christians. Present-day Englishmen, who
seem also on the whole to have renounced war, seize on a different means of
again engendering their fading energies: those perilous journeys of discovery,
navigations, mountain-climbings, undertaken for scientific ends as they
claim, in truth so as to bring home with them superfluous energy acquired
through adventures and perils of all kinds. One will be able to discover many
other such surrogates for war, but they will perhaps increasingly reveal that
so highly cultivated and for that reason necessarily feeble humanity as that of
the present-day European requires not merely war but the greatest and most
terrible wars - thus a temporary relapse into barbarism - if the means to
culture are not to deprive them of their culture and of their existence itself.
478
Industriousness in south and north. - Industriousness originates in two
quite different ways. Workmen in the south are industrious, not from a desire
for gain, but because others are always in need. Because someone always
comes along who wants a horse shod, a cart repaired, the smith is always
industrious. If no one came along, he would lounge about in the market-
place. To feed himself in a fruitful country requires no great effort: a very
moderate amount of work will suffice, in any event he has no need for
industriousness; ultimately he would be quite content to beg. - The
industriousness of English workers, on the other hand, has behind
176
A GLANCE AT THE STATE
it the sense for gain: it is aware of itself and of its objectives, and desires
with possessions power, with power the greatest possible freedom and
individual nobility.
479
Wealth as the origin of a nobility of birth. - Wealth necessarily
engenders an aristocracy of race, for it permits one to select the fairest
women, pay the best teachers, grants to a man cleanliness, time for physical
exercises, and above all freedom from deadening physical labour. To this
extent it creates all the conditions for the production over a few generations
of a noble and fair demeanour, even noble and fair behaviour, in men: greater
freedom of feeling, the absence of the wretched and petty, of abasement
before breadgivers, of penny-pinching. - It is precisely these negative
qualities that are the richest gifts of happiness for a young man; a very poor
man usually destroys himself through nobility of disposition, it takes him
nowhere and gains him nothing, his race is not capable of life. - What must
also be considered, however, is that wealth exercises almost the same effects
whether one has 300 or 30,000 talers a year to spend: there is no essential
progression in favouring circumstances. But to have less, as a boy to beg and
abase oneself, is dreadful: although for those who seek their happiness in the
glitter of the court, in subordination to the powerful and influential, or desire
to be heads of the church, it may well be the right starting-point. (- It teaches
one to steal stooping into the casements of favour.)
480
Envy and indolence in different directions. - The two opposing parties,
the socialist and the nationalist - or whatever their names may be in the
various countries of Europe - are worthy of one another: envy and laziness
are the moving forces in both of them. In the former camp they want to work
as little as possible with their hands, in the latter as little as possible with their
heads; in the latter they hate and envy the prominent, self- evolved
individuals unwilling to let themselves be enlisted in the ranks for the
production of a mass effect, in the former the better, outwardly more
favoured caste of society whose real task, the production of the supreme
cultural values, makes their inner life so much harder and more painful. If, to
be sure, the nationalists should succeed in imposing the spirit of the mass
effect upon the higher classes of society, then the socialist hordes would be
quite justified in seeking to level them with themselves also outwardly, since
they would already be level with one another in head and heart. - Live as
higher men and perform perpetually the deeds of higher culture - to this all
that lives admits your right, and the order of society whose summit you are
will be proof against every evil eye and evil claw!
481
Grand politics and what they cost. - Just as the greatest cost to a people
involved in war and preparation for war is not the expense of the war or
177
the interruption to trade and commerce, nor the maintenance of standing
armies - however great these expenses may be now that eight states of
Europe expend between two and three milliards annually on it - but the cost
involved in the removal year in, year out of an extraordinary number of its
efficient and industrious men from their proper professions and occupations
so that they may become soldiers: so a people which sets about practising
grand politics and ensuring to itself a decisive voice among the most
powerful states does not incur the highest costs where these are usually
thought to lie. It is true that from this moment on a host of the most
prominent talents are continually sacrificed on the 'altar of the fatherland' or
of the national thirst for honour, whereas previously other spheres of activity
were open to these talents now devoured by politics. But aside from these
public hecatombs, and at bottom much more horrible, there occurs a
spectacle played out continually in a hundred thousand simultaneous acts:
every efficient, industrious, intelligent, energetic man belonging to such a
people lusting after political laurels is dominated by this lust and no longer
belongs wholly to his own domain, as he formerly did: questions and cares of
the public weal, renewed every day, devour a daily tribute from the capital in
every citizen's head and heart: the sum total of all these sacrifices and costs in
individual energy and work is so tremendous that the political emergence of a
people almost necessarily draws after it a spiritual impoverishment and
enfeeblement and a diminution of the capacity for undertakings demanding
great concentration and application. Finally one may ask: is all this
inflorescence and pomp of the whole (which is, after all, apparent only in the
fear of other states for the new colossus and in the more favourable terms for
trade and travel extorted from them) worth it, if all the nobler, tenderer, more
spiritual plants and growths in which its soil was previously so rich have to
be sacrificed to this coarse and gaudy flower of the nation?
482
And to repeat. - Public opinions - private indolence.
178
9
MAN ALONE WITH HIMSELF
483
Enemies of truth. - Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth
than lies.
484
Upside down world. - One criticizes a thinker more severely when he
advances a proposition we find unpleasing; and yet it would be more
reasonable to do so when his proposition pleases us.
485
Full of character. - A man appears full of character much more often
because he always obeys his temperament than because he always obeys his
principles.
486
The one thing needful. - There is one thing one has to have: either a
cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and
knowledge.
487
Passion for causes. - He who directs his passion upon causes (the
sciences, the common weal, cultural interests, the arts) deprives his passion
for people (even when they are advocates of these causes, as statesmen,
philosophers, artists are advocates of their creations) of much of its fire.
488
Composure in action. - Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly
suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action usually acts with
greater composure than the fierceness of his desires before he acted had led
us to expect.
489
Not too deep. - People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay
faithful to it for ever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day:
and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.
490
Delusion of the idealists. - All idealists imagine that the causes they
serve are essentially better than all the other causes in the world and refuse to
believe that, if their cause is to prosper at all, it requires precisely the same
evil-smelling manure as all other human undertakings have need of.
491
Self-observation. - Man is very well defended against himself, against
179
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
being reconnoitred and besieged by himself, he is usually able to
perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible,
even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and
conduct him in by a secret path.
492
The right profession. - Men can rarely endure a profession of which they
do not believe or convince themselves it is at bottom more important than any
other. Women adopt a similar attitude towards their lovers.
493
Nobility of mind. - Nobility of mind consists to a great degree in good-
naturedness and absence of distrust, and thus contains precisely that which
successful and money-hungry people are so fond of looking down on and
laughing at.
494
Goal and path. - Many are obstinate with regard to the path once they
have entered upon it, few with regard to the goal.
495
What excites indignation in an individual xoay of life. - All very
individual rules of life excite hostility against him who adopts them; other
people feel humiliated by the exceptional treatment he accords himself, as
though they were being treated as merely commonplace creatures.
496
Privilege of greatness. - It is the privilege of greatness to give great
delight with meagre gifts.
497
Involuntarily noble. - Man involuntarily conducts himself nobly when he
has become accustomed to desiring nothing of men and always bestowing
gifts upon them.
498
Condition for heroism. - If a man wants to become a hero the serpent
must first have become a dragon: otherwise he will lack his proper enemy.
499
Friend. - Fellow rejoicing [Mitfreude], not fellow suffering [Mitleiden],
makes the friend.
500
Employing ebb and flow. - To the ends of knowledge one must know
how to employ that internal current that draws us to a thing and then that
other current that after a time draws us away from it.
501
Pleasure in oneself. - One says 'pleasure in a thing
7
: but in reality it is
pleasure in oneself by means of a thing.
180
MAN ALONE WI TH HI MSELF
502
The modest man. - He who comports himself modestly in relation to
people is all the more presumptuous in relation to things (city, state, society,
the age, mankind). This constitutes his revenge.
503
Envy and jealousy. - Envy and jealousy are the privy parts of the human
soul. The comparison can perhaps be extended.
504
The noblest hypocrite. - Never to speak about oneself is a very noble
piece of hypocrisy.
505
Ill-humour. - Ill-humour is a physical illness that is by no means done
away with if the occasion for ill-humour is subsequently abolished.
506
Advocates of truth. - Not when it is dangerous to tell the truth does truth
lack advocates, but when it is boring to do so.
507
More troublesome than enemies. - People who we are not convinced
would be sympathetically inclined towards us under all circumstances but to
whom we are for any reason (e.g. gratitude) on our part obligated to maintain
the appearance of unconditional sympathy torment our imagination much
more than our enemies do.
508
The open countryside. - We enjoy being in the open countryside so much
because it has no opinion concerning us.
509
Everyone superior in one thing. - Under civilized conditions everyone
feels himself to be superior to everyone else in at any rate one thing: it is
upon this that the general mutual goodwill that exists depends, inasmuch as
everyone is someone who under certain circumstances is able to be helpful
and who thus feels free to accept help without a sense of shame.
510
Grounds of consolation. - When somebody dies one needs grounds of
consolation most of all not so much to assuage one's grief as to provide an
excuse for the fact that one is so easily consoled.
5
11

Those faithful to their convictions. - He who has much to do preserves
his general opinions and points of view almost unaltered. Likewise anyone
who works in the service of an idea: he will cease to examine even the idea
itself, for he has no time for that; indeed it is against his interests to regard it
as so much as discussable.
181
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
5^2
Morality and quantity. - One man's morality is higher compared with
another's often only because its goals are quantitavely greater. The latter is
drawn down by his narrowly bounded occupation with the petty.
513
Life as the yield of life. - No matter how far a man may extend himself
with his knowledge, no matter how objectively he may come to view himself,
in the end it can yield to him nothing but his own biography.
514
Iron necessity. - Iron necessity is a thing which in the course of history
men come to see as neither iron nor necessary.
515
Front experience. - The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its
existence, rather a condition of it.
516
Truth. - No one now dies of fatal truths: there are too many antidotes to
them.
517
Fundamental insight. - There is no pre-established harmony* between
the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.
518
The human lot. - He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever
his acts and judgements may be, he is always wrong.
519
Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth
perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?
520
Danger facing our culture. - We belong to an age whose culture is in
danger of perishing through the means to culture.
521
Greatness means giving direction. - No river is great and abundant of
itself: it is the fact that it receives and bears onward so many tributaries that
makes it so. Thus it is too with all great men of the spirit. All that matters is
that one supplies the direction which many inflowing tributaries then have to
follow, not whether one is poorly or richly gifted from the beginning.
522
Feeble conscience. - People who speak of their own significance for
humanity possess with regard to common, bourgeois integrity, in the keeping
of compacts and promises, a feeble conscience.
* pre-established harmony: Leibnitz's conception of the world as composed of monads,
individuals whose relations of mutual agreement are predetermined by God.
182
MAN ALONE WI TH HI MSELF
523
Wanting to be loved. - The demand to be loved is the greatest of all
pieces of presumption.
524
Contempt of man. - The most unambiguous sign that one holds men in
contempt is this, that one acknowledges them only as a means to one's own
ends or does not acknowledge them at all.
525
Adherents out of contradictoriness. - He who has raised men up in rage
against him has always gained a party in his favour too.
526
Forgetting experiences. - He who thinks a great deal, and thinks
objectively, can easily forget his own experiences, but not the thoughts these
experiences called forth.
527
Retaining an opinion. - One person retains an opinion because he flatters
himself it was his own discovery, another because he acquired it with effort
and is proud of having grasped it: thus both do so out of vanity.
528
Shunning the light. - The good deed shuns the light just as fearfully as
does the bad deed: the latter fears that detection will bring pain (in the form
of punishment), the former fears that detection will bring loss of pleasure
(namely that pure pleasure in oneself that ceases immediately vanity is
satisfied).
529
The length of the day. - When one has a great deal to put into it a day has
a hundred pockets.
53
Genius of tyranny. - When there is alive in the soul an invincible desire
for tyrannical rule, and the fire is constantly being fuelled, even a modest
talent (in politicians, artists) will gradually become an almost irresistible
natural force.
531
The life of ones enemy. - He who lives for the sake of combating an
enemy has an interest in seeing that his enemy stays alive.
532
More seriously. - One takes an obscure and inexplicable thing more
seriously than a clear and explicable one.
533
Evaluation of services rendered. - We value services anyone renders us
according to the worth he places upon them, not according to the value they
possess for us.
183
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
534
Misfortune. - The distinction bestowed by misfortune (as though to feel
lucky were a sign of shallowness, unpretentiousness, commonplaceness) is so
great that when anyone is told: Tmt how lucky you are!' he usually protests.
535
Chimera of fear. - The chimera of fear is that evil, apish kobold who
leaps on to the back of man at precisely the moment he is already bearing the
heaviest burden.
536
Value of tasteless opponents. - Sometimes one stays faithful to a cause
only because its opponents are unfailingly tasteless.
537
Value of a profession. - A profession makes one thoughtless, therein lies
its greatest blessing. For it is a rampart behind which one can lawfully retreat
when one is assailed by commonplace cares and scruples.
538
Talent. - The talent of many a man appears less than it is because he has
always set himself too great tasks.
539
Youth. - Youth is unpleasant; for in youth it is not possible or not
sensible to be productive, in any sense of the word.
540
Too great objectives. - He who has publicly set himself great objectives
and afterwards realizes he is too weak for them is usually also too weak
publicly to repudiate them, and then he unavoidably becomes a hypocrite.
541
In the stream. - Mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with
them, mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads.
542
Perils of spiritual liberation. - When a man is seriously engaged upon
liberating himself spiritually his desires and passions as well hope to derive
some advantage from it.
543
Embodiment of the spirit. - When we think much and sagaciously not
only our face but our body too assumes a sagacious appearance.
544
Seeing badly and listening badly. - He who sees badly sees less and less;
he who listens badly hears more than has been said.
184
MAN ALONE WITH HIMSELF
545
Self-enjoyment in vanity. - The vain man wants not so much to
predominate as to feel himself predominant; that is why he disdains no means
of self-deception and self-outwitting. What he treasures is not the opinion of
others but his own opinion of their opinion.
546
Vain exceptionally. - He who is usually self-sufficient is vain and
receptive to fame and commendation on exceptional occasions, namely when
he is physically ill. To the extent that he feels himself diminishing he has to
try to recoup himself from outside through the opinion of others.
547
The 'rich in spirit'. - He has no spirit who seeks spirit.
548
Hint for party leaders. - If you can bring people to declare themselves in
favour of something publicly you have usually also brought them to declare
themselves in favour of it inwardly; they want to be regarded as
consistent.
549
Contempt. - Contempt gained through others is more painful to a man
than contempt gained through himself.
550
Cord of gratitude. - There are slavish souls who go so far in readiness to
acknowledge favours done them that they choke themselves with the cord of
gratitude.
551
Trick of the prophet. - To divine in advance how ordinary people will act
one has to assume that, when they are in an unpleasant situation, they always
seek to get out of it with the smallest expenditure of intelligence.
552
The only human right. - He who deviates from the traditional falls victim
to the extraordinary; he who remains in the traditional becomes its slave. In
either event he perishes.
553
Lower than the animal. - When man neighs with laughter he excels any
animal in his vulgarity.
554
Half-knowledge. - He who speaks little of a foreign language gets more
pleasure from it than he who speaks it well. Enjoyment is with the half-
knowers.
555
Dangerous readiness to help. - There are people who want to make other
185
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
people's life harder for no other reason than to be able afterwards to offer
them their recipe for alleviating life (for example their Christianity).
556
Industriousness and conscientiousness. - Industriousness and
conscientiousness are often at odds with one another because industriousness
wants to pluck the fruit from the tree while it is sour whereas
conscientiousness lets it hang too long until it falls and smashes itself to
pieces.
557
Casting suspicion. - Upon people one cannot endure one seeks in one's
own mind to cast suspicion.
558
No occasion. - Many people wait their whole life long for an opportunity
of being good in their fashion.
559
Lack of friends. - A lack of friends may be put down to envy or
presumption. Many owe their friends only to the fortunate circumstance that
they have no occasion for envy.
560
Danger in multiplicity. - With one talent more one often stands less
securely than with one fewer: as a table stands better on three than on four
legs.
561
A model for others. - He who wants to give a good example must add a
grain of folly to his virtue; then others will imitate and at the same time
surpass him they imitate - which men love to do.
562
Being a target. - Unkind remarks about us by others are often not really
directed at us but are an expression of an annoyance, of an ill-humour of quite
a different origin.
563
Easily resigned. - One suffers little from disappointed wishes if one has
trained one's imagination to blacken the past.
564
In danger. - One is most in danger of being run over when one has just
avoided a carriage.
565
The role suited to the voice. - He who is compelled to speak louder than
he is used to speaking (to a half-deaf person, for instance, or before a great
auditorium) usually exaggerates the things he has to say. - Many a person has
become a conspirator, a malicious gossip, an intriguer, simply because his
voice is best suited to whispering.
186
MAN ALONE WITH HIMSELF
566
Love and hatred. - Love and hatred are not blind but dazzled by the fire
they themselves bear with them.
567
Advantageous enmity. - People unable to make the world see them at
their true worth seek to arouse violent enmity towards themselves. They then
have the consolation of thinking that this enmity is standing between their
true worth and recognition of it - and that many others suppose the same:
which is very advantageous for their reputation.
568
Confession. - One forgets one's sins when one has confessed them to
another, but the other does not usually forget them.
569
Self-satisfaction. - The golden fleece of self-satisfaction protects against
blows but not against pinpricks.
570
Shadows in the flame. - The flame is not as bright to itself as it is to those
it illumines: so too the sage.
571
Our own opinions. - The first opinion that occurs to us when we are
suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the
customary one pertaining to our caste, station, origin; our own opinions rarely
swim to the top.
572-
Origin of courage. - The ordinary man is as courageous and invulnerable
as a hero when he does not perceive the danger and has no eyes for it.
Conversely: the hero's only vulnerable spot is on his back, that is to say
where he has no eyes.
573
Danger in one's physician. - One must have the physician one was born
for, otherwise one will perish by one's physician.
574
Miraculous vanity. - He who has boldly foretold the weather three times
and each time successfully believes a little in the depths of his soul that he is
prophetically gifted. We accept the existence of the miraculous and irrational
when it flatters our self-esteem.
575
Profession. - A profession is the backbone of life.
576
Danger in personal influence. - He who feels he exercises a great inner
influence upon another has to allow him entirely free rein, occasionally
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
indeed be glad to see resistance in him and even induce it: otherwise he
will inevitably make for himself an enemy.
577
Acknowledging heirs. - He who has founded something great in a
selfless attitude of mind takes pains to rear heirs for himself. To see an
opponent in every possible heir of one's work and to live in a state of self-
defence against them is a sign of a tyrannical and ignoble nature.
578
Half-knowledge. - Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole
knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this
renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.
579
Not suited to be a party man. - He who thinks a great deal is not suited
to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side
too soon.
580
Bad memory. - The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the
same good things for the first time several times.
581
Causing oneself pain. - Ruthlessness in thinking is often the sign of a
discordant inner disposition that desires insensitizing.
582
Martyr. - A martyr's disciples suffer more than the martyr.
583
Vanity behind the times. - The vanity of many people who have no need
to be vain is a habit, retained and exaggerated, from a time when they did not
yet have the right to believe in themselves and had first to beg for this belief
from others in small coinage.
584
Punctum saliens of passion* - He who is on the point of getting into a
rage or a violent attack of love reaches a point at which the soul is as full as a
vessel: but one drop of water has still to be added, an assent to passion
(which is something one usually dissents from). Only this little drop is
needed and then the vessel runs over.
585
Ill-humoured reflections. - It is with men as with the charcoal-kilns in
the forest. Only when the young have ceased to glow and are carbonized do
they become useful. As long as they are smoking and smouldering they may
perhaps be more interesting but they are of no use and all too often
unmanageable. - Mankind mercilessly employs every individual as material
for heating its great machines: but what then is the purpose of the machines if
all individuals (that is to say mankind) are of no other use
* punctum saliens: salient point
MAN ALONE WITH HIMSELF
than as material for maintaining them? Machines that are an end in
themselves - is that the umana commedia?
586
Of the hour-hand of life. - Life consists of rare individual moments of
the highest significance and countless intervals in which at best the phantoms
of those moments hover about us. Love, spring, a beautiful melody, the
mountains, the moon, the sea - they all speak truly to our heart only once: if
they ever do in fact truly find speech. For many people never experience
these moments at all but are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony
of real life.
587
To attack or to intervene. - We often make the mistake of actively
opposing a tendency or party or age because we happen to have seen only its
external side, its deliquescence or the 'faults of its virtues' necessarily
adhering to it - perhaps because we ourselves have participated in them to a
marked degree. Then we tum our back on them and go off in an opposite
direction; but it would be better if we sought out their good and strong side
instead or evolved and developed it in ourself. It requires, to be sure, a more
penetrating eye and a more favourable inclination to advance what is
imperfect and evolving than to see through it in its imperfection and deny it.
588
Modesty. - There is true modesty (that is, the recognition that we are not
the work of ourselves); and it well becomes the great mind because it is
precisely he who can grasp the idea of his complete unaccountability (also for
the good he creates). One hates the immodesty of the great man, not to the
extent that it comes from a sensation of his own strength, but because through
it he evidences a desire to experience this strength by wounding others,
treating them in a domineering way and seeing how far they will put up with
it. As a rule this behaviour is even a sign that he lacks a calm certainty of his
strength and thus leads men to doubt his greatness. To this extent immodesty
is from a prudential point of view very inadvisable.
589
The first thought of the day. - The best way of beginning each day well is
to think on awakening whether one cannot this day give pleasure to at any
rate one person. If this could count as a substitute for the religious practice of
prayer, then this substitution would be to the benefit of one's fellow men.
590
Presumption as the last means of comfort. - When we interpret a
misfortune, our intellectual shortcomings or an illness in such a way that we
see in them our prescribed destiny, a testing or a secret punishment for past
actions, we make our own being interesting to ourselves and in our own
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
imagination raise ourselves above our fellow men. The proud sinner is a
familiar figure in all ecclesiastical sects.
591
Vegetation of happiness. - Close beside the woe of the world, and often
upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness.
Whether one views life with the eye of him who desires of existence only
knowledge, or of him who submits and is resigned, or of him who rejoices
over difficulties overcome - everywhere one will find a little happiness
sprung up beside the misfortune - and the more happiness the more volcanic
the soil - only it would be ludicrous to say that with this happiness suffering
itself is justified.
592
The road of one's forebears. - It is sensible for anyone to develop further
in himself the talent upon which his father and grandfather expended effort
and not to turn to something completely new, otherwise he will make it
impossible for himself to achieve perfection in any trade at all. That is why
the proverb says: 'What road should you take? - the road of your forebears.'
593
Vanity and ambition as education. - So long as a man has not yet
become an instrument of general human utility let him be plagued by
ambition; if that goal has been attained, however, if he is working with the
necessity of a machine for the good of all, then let him be visited by vanity; it
will humanize him and make him more sociable, endurable and indulgent in
small things, now that ambition (to render him useful) has finished
roughhewing him.
594
Philosophical novices. - If we have just become the recipient of the
wisdom of a philosopher we walk along the street feeling we have been
recreated and become a great man; for we encounter only people who are
unaware of this wisdom and have therefore to deliver a new, so far unknown
verdict on all things: because we acknowledge a code of law we think we are
henceforth obliged to bear ourselves like a judge.
595
Pleasing by displeasing. - People who prefer to draw attention to
themselves and thereby cause displeasure desire the same thing as those who
want not to draw attention to themselves and give pleasure, only they do so to
a far greater degree and indirectly, by means of a state through which they
appear to be retreating from their goal. They desire power and influence, and
therefore demonstrate their superiority even in a way that makes them
unpleasing; for they know that he who has finally attained to power pleases
in almost all he does and says, and that even when he causes displeasure he
still seems to please. - The free spirit too, and likewise the believer, desire
power in order to please through it;
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MAN ALONE WITH HIMSELF
when they are threatened by an ill fate, persecution, imprisonment,
execution on account of their teaching they rejoice in the thought that in this
way their teaching will be cut and burned into mankind; they accept it as a
painful but vigorous, if late-acting means of nonetheless attaining to power.
596
Casus belli and the like.* - The prince who, having resolved on war with
his neighbour, discovers a casus belli, is like a father who foists upon his
child a mother who is henceforth to count as such. And are almost all the
publicly declared motives for our actions not such substituted mothers?
597
Passion and rights. - No one talks more passionately about his rights
than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting
passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will
acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
598
Trick of renouncers. - He who protests against marriage, in the way
Catholic priests do, will try to think of it in its lowest and most vulgar form.
Likewise he who refuses to be honoured by his contemporaries will
understand the concept in a base sense; thus he will render this self- denial
and the struggle against it easier for himself. In general he who denies
himself much in things of importance will tend to permit himself petty
indulgences. It may be possible that he who is raised above the applause of
his contemporaries is nonetheless incapable of denying himself the
satisfaction of little vanities.
599
Age of presumption. - With gifted people the actual period of
presumption lies between their twenty-sixth and thirtieth years; it is the time
of their first maturity, with a strong residue of acidulousness. On the basis of
what they feel within them they demand honour and humility of men who see
little or nothing of it, and when these are at first denied them they revenge
themselves with that presumptuous glance and bearing, that tone of voice
which a subtle ear and eye can recognize in every product of that age,
whether it be poetry, philosophy, pictures or music. Older, more experienced
men smile at this, and recall with emotion that fair time of life in which one
is angry that it is one's fate to be so much and seem so little. Later one really
does appear more - but one has by then lost the belief that one is very much:
one then remains an incorrigible fool of vanity for the rest of one's life.
600
Deceptive and yet tenable. - Just as in order to walk beside an abyss or
cross a deep stream by a plank one needs a railing, not so as to hold on to it -
for it would at once collapse if one did that - but to give to the eye a feeling
of
* casus belli-, motive for war
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
security, so as a youth one has need of people who without knowing it
perform for us the service of a railing. It is true that, if we were really in great
danger, they would not help us if we sought to rely on them, but they give us
the quieting sensation that there is protection close at hand (for example
fathers, teachers, friends, as all three usually are).
601
Learning to love. - We have to learn to love, learn to be charitable, and
this from our youth up; if education and chance offer us no opportunity to
practise these sensations our soul will grow dry and even incapable of
understanding them in others. Hatred likewise has to be learned and
nourished if one wants to become a good hater: otherwise the germ of that
too will gradually wither away.
602
Ruins as ornamentation. - Those who go on many intellectual journeys
retain certain outlooks and habits belonging to earlier ages, which then
intrude into their modern thoughts and actions like a piece of inexplicable
antiquity and grey stonework: often to the embellishment of the whole
region.
603
Love and honour. - Love desires, fear shuns. That is why one cannot be
loved and honoured by one and the same person, at least not at the same
time. For he who honours recognizes power, that is to say he fears it. Love,
however, recognizes no power, nothing that separates, contrasts, ranks above
and below. Because love does not honour, ambitious men are, secretly or
openly, recalcitrant towards being loved.
604
Prejudice in favour of the cold. - People who catch fire quickly, quickly
grow cold and are thus on the whole unreliable. That is why all those who are
always cold, or pretend to be so, have in their favour the prejudice that they
are particularly trustworthy and reliable: people confuse them with those who
catch fire slowly and retain it a long time.
605
What is dangerous in independent opinions - Occasional indulgence in
independent opinions is stimulating, like a kind of itch; if we proceed further
in them we begin to scratch the spot; until in the end we produce an open
wound, that is to say until our independent opinions begin to disturb and
harass us in our situation in life and our human relationships.
606
Thirst for profound pain. - When it has passed, passion leaves behind an
obscure longing for itself and even in departing casts a seductive glance. To
be scourged by it must have afforded us a kind of joy. The milder sensations,
on the other hand, appear insipid; it seems we always prefer the more
vehement displeasure to a feeble pleasure.
MAN ALONE WI TH HI MSELF
607
Ill-humour with others and with the world. - When, as we so often do,
we expend our ill-humour on others while it is really against ourselves that
we feel it, what we are doing at bottom is endeavouring to befog and deceive
our own judgement: we want to motivate this ill-humour a posteriori through
the blunders and deficiencies of others and thus lose sight of ourselves. -
Those rigorously religious people who are inexorable judges of themselves
have at the same time been the most vehement accusers of mankind in
general: the saint has never lived who reserved sin for himself and virtue for
others: just as little as has the man who, following Buddha's prescript, has
concealed his good from the people and let his evil alone shine forth.
608
Cause confused with effect. - We unconsciously seek for the principles
and dogmas appropriate to our temperament, so that in the end it appears as
though these principles and dogmas had created our character and given it
firmness and assurance: whereas what has happened is precisely the reverse.
Our thinking and judgement are, it seems, to be made the cause of our nature:
but in fact it is our nature that is the cause of our thinking and judging thus
and thus. - And what is it destines us for this almost unconscious comedy?
Indolence and love of ease and not least the desire of our vanity to be thought
consistent through and through, homogeneous in thought and being: for this
procures respect and bestows confidence and power.
609
Age and truth. - Young people love what is strange and interesting,
regardless of whether it is true or false. More mature spirits love in truth that
which is strange and interesting in it. Heads fully mature, finally, love truth
also where it appears plain and simple and is boring to ordinary people: they
have noticed that truth is accustomed to impart its highest spiritual
possessions with an air of simplicity.
610
Men as bad poets. - Just as in the second half of a stanza bad poets seek
the idea that will fit the rhyme, so men are in the second half of life
accustomed to become more anxious to seek actions, positions, relationships
suited to those of their earlier life, so that externally it all sounds in harmony:
but their life is no longer dominated and repeatedly directed by a powerful
idea, in place of which there appears the objective of finding a rhyme.
611
Boredom and play. - Need compels us to perform work with the
proceeds of which the need is assuaged; need continually recurs and we are
thus accustomed to working. In the intervals, however, during which our
needs have been assuaged and are as it were sleeping, we are overtaken by
boredom. What is this? It is our habituation to work as such, which
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
now asserts itself as a new, additional need; and the more strongly
habituated we are to working, perhaps even the more we have suffered need,
the stronger this new need will be. To elude boredom man either works
harder than is required to satisfy his other needs or he invents play, that is to
say work designed to assuage no other need than the need for work as such.
He who has become tired of play, and who has no fresh needs that require
him to work, is sometimes overtaken by a longing for a third condition which
stands in the same relation to play as floating does to dancing and dancing to
walking - for a state of serene agitation: it is the artist's and philosopher's
vision of happiness.
612
Instruction from pictures. - When we regard a series of pictures of
ourselves from our late childhood to our mature manhood, we are pleasantly
surprised to see that the man resembles the child more closely than he does
the youth: what this process probably indicates is that a temporary alienation
from our basic character occurred during our youth but has been overcome by
the accumulated strength of manhood. This observation is consistent with this
other, that all those powerful influences exerted upon us in our youth by our
passions and by theories and political events seem later on to be again
reduced back to a firm basis, so that, although they certainly continue to live
on in us and affect our actions, our fundamental feelings and outlook have
come to dominate them and, while we continue to employ them as sources of
energy, they no longer regulate us as they did in our twenties. Thus the
thinking and feelings of the man are likewise more conformable to those of
his childhood - and this inward fact is expressed in the external one referred
to.
613
Age and tone of voice. - The tone in which young people speak, praise,
blame, poetize displeases their elders because it is too loud and yet at the
same time hollow and indistinct, like a sound in a vault that acquires such
volume through the emptiness surrounding it; for most of what young people
think does not proceed from the abundance of their own nature but is a
resonance and echo of what has been thought, said, praised and blamed in
their presence. But because sensations (inclination and aversion) resound in
them much more strongly than do the reasons for them, when they again give
vent to these sensations there arises that hollow, resonant tone through which
one can recognize the absence or sparseness of reasons. The tone of more
mature years is stem, abrupt, of moderate loudness but, like everything
clearly articulated, very far- carrying. Old age, finally, often introduces a
certain gentleness and forbearance into the voice and as it were sweetens it:
in many cases, to be sure, it also sours it.
614
Retarded and anticipatory men. - The unpleasant character who is full of
mistrust, consumed with envy whenever competitors or neighbours
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achieve a success, and violently opposes all opinions not his own,
demonstrates that he belongs to an earlier stage of culture and is thus a relic:
for the way in which he traffics with men was the apt and right one for
conditions obtaining during an age of club-law; he is a retarded man.
Another character who readily rejoices with his fellow men, wins friends
everywhere, welcomes everything new and developing, takes pleasure in the
honours and successes of others and makes no claim to be in the sole
possession of the truth but is full of a diffident mistrust - he is an anticipatory
man striving towards a higher human culture. The unpleasant character
derives from ages when the rude foundations of human intercourse had still
to be constructed, the other dwells on its highest floor as far removed as
possible from the savage beast which, locked in the cellars beneath the
foundations of culture, howls and rages.
615
Comfort for hypochondriacs. - Whenever a great thinker is temporarily
subject to hypochondriac self-torments he may comfort himself with the
words: 'it is your own great strength upon which this parasite is feeding; if it
were less you would suffer less'. The statesman may do the same whenever
jealousy and feelings of revengefulness, the mood of bellum omnium contra
omnes* in general for which as representative of a nation he must necessarily
have a decided gift, intrudes into his private life and makes it hard for him.
616
Estranged from the present. - There is great advantage to be gained in
distantly estranging ourselves from our age and for once being driven as it
were away from its shores back on to the ocean of the world-outlooks of the
past. Looking back at the coast from this distance we command a view, no
doubt for the first time, of its total configuration, and when we approach it
again we have the advantage of understanding it better as a whole than those
who have never left it.
617
Sowing and reaping with one's personal shortcomings. - Men like
Rousseau know how to employ their weaknesses, deficiencies and vices as it
were as manure for their talents. If he bewails the depravity and degeneration
of society as the deplorable consequence of culture, he does so on the basis
of a personal experience; it is the bitterness deriving from this that gives to
his general condemnation the sharpness of its edge and poisons the arrows
with which he shoots; he unburdens himself first of all as an individual and
thinks to seek a cure that, operating directly upon society, will indirectly and
through society also be of benefit to him himself.
618
Being philosophically minded. - We usually endeavour to acquire a single
deportment of feeling, a single attitude of mind towards all the events and
situations of life - that above all is what is called being philosophically *
bellum ... omnes: 'war of all against all'; Hobbes' phrase.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
minded. But for the enrichment of knowledge it may be of more value
not to reduce oneself to uniformity in this way, but to listen instead to the
gentle voice of each of life's different situations; these will suggest the
attitude of mind appropriate to them. Through thus ceasing to treat oneself as
a single rigid and unchanging individuum one takes an intelligent interest in
the life and being of many others.
619
In the fire of contempt. - It is a new step towards independence when
first we venture to express views regarded as disgraceful in him who
harbours them; even our friends and acquaintances then begin to worry. The
gifted nature must pass through this fire too; after it has done so it will
belong much more to itself.
620
Sacrifice. - When there is a choice in the matter, a great sacrifice will be
preferred to a small one: because in the case of the former we can indemnify
ourselves through the self-admiration we feel, which we cannot do in the
case of the latter.
621
Love as artifice. - He who really wants to get to know something new
(be it a person, an event, a book) does well to entertain it with all possible
love and to avert his eyes quickly from everything in it he finds inimical,
repellent, false, indeed to banish it from mind: so that, for example, he allows
the author of a book the longest start and then, like one watching a race,
desires with beating heart that he may reach his goal. For with this procedure
one penetrates to the heart of the new thing, to the point that actually moves
it: and precisely this is what is meant by getting to know it. If one has got this
far, reason can afterwards make its reservations; that over-estimation, that
temporary suspension of the critical pendulum, was only an artifice for luring
forth the soul of a thing.
622
Thinking too well and too ill of the toorld. - Whether one thinks too well
or too ill of things one always enjoys the advantage of reaping a greater
pleasure: for if our preconceived opinion is too favourable we usually
introduce more sweetness into things (experiences) than they actually
contain. A preconceived opinion that is too unfavourable causes a pleasant
disappointment: what was already pleasant in the thing receives an addition
through the pleasantness of the surprise. - A gloomy temperament will in
both cases experience the opposite.
623
Deep men. - Those whose strength lies in the depth impressions make on
them - they are usually called deep men - are when they encounter the
unexpected relatively calm and resolved: for at the first moment the
impression was still shallow, only then did it become deep. Long foreseen
and expected things and people, on the other hand, excite such natures
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the most, and when such things finally do arrive their presence of mind
almost deserts them.
624
Traffic with one's higher self. - Everyone has his good days when he
discovers his higher self; and true humanity demands that everyone be
evaluated only in the light of this condition and not in that of his working-day
unfreedom and servitude. A painter, for example, should be appraised and
revered in the light of the highest vision he is capable of seeing and
reproducing. But men themselves traffic in very various ways with this
higher self of theirs and are often actors of themselves, inasmuch as they
afterwards continually imitate that which they are in those moments. Many
live in awe of and abasement before their ideal and would like to deny it:
they are afraid of their higher self because when it speaks it speaks
imperiously. It possesses, moreover, a spectral freedom to come or to stay
away as it wishes; on this account it is often called a gift of the gods, whereas
in reality it is everything else that is a gift of the gods (of chance): this
however is man himself.
625
Solitary men. - Some men are so accustomed to being alone with
themselves that they do not compare themselves with others at all but spin
out their life of monologue in a calm and cheerful mood, conversing and
indeed laughing with themselves alone. If they are nonetheless constrained to
compare themselves with others they are inclined to a brooding
underestimation of themselves: so that they have to be compelled to acquire
again a good and just opinion of themselves from others: and even from this
acquired opinion they will tend continually to detract and trade away
something. - We must therefore allow certain men their solitude and not be
so stupid, as we so often are, as to pity them for it.
626
Without melody. - There are people who repose so steadily within
themselves and whose capacities are balanced with one another so
harmoniously that any activity directed towards a goal is repugnant to them.
They are like music that consists of nothing but long drawn out harmonious
chords, without even the beginning of a moving, articulated melody making
an appearance. Any movement from without serves only to settle the barque
into a new equilibrium on the lake of harmonious euphony. Modern men
usually grow extremely impatient when confronted by such natures, which
become nothing without our being able to say that they are nothing. But in
certain moods the sight of them prompts the unusual question: why melody at
all? Why does the quiet reflection of life in a deep lake not suffice us? - The
Middle Ages were richer in such natures than our age is. How seldom do we
now encounter one able to live thus happily and peaceably with himself even
in the turmoil of life, saying to himself with Goethe: 'the best is the profound
stillness towards the world in which I live and grow, and win for myself what
they cannot take from me with fire and sword'.
197
627
Living and experiencing. - When we observe how some people know
how to manage their experiences - their insignificant, everyday experiences -
so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while
others - and how many there are! - are driven through surging waves of
destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet
always remain on top, bobbing like a cork: then we are in the end tempted to
divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to
make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of
much; indeed, one does encounter those inverted sorcerers who, instead of
creating the world out of nothing, create nothingness out of the world.
628
Seriousness in play. - In Genoa at the time of evening twilight I heard
coming from a tower a long peal of bells: it seemed it would never stop,
resounding as though it could never have enough of itself over the noise of
the streets out into the evening sky and the sea breeze, so chilling and at the
same time so childlike, so melancholy. Then I recalled the words of Plato and
suddenly they spoke to my heart: Nothing human is worthy of being taken
very seriously; nonetheless11 - -
629
Of conviction and justice. - That a man must, in subsequent cold
sobriety, continue to adhere to what he has said, promised, resolved in
passion - this demand is among the heaviest of the burdens that oppress
mankind. To be obliged to recognize the consequences of anger, of a blazing
revengefulness, of an enthusiastic devotion, for all future time - that can
engender an animosity towards these sensations made the more bitter by their
idolization everywhere and especially by the artists. These latter greatly
encourage the high value accorded the passions and have always done so;
they also, to be sure, glorify the fearful amends one must make for these
same passions, the death, maiming and voluntary banishment following on
outbursts of revenge, the resignation of the broken heart. In any event, they
keep awake our curiosity regarding the passions, as though to say:
'experience without passion is nothing at all'. - Because we have sworn to be
faithful, perhaps even to a purely fictitious being such as a god, because we
have surrenderd our heart to a prince, to a party, to a woman, to a priestly
order, to an artist, to a thinker, in a state of deluded infatuation that made that
being seem worthy of every kind of sacrifice and reverence - are we now
ineluctably committed? Were we not indeed at that time deceiving ourselves?
Was it not a hypothetical promise, made under the admittedly silent condition
that the beings to which we consecrated ourselves were in reality what they
appeared to us to be? Are we obliged to be faithful to our errors, even when
we realize that

11 Republic, X 604c
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through this faithfulness we are injuring our higher self? - No, there
exists no law, no obligation, of this kind; we have to become traitors, be
unfaithful, again and again abandon our ideals. We cannot advance from one
period of our life into the next without passing through these pains of
betrayal and then continuing to suffer them. If we were to avoid these pains,
would it not be necessary for us to guard ourselves against these ebullitions
of our emotions? Would the world not then become too dreary, too spectral
for us? Let us ask ourselves, rather, whether these pains are necessarily
attendant on a change in our convictions, or whether they do not proceed
from an erroneous evaluation and point of view. - Why do we admire him
who is faithful to his convictions and despise him who changes them? I am
afraid the answer must be: because everyone assumes that such a change can
be motivated only by considerations of vulgar advantage or personal fear.
That is to say, we believe at bottom that no one would change his convictions
so long as they are advantageous to him, or at least so long as they do not do
him any harm. If this is so, however, it is an ill witness as to the intellectual
significance of all convictions. Let us for once examine how convictions
originate, and let us see whether they are not greatly overestimated: what will
emerge too is that a change in convictions has also invariably been assessed
by a false criterion and that we have hitherto been accustomed to suffer too
much when such a change has occurred.
630
Conviction is the belief that on some particular point of knowledge one
is in possession of the unqualified truth. This belief thus presupposes that
unqualified truths exist; likewise that perfect methods of attaining to them
have been discovered; finally, that everyone who possesses convictions avails
himself of these perfect methods. All three assertions demonstrate at once
that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thought; he stands
before us in the age of theoretical innocence and is a child, however grown
up he may be in other respects. But whole millennia have lived in these
childish presuppositions and it is from them that mankind's mightiest sources
of energy have flowed. Those countless numbers who have sacrificed
themselves for their convictions thought they were doing so for unqualified
truth. In this they were all wrong: probably a man has never yet sacrificed
himself for truth; at least the dogmatic expression of his belief will have been
unscientific or half-scientific. In reality one wanted to be in the right because
one thought one had to be. To allow oneself to be deprived of one's belief
perhaps meant calling one's eternal salvation into question. In a matter of
such extreme importance as this the 'will' was only too audibly the prompter
of the intellect. The presupposition of every believer of every kind was that
he could not be refuted; if the counter-arguments proved very strong it was
always left to him to defame reason itself and perhaps even to set up the
'credo quia absurdum est'* as the banner of the extremest fanaticism. It is not
conflict
* credo quia absurdum est': I believe it because it is absurd
199
of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in
opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions. But if all those who have
thought so highly of their convictions, brought to them sacrifices of every
kind, and have not spared honour, body or life in their service, had devoted
only half their energy to investigating with what right they adhered to this or
that conviction, by what path they had arrived at it, how peaceable a picture
the history of mankind would present! How much more knowledge there
would be! We should have been spared all the cruel scenes attending the
persecution of heretics of every kind, and for two reasons: firstly because the
inquisitors would have conducted their inquisition above all within
themselves and emerged out of the presumptuousness of being the defenders
of unqualified truth; then because the heretics themselves would, after they
had investigated them, have ceased to accord any further credence to such ill-
founded propositions as the propositions of all religious sectarians and 'right
believers' are.
631
From the ages in which men were accustomed to believe in possession
of unqualified truth there has come a profound displeasure with all sceptical
and relativistic positions in regard to any question of knowledge whatever;
one usually prefers to surrender unconditionally to a conviction harboured by
people in authority (fathers, friends, teachers, princes) and feels a kind of
pang of conscience if one fails to do so. This tendency is quite
comprehensible, and its consequences give us no right to any violent
reproaches against the way human reason has evolved. But gradually the
scientific spirit in men has to bring to maturity that virtue of cautious reserve,
that wise moderation which is more familiar in the domain of the practical
life than in the domain of the theoretical life and which, for example, Goethe
has depicted in Antonio as an object of animosity for all Tassos,* that is to
say for unscientific and at the same time inactive natures. The man of
conviction has in himself the right to fail to comprehend the man of cautious
thinking, the theoretical Antonio; the scientific man, on the other hand, has
no right to blame him for that: he makes allowances for him, and knows
moreover that in the end the latter will come to cleave to him, as Tasso
finally does to Antonio.
632
He who has not passed through different convictions, but remains in the
belief in whose net he was first captured, is on account of this
unchangeability under all circumstances a representative of retarded cultures;
in accordance with this lack of cultivation (which always presupposes culti-
vatability) he is a man hard, uncomprehending, unteachable, ungenerous,
everlastingly suspicious and unheeding, who neglects no means of constantly
asserting his own point of view because he is quite incapable of grasping that
there are bound to be other points of view; on this account he is perhaps a
source of strength, and in cultures grown too slack and flabby even salutary,
but only because he arouses vigorous op- * Antonio... Tassos: characters in Goethe's
piay Torquato Tasso
MAN ALONE WI TH HI MSELF
position: for in being compelled to struggle against him the more fragile
structure of the new culture itself grows strong.
633
We are essentially the same men as those of the age of the Reformation:
and how could it be otherwise? But that we no longer permit ourselves certain
means of assisting our opinion to victory distinguishes us from that age and
demonstrates that we belong to a higher culture. He who still, in the manner
of the Reformation man, combats and crushes other opinions with
defamations and outbursts of rage betrays clearly that he would have burned
his opponents if he had lived in another age, and that he would have had
recourse to all the methods of the Inquisition if he had been an opponent of
the Reformation. This Inquisition was at that time reasonable, for it signified
nothing other than the state of siege that had to be decreed for the whole
domain of the Church and which, like every state of siege, justified the
extremest measures, always under the presupposition (which we now no
longer share with the men of those days) that in the Church one possessed the
truth and was obliged to preserve it at the cost of any sacrifice for the
salvation of mankind. Nowadays, however, we no longer so easily concede to
anyone that he is in possession of the truth: the rigorous procedures of inquiry
have propagated distrust and caution, so that anyone who advocates opinions
with violent word and deed is felt to be an enemy of our present-day culture,
or at least as one retarded. And the pathos of possessing truth does now in
fact count for very little in comparison with that other, admittedly gentler and
less noisy pathos of seeking truth that never wearies of learning and
examining anew.
634
The methodical search for truth is, moreover, itself a product of those
ages in which convictions were at war with one another. If the individual had
not been concerned with his 'truth', that is to say with his being in the right,
there would have been no methods of inquiry at all; but with the claims of
different individuals to unqualified truth everlastingly in conflict with one
another, men went on step by step to discover incontestable principles by
which these claims could be tested and the contest decided. At first they
appealed to authorities, later they criticized the ways and means through
which the other's supposed truths had been discovered; in between there was
a period when they drew the consequences of their opponent's proposition
and perhaps found it harmful and productive of unhappiness: from which
everyone was supposed to see that the opponent's conviction contained an
error. The personal strife of thinkers at last rendered their procedures so acute
that truths really could be discovered and the aberrations of earlier procedures
exposed for all to see.
635
On the whole, the procedures of science are at least as important a
product of inquiry as any other outcome: for the scientific spirit rests upon an
201
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
insight into the procedures, and if these were lost all the other products
of science together would not suffice to prevent a restoration of superstition
and folly. There are people of intelligence who can learn as many of the facts
of science as they like, but from their conversation, and especially from the
hypotheses they put forward, you can tell that they lack the spirit of science:
they have not that instinctive mistrust of devious thinking which, as a
consequence of long practice, has put its roots down in the soul of every
scientific man. For them it is enough to have discovered any hypothesis at all
concerning any matter, then they are at once on fire for it and believe the
whole thing is accomplished. To possess an opinion is to them the same thing
as to become a fanatical adherent of it and henceforth to lay it to their heart as
a conviction. When something is in need of explanation they grow
impassioned for the first idea to enter their head that looks in any way like an
explanation of if. a procedure productive of the evilest consequences,
especially in the domain of politics. - It is for this reason that everyone now
should have acquired a thorough knowledge of at least one science: then he
would know what is meant by method and procedure and how vital it is to
exercise the greatest circumspection. Women are especially in need of this
advice: for they are at present the helpless victims of every hypothesis that
appears, especially when it produces the impression of being intelligent,
thrilling, animating, invigorating. On closer examination, indeed, one sees
that by far the greater part of all educated people even now still desire from a
thinker convictions and nothing but convictions, and that only a small
minority want certainty. The former want to be violently carried away, so as
themselves to experience an increase in strength; the latter few possess that
objective interest that ignores personal advantage, even the increase in
strength referred to. The former, vastly preponderant class is what the thinker
has in view when he takes himself for a genius, and presents himself as a
higher being possessing authority. Insofar as genius of every kind maintains
the fire of convictions and awakens distrust of the modesty and
circumspection of science, it is an enemy of truth, no matter how much it may
believe itself to be truth's suitor.
636
There is, to be sure, a quite different species of genius, that of justice;
and I cannot in any way persuade myself to regard it as lower than any kind
of philosophical, political or artistic genius. It is the way of this kind of
genius to avoid with hearty indignation everything that confuses and deceives
us in our judgement of things; it is consequently an opponent of convictions,
for it wants to give to each his own, whether the thing be dead or living, real
or imaginary - and to that end it must have a clear knowledge of it; it
therefore sets every thing in the best light and observes it carefully from all
sides. In the end it will give to its opponent, blind or shortsighted 'conviction'
(as men call it: - women call it 'faith'), what is due to conviction - for the sake
of truth.
202
MAN ALONE WI TH HI MSELF
637
Opinions grow out of passions; inertia of the spirit lets them stiffen into
convictions. - He, however, whose spirit is free and restlessly alive can
prevent this stiffening through continual change, and even if he should be
altogether a thinking snowball, he will have in his head, not opinions, but
only certainties and precisely calculated probabilities. - But let us, who are
compound creatures, now heated up by fire, now cooled down by the spirit,
kneel down before justice as the only goddess we recognize over us. The fire
in us usually makes us unjust and, from the viewpoint of that goddess,
impure; in this condition we may never grasp her hand, never will the smile
of her pleasure light upon us. We revere her as the veiled Isis of our lives;
abashed, we offer up to her our pain as penance and sacrifice whenever the
fire seeks to burn and consume us. It is the spirit that rescues us, so that we
are not wholly reduced to ashes; it tears us away from the sacrificial altar of
justice or encloses us in a coat of asbestos. Redeemed from the fire, driven
now by the spirit, we advance from opinion to opinion, through one party
after another, as noble traitors to all things that can in any way be betrayed -
and yet we feel no sense of guilt.
638
The Wanderer. - He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of
mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth - though not as a traveller
to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and
observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world;
for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual
thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure
in change and transience. Such a man will, to be sure, experience bad nights,
when he is tired and finds the gate of the town that should offer him rest
closed against him; perhaps in addition the desert will, as in the Orient, reach
right up to the gate, beasts of prey howl now farther off, now closer to, a
strong wind arise, robbers depart with his beasts of burden. Then dreadful
night may sink down upon the desert like a second desert, and his heart grow
weary of wandering. When the morning sun then rises, burning like a god of
wrath, and the gate of the town opens to him, perhaps he will behold in the
faces of those who dwell there even more desert, dirt, deception, insecurity
than lie outside the gate - and the day will be almost worse than the night.
Thus it may be that the wanderer shall fare; but then, as recompense, there
will come the joyful mornings of other days and climes, when he shall see,
even before the light has broken, the Muses come dancing by him in the mist
of the mountains, when afterwards, if he relaxes quietly beneath the trees in
the equanimity of his soul at morning, good and bright things will be thrown
down to him from their tops and leafy hiding-places, the gifts of all those free
spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude and who, like him,
are, in their now joyful, now thoughtful way, wanderers and philosophers.
Born out of the mysteries
203
of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and the twelfth stroke
of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so light-filled, so cheerful
and transfigured: - they seek the philosophy of the morning.
204
AMONG FRIENDS
AN EPI LOGUE
Fine to lie in quiet together.
Finer still to join in laughing - Underneath a silken heaven Lying back amid the
grasses Join with friends in cheerful laughing. Showing our white teeth together.
Am I right? let's lie in quiet;
Am I wrong? let's join in laughing And in being aggravating,
Aggravating, loudly laughing.
Till we reach the grave together.
Shall we do this, friends, again?
Amen! and auf Wiedersehnl
2
No excuses! No forgiving!
You who laugh and joy in living Grant this book, with all its follies.
Ear and heart and open door!
Friends, believe me, all my folly's Been a blessing heretofore!
What I seek, what I discover - Has a book contained it ever?
Hail in me the guild of fools!
Learn what this fools-book's offence is: Reason coming to its senses!
Shall we, friends, do this again?
Amen! and auf Wiedersehn!
205
VOLUME TWO
PREFACE
One should speak only when one may not stay silent; and then only of
that which one has overcome - everything else is chatter, 'literature', lack of
breeding. My writings speak only of my overcomings: T am in them, together
with everything that was inimical to me, ego ipsissimus, indeed, if a yet
prouder expression be permitted, ego ipsissimum.* One will divine that I
already have a great deal - beneath me... But it has always required time,
recovery, distancing, before the desire awoke within me to skin, exploit,
expose, 'exhibit' (or whatever one wants to call it) for the sake of knowledge
something I had experienced and survived, some fact or fate of my life. To
this extent, all my writings, with a single though admittedly substantial
exception, are to be dated back - they always speak of something 'behind me'
- : some, as with the first three Untimely Meditations, even to a period earlier
than that in which I experienced and produced a book published before them
(the Birth of Tragedy in the case mentioned: as a more subtle observer and
comparer will be able to tell for himself). That angry outburst against the
inflated Germanism, complacency and beggarly language of the aged David
Strauss, the content of the first Meditation,t gave vent to feelings engendered
long before when I had sat as a student in the midst of German culture and
cultural philistinism (I make claim to be the father of the nowadays so much
used and misused expression 'cultural philistine' -); and what I had to say
against the 'historical sickness' I said as one who had slowly and toilsomely
learned to recover from it and was in no way prepared to give up 'history'
thereafter because he had once suffered from it. When, in the third Untimely
Meditation, I then went on to give expression to my reverence for my first
and only educator, the great Arthur Schopenhauer -1 would now express it
much more strongly, also more personally -1 was, so far as my own
development was concerned, already deep in the midst of moral scepticism
and destructive analysis, that is to say in the critique and likewise the
intensify- ing of pessimism as understood hitherto, and already 'believed in
nothing any more', as the people puts it, not even in Schopenhauer: just at
that time I produced an essay I have refrained from publishing, 'On Truth and
Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense'. Even my festive victory address in
honour of Richard Wagner on the occasion of his celebration of victory at
Bayreuth in 1876 - Bayreuth signifies the greatest victory an artist has ever
* ego ipsissimus: my very own self; ego ipsissimum: my innermost self
t David Strauss (1800-74): German theologian an attack on whom forms the substance of
the first of the Untimely Meditations
209
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
achieved - a work wearing the strongest appearance of being 'up to the
minute', was in its background an act of homage and gratitude to a piece of
my own past, to the fairest but also most perilous period of dead calm of my
whole voyage ... and in fact a liberation, a farewell. (Was Richard Wagner
himself deceived as to this? I do not believe so. As long as one still loves one
does not paint pictures like this; one does not yet 'meditate' on one's subject,
one does not set oneself at a distance in the way a 'meditator' must. 'Even
contemplation involves a secret antagonism, the antagonism involved in
comparison' - it says on page forty-six12 of the said essay itself, in a
revealing and melancholy phrase perhaps intended for but few ears.) The
composure needed to be able to speak of an inner solitude and self-denial
extending over long intervening years first came to me with the book Human,
All Too Human, to which this second foreword and intercession too is to be
dedicated. As a book 'for free spirits', there reposes upon it something of the
almost cheerful and inquisitive coldness of the psychologist who takes a host
of painful things that lie beneath and behind him and identifies and as it were
impales them with the point of a needle: - is it any wonder if, with such
sharp-pointed and ticklish work, a certain amount of blood occasionally
flows, if the psychologist engaged on it has blood on his fingers and not
always only - on his fingers?...
2
The 'Assorted opinions and maxims' were, like 'The wanderer and his
shadow', first published singly as continuations and appendices of the above-
named human-all-too-human 'Book for free spirits': at the same time as a
continuation and redoubling of a spiritual cure, namely of the anti-romantic
self-treatment that my still healthy instinct had itself discovered and
prescribed for me against a temporary attack of the most dangerous form of
romanticism. May these same writings now, after six years of convalescence,
prove acceptable united as the second volume of Human, All Too Human:
perhaps taken together they will teach their precepts more powerfully and
clearly - they are precepts of health that may be recommended to the more
spiritual natures of the generation just coming up as a disciplina voluntatis.
There speaks out of them a pessimist whose insights have often made him
jump out of his skin but who has always known how to get back into it again,
a pessimist, that is to say, well disposed towards pessimism - and thus in any
event no longer a romantic: what? should a spirit who understands the
serpent's prudent art of changing his skin not be permitted to read a lecture to
our pessimists of today, who are one and all still in danger of romanticism?
And at the very least to demonstrate to them how it is - done?...
3
- At that time it was indeed high time to say farewell: and I immediately
received a confirmation of the fact. Richard Wagner, seemingly the all-
conquering, actually a decaying, despairing romantic, suddenly sank

12 p.223 of the Cambridge University Press edition of Untimely Meditations.
PREFACE
down helpless and shattered before the Christian cross.. .* Was there no
German with eyes in his head, empathy in his conscience, for this dreadful
spectacle? Was I the only one who - suffered from it? Enough, this
unexpected event illumined for me like a flash of lightning the place I had
left - and likewise gave me those subsequent horrors that he feels who he has
passed through a terrible peril unawares. As I went on alone, I trembled; not
long afterwards I was sick, more than sick, I was weary of the unending
disappointment with everything we modern men have left to inspire us, of the
energy, labour, hope, youth, love everywhere dissipated; weary with disgust
at the femininity and ill-bred rapturousness of this romanticism, weary of the
whole idealist pack of lies and softening of conscience that had here once
again carried off the victory over one of the bravest; weary, last but not least,
with the bitterness of a suspicion - that, after this disappointment, I was
condemned to mistrust more profoundly, despise more profoundly, to be
more profoundly alone than ever before. My task - where had it gone? What?
was it now not as if my task had withdrawn from me, as though 1 would for a
long time to come cease to have any right to it? How was I going to be able
to endure this greatest of privations? -1 began by forbidding myself, totally
and on principle, all romantic music, that ambiguous, inflated, oppressive art
that deprives the spirit of its severity and cheerfulness and lets rampant every
kind of vague longing and greedy, spongy desire. 'Cave musicam'f is to this
day my advice to all who are man enough to insist on cleanliness in things of
the spirit; such music unnerves, softens, feminizes, its 'eternal womanly'
draws us - downwards! ... At that time I was first and foremost suspicious of
and circumspect towards romantic music; and if I continued to harbour any
hope at all for music it lay in the expectation that a musician might come who
was sufficiently bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy to confront
that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it. -
4
Henceforth alone and sorely mistrustful of myself, I thus, and not
without a sullen wrathfulness, took sides against myself and for everything
painful and difficult precisely for me: - thus I again found my way to that
courageous pessimism that is the antithesis of all romantic mendacity, and
also, as it seems to me today, the way to 'myself', to my task. That concealed
and imperious something for which we for long have no name until it finally
proves to be our task - this tyrant in us takes a terrible retribution for every
attempt we make to avoid or elude it, for every premature decision, for every
association on equal terms with those with whom we do not belong, for every
activity, however respectable, if it distracts us from our chief undertaking,
even indeed for every virtue that would like to shield us from the severity of
our own most personal
* Richard Wagner ... Christian cross: alludes to Wagner's last work, Parsifal (produced at
Bayreuth in 1882).
t 'Cave musicamBeware music
211
responsibility. Illness is the answer every time we begin to doubt our
right to our task - every time we begin to make things easier for ourselves.
Strange and at the same time terrible! It is our alleviations for which we have
to atone the most! And if we afterwards want to return to health, we have no
choice: we have to burden ourselves more heavily than we have ever been
burdened before...
5
- It was only then that I learned that solitary's speech that only the
most silent and the most suffering understand: I spoke without witnesses, or
rather in indifference to witnesses, so as not to suffer from staying silent, I
spoke only of things that had nothing to do with me but did so as though they
had something to do with me. It was then I learned the art of appearing
cheerful, objective, inquisitive, above all healthy and malicious
- and this, it seems to me, constitutes 'good taste' on the part of an
invalid. A subtler eye and empathy will nonetheless not fail to see what
perhaps constitutes the charm of this writing - that here a sufferer and self-
denier speaks as though he were not a sufferer and self-denier. Here there is a
determination to preserve an equilibrium and composure in the face of life
and even a sense of gratitude towards it, here there rules a vigorous, proud,
constantly watchful and sensitive will that has set itself the task of defending
life against pain and of striking down all those inferences that pain,
disappointment, ill-humour, solitude, and other swampgrounds usually cause
to flourish like poisonous fungi. This perhaps offers to precisely our
pessimists a signpost to their own selftesting? - for it was then that I acquired
for myself the proposition: 'a sufferer has no right to pessimism because he
suffers!', it was then that I conducted with myself a patient and tedious
campaign against the unscientific basic tendency of that romantic pessimism
to interpret and inflate individual personal experiences into universal
judgements and, indeed, into condemnations of the world ... in short, it was
then that I turned my perspective around. Optimism, for the purpose of
restoration, so that at some future time I could again have the right to be a
pessimist - do you understand that? Just as a physician places his patient in a
wholly strange environment so that he may be removed from his entire
'hitherto', from his cares, friends, letters, duties, stupidities and torments of
memory and learn to reach out his hands and senses to new nourishment, a
new sun, a new future, so I, as physician and patient in one, compelled
myself to an opposite and unexplored clime of the soul, and especially to a
curative journey into strange parts, into strangeness itself, to an
inquisitiveness regarding every kind of strange thing... A protracted
wandering around, seeking, changing followed from this, a repugnance
towards all staying still, towards every blunt affirmation and denial; likewise
a dietetic and discipline designed to make it as easy as possible for the spirit
to run long distances, to fly to great heights, above all again and again to fly
away. A minimum of life, in fact, an unchaining from all coarser desires, an
independence in the midst of all kinds of un-
PREFACE
favourable outward circumstances together with pride in being able to
live surrounded by these unfavourable circumstances; a certain amount of
cynicism, perhaps, a certain amount of 'barrel',* but just as surely a great deal
of capricious happiness, capricious cheerfulness, a great deal of stillness,
light, subtler folly, concealed enthusiasm - all this finally resulted in a great
spiritual strengthening, an increasing joy and abundance of health. Life itself
rewards us for our tough will to live, for the long war such as I then waged
with myself against the pessimism of weariness with life, even for every
attentive glance our gratitude accords to even the smallest, tenderest, most
fleeting gift life gives us. Finally our reward is the greatest of life's gifts,
perhaps the greatest thing it is able to give of any kind - we are given our task
back.
6
- Shall my experience - the history of an illness and recovery, for a
recovery was what eventuated - have been my personal experience alone?
And only my 'human, all-too-human'? Today I would like to believe the
reverse; again and again I (eel sure that my travel books were not written
solely for myself, as sometimes seems to be the case - . May I now, after six
years of growing confidence, venture to send them off again? May I venture
to commend them especially to the hearts and ears of those burdened with
any kind of 'past' and have sufficient spirit left still to suffer from the spirit of
their past too? Above all, however, to you, who have the hardest fate, you
rare, most imperilled, most spiritual, most courageous men who have to be
the conscience of the modern soul and as such have to possess its knowledge,
and in whom all that exists today of sickness, poison and danger comes
together - whose lot it is to have to be sicker than any other kind of individual
because you are not 'only individuals' ... whose comfort it is to know the way
to a new health, and alas! to go along it, a health of tomorrow and the day
after, you predestined and victorious men, you overcomers of your age, you
healthiest and strongest men, you good Europeans'.
7
- Finally, to reduce my opposition to romantic pessimism,+ that is to
say the pessimism of the renunciators, the failed and defeated, to a formula:
there is a will to the tragic and to pessimism that is as much a sign of severity
and of strength of intellect (taste, feeling, conscience). With this will in one's
heart one has no fear of the fearful and questionable that characterizes all
existence; one even seeks it out. Behind such a will there stands courage,
pride, the longing for a great enemy. - This has been my pessimistic
perspective from the beginning - a novel perspective, is it not? a perspective
that even today is still novel and strange? To this very
* 'barrel': reference to Diogenes the Cynic (c. 400 to c. 325 BC), reputed to have lived in a
barrel.
t Nietzsche's term 'romantic pessimism' circumscribes Schopenhauer's philosophy of the
will as well as Wagner's music. In The Gay Science, section 370, it is set against Dionysian pessi*
mism.
213
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
moment I continue to adhere to it and, if you will believe me, just as
much for myself as, occasionally at least, against myself... Do you want me
to prove this to you? But what else does this long preface - prove?
Sils-Maria, Oberengadin September 1886
214
PART ONE
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
1
To the disappointed of philosophy - If you have hitherto believed that
life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do
you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
2
Spoiled. - It is possible to be spoiled even in regard to clarity of
concepts: how repulsive one then finds it to traffic with the half-obscure,
hazy, aspiring, portentous! How ludicrous and yet not at all cheering an effect
is produced by their everlasting fluttering and snatching while being unable
to fly or to capture!
3
The wooer of reality. - He who finally sees how long and how greatly he
has been made a fool of embraces in defiance even the ugliest reality: so that,
viewing the way of the world as a whole, the latter has at all times had the
best of all wooers - for it is the best who have always been most
thoroughly deceived.
4
Progress of free-spiritedness. - The difference between free-spiritedness
as it used to be and as it is now cannot be made clearer than by recalling that
proposition for the recognition and expression of which the previous century
had to summon up all its intrepidity but which, judged from the present
posture of knowledge, nonetheless sinks to being a piece of involuntary
naivety - I mean Voltaire's proposition: 'croyez moi, mon ami, Terreur aussi a
son merite' .*
5
An original sin of philosophers. - Philosophers have at all times
appropriated the propositions of the examiners of men (moralists) and ruined
them, inasmuch as they have taken them for unqualified propositions and
sought to demonstrate the absolute validity of what these moralists intended
merely as approximate signposts or even as no more than truths possessing
tenancy only for a decade - and through doing so thought to elevate
themselves above the latter. Thus we find pieces of popular wisdom
originating with the moralists employed to buttress Schopenhauer's
celebrated doctrines of the primacy of the will over the intellect, of the
unalterability of the character and of the negativity of pleasure - all of which
are, in the sense in which he understands them, errors. Even * 'croyez ...
believe me, my friend/ error also has its merits.
215
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
the word 'will', which Schopenhauer remoulded as a common
designation for many different human states and inserted into a gap in the
language - greatly to his own advantage insofar as he was a moralist, since he
was now at liberty to speak of the 'will' as Pascal had spoken of it - even
Schopenhauer's 'will' has, in the hands of its originator through the
philosopher's rage for generalization turned out to be a disaster for science:
for this will has been turned into a metaphor when it is asserted that all things
in nature possess will; finally, so that it can be pressed into the service of all
kinds of mystical mischief it has been misemployed towards a false
reification - and all the modish philosophers speak of it and seem to know for
certain that all things possess one will and, indeed, are this one will (which,
from the description they give of this all-one-will, is as good as wanting to
make God out to be the stupid Devil).
6
Against fantasists. - The fantasist denies reality to himself, the liar does
so only to others.
7
Hostile to light. - If we make it clear to someone that strictly speaking he
is never able to speak of truth but only of probability and degrees of
probability, we usually discover from the unconcealed joy of one so
instructed how much men prefer the spiritual horizon to be fluctuating and
how in the depths of their soul they hate truth on account of its certainty. - Is
the reason that they are all secretly afraid that one day the light of truth will
be directed too brightly upon them? They want to signify something,
consequently no one must know too exactly what they are? Or is it merely
dread of a light brighter than their twilight, easily dazzled bat-souls are
unaccustomed to and which they must therefore hate?
8
Christian scepticism. - Christians today like to set up Pilate, with his
question 'What is truth?', as an advocate of Christ, so as to cast suspicion on
everything known or knowable and to erect the Cross against the dreadful
background of the impossibility of knowing.
9
Law of nature' a superstition. - When you speak so rapturously of a
conformity to law in nature you must either assume that all natural things
freely obey laws they themselves have imposed upon themselves - in which
case you are admiring the morality of nature - or you are entranced by the
idea of a creative mechanic who has made the most ingenious clock, with
living creatures upon it as decorations. - Necessity in nature becomes more
human and a last refuge of mythological dreaming through the expression
'conformity to law'.
to
For;... io history. - The veil-philosophers and world-obscurers, that is to
say all metaphysicians of finer or coarser grain, are seized with eye-, ear-
216
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
and toothache when they begin to suspect that the proposition 'The
whole of philosophy is henceforth forfeit to history' is quite true. On account
of the pain they feel they must be forgiven for throwing stones and dirt at
him who speaks thus: the proposition itself, however, can thereby become
dirty and unsightly for a time, and its effectiveness be diminished.
11
The pessimist of the intellect. - The truly free in spirit will also think
freely regarding the spirit itself and will not dissemble over certain dreadful
elements in its origin and tendency. On that account others will perhaps
designate him the worst of the opponents of free-spiritedness and inflict on
him the abusive title of 'pessimist of the intellect': which they will do because
they are accustomed to call everyone, not by those strengths and virtues that
distinguish him, but by that in him in which he most differs from them.
12
Knapsack of the metaphysicians. - Those who boast so mightily of the
scien- tificality of their metaphysics should receive no answer; it is enough to
pluck at the bundle which, with a certain degree of embarrassment, they keep
concealed behind their back; if one succeeds in opening it, the products of
that scientificality come to light, attended by their blushes: a dear little Lord
God, a nice little immortality, perhaps a certain quantity of spiritualism, and
in any event a whole tangled heap of 'wretched poor sinner' and Pharisee
arrogance.
13
Knowledge occasionally harmful. - The utility of the unconditional
search for the true is continually being demonstrated in so many ways that we
are obliged to accept unconditionally the subtler and rarer harm the
individual has to suffer as a consequence of it. We cannot prevent the chemist
from occasionally poisoning or burning himself in the course of his
experiments. - What applies to the chemist also applies to our entire culture:
from which, by the way, it clearly emerges how much attention the latter has
to pay to the provision of ointments to counter burning and to the constant
availability of antidotes to poison.
M
Philistine's necessity. - The Philistine believes that what he needs most is
a purple drape or turban of metaphysics, and will in no way allow these to be
taken from him: and yet he would look less ludicrous without this finery.
15
Fanatics. - However much fanatics may bear themselves as judges (and
not as the accused), all they have to say in favour of their gospel or their
master is in fact said in their own self-defence: for it reminds them,
involuntarily and at almost every moment, that they are exceptions that have
to legitimise themselves.
217
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
16
Good things seduce one to life. - All good things are powerful stimulants
to life, even a good book written against life.
17
Happiness of the historian. - 'When we hear ingenious metaphysicians
and backworldsmen talk, we others may feel that we are the poor in spirit",
but we also feel that ours is the kingdom of Heaven of change, with spring
and autumn, winter and summer, and that theirs is the backworld - with its
gray, frosty, unending mist and shadow.' - Thus a man spoke to himself while
walking in the morning sun: one in whom history again and again transforms
not only his spirit but also his heart, and who, in contrast to the
metaphysicians, is happy to harbour in himself, not 'an immortal soul', but
many mortal souls.
18
Three kinds of thinker. - There are mineral springs that gush, those that
flow, and those that trickle; and correspondingly three kinds of thinker. The
laity evaluates them according to the volume of water, the true judge
according to the content of the water, that is to say according to precisely that
in them that is not water.
19
The picture of life. - The task of painting the picture of life, however
often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nonetheless senseless: even
under the hands of the greatest of painter-thinkers all that has ever eventuated
is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own - and nothing else
is even possible. Something in course of becoming cannot be reflected as a
firm and lasting image, as a 'the', in something else in course of becoming.
20
Truth will have no other gods beside it. - Belief in truth begins with
doubt as to all truths believed in hitherto.
21
Where silence is demanded. - When one speaks of free-spiritedness as of
a highly perilous wandering on glaciers and polar seas, those who do not
wish to make this journey are offended, as though they had been reproached
with timorousness and weak knees. A difficult thing we do not feel up to is
not supposed even to be spoken of in our presence.
22
Historia in nuce.* - The most serious parody I have ever heard is the
following: 'in the beginning was the madness, and the madness was, by God!,
and God (divine) was the madness'.
23
Incurable. - An idealist is incorrigible: if he is ejected from his Heaven he
* Historia in nuce: History in a nutshell
218
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
makes an ideal out of Hell. Let him be disillusioned and behold! - he
will embrace this disillusionment just as fervently as a little while before he
embraced his hopes. Insofar as his tendency is among the great incurable
tendencies of human nature he is able to give rise to tragic destinies and
afterwards become the subject of tragedies: for tragedies have to do with
precisely what is incurable, ineluctable, inescapable in the fate and character
of man.
24
Applause itself as a continuation of the play. - Radiant eyes and a
benevolent smile is the kind of applause rendered to the whole great universal
comedy of existence - but at the same time a comedy within the comedy
aimed at seducing the other spectators to a plaudite amici'.*
25
Courage to be boring. - Whoever lacks the courage to allow himself and
his work to be found boring is certainly not a spirit of the first rank, whether
in the arts or the sciences. - A scoffer who was also, exceptionally, a thinker,
might take a glance at the world and its history and add: 'God lacked this
courage; he wanted to make all things too interesting, and he did so.'
26
From the thinker's innermost experience. - Nothing is more difficult for
man than to apprehend a thing impersonally: I mean to see it as a thing, not
as a person: one might question, indeed, whether it is at all possible for him
to suspend the clockwork of his person-constructing, person-inventing drive
even for a moment. He traffics even with ideas, though they be the most
abstract, as if they were individuals with whom one has to struggle, to whom
one was to ally oneself, whom one has to tend, protect and nourish. We have
only to spy on ourselves at that moment when we hear or discover a
proposition new to us. Perhaps it displeases us because of its defiant and
autocratic bearing; we unconsciously ask ourselves whether we shall not set a
counter-proposition as an enemy beside it, whether we can append to it a
'perhaps', a 'sometimes'; even the little word 'probably' does us good, because
it breaks the personally burdensome tyranny of the unconditional. If, on the
other hand, this new proposition approaches us in a milder shape, nice and
tolerant, humble, and sinking as it were into the arms of contradiction, we try
another way of testing our autocracy: what, can we not come to the assistance
of this weak creature, stroke and feed it, give it strength and fullness, indeed
truth and even unconditionality? Can we possibly be parental or knightly or
pitying towards it? - Then again, we behold a judgement here and a
judgement there, separated from one another, not regarding one another,
making no impression one upon the other: and we are tickled by the thought
of whether here a marriage might not be arranged, a conclusion
* plaudite amici: applaud, friends!
219
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
drawn, in the presentiment that, if a consequence should proceed from
this conclusion, the honour of it will fall not only to the two married
judgements but also to those who arranged the marriage. If, however, one can
get hold of that idea neither by means of defiance and ill-will nor by means
of good-will (if one holds it for true-), then one yields and pays it homage as
a prince and leader, accords it a seat of honour and speaks of it with pomp
and pride: for in its glitter one glitters too. Woe to him who seeks to darken
it; unless it itself should one day become suspicious to us: - then, unwearying
king-makers in the history of the spirit that we are, we hurl it from the throne
and immediately raise its opponent in its place. Let one ponder this and then
think on a little further: certainly no one will then speak of a 'drive to
knowledge in and for itself! - Why then does man prefer the true to the
untrue in this secret struggle with idea-persons, in this usually hidden idea-
marrying, idea-state-founding, idea- pedagogy, idea-tending of the sick and
poor? For the same reason as he practises justice in traffic with real persons:
now out of habit, heredity and training, originally because the true - as also
the fair and just - is more useful and more productive of honour than the
untrue. For in the realm of thought, power and fame are hard to maintain if
erected on the basis of error or lies: the feeling that such a building could at
some time or other fall down is humiliating to the self-conceit of its architect;
he is ashamed of the fragility of his material and, because he takes himself
more seriously than he does the rest of the world, wants to do nothing that is
not more enduring than the rest of the world. It is as a consequence of his
demand for truth that he embraces belief in personal immortality, that is to
say the most arrogant and defiant idea that exists, united as it is with the
hidden thought 'pereat mundus, dum ego salvus simV13 His work has
become for him his ego, he transforms himself into the intransitory, the all-
defiant. It is his immeasurable pride which wants to employ only the finest,
hardest stones for its work, that is to say truths or what it takes for truths. At
all times arrogance has rightly been designated the 'vice of the intellectual' -
yet without the motive power of this vice truth and the respect accorded it
would be miserably accommodated on this earth. That we are afraid of our
own ideas, concepts, words, but also honour ourselves in them and
involuntarily ascribe to them the capacity to instruct, despise, praise and
censure us, that we thus traffic with them as with free intelligent persons,
with independent powers, as equals with equals - it is in this that the strange
phenomenon I have called 'intellectual conscience' has its roots. - Thus here
too something moral of the highest sort has blossomed out of a black root.
27

Obscurantists. - The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is
not that it wants to darken individual understanding but that it wants to
blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.
Darkening of the understanding is, to be sure, often the means that serves it
to

13 ' pereat. , . simlet the world perish so long as I am safe.
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
thwart the enlightenment of the mind: sometimes, however, it employs
the opposite means and seeks through the highest refinement of the intellect
to induce a satiation with its fruits. Ingenious metaphysicians who prepare
the way for scepticism, and through their excessive acuteness invite mistrust
of acuteness, are excellent instruments in the hands of a more refined
obscurantism. - Is it possible that even Kant can be used to this end? that he
himself, indeed, according to his own notorious declaration, desired
something of the kind, at any rate for a time: to open a path for faith by
showing knowledge its limitations? - which, to be sure, he failed to do, just as
little as did his successors on the wolf- and fox-paths of this most refined and
dangerous obscurantism: the most dangerous of all, indeed, for here the black
art appears in a veil of light.
28
By what kind of philosophy art is corrupted. - When the mists of a
metaphysical-mystical philosophy succeed in rendering all aesthetic
phenomena opaque, it follows that they are also incapable of being evaluated
one against another, because each of them has become inexplicable. If,
however, they are never again compared with one another for the purpose of
evaluation, there at last arises a completely uncritical frame of mind, a blind
toleration, but likewise a steady decline in the enjoyment of art (which is
distinguished from the crude appeasement of a need only by a highly acute
tasting and distinguishing). The more this enjoyment declines, however, the
more the desire for art is transformed back to a vulgar hunger which the artist
then seeks to satisfy with ever coarser fare.
2
9
In Gethsemane. - The most grievous thing the thinker can say to the
artists is: 'What, could ye not watch with me one hour?'
30
At the loom. - The few who take pleasure in untying the knot of things
and unravelling its threads are actively opposed by those many (for example
all artists and women) who repeatedly try to tie it again, to entangle it and
thus transform what is comprehended into the uncomprehended and, where
possible, incomprehensible. Whatever else may eventuate from this - the
resulting knots and ravelled threads are always bound to look a trifle dirty,
because too many hands have been working and tugging at them.
31
In the desert of science. - To the man of science on his unassuming and
laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert,
there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems': with
bewitching, deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the
freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices,
and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all
the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific
221
life, so that he involuntarily presses forward. There are other natures, to
be sure, which stand still, as if bewildered by the fair illusion: the desert
swallows them up and they are dead to science. Other natures again, which
have often before experienced this subjective solace, may well grow
exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions
leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst - without
one's having been brought so much as a single step nearer to any kind of
spring.
32
Alleged 'real reality'. - When he describes the various professions - e.g.
that of the general, the silk-weaver, the seaman - the poet poses as knowing
of these things to the very bottom; indeed, when it comes to the conflict of
human actions and destinies he acts as though he had been present at the
weaving of the whole nexus of the world; to this extent he is a deceiver. And
he practises his deception only before those who do not know - and that is
why his deception is successful: the latter commend him for his profound and
genuine knowledge and in the end induce in him the delusion that he really
does know these things as well as do the individuals he is describing, indeed
as well as the great world-spider itself. Thus at last the deceiver becomes
honest and believes in his own veracity. People of sensibility, indeed, even
tell him to his face that he possesses a higher truth and veracity - for they are
for a time tired of reality and accept the poetic dream as a beneficent
relaxation and night for head and heart. What this dream shows them how
seems to them more valuable, because, as remarked, they find it more
beneficent: and men have always believed that that which seems more
valuable is the truer and more real. Poets conscious of possessing this power
deliberately set out to discredit that which is usually called reality and
transform it into the uncertain, apparent, spurious, sinful, suffering,
deceptive; they employ all the doubts that exist as to the limitations of
knowledge, all the extravagances of scepticism, to spread a wrinkled veil of
uncertainty over things: in order that after this darkening their sorcery and
soul-magic shall be unhesitatingly taken for the path to true truth', to 'real
reality'.
33
The desire to be just and the desire to be a judge. - Schopenhauer,
whose great knowledgeability about the human and all-too-human, whose
native sense of reality was not a little dimmed by the motley leopard-skin of
his metaphysics (which one must first remove from him if one is to discover
the real moralist genius beneath it) - Schopenhauer makes that striking
distinction which is very much more justified than he really dared to admit to
himself: 'the insight into the strict necessity of human actions is the boundary
line which divides philosophical heads from the others'. This mighty insight,
which from time to time he publicly avowed, he nonetheless counteracted in
his own mind with that prejudice which he still had in common with moral
men (not with the moralists) and which, quite innocuously and credulously,
he expressed as: 'the ultimate and true eluri-
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
dation of the inner nature of the whole of things must necessarily hang
closely together with that of the ethical significance of human behaviour^ -
which is absolutely not 'necessary' but, on the contrary, has been rejected by
precisely that proposition of the strict necessity of human actions, that is to
say, the unconditional unfreedom and unaccountability of the will.
Philosophical heads will thus distinguish themselves from the others through
their unbelief in the metaphysical significance of morality: and that may
establish a gulf between them of whose depth and unbridgeability the so
much lamented gulf between the 'cultured' and the 'uncultured', as it now
exists, gives hardly any idea. Many more backdoors, to be sure, which
'philosophical heads' have, like Schopenhauer himself, left open must be
recognised as useless: none leads outside, into the air of free will: every one
which has hitherto been slipped through reveals behind it every time a brazen
wall of fate: we are in prison, we can only dream ourselves free, not make
ourselves free. That this knowledge cannot for very much longer be resisted
is indicated by the despairing and incredible postures and contortions of
those who assail it, who still continue to wrestle with it. - This,
approximately, is how they go on: 'What, is no man accountable? And is
everything full of guilt and feeling of guilt? But someone or other has to be
the sinner, if it is impossible and no longer permissible to accuse and to
judge the individual, the poor wave in the necessary wave-play of becoming -
very well: then let the wave-play itself, becoming, be the sinner: here is free
will, here there can be accusing, condemning, atonement and expiation: then
let God be the sinner and man his redeemer: then let world history be guilt,
self- condemnation and suicide; thus will the offender become his own judge,
the judge his own executioner.' - This Christianity stood on its head - for
what else is it? - is the final lunge in the struggle of the theory of
unconditional morality with that of unconditional freedom - a horrible thing
if it were anything more than a logical grimace, more than an ugly gesture on
the part of the defeated idea - perhaps the death-throes of the despairing and
salvation-thirsty heart to which madness whispers: 'Behold, thou art the lamb
that beareth the sins of God.' - The error lies not only in the feeling 'I am
accountable', but equally in that antithesis 'I am not, but somebody has to be.'
- This is, in fact, not true: the philosopher thus has to say, as Christ did,
'judge not!' and the ultimate distinction between philosophical heads and the
others would be that the former desire to be just, the others to be a judge.
34
Sacrifice. - Do you think that the mark of the moral action is sacrifice? -
But reflect whether sacrifice is not present in every action that is done with
deliberation, in the worst as in the best.
35
Against the examiners of morality. - To know the strength of a man's
moral nature one has to know the best and the worst he is capable of in
thought and deed. But to learn that is impossible.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
36
Serpent's tooth. - We do not know whether or not we have a serpent's
tooth until someone has set his heel on us. A woman or mother would say:
until someone has set his heel on our darling, our child. - Our character is
determined even more by the lack of certain experiences than by that which
we experience.
37
Deception in love. - We forget a great deal of our own past and
deliberately banish it from our minds: that is to say, we want the image of
ourself that shines upon us out of the past to deceive us and flatter our self-
conceit - we are engaged continually on this self-deception. - And do you
think, you who speak so much of 'self-forgetfulness in love', of 'the merging
of the ego in the other person', and laud it so highly, do you think this is
anything essentially different? We shatter the mirror, impose ourself upon
someone we admire, and then enjoy our ego's new image, even though we
may call it by that other person's name - and this whole pro- ceding is
supposed not to be self-deception, not egoism! A strange delusion! - Those
who conceal something of themselves from themselves and those who
conceal themselves from themselves as a whole are, I think, alike in this, that
they perpetrate a robbery in the treasure-house of knowledge: from which we
can see against which transgression the injunction 'know thyself' is a
warning.
38
To him who denies his vanity. - He who denies he possesses vanity
usually possesses it in so brutal a form he instinctively shuts his eyes to it so
as not to be obliged to despise himself.
39
Why the stupid are so often malicious. - When our head feels too weak
to answer the objections of our opponent our heart answers by casting
suspicion on the motives behind his objections.
40
The art of the moral exceptions. - An art that exhibits and glorifies the
exceptional cases of morality - in which good becomes bad and the unjust
just - should be listened to only rarely : just as we now and then buy
something from the gipsies but do so in trepidation lest they should obtain
much more from us than the purchase is worth.
41
Enjoyment and non-enjoyment of poisons. - The only decisive argument
that has at all times prevented men from drinking a poison is not that it would
kill them but that it tasted nasty.
42
The world without feeling of sin. - If only those deeds were done which
engendered no bad conscience the human world would still look bad and
villainous enough: but not as sickly and wretched as it does now. - There
224
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
have at all times been sufficient bad men without a conscience: and
many good and fine men lack the pleasurable sensation of the good
conscience.
43
The conscientious. - It is more comfortable to follow one's conscience
than one's reason: for it offers an excuse and alleviation if what we undertake
miscarries - which is why there are always so many conscientious people and
so few reasonable ones.
44
Opposite ways of avoiding embitterment. - To one kind of temperament
it is useful to be able to expel its ill-humour in words: in speech it sweetens
itself. Another temperament, however, attains to the height of its bitterness
only through articulation: to this kind it is more advisable to have to swallow
something down: compulsion to constrain themselves before enemies or
superiors improves the character of such people and prevents them from
growing too acrid and sour.
45
Not too seriously. - To get bed-sores is unpleasant, but it is not evidence
against the validity of the cure that consigned one to bed. - Men who lived for
long outside themselves and finally turned to the philosophical inner life
know that the heart and the spirit can also get bed-sores. This is likewise no
argument against the mode of life they have chosen as a whole, but it makes a
few little exceptions and apparent relapses necessary.
46
The human 'thing in itself. - The thing most vulnerable and yet the most
unconquerable is human vanity: indeed, its strength increases, and can in the
end become gigantic, through being wounded.
47
Farce of many of the industrious. - Through an excess of exertion they
gain for themselves free time, and afterwards have no idea what to do with it
except to count the hours until it has expired.
48
Having much joy. - He who has much joy in his life must be a good man:
but he is perhaps not the cleverest, even though he has attained precisely that
which the cleverest man strives after with all his cleverness.
49
In the mirror of nature. - Has a man not been fairly exactly described
when one hears that he likes to wander between fields of tall yellow com, that
he prefers the colours of the woods and flowers in glowing and golden
autumn because they intimate greater beauty than ever nature achieved, that
he feels quite at home among great thick-leaved nut-trees as though among
his blood relations, that in the mountains his greatest joy is to encounter those
remote little lakes out of which solitude itself seems to gaze
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
up at him, that he loves that gray reposefulness of twilight mist that
creeps up to the windows on autumn and early winter evenings and shuts out
every soulless sound as though with velvet curtains, that he feels the unhewn
rocks to be unwillingly mute witnesses to times primeval and has revered
them from a child, and finally that the sea, with its rippling snake-skin and
beast-of-prey beauty, is and remains alien to him? - Yes, something of this
man has therewith been described, to be sure, but the mirror of nature says
nothing of the fact that the same man, with all his idyllic sensibility (and not
even 'in spite of it'), could be somewhat loveless, niggardly and conceited.
Horace, who understood such things as this, placed the tenderest feeling for
country life in the mouth and soul of a Roman usurer, in the celebrated
'beatus ille qui procul negotiis'.*
50
Power without victories. - The strongest knowledge (that of the total
unfreedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it
always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.
51
Joy and error. - One person has a beneficent effect on his friends
involuntarily through his nature, another does so voluntarily through
individual actions. Although the former counts as the higher, yet only the
latter is associated with joy and a good conscience - the joy, that is, attending
the performance of good works, which rests on belief in the voluntary nature
of our good or wicked acts, that is to say on an error.
52
It is foolish to act unjustly. - An injustice we have perpetrated is much
harder to bear than an injustice perpetrated against us (not precisely on moral
grounds, nota bene -); the actor is always the actual sufferer, if, that is to say,
he is accessible to pangs of conscience or has the insight to see that through
his action he has armed society against him and isolated himself. That is why
we ought, purely for the sake of our inner happiness, that is to say so as not
to lose our ease and quite apart from the commandments of religion and
morality, to guard ourselves against committing injustice even more than
against experiencing injustice: for the latter carries with it the consolation of
the good conscience and hope of revenge and of the sympathy and applause
of the just, indeed of the whole of society, who live in fear of the evil-doer. -
There are not a few who understand the unclean art of self-duping by means
of which every unjust act they perform is reminted into an injustice done to
them by others and the exceptional right of self-defence reserved to what
they themselves have done: the purpose being greatly to ease the weight of
their own burden.
53
Envy with or without mouthpiece. - Commonplace envy is accustomed to
cackle as soon as the envied hen has laid an egg: it thereby relieves itself *
'beatus ... negotiis*: happy the man who, far from business cares ... (Horace: Epodes II).
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
and grows gentler. But there exists a yet deeper envy: in such a case it
becomes deathly silent and, wishing that every mouth would now become
sealed, grows ever angrier that precisely this is what is not happening. Silent
envy grows in silence.
54
Anger as spy. - Anger empties out the soul and brings even its dregs to
light. That is why, if we know no other way of discovering the truth of the
matter, we must know how to put our acquaintances, our adherents and
opponents, into a rage, so as to learn all that is really being thought and
undertaken against us.
55
Defence presents greater moral difficulty than attack. - The real heroic
deed and masterpiece of the good man lies not in his attacking the cause and
continuing to love the person but in the much more difficult feat of defending
his own cause without inflicting and desiring to inflict with bitter anguish the
person attacked. The sword of attack is broad and honest, that of defence
usually comes to a needle-point.
56
Honest about honesty. - He who is publicly honest about himself ends
by priding himself a little on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he
is honest - for the same reason another prefers appearance and dissimulation.
57
Hot coals. - Heaping hot coals on another's head is usually
misunderstood and miscarries, because the other likewise knows he is in
possession of the right and for his part has also thought of heaping coals.
58
Dangerous books. - Somebody remarked: 'I can tell by my own reaction
to it that this book is harmful.' But let him only wait and perhaps one day he
will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by
bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible. - Altered
opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do
illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which
with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and
unrecognizable.
59
Feigned sympathy. - We feign sympathy when we want to demonstrate
our superiority to feelings of hostility: but usually in vain. When we notice
this we experience a sharp rise in those hostile sensations.
60
Open contradiction often reconciliatory. - When someone publicly
declares that he differs from a celebrated party leader or teacher in a matter
of dogma all the world believes that at that moment he must harbour a
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dislike of him. But sometimes it is at precisely that moment that he
ceases to dislike him: he ventures to set himself up beside him and is free of
the torment of unspoken jealousy.
61
Seeing one's light shine. - In dark states of distress, sickness or debt we
are glad when we perceive others still shining and they perceive in us the
bright disk of the moon. In this indirect way we participate in our own
capacity to illumine.
62
Joying with. - The serpent that stings us means to hurt us and rejoices as
it does so; the lowest animal can imagine the pain of others. But to imagine
the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest
animals, and among them it is accessible only to the choicest exemplars -
thus a rare humanum:14 so that there have been philosophers who have
denied the existence of joying with.
63
Pregnancy after birth. - Those who have arrived at their works and
deeds they know not how usually go about afterwards all the more pregnant
with them: as though later to prove that these children are theirs and not
those of chance.
64
Hard-hearted out of vanity. - Just as justice is so often a cloak for
weakness, so fair thinking but weak men are sometimes led by ambition to
dissimulation and deliberately behave unjustly and harshly so as to leave
behind them an impression of strength.
65
Humiliation. - If anyone given a whole sack of advantages finds in it
even one grain of humiliation he cannot help making the worst of a good
bargain.
66
Extreme of Herostratism. - There could be Herostratuses who burned
down their own temple where their images were venerated.
67
The diminutive world. - The circumstance that everything weak and in
need of assistance speaks to our heart has produced in us the habit of
characterizing everything that speaks to our heart with diminishing and
enfeebling words - so as to make it seem weak and in need of assistance.
68
Pity's bad qualities. - Pity has a singular piece of impudence for its
companion: for, because it is absolutely determined to render assistance, it
experiences no perplexity as to either the means of cure or the nature and

14 humanum: human quality
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
cause of the illness, but gaily sets about quackdoctoring at the health and
reputation of its patient.
69
Importunity. - There also exists an importunate attitude towards works;
and to associate oneself imitatively on a Du and Du basis with the most
illustrious works of all time while still no more than a youth reveals a
complete lack of shame. - Others are importunate only through ignorance:
they do not know whom they are dealing with - as, for instance, is often the
case with philologists old and young in regard to the works of the Greeks.
70
The will is ashamed of the intellect. - We draw up rational plans in all
coldness to counter our emotions: then, however, we commit the crudest
blunders with respect to these plans, because at the moment we are supposed
to act we are often overcome with shame at the coldness and circumspection
with which we conceived them. And what we then do is precisely the
irrational - out of that species of defiant magnanimity that every emotion
brings with it.
71
Why sceptics dislike morality. - He who takes his morality with high
seriousness is angry with the sceptics in the domain of morals: for here where
he is expending all his strength others are supposed to stand astonished, not
inquire and express doubts. - Then there are natures in whom belief in
morality is the last remnant of morality remaining to them; they likewise
oppose the sceptics, if possible even more passionately.
72
Bashfulness. - All moralists are bashful, because they know that as soon
as people notice their inclinations they will be taken for spies and traitors.
Then they are in general aware of being feeble in action; for in the midst of
what they are doing their attention is largely distracted from it by the motives
behind it.
73
A danger to general morality. - People who are at the same time noble
and honest accomplish the feat of deifying every piece of devilry their
honesty concocts and for a time making the scales of moral judgement stand
still.
74
Bitterest error. - It offends us beyond forgiving when we discover that
where we were convinced we were loved we were in fact regarded only as a
piece of household furniture and room decoration for the master of the house
to exercise his vanity upon before his guests.
75
Love and duality. - What is love but understanding and rejoicing at the fact
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that another lives, feels and acts in a way different from and opposite to
ours? If love is to bridge these antitheses through joy it may not deny or seek
to abolish them. - Even self-love presupposes an unblendable duality (or
multiplicity) in one person.
76
Interpreting by dreams. - That which we sometimes do not know or feel
precisely while awake - whether we have a good or a bad conscience towards
a particular person - the dream informs us of without any ambiguity.
77
Excess. - The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
78
Reward and punishment. - No one utters an accusation without there
being present in his mind the thought of revenge and punishment - even when
he accuses his fate, or indeed himself. - All complaining is accusation, all
rejoicing is praise: whether we do the one or the other we are always making
somebody responsible.
79
Twice unjust. - We sometimes promote truth through a twofold injustice,
namely when, being unable to see both sides of a thing at the same time, we
see and represent them one after the other, but in such a way that we always
misjudge or deny the other side in the delusion that what we are seeing is the
whole truth.
80
Mistrust. - Mistrust of oneself does not always go about shy and
uncertain but sometimes as though mad with rage: it has got drunk so as not
to tremble.
81
Philosophy of the parvenu. - If you want to become a person of standing
you must hold your shadow too in honour.
82
Knowing how to wash oneself clean. - You must leam how to emerge out
of unclean situations cleaner, and if necessary to wash yourself with dirty
water.
83
Indulging oneself. - The more a person indulges himself the less others
are willing to indulge him.
84
The innocent knave. - The path to every kind of vice and knavishness is a
slow one proceeded along step by step. He who walks it is, by the time he
reaches its end, wholly free of the insect-swarms of the bad conscience, and,
although wholly infamous, he nonetheless goes in innocence.
230
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85
Making plans. - To make plans and project designs brings with it many
good sensations; and whoever had the strength to be nothing but a forger of
plans his whole life long would be a very happy man: but he would
occasionally have to take a rest from this activity by carrying out a plan - and
then comes the vexation and the sobering up.
86
The eyes with which we behold the ideal. - Every proficient man is stuck
in his proficiency and cannot see freely beyond it. If he were not very
imperfect in other respects his virtue would prevent him from attaining to any
spiritual and moral freedom at all. Our deficiencies are the eyes with which
we behold the ideal.
87
False praise. - We afterwards feel far more pangs of conscience over
false praise than we do over false blame, probably merely because with too
great praise we have compromised our judgement far worse than with too
great, even unjust blame.
88
How one dies is a matter of indifference. - The whole way in which a
person thinks of death during the high tide of his life and strength bears, to be
sure, very eloquent witness as to that which is called his character; but the
hour of death itself, his bearing on the deathbed, hardly does so at all. The
exhaustion of expiring existence, especially when old people die, the irregular
or insignificant nourishment of the brain during this last period, the
occasional very bad attacks of pain, the new and untried nature of the whole
condition and all too often the coming and going of superstitious impressions
and fears, as if dying were a very important thing and bridges of the most
terrible description were here being crossed - all this does not permit us to
employ dying as evidence as to the living. It is, moreover, not true that the
dying are in general more honest than the living: almost everyone is, rather,
tempted by the solemn bearing of the bystanders, the streams of tears and
feeling held back or let flow, into a now conscious, now unconscious comedy
of vanity. The seriousness with which every dying person is treated has
certainly been for many a poor despised devil the most exquisite pleasure of
his entire life and a kind of indemnification and part-payment for many
deprivations.
89
Custom and its sacrifices. - The origin of custom lies in two ideas: 'the
community is worth more than the individual' and 'an enduring advantage is
to be preferred to a transient one'; from which it follows that the enduring
advantage of the community is to take unconditional precedence over the
advantage of the individual, especially over his momentary wellbeing but also
over his enduring advantage and even over his survival. Even if
231
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
the individual suffers from an arrangement which benefits the whole,
even if he languishes under it, perishes by it - the custom must be maintained
the sacrifice offered up. Such an attitude originates, however, only in those
who are not the sacrifice - for the latter urges that, in his own case, the
individual could be worth more than the many, likewise that present
enjoyment, the moment in paradise, is perhaps to be rated higher than an
insipid living-on in a painless condition of comfort. The philosophy of the
sacrificial beast, however, is always noised abroad too late: and so we
continue on with custom and morality [Sittlichkeit]: which latter is nothing
other than simply a feeling for the whole content of those customs under
which we live and have been raised - and raised, indeed, not as an individual,
but as a member of the whole, as a cipher in a majority. - So it comes about
that through his morality the individual outvotes himself.
90
The good and the good conscience. - Do you think that every good thing
has always had a good conscience? - Science, which is certainly something
good, entered the world without one, and quite destitute of pathos, but did so
rather in secret, by crooked and indirect paths, hooded or masked like a
criminal and at least always with the feeling of dealing in contraband. The
good conscience has as a preliminary stage the bad conscience - the latter is
not its opposite: for everything good was once new, consequently unfamiliar,
contrary to custom, immoral, and gnawed at the heart of its fortunate inventor
like a worm.
91-
Success sanctifies the ends. - We do not hesitate to take the path to a
virtue even when we are clearly aware that the motives which impel us -
utility, personal comfort, fear, considerations of health, of fame or reputation
- are nothing but egoism. These motives are called selfish and ignoble: very
well, but when they incite us to a virtue - to, for example, renunciation,
dutifulness, orderliness, thrift, measure and moderation - we pay heed to
them, whatever they may be called! For if we attain what they summon us to,
achieved virtue ennobles the remoter motives for our action through the pure
air it lets us breathe and the psychical pleasure it communicates, and when we
later perform these same actions it is no longer from the same coarse motives
that led us to perform them before. - That is why education ought to compel
to virtue, as well as it can and according to the nature of the pupil: virtue
itself, as the sunshine and summer air of the soul, may then perform its own
work on the soul and bestow maturity and sweetness upon it.
92
Affecters of Christianity, not Christians. - Just look at your Christianity!
- To irritate men you praise 'God and his saints'; and when, conversely, you
desire to praise men you go to such lengths that you must irritate God and his
saints. -1 wish you would at least learn Christian manners, since you are so
greatly wanting in the politeness of the Christian heart.
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93
Natural features of the pious and the impious. - A wholly pious man
must be an object of reverence to us: but so must a man wholly permeated
with a sincere impiety. If with men of the latter sort we are as though in the
proximity of high mountains where the mightiest streams have their origin,
with the pious we are as though among succulent, wide-shadowed, restful
trees.
94
Judicial murders. - The two greatest judicial murders in world history
are, not to mince words, disguised and well disguised suicides. In both cases
the victim wanted to die; in both cases he employed the hand of human
injustice to drive the sword into his own breast.
95
'Love' - The subtlest artifice which Christianity has over the other
religions is a word: it spoke of love. Thus it became the lyrical religion
(whereas in their two other creations the Semites have given the world
heroic-epic religions). There is in the word love something so ambiguous and
suggestive, something which speaks to the memory and to future hope, that
even the meanest intelligence and the coldest heart still feels something of the
lustre of this word. The shrewdest woman and the commonest man think
when they hear it of the relatively least selfish moments of their whole life,
even if Eros has paid them only a passing visit; and those countless numbers
who never experience love, of parents, or children, or lovers, especially
however the men and women of sublimated sexuality, have made their find in
Christianity.
96
Realized Christianity. - Even within Christianity there exists an
Epicurean point-of-view: it proceeds from the idea that God could demand of
man, his creature and likeness, only that which it is possible for the latter to
accomplish, and that Christian virtue and perfection must therefore be
achievable and frequently achieved. Now, the belief that we love our enemy,
for example - even when it is only belief, fancy, and in no way a
psychological reality (is not love, that is to say) - undoubtedly makes us
happy so long as it really is believed (why? as to that the psychologist and the
Christian will, to be sure, think differently). And thus earthly life may,
through the belief, I mean the fancy, that one has fulfilled not only the
demand to love one's enemy but all other Christian demands as well, and has
really appropriated and incorporated divine perfection according to the
commandment 'be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect', in fact
become a life of bliss. Error is thus able to make Christ's promise come true.
97
On the future of Christianity. - As to the disappearance of Christianity,
and as to which regions it will fade most slowly in, one can allow oneself a
conjecture when one considers on what grounds and where Protestantism
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
took root so impetuously. As is well known, it promised to do the same
things as the old church did but to do them much cheaper: no expensive
masses for the soul, pilgrimages, priestly pomp and luxury; it spread
especially among the northerly nations, which were not so deeply rooted in
the symbolism and love of forms of the old church as were those of the south:
for with the latter a much stronger religious paganism continued to live on in
Christianity, while in the north Christianity signified a breach with and
antithesis of the old native religion and was from the beginning a matter more
for the head than for the senses, though for precisely that reason also more
fanatical and defiant in times of peril. If the uprooting of Christianity begins
in the head then it is obvious where it will first start to disappear: in precisely
the place, that is to say, where it will also defend itself most strenuously.
Elsewhere it will bend but not break, be stripped of its leaves but put forth
new leaves in their place - because there it is the senses and not the head that
have taken its side. It is the senses, however, that entertain the belief that
even meeting the cost of the church, high though it is, is nonetheless a
cheaper and more comfortable arrangement than existing under a strict
regime of work and payment would be: for what price does one not place
upon leisure (or lazing about half the time) once one has become accustomed
to it! The senses raise against a dechristianized world the objection that too
much work would have to be done in it, and the yield of leisure would be too
small: they take the side of the occult, that is to say - they prefer to let God
work for them (oremus nos, deus laboretl).*
98
Honesty and play-acting among unbelievers. - There exists no book that
expresses so candidly or contains such an abundance of that which does
everybody good once in a while - the joyful enthusiasm, ready for any
sacrifice, which we feel when we believe in and behold our 'truth' - than does
the book that speaks of Christ: a perspicacious man can learn from it all the
expedients by which a book can be made into a universal book, a friend of
everyone, and especially that master expedient of representing everything as
having already been discovered, with nothing still on the way and as yet
uncertain. All influential books try to leave behind this kind of impression:
the impression that the widest spiritual and psychical horizon has here been
circumscribed and that every star visible now or in the future will have to
revolve around the sun that shines here. - Must it therefore not be the case
that the causes that make such books as this influential will render every
purely scientific book poor in influence? Is the latter not condemned to live a
lowly existence among the lowly, and finally to be crucified, never to rise
again? Are all honest men of science not 'poor in spirit' by comparison with
that which religious men proclaim of their 'knowledge', of their 'holy' spirit?
Can any religion demand more renunciation, draw the egoistic more
inexorably out of themselves, than science does? - - Thus and in similar
ways, and in any event with a cer-
* oremus ... laboretl: let us pray, let God labour!
tain amount of play-acting, may we speak if we have to defend ourselves
before believers; for it is hardly possible to conduct a defence without
employing some degree of play-acting. Among ourselves, however, we must
speak more honestly; here we may employ a freedom which, in their own
interests, everyone is not permitted even to understand. Away, therefore, with
the monk's cowl of renunciation! with the humble mien! Much more and
much better; that is how our truth sounds! If science were not united with the
joy of knowledge and the utility of what is known, what interest would we
have in science? If a little faith, hope and charity did not lead our soul
towards knowledge, what else would draw us to science? And if the ego does
indeed have no place in science, the happy, inventive ego, even that honest
and industrious ego already mentioned, has a very considerable place in the
republic of scientific men. Respect, the pleasure of those we wish well or
revere, sometimes fame and a modest personal immortality are the
achievable rewards of this depersonalization, not to speak of lesser objectives
and remunerations, even though it is on their account that most have sworn
and continue to swear allegiance to the laws of that republic and of science in
general. If we had not remained to some extent unscientific men what
meaning could science possibly have for us? Taken as a whole and expressed
without qualification: to a purely cognitive being knowledge would be a
matter of indifference. - What distinguishes us from the pious and the
believers is not the quality but the quantity of belief and piety; we are
contented with less. But if the former should challenge us; then be contented
and appear to be contented! - then we might easily reply: 'We are, indeed, not
among the least contented. You, however, if your belief makes you blessed
then appear to be blessed! Your faces have always been more injurious to
your belief than our objections have! If those glad tidings of your Bible were
written in your faces you would not need to insist so obstinately on the
authority of that book: your works, your actions ought continually to render
the Bible superfluous, through you a new Bible ought to be continually in
course of creation! As things are, however, all your apologies for Christianity
have their roots in your lack of Christianity; with your defence plea you
inscribe your own bill of indictment. But if you should wish to emerge out of
this insufficiency of Christianity, then ponder the experience of two
millennia: which, clothed in the modesty of a question, speaks thus: "if Christ
really intended to redeem the world, must he not be said to have failed?"'
99
The poet as signpost to the future. - That poetic power available to men
of today which is not used up in the depiction of life ought to be dedicated,
not so much to the representation of the contemporary world or to the
reanimation and imaginative reconstruction of the past, but to signposting the
future: - not, though, as if the poet could, like a fabulous economist,
figuratively anticipate the kind of conditions nations and societies would
prosper better under and how they could then be brought about. What
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
he will do, rather, is emulate the artists of earlier times who
imaginatively developed the existing images of the gods and imaginatively
develop a fair image of man; he will scent out those cases in which, in the
midst of our modern world and reality and without any artificial withdrawal
from or warding off of this world, the great and beautiful soul is still possible,
still able to embody itself in the harmonious and well-proportioned and thus
acquire visibility, duration and the status of a model, and in so doing through
the excitation of envy and emulation help to create the future. The poems of
such poets will be distinguished by the fact that they appear to be secluded
and secured against the fire and breath of the passions: the incorrigible error,
the shattering of the entire human instrument, mocking laughter and gnashing
of teeth, and everything tragic and comic in the old customary sense will be
experienced as a tedious, archaisizing coarsening of the human image when
confronted with his new art. Strength, goodness, mildness, purity and an
involuntary inborn moderation in the characters and their actions: a level
ground which it is repose and joy to the feet to walk upon: countenances and
events mirroring a luminous sky: knowledge and art blended to a new unity:
the spirit dwelling together with its sister, the soul, without presumptuousness
or jealousy and evoking from what divides them not impatience and
contention but a graceful seriousness: - all this would make up the general
and all-embracing golden ground upon which alone the tender distinctions
between the different embodied ideals would then constitute the actual
painting - that of the ever increasing elevation of man. - Many a path to this
poetry of the future starts out from Goethe: but it requires good pathfinders
and above all a much greater power than present-day poets - that is to say the
innocuous depicters of the semi-animal and of immaturity and abnormality
confused with force and naturalness - possess.
100
The muse as Penthesilea.* - 'Rather perish than be a woman who does
not charm.' When once the Muse thinks like that the end of her art is again in
sight. But its termination can be tragic as well as comic.
101
Detour to the beautiful. - If the beautiful is at the same time the
gladdening - and the Muses once sang that it is - then the utilitarian is the
frequently necessary detour to the beautiful: it can rightly repulse the
shortsighted censure of those men who cleave to the moment, are unwilling
to wait and think to attain to every good thing without a detour.
102
An excuse for many a fault. - The ceaseless desire to create on the part of
the artist, together with his ceaseless observation of the world outside him,
prevent him from becoming better and more beautiful as a person, that is to
say from creating himself - except, that is, if his self-respect is suf-
* Penthesilea: in Greek mythology, an Amazonian queen killed by Achilles in the Trojan
war.
236
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
ficiently great to compel him to exhibit himself before others as being as
great and beautiful as his works increasingly are. In any event, he possesses
only a fixed quantity of strength: that of it which he expends upon himself -
how could he at the same time expend it on his work? - and the reverse.
103
Satisfying the best. - If one has 'satisfied the best of one's age' with one's
art, this is an indication that one will not satisfy the best of the next age with
it: one will 'live to all future ages', to be sure - the applause of the best will
ensure one's fame.
104
Of one substance. - If we are of one substance with a book or a work of
art we are quite convinced it must be excellent, and we are offended if others
find it ugly, over-spiced or inflated.
105
Language and feeling. - That language is not given us for the
communication of feeling is demonstrated by the fact that all simple men are
ashamed to seek words for their profounder excitations: these find expression
only in actions, and even here the man blushes if the other appears to divine
their motives. Among poets, to whom the gods have in general denied this
sense of shame, the nobler are nonetheless inclined to be monosyllabic in the
language of feeling and give evidence of acting under constraint: while the
actual poets of feeling are in practical life mostly quite shameless.
106
Error regarding privation. - He who has not long disaccustomed himself
to an art but is still at home in it has not the remotest notion how little one is
deprived of when one lives without this art.
107
Three-quarter strength. - If a work is to make an impression of health its
originator must expend at most three-quarters of his strength on it. If, on the
contrary, he has gone to the limit of his capacity, the tension in the work
produces in its audience a feeling of agitation and distress. All good things
have something easygoing about them and lie like cows in the meadow.
108
Turning away hunger. - To the hungry man delicate food is as good as
but no better than coarse: thus the more pretentious artist will never think of
inviting the hungry to his repast.
109
Living without art and wine. - Works of art are like wine: it is better if
one has need of neither, keeps to water and, through one's own inner fire and
sweetness of soul, again and again transforms the water into wine on one's
own account.
237
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
110
The robber-genius. - The robber-genius in the arts, who knows how to
deceive even discriminating spirits, originates when anyone has from his
youth on naively regarded every good thing not expressly the legal property
of some particular person as free for all to plunder. Now, all the good things
of past ages and masters lie freely about, hedged round and guarded by the
reverential awe of the few who know them: by virtue of the lack of this
feeling in him, the robber-genius is able to bid these few defiance and to
accumulate for himself an abundance of riches that itself evokes reverence
and awe in its turn.
m
To the poets of the great cities. - In the gardens of contemporary poetry
one notices that they stand too close to the sewers of the great cities: the scent
of flowers is blended with something that betrays nausea and putridity. - I ask
in sorrow: when you want to baptise some fair and innocent sensation, do
you, you poets, always have to call on dirt and witticisms to be the
godfathers? Do you absolutely need to set a comical devils-cap on the head of
your noble goddess? But why do you feel this need, this compulsion? -
Precisely because you dwell too close to the sewers.
112
Of the salt of speech. - No one has yet explained why the Greek writers
made so thrifty a use of the means of expression available to them in such
unheard-of strength and abundance that every book that comes after them
seems by comparison lurid, glaring and exaggerated. - One understands that
the use of salt is more sparing both in the icy regions near the North Pole and
in the hottest countries, but that the dwellers of the coasts and plains in the
more temperate zones use it most liberally. Is it not likely that, since their
intellect was colder and clearer but their passions very much more tropical
than ours, the Greeks would have had less need of salt and spices than we
have?
3
The most liberated writer. - How, in a book for free spirits, should there
be no mention of Laurence Sterne,* whom Goethe honoured as the most
liberated spirit of his century! Let us content ourselves here simply with
calling him the most liberated spirit of all time, in comparison with whom all
others seem stiff, square, intolerant and boorishly direct. What is to be
praised in him is not the closed and transparent but the 'endless melody': if
with this expression we may designate an artistic style in which the fixed
form is constantly being broken up, displaced, transposed back into
indefiniteness, so that it signifies one thing and at the same time another.
Sterne is the great master of ambiguity - this word taken in a far wider sense
than is usually done when it is accorded only a sexual signification. The
reader who demands to know exactly what Sterne really thinks of a thing,
whether he is making a serious or a laughing face, must be given
* Laurence Sterne (1713-68): English writer, the author of Tristram Shandy.
238
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
up for lost: for he knows how to encompass both in a single facial
expression; he likewise knows how, and even wants to be in the right and in
the wrong at the same time, to knot together profundity and farce. His
digressions are at the same time continuations and further developments of
the story; his aphorisms are at the same time an expression of an attitude of
irony towards all sententiousness, his antipathy to seriousness is united with a
tendency to be unable to regard anything merely superficially. Thus he
produces in the right reader a feeling of uncertainty as to whether one is
walking, standing or lying: a feeling, that is, closely related to floating. He,
the supplest of authors, communicates something of this suppleness to his
reader. Indeed, Sterne unintentionally reverses these roles, and is sometimes
as much reader as author; his book resembles a play within a play, an
audience observed by another audience. One has to surrender unconditionally
to Sterne's caprices - always in the expectation, however, that one will not
regret doing so. - It is strange and instructive to see how as great a writer as
Diderot* adopted this universal ambiguity of Sterne's: though he did so, of
course, ambiguously - and thus truly in accord with the Stemean humour.
Was he, in his Jacques le fataliste, imitating Sterne, or was he mocking and
parodying him? - it is impossible finally to decide: and perhaps precisely this
was Diderot's intention. It is precisely this dubiety that makes the French
unjust to one of their greatest masters (who can challenge comparison with
any other of any time): for the French are too serious for humour, and
especially for this taking of humour humorously. - Is it necessary to add that,
of all great writers, Sterne is the worst model, the author who ought least to
be imitated, or that even Diderot had to pay for the risk he took? That which
good French writers, and before them certain Greeks and Romans, wanted
and were able to do in prose is precisely the opposite of what Sterne wants
and is able to do: for, as the masterly exception, he raises himself above that
which all artists in writing demand of themselves: discipline, compactness,
simplicity, restraint in motion and deportment. - Unhappily, Sterne the man
seems to have been only too closely related to Sterne the writer: his squirrel-
soul leaped restlessly from branch to branch; he was familiar with everything
from the sublime to the rascally; he had sat everywhere, and always with the
same shamelessly watering eyes and play of sensibility on his features. If
language does not start back at such a juxtaposition, he possessed a hard-
hearted good-naturedness; and in the enjoyment of a baroque, indeed
depraved imagination he almost exhibited the bashful charm of innocence.
Such an ambiguousness become flesh and soul, such a free-spiritedness in
every fibre and muscle of the body, have as he possessed these qualities
perhaps been possessed by no other man.
114
Select reality. - Just as the good prose-writer employs only words that
* Denis Diderot (1713-84): French essayist and dramatist; a leading spirit of the
Enlightenment.
239
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
belong to common speech, but by no means all the words that belong to
it - this is precisely how select or high style originates - so the good poet of
the future will depict only reality and completely ignore all those fantastic,
superstitious, half-mendacious, faded subjects upon which earlier poets
demonstrated their powers. Only reality, but by no means every reality! - he
will depict a select reality!
5
Degenerate varieties of art. - Beside the genuine species of art, those of
great repose and those of great motion, there exist degenerate varieties - art in
search of repose and excited and agitated art: both would like their weakness
to be taken for strength and that they themselves should be mistaken for the
genuine species.
116
No colours for painting the hero. - Poets and artists who really belong to
the present love to lay their colours on to a background flickering in red,
green, grey and gold, on to the background of nervous sensuality: in this the
children of this century are skilled. The disadvantage of it - if one beholds
these paintings with eyes other than those of this century - is that when they
paint their grandest figures they seem to have something flickering,
trembling, giddy about them: so that one simply cannot credit them with
heroic deeds, but at the most with boastful misdeeds posing as heroism.
117
Overladen. - The florid style in art is the consequence of a poverty of
organizing power in the face of a superabundance of means and ends. - In the
earliest stages of art we sometimes find the exact opposite.
118
Pulchrum est paucorum hominum.* - History and experience tell us that
the monstrosity which secretly rouses the imagination and bears it beyond
actuality and the everyday is older and of more abundant growth than the
beautiful and the cult of beauty in art - and that if the sense for the beautiful
grows dim it at once breaks exuberantly out again. It seems that the great
majority of men have greater need of it than they do of the beautiful: no
doubt because it contains a stronger narcotic.
119
Origins of the taste for works of art. - If we think of the original germs
of the artistic sense and ask ourselves what different kinds of pleasure are
evoked by the firstlings of art, for example among savage peoples, we
discover first of all the pleasure of understanding what another means', here
art is a kind of solving of a riddle that procures for the solver enjoyment of
his own quick perspecuity. - Then, the rudest work of art calls to mind that
which has been pleasurable in actual experience and to this extent produces
present pleasure, for example whenever the artist has depicted a
* Pulchrum ... hominum: Beauty is for the few.
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
hunt, a victory, a wedding. - Again, what is represented can arouse,
move, enflame the auditor, for example through the glorification of revenge
or danger. Here the pleasure lies in the arousal as such, in the victory over
boredom. - Even recollection of the unpleasurable, insofar as it has been
overcome, or insofar as it makes us ourselves interesting to the auditor as a
subject of art (as when a minstrel describes the misfortunes of an intrepid
seafarer), can produce great pleasure, which pleasure is then attributed to art.
- That pleasure which arises at the sight of anything regular and symmetrical
in lines, points, rhythms, is already of a more refined sort; for a certain
similarity in appearance evokes the feeling for everything orderly and regular
in life which alone we have, after all, to thank for all our wellbeing: in the
cult of symmetry we thus unconsciously honour regularity and proportion as
the source of our happiness hitherto; pleasure is a kind of prayer of
thanksgiving. Only when we have become to some extent satiated with this
last-mentioned pleasure does there arise the even subtler feeling that
enjoyment might also lie in breaking through the orderly and symmetrical;
when, for example, it seems enticing to seek the rational in the apparently
irrational: whereby this feeling is then, as a kind of reading of aesthetic
riddles, revealed as a higher species of the pleasure in art referred to first of
all. - Whoever continues on in this train of thought will realize what kind of
hypotheses for the explanation of aesthetic phenomena are here being
avoided on principle.
120
Not too close. - It is a disadvantage for good ideas if they follow upon
one another too quickly; they get in one another's way. - That is why the
greatest artists and writers have always made abundant use of the mediocre.
121
Coarseness and weakness. - Artists of all ages have made the discovery
that a certain strength lies in coarseness, and that many who would no doubt
like to be coarse are unable to be so; they have likewise discovered that many
kinds of weakness make a strong impression on the feelings. From these
discoveries there have been derived not a few artifices and surrogates which
even the greatest and most conscientious artists have found it hard wholly to
abstain from.
122
Good memory. - Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his
memory is too good.
Making hungry instead of stilling hunger. - Great artists believe that
through their art they have taken a soul entirely into their possession and
filled it utterly: in truth, and often to their painful disappointment, this soul
has only been rendered all the more spacious and unfillable, so that now ten
greater artists could plunge into its depths without satisfying it.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
Artist's fear. - The fear that the figures they create will not produce the
appearance of being alive can mislead artists of declining taste into
constructing them in such a way that they behave as though mad: just as, on
the other hand, the same fear induced the Greek artists of the first dawn to
bestow even on the dying and the gravely injured that smile which they knew
to be the liveliest indication of life - quite unconcerned at what such people
on the edge of life would look like in reality.
125
The circle must be closed. - He who has followed a philosophy or a
species of art to the end of its course and then around the end will grasp from
his inner experience why the masters and teachers who came afterwards
turned away from it, often with an expression of deprecation. For, though the
circle has to be circumscribed, the individual, even the greatest, sits firmly on
his point of the periphery with an inexorable expression of obstinacy, as
though the circle ought never to be closed.
126
Art of the past and the soul of the present. - Because every art becomes
capable of expressing states of soul with ever increasing suppleness and
refinement, with greater and greater passion and intensity, later masters
spoiled by these means of expression feel a sense of discomfort in the
presence of works of art of earlier ages, as though what was wrong with the
ancients was merely that they lacked these means of expressing their souls
clearly, or perhaps even were missing only a few technical accomplishments;
and they think they have to put things right here - for they believe in the
equality, indeed in the complete unity of souls. In truth, however, the soul of
this master himself was a different soul, greater perhaps, but in any case
colder and still averse to what we find stimulating and lively: moderation,
symmetry, contempt for the joyful and pleasing, an unconscious astringency
and morning chilliness, an avoidance of passion as though it will prove the
ruin of art - this is what constituted the mind and morality of the older
masters, and they selected and breathed life into their means of expression,
not by chance but of necessity, in accordance with the same morality. - But
does this insight mean we have to deny those who come later the right to
reanimate the works of earlier times with their own souls? No, for it is only if
we bestow upon them our soul that they can continue to live: it is only our
blood that constrains them to speak to MS. A truly 'historical' rendition would
be ghostly speech before ghosts. - We honour the great artists of the past less
through that unfruitful awe which allows every word, every note, to lie where
it has been put than we do through active endeavours to help them to come
repeatedly to life again. - To be sure, if we were to imagine Beethoven
suddenly returning and hearing one of his works rendered in the animated
and nervous manner for which our masters of performance
242
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
are celebrated, he would probably for a long time stay dumb, undecided
whether to raise his hand in a blessing or a curse, but at length say perhaps:
'Well, yes! That is neither I nor not-I but some third thing - and if it is not
exactly right, it is nonetheless right in its own way. But you had better take
care what you're doing, since it's you who have to listen to it - and, as our
Schiller says, the living are always in the right. So be in the right and let me
depart again.'
127
Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit
of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as
yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something
embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such
immature and unripened fare.
128
Against the shortsighted. - Do you think this work must be fragmentary
because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments?
129
Readers of maxims. - The worst readers of maxims are the friends of
their author when they are exercised to trace the general observation back to
the particular event to which the maxim owes its origin: for through this
prying they render all the author's efforts null and void, so that, instead of
philosophical instruction, all they receive (and all they deserve to receive) is
the satisfaction of a vulgar curiosity.
130
Reader's ill breeding. - Two kinds of ill breeding exhibited by the reader
towards the author are to praise his second book at the expense of his first (or
the reverse) and at the same time to demand that the author should be grateful
to him.
The seditious in the history of art. - If we follow the history of an art,
that of Greek rhetoric for instance, as we proceed from master to master and
behold the ever increasing care expended on obedience to all the ancient rules
and self-limitations and to those added subsequently, we are aware of a
painful tension in ourselves: we grasp that the bow has to break and that the
so-called inorganic composition bedecked and masked with the most
marvellous means of expression - the baroque style of Asia, that is to say -
was sooner or later a necessity and almost an act of charity.
132
To the great men of art. - That enthusiasm for a cause which you, great
men, bear into the world cripples the reason of many others. To know this is
humbling. But the enthusiast wears his hump with pride and joy: to this
extent you have the consolation of knowing that through you the amount of
happiness in the world is increased.
243
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
133

Those with no aesthetic conscience. - The actual fanatics of an artistic
faction are those completely inartistic natures who have not penetrated even
the elements of artistic theory or practice but are moved in the strongest way
by all the elemental effects of an art. For them there is no such thing as an
aesthetic conscience - and therefore nothing to hold them back from
fanaticism.
134
How modern music is supposed to make the soul move. - The artistic
objective pursued by modern music in what is now, in a strong but
nonetheless obscure phrase, designated 'endless melody' can be made clear by
imagining one is going into the sea, gradually relinquishing a firm tread on
the bottom and finally surrendering unconditionally to the watery element:
one is supposed to swim. Earlier music constrained one - with a delicate or
solemn or fiery movement back and forth, faster and slower - to dance: in
pursuit of which the needful preservation of orderly measure compelled the
soul of the listener to a continual self-possession: it was upon the reflection of
the cooler air produced by this self-possession and the warm breath of
musical enthusiasm that the charm of this music rested. - Richard Wagner
desired a different kind of movement of the soul: one related, as aforesaid, to
swimming and floating. Perhaps this is the most essential of his innovations.
The celebrated means he employs, appropriate to this desire and sprung from
it - 'endless melody' - endeavours to break up all mathematical symmetry of
tempo and force and sometimes even to mock it; and he is abundantly
inventive in the production of effects which to the ear of earlier times sound
like rhythmic paradoxes and blasphemies. What he fears is petrifaction,
crystallization, the transition of music into the architectonic - and thus with a
two-four rhythm he will juxtapose a three-four rhythm, often introduce bars
in five-four and seven-four rhythm, immediately repeat a phrase but
expanded to two or three times its original length. A complacent imitation of
such an art as this can be a great danger to music: close beside such an over-
ripeness of the feeling for rhythm there has always lain in wait the
brutalization and decay of rhythm itself. This danger is especially great when
such music leans more and more on a wholly naturalistic art of acting and
language of gesture uninfluenced and uncontrolled by any higher plastic art:
for such an art and language possesses in itself no limit or proportion, and is
thus unable to communicate limit and proportion to that element that adheres
to it, the all too feminine nature of music.
135
Poet and reality. - When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will
consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and
fragile-limbed children.
136
Means and ends. - In art the end does not sanctify the means: but sacred
means can here sanctify the end.
244
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
137
The worst readers. - The worst readers are those who behave like
plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and
confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
138
Marks of the good writer. - Good writers have two things in common:
they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for
knowing and over-acute readers.
139
The mixed genres. - The mixed genres in art bear witness to the mistrust
their originators felt towards their own powers; they sought assistants,
advocates, hiding-places - for example, the poet who calls on philosophy for
aid, the composer who calls on the drama, the thinker who calls on rhetoric.
140
Shutting his mouth. - When his work opens its mouth, the author has to
shut his.
141
Insignia of rank. - All poets and writers enamoured of the superlative
want to do more than they can.
142
Cold books. - The good thinker counts on readers who appreciate the
happiness that lies in good thinking: so that a book distinguished by coldness
and sobriety can, when viewed through the right eyes, appear as though
played about by the sunshine of spiritual cheerfulness and as a true comfort
for the soul.
M3
Artifices of the ponderous. - The ponderous thinker usually chooses
garrulousness or pomposity for his allies: through the former he thinks to
appropriate to himself flexibility and fleetness of foot, through the latter he
makes it appear as though his quality were a product of free will, of artistic
intention, with the object of achieving the dignity that slowness of movement
promotes.
144
On the baroque style. - He who knows that, as a thinker or writer, he was
not born or educated for dialectics and the analysis of ideas will involuntarily
reach for the rhetorical and dramatic: for in the long run what he is
concerned with is to make himself understood and thereby to acquire force,
its being a matter of indifference to him whether he conducts sensibilities
towards him along a level path or overtakes them unawares - either as a
shepherd or a brigand. This applies to the plastic as much as to the poetic arts;
where the feeling of a lack of dialectics or inadequacy in
M5
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
expressive or narrative ability, combined with an over-abundant,
pressing formal impulsion, gives rise to that stylistic genre called the
baroque. - Only the ill-instructed and presumptuous, by the way, will at once
feel a sense of contempt at the sound of this word. The baroque style
originates whenever any great art starts to fade, whenever the demands in the
art of classic expression grow too great, as a natural event which one may
well behold with sorrow - for it means night is coming - but at the same time
with admiration for the substitute arts of expression and narration peculiar to
it. To these belong the choice of material and themes of the highest dramatic
tension of a kind that make the heart tremble even without the assistance of
art because they bring Heaven and Hell all too close: then the eloquence of
strong emotions and gestures, of the sublime and ugly, of great masses, of
quantity as such - as was already proclaimed in the case of Michelangelo, the
father or grandfather of the artists of the Italian baroque - : the glow of
twilight, transfiguration or conflagration upon such strongly constructed
forms: in addition a continual daring experimentation in new methods and
objectives, strongly underlined by the artist for other artists, while the laity
are obliged to think they behold a constant involuntary overflowing of all the
cornucopias of a primeval art born of nature: all these qualities in which this
style possesses its greatness are not possible, not permitted, in the earlier,
pre- dassical and classical epochs of a species of art: such delicacies hang
long on the tree as forbidden fruit. - It is precisely now, when musk is
entering this last epoch, that we can get to know the phenomenon of the
baroque style in a particularly splendid form and learn a great deal about
earlier ages through comparison with it: for a baroque style has already
existed many times from the age of the Greeks onwards - in poetry, rhetoric,
in prose style, in sculpture, as well as in architecture - and, although this
style has always lacked the highest nobility and an innocent, unconscious,
victorious perfection, it has nonetheless satisfied many of the best and most
serious of its age: which is why I called it presumptuous straightaway to
judge it with contempt; even though he whose receptivity for the purer and
greater style is not blunted by it may count himself lucky.
145
Value of honest books. - Honest books make the reader honest, at least
to the extent that they lure out his antipathy and hatred, which cunning
prudence otherwise knows best how to conceal. Against a book, however, we
may let ourselves go, however much we may restrain ourselves when it
comes to men.
146
How art creates a faction. - Individual beautiful passages, an exciting
overall effect and a rapturous mood at the end - this much in a work of art is
accessible even to most of the laity: and in an artistic period in which it is
desired to draw over the great mass of the laity to the side of the artist - to
create a faction, that is to say, perhaps for the purpose of preserving art
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
as such - the creator will do well to give no more than this: otherwise he
will squander his strength in areas where no one will thank him for it. For to
do what remains undone - to imitate nature in its organic growth and shaping
- would in any case be to scatter seed on water.
147
Growing great to the prejudice of history. - Every later master who leads
the taste of those who appreciate art on to his path involuntarily gives rise to
a reordering and new assessment of the earlier masters and their works: that
in them which is attuned and related to him, which constitutes a foretaste and
annunciation of him, henceforth counts as that which is really significant in
them and in their works - a fruit in which there is usually concealed a great
worm of error.
148
How an age is lured to art. - If, with the aid of all the magical tricks of
artist and thinker, one teaches men to feel reverence for their deficiencies,
their spiritual poverty, their senseless infatuations and passions - and this can
be done - if one exhibits only the sublime aspect of crime and madness, only
what is moving and heart-touching in the weakness of the will-less and
blindly devoted - this too has happened often enough - : then one has
acquired the means of imbuing even a wholly inartistic and unphilo- sophical
age with a love of philosophy and art (and especially of artists and
philosophers as persons) and, under unfavourable circumstances, perhaps the
sole means of preserving the existence of such delicate and imperilled
creatures.
149
}oy and criticism. - Criticism, onesided and unjust criticism just as much
as judicious, gives him who practises it so much pleasure that the world owes
a debt of gratitude to every work, every action that invites a great deal of
criticism from a great many people: for behind it it drags a glittering tail of
joy, wit, self-admiration, pride, instruction and intention to do better. - The
god of joy created the bad and mediocre for the same reason he created the
good.
150
Beyond his limits. - When an artist wants to be more than an artist, for
example the moral awakener of his nation, the retribution is that he ends up
enamoured of a moral monster - and the muse laughs at him: for this goddess,
otherwise so good-hearted, can grow malicious out of jealousy. Consider
Milton and Klopstock.*
Glass eye. - A gift for moral subjects, characters, motives directed upon
the beautiful soul of a work of art is sometimes only the glass eye which the
artist who lacks a beautiful soul inserts into himself: the consequence can
* Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803): German poet, often alluded to in his lifetime as
the 'German Milton'.
247
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
be, though rarely is, that this eye at length becomes living nature, even if
somewhat jaundiced nature - the usual consequence, however, is that all the
world thinks it sees nature where there is only glass.
152
Writing and the desire for victory. - Writing ought always to advertise a
victory - an overcoming of oneself which has to be communicated for the
benefit of others; but there are dyspeptic authors who write only when they
cannot digest something, indeed when it is still stuck in their teeth: they
involuntarily seek to transfer their own annoyance to the reader and in this
way exercise power over him: that is to say, they too desire victory, but over
others.
153
'A good book takes its time.' - Every good book tastes astringent when it
appears: it possesses the fault of newness. In addition it is harmed by its
living author if he is celebrated and much is known about him: for all the
world is accustomed to confound the author with his work. What there is of
spirit, sweetness and goodness in the latter can evolve only over the years,
under the care of growing, then established, finally traditional reverence.
Many hours must pass over it, many a spider have spun her web on it. Good
readers continually improve a book and good opponents clarify it.
154
Extravagance as an artistic method. - Artists well understand what it
means to employ extravagance as an artistic method so as to produce an
impression of wealth. It is among the innocent subterfuges for seducing the
soul which artists have to be skilled in: for in their world, in which what is
aimed at is appearance, the methods by which appearance is produced do not
necessarily have to be genuine.
155
The hidden barrel-organ. - Geniuses know better than the talented how
to hide the barrel-organ, by virtue of their more abundant drapery; but at
bottom they too can do no more than repeat their same old tunes.
156
The name on the title-page. - That the name of the author should be
inscribed on the book is now customary and almost a duty; yet it is one of the
main reasons books produce so little effect. For if they are good, then, as the
quintessence of the personality of their authors, they are worth more than
these; but as soon as the author announces himself on the title- page, the
reader at once dilutes the quintessence again with the personality, indeed with
what is most personal, and thus thwarts the object of the book. It is the
intellect's ambition to seem no longer to belong to an individual.
157
Sharpest criticism. - We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we
sketch out their ideal.
248
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
158
Few and without love. - Every good book is written for a definite reader
and those like him, and for just this reason will be viewed unfavourably by all
other readers, the great majority: which is why its reputation rests on a
narrow basis and can be erected only slowly. - The mediocre and bad book is
so because it tries to please many and does please them.
159
Music and sickness. - The danger inherent in modern music lies in the
fact that it sets the chalice of joy and grandeur so seductively to our lips and
with such a show of moral ecstasy that even the noble and self-controlled
always drink from it a drop too much. This minimal intemperance,
continually repeated, can however eventuate in a profounder convulsion and
undermining of spiritual health than any coarser excess is able to bring about:
so that there is in the end nothing for it but one day to flee the nymph's
grotto* and to make one's way through the perils of the sea to foggy Ithaca
and to the arms of a simpler and more human wife.
160
Advantage for the opponent. - A book full of spirit communicates some
of it to its opponents too.
161
Youth and criticism. - To criticize a book means to a young person no
more than to repulse every single productive idea it contains and to defend
oneself against it tooth and claw. A youth lives in a condition of perpetual
self-defence against everything new that he cannot love wholesale, and in this
condition perpetrates a superfluous crime against it as often as ever he can.
162
Effect of quantity. - The greatest paradox in the history of poetry lies in
the fact that in everything in which the old poets possess their greatness one
can be a barbarian, that is to say erroneous and deformed from head to toe,
and yet still be the greatest of poets. For such is the case with Shakespeare,
who, when compared with Sophocles, resembles a mine full of an
immeasurable quantity of gold, lead and rubble, while the latter is not merely
gold but gold in so noble a form its value as metal almost comes to be
forgotten. But quantity raised to the highest pitch has the effect of quality.
That fact benefits Shakespeare.
163
All beginnings are dangerous. - The poet has the choice of either raising
the feelings from one step to the next and thus eventually raising them very
high - or attempting an assault on them and pulling on the bellrope with all
his force from the very beginning. Both courses have their dangers: in the
former instance his listeners may perhaps desert him out of boredom, in the
latter out of fear.
* Nymph's grotto: reference to Odysseus' seduction by and stay with the nymph Calypso.
249
HUMAN/ ALL TOO HUMAN
164
In favour of critics. - Insects sting/ not out of malice, but because they
too want to live: likewise our critics; they want, not to hurt us, but to take our
blood.
165
Maxims and their outcome. - When a maxim straightaway impresses
them with its simple truth, the inexperienced always believe it to be old and
familiar, and they look askance at its author as though he has desired to steal
for himself what is common property: whereas they take pleasure in spiced-
up half-truths and make this fact known to the author. The latter knows how
to evaluate such a hint and has no difficulty in divining from it where he has
succeeded and where failed.
166
Desire for victory. - An artist who in all he undertakes exceeds his
powers will nonetheless at last draw the crowd along with him through the
spectacle of a mighty struggle he affords: for success is accorded not only to
victory but sometimes to the desire for victory too.
167
Sibi scribere15 - The sensible author writes for no other posterity than
his own, that is to say for his old age, so that then too he will be able to take
pleasure in himself.
168
In praise of the maxim. - A good maxim is too hard for the teeth of time
and whole millennia cannot consume it, even though it serves to nourish
every age: it is thus the great paradox of literature, the imperishable in the
midst of change, the food that is always in season, like salt - though, unlike
salt, it never loses its savour.
169
Artistic need of the second rank. - The people no doubt possesses
something that might be called an artistic need, but it is small and cheap to
satisfy. The refuse of art is at bottom all that is required: we should honestly
admit that to ourselves. Just consider, for instance, the kind of songs and
tunes the most vigorous, soundest and most naive strata of our populace
nowadays take true delight in, dwell among shepherds, cowherds, farmers,
huntsmen, soldiers, seamen, and then supply yourself with an answer. And in
the small town, in precisely the homes that are the seat of those civic virtues
inherited from of old, do they not love, indeed dote on, the very worst music
in any way produced today? Whoever talks of a profound need for art, of an
unfulfilled desire for art, on the part of the people as it is, is either raving or
lying. Be honest! Nowadays it is only in exceptional men that there exists an
artistic need of an exalted kind - because art as such is again in decline and
the powers and expectations of men

15 Sibi scribere: To write for oneself.
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
have for a time been directed at other things. - In addition, that is to say
apart from the people, there does indeed still exist a broader, more extensive
artistic need in the higher and highest strata of society, but it is of the second
rank. Here something like a seriously intentioned artistic community is
possible: but just look at what elements it consists of! They are, generally
speaking, the more refined discontented unable to take any real pleasure in
themselves: the cultivated who have not become sufficiently free to do
without the consolations of religion and yet find its oil insufficiently sweet-
scented: the half-noble who are too weak to correct the one fundamental
mistake of their life or the harmful inclinations of their character through a
heroic conversion or abstinence: the richly gifted who think themselves too
fine for modest useful activities and are too indolent for a serious, self-
sacrificing labour: the girl who does not know how to create for herself a
satisfying circle of duties: the woman who has tied herself to a frivolous or
mischievous marriage and knows she is not tied to it tightly enough: the
scholar, physician, merchant, official who became one too soon and whose
nature has as a whole never been given free rein, and who pays for this by
performing his duties efficiently but with a worm in his heart: finally, all the
imperfect and defective artists - it is these who now still possess a true artistic
need! And what is it they really desire of art? That it shall scare away their
discontent, boredom and uneasy conscience for moments or hours at a time
and if possible magnify the errors of their life and character into errors of
world-destiny - being in this very different from the Greeks, to whom their
art was an outflowing and overflowing of their own healthiness and
wellbeing and who loved to view their perfection repeated outside
themselves: - self-enjoyment was what led them to art, whereas what leads
our contemporaries to it is - self-disgust.
170
The Germans in the theatre. - The real theatrical talent among the
Germans has been Kotzebue;* he and his Germans, those of the higher as
well as those of middle-class society, necessarily belonged together, and his
contemporaries could have said of him in all seriousness: 'in him we live and
move and have our being'. Here there was nothing forced, imaginary, only
half enjoyed: what he desired and could do was comprehended; to the present
day, indeed, genuine theatrical success on the German stage is in the
possession of the admitted or unadmitted inheritors of Kotzebue's methods
and effects, especially wherever comedy is still to some extent flourishing;
from which it appears that much of the German character of that time still
lives on, particularly away from the great cities. Good- natured, intemperate
in small pleasures, eager for tears, with the desire to be allowed to throw off
an inborn, dutiful sobriety at least in the theatre and here to practise a
smiling, indeed laughing tolerance, confusing goodness with pity and
mingling them together - for such is the
* Kotzebue: August Friedrich von Kotzebue (1761-1819), the most prolific and popular
German dramatist of his time.
251
essence of German sentimentality - delighted with a fair, magnanimous
action, for the rest subservient towards those above, envious towards one
another, and yet in the depths of them self-satisfied - that is how they were,
that is how he was. - The second theatrical talent was Schiller: he discovered
a class of auditors who had previously not come into consideration; he found
them among the immature, in German youths and girls. With his works he
came out to meet their higher, nobler, stormier, even if vague impulses, their
pleasure in the jangle of moral expressions (which tends to fade in the
thirties), and by virtue of the passionateness and thirst for taking sides that
characterizes this age-group achieved a success that gradually produced a
favourable impression on those of maturer age too: in general, Schiller
rejuvenated the Germans. - Goethe stood above the Germans in every respect
and still stands above them: he will never belong to them. How could a
people ever be equal to Goethean spirituality in wellbeing and well-wishing'.
Just as Beethoven composed music above the heads of the Germans, just as
Schopenhauer philosophized above the heads of the Germans, so Goethe
wrote his Tasso, his Iphigenie, above the heads of the Germans. His
following was composed of a very small band of the most highly cultivated
people, educated by antiquity, life and travels, and grown beyond the
confines of the merely German: - he himself did not desire it otherwise. -
When the romantics then established their cult of Goethe, whose aim they
were well aware of; when their astonishing accomplishment in tasting
everything passed over to the pupils of Hegel, the actual educators of the
Germans of this century; when awakening national ambition also came to
benefit the fame of German poets, and the actual standard applied by the
people, which is whether they can honestly say they enjoy something, was
inexorably subordinated to the judgement of individuals and to that national
ambition - that is to say, when one began to feel compelled to enjoy - then
there arose that mendaciousness and spuriousness in German culture which
felt ashamed of Kotzebue, which put Sophocles, Calderdn and even Goethe's
continuation of Faust on the stage, and which on account of its furred tongue
and congested stomach in the end no longer knows what it likes and what it
finds boring. - Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad
taste! - And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this
quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things,
designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and
called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual,
simply 'taste' (sophia).
171
Music as the late fruit of every culture. - Of all the arts that grow up on a
particular cultural soil under particular social and political conditions, music
makes its appearance last, in the autumn and deliquescence of the culture to
which it belongs: at a time when the first signs and harbingers of a new
spring are as a rule already perceptible; sometimes, indeed, music resounds
into a new and astonished world like the language of an age that
252
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
has vanished and arrives too late. It was only in the art of the musicians
of the Netherlands that the soul of the Christian Middle Ages found its full
resonance: their tonal architecture is the posthumous but genuine and equal
sister of the Gothic. It was only in the music of Handel that there sounded the
best that the soul of Luther and his like contained, the mighty Jewish-heroic
impulse that created the whole Reformation movement. It was only Mozart
who gave forth the age of Louis the Fourteenth and the art of Racine and
Claude Lorraine* in ringing gold. It was only in the music of Beethoven and
Rossini that the eighteenth century sang itself out: the century of enthusiasm,
of shattered ideals and of fleeting happiness. So that a friend of delicate
metaphors might say that all truly meaningful music is swan-song. - Music is
thus not a universal language for all ages, as has so often been claimed for it,
but accords precisely with a measure of time, warmth and sensibility that a
quite distinct individual culture, limited as to area and duration, bears within
it as an inner law: the music of Palestrina would be wholly inaccessible to a
Greek, and conversely - what would Palestrina hear in the music of Rossini?
- Perhaps our latest German music too, dominant and thirsting for dominance
though it is, will in a short time cease to be understood: for it arose from a
culture that is going speedily downhill; its soil is that period of reaction and
recuperation in which a certain catholicity of feeling together with a joy in
everything primevally national came into flower and exuded a mingled odour
over Europe: both of which directions of sensibility, comprehended in their
greatest intensity and pursued to their farthest limits, finally became audible
in the art of Wagner. Wagner's appropriation of the old Germanic sagas, his
ennobling disposing of the strange gods and heroes contained in them - who
are actually sovereign beasts of prey with occasional impulses to
thoughtfulness, magnanimity and worldweariness - the reanimation of these
figures, to whom he added the Christian-medieval thirst for ecstatic
sensuality and asceticism, this entire Wagnerian giving and taking in regard
to subject-matter, souls, forms and words, would also be clearly expressed in
the spirit of his music if, in common with all music, it were able to speak of
itself with complete unambiguity: this spirit wages the ultimate war of
reaction against the spirit of the Enlightenment wafted across from the
preceding century into this, likewise against the supra-national ideas of
French revolutionary enthusiasm and English-American sobriety in the
reconstruction of state and society. - But is it not evident that these spheres of
ideas and feelings - here seemingly still repressed by Wagner himself and by
his adherents - have long since regained the upper hand, and that this late
musical protest against them sounds mostly into ears that prefer to hear other
and antithetical tones? So that this wonderful and elevated art will one day
quite suddenly become incomprehensible and covered in forgetfulness and
cobwebs. - One must not allow oneself to be misled as to this state of affairs
by the fleeting fluctuations that appear as a reaction within reaction, as a
temporary sinking of the wave-crest in the midst of the total * Claude Lorraine:
adoptive name of Claude Gelle (1600-82): French landscape painter
2
53
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
movement; thus it may be that the subtler after-effects of this decade of
national wars, ultramontane martyrdom* and socialist uneasiness may assist
the above-named art to a sudden radiance of glory - without, however,
therewith supplying it with a guarantee of 'having a future', let alone of
possessing the future. - It lies in the nature of music that the fruits of its great
cultural vintages grow unpalatable more quickly and are more speedily
ruined than the fruits of the plastic arts, let alone those that have ripened on
the tree of knowledge: for of all the products of the human artistic sense ideas
are the most enduring and durable.
172
Poets no longer teachers. - Strange though it may sound to our age, there
were once poets and artists whose souls were beyond the passions and their
raptures and convulsions and who therefore took pleasure in purer materials,
worthier men, more delicate combinations and resolutions. If today's great
artists are mostly unchainers of the will and for that reason under certain
circumstances liberators of life, those earlier artists were tamers of the will,
transformers of animals, creators of men, and in general sculptors and
remodellers of life: whereas the fame of those of today may lie in
unharnessing, unfettering, destroying. - The older Greeks demanded of the
poet that he should be a teacher of adults: but how embarrassed a poet would
be now if this was demanded of him - he who was no good teacher of himself
and thus himself failed to become a fine poem, a fair statue, but at best as it
were the modest, attractive ruins of a temple, though at the same time a cave
of desires, overgrown with flowers, thistles and poisonous weeds, and dwelt
in or haunted by snakes, reptiles, birds and spiders - an object inspiring sad
reflections on why the noblest and most precious must nowadays grow up
straightway as a ruin without any past or future perfection.
m
Looking before and after. - An art such as issues forth from Homer,
Sophocles, Theocritus,t Calderon, Racine, Goethe, as the surplus of a wise
and harmonious conduct of life - this is the art we finally learn to reach out
for when we ourselves have grown wiser and more harmonious: not that
barbaric if enthralling spluttering out of hot and motley things from a chaotic,
unruly soul which as youths we in earlier years understood to be art. It goes
without saying, however, that during certain periods of life an art of high
tension, excitation, repugnance for the regulated, monotonous, simple and
logical, is a necessary requirement that artists have to meet if the soul is
during this period not to discharge itself in other directions through mischief
and improprieties of all kinds. Thus youth, as it usually is, full, fermenting,
plagued by nothing more than by boredom, needs this art of thrilling disorder
- women who lack a soul-fulfilling
* Ultramontane martyrdom: ultramontanism was a term used to refer to the Catholic
movements that upheld papal supremacy, in France, Germany and the Netherlands in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries t Theocritus (c. 310 to 250 BC): Greek poet.
254
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
occupation also need it. Their longing for a contentment that knows no
change, a happiness without delirium and stupefaction, will be kindled all the
more vehemently.
174
Against the art of works of art. - Art is above and before all supposed to
beautify life, thus make us ourselves endurable, if possible pleasing to others:
with this task in view it restrains us and keeps us within bounds, creates
social forms, imposes on the unmannerly rules of decency, cleanliness,
politeness, of speaking and staying silent at the proper time. Then, art is
supposed to conceal or reinterpret everything ugly, those painful, dreadful,
disgusting things which, all efforts notwithstanding, in accord with the origin
of human nature again and again insist on breaking forth: it is supposed to do
so especially in regard to the passions and psychical fears and torments, and
in the case of what is ineluctably or invincibly ugly to let the meaning of the
thing shine through. After this great, indeed immense task of art, what is
usually termed art, that of the work of art, is merely an appendage. A man
who feels within himself an excess of such beautifying, concealing and
reinterpreting powers will in the end seek to discharge this excess in works of
art as well; so, under the right circumstances, will an entire people. - Now,
however, we usually start with art where we should end with it, cling hold of
it by its tail and believe that the art of the work of art is true art out of which
life is to be improved and transformed - fools that we are! If we begin the
meal with the dessert and cram ourselves with sweet things, is it any wonder
if we spoil our stomach, and even our appetite, for the good, strengthening,
nourishing meals to which art invites us!
1
75
Endurance of art. - Why, at bottom, is it that an art of works of art
continues to endure? It is because most of those who possess leisure - and it
is only for them that such an art exists - believe that without music,
attendance at the theatre and picture-galleries, without reading novels and
poems, they will never get through the day. Supposing one were able to
deprive them of these satisfactions, they would either cease to strive after
leisure so eagerly and the envy-inspiring sight of the rich would become
rarer - a great gain for the stability of society; or, still possessing leisure, they
could learn how to reflect - which can be learned and also unlearned - upon
their work, for example, their relationships, upon pleasures they might
bestow: in both cases all the world, the artists alone excepted, would derive
advantage from it. - There are many fine and sensible readers who at this
point would certainly raise a valid objection. For the sake of the dull and
malevolent, however, it should for once be said that, here as so often in this
book, the author is alive to this objection, and that there is much in it that
does not appear on the printed page.
176
The mouthpiece of the gods. - The poet expresses the general higher
255
opinions possessed by a people, he is their flute and mouthpiece - but,
by virtue of metric and all the other methods of art, he expresses them in such
a way that the people receive them as something quite new and marvellous
and believe in all seriousness that the poet is the mouthpiece of the gods.
Indeed, in the clouds of creation the poet himself forgets whence he has
acquired all his spiritual wisdom - from his father and mother, from teachers
and books of all kinds, from the street and especially from the priests; he is
deceived by his own art and, in naive ages, really does believe that a god is
speaking through him, that he is creating in a state of religious illumination -
whereas he is repeating only what he has learned, popular wisdom mixed up
with popular folly. Thus, insofar as the poet really is vox populi he counts as
vox dei.*
177
What all art wants to do but cannot. - The hardest and ultimate task of
the artist is the representation of the unchanging, of that which reposes in
itself, the exalted and simple; that is why the highest forms of moral
perfection are rejected by the weaker artists themselves as inartistic sketches,
because the sight of this fruit is all too painful to their ambition: it glitters
down upon these artists from the highest branches of art, but they lack the
ladder, the courage and the skill to dare to venture so high. In itself, a
Phidiast as poet is perfectly possible, but, considering what modem
capacities are like, almost only in the sense that with God all things are
possible. The desire even for a poetic Claude Lorrain is, indeed, at the
present time a piece of immodesty, however much the heart may crave it. -To
the representation of the ultimate man, that is to say the simplest and at the
same time the most whole, no artist has so far been equal; perhaps, however,
in the ideal of Athene the Greeks cast their eyes farther than any other men
have done hitherto.
178
Art and recuperation. - The retrogressive movements in history, the so-
called periods of recuperation, which seek to restore life to a spiritual and
social condition preceding them and do actually seem to achieve a brief
awakening of the dead, possess the charm of an agreeable recollection, a
yearning desire for what has almost been lost, a hurried embracing of a
happiness that lasts for but a few minutes. On account of this strange
deepening of mood it is in precisely such fleeting, almost dreamlike ages that
art and poetry find a natural soil: just as the rarest and most delicate plants
flourish on steep mountainsides. - Thus many a fine artist is driven unawares
to a recuperative disposition in politics and society for which he prepares for
himself on his own account a quiet corner and little garden: where he then
assembles around him the human remains of this historical era he finds so
comfortable and lets his lyre resound before no one but the dead, the half-
dead and the weary unto death, perhaps with the outcome referred to above
of a brief awakening of the dead.
* vox populi-. voice of the people; vox dei: voice of God
t Phidias (fifth century BC): Greek sculptor.
256
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
179
Our age's good fortune. - There are two respects in which our age may
be called fortunate. With respect to the past we have enjoyment of all the
cultures there have ever been and of their productions, and nourish ourselves
with the noblest blood of every age; we still stand sufficiently close to the
magical forces of the power out of whose womb they were born to be able to
subject ourselves to them in passing with joy and awe: whereas earlier
cultures were capable of enjoying only themselves, with no view of what lay
outside - it was as though they lay beneath a vaulted dome, of greater or less
extent, which, though light streamed down upon them from it, was itself
impenetrable to their gaze. In respect to the future there opens out before us,
for the first time in history, the tremendous far-flung prospect of human-
ecumenical goals embracing the entire inhabited earth. At the same time we
feel conscious of possessing the strength to be allowed without presumption
to take this new task in hand ourselves without requiring supernatural
assistance; indeed, let our undertaking eventuate as it may, even if we have
overestimated our strength, there is in any case no one to whom we owe a
reckoning except ourselves: henceforth mankind can do with itself whatever
it wishes. - There are, to be sure, singular human bees who know how to
extract from the flower-cup of all things only what is bitterest and most
vexatious; - and all things do in fact contain in them something of this non-
honey. Let these feel as they must about the good fortune of our age just
described and carry on with the construction of their beehive of discontent.
180
A vision. - Lectures and hours of meditation for adults, for the mature
and maturest, and these daily, without compulsion but attended by everyone
as a command of custom: the churches as the worthiest venues for them
because richest in memories: every day as it were a festival of attained and
attainable dignity of human reason: a new and fuller efflorescence of the
ideal of the teacher, in which the priest, the artist and the physician, the man
of knowledge and the man of wisdom, are fused with one another, with a
resultant fusion of their separate virtues into a single total virtue which would
also be expressed in their teaching itself, in their delivery and their methods -
this is my vision: it returns to me again and again, and I firmly believe that it
lifts a corner of the veil of the future.
181
Educational contortion. - The reason for the extraordinary
precariousness of all institutions of instruction, which gives every adult the
feeling his only educator has been chance - for the fact that educational
methods and objectives are like a weather-vane - is that today the oldest and
the newest cultural powers want, as in a noisy popular assembly, to be heard
rather than understood and through their shrill cries to demonstrate at
257
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
any price that they still exist or already exist. In the midst of this
senseless hubbub the poor teachers and educators have at first been deafened,
then grown silent and finally apathetic, and they now bear all patiently and
merely pass it on to their pupils. They themselves are not educated: how
should they be able to educate? They themselves are not trees grown straight,
strong and full of sap: whoever wants to attach himself to them will have to
bend and twist himself, and will in the end appear contorted and deformed.
182
Philosophers and artists of our time. - Dissoluteness and indifference,
burning desires, cooling of the heart - this repulsive juxtaposition is to be
found in the higher society of Europe of the present day. The artist believes
he has done a great deal if through his art he has for once set the heart aflame
beside these burning desires: and likewise the philosopher if, given the
coolness of the heart he has in common with his age, he succeeds through his
world-denying judgements in cooling the heat of the desires in himself and in
this society.
183
Do not be a warrior of culture if you do not need to be. - At long last we
learn that of which our ignorance in our youth caused us so much harm: that
we have first to do what is excellent, then seek out what is excellent,
wherever and under whatever name it is to be found, but avoid all that is bad
and mediocre without combatting it, and that to doubt the goodness of a thing
- as can easily happen to a more practised taste - may already count as an
argument against it and a reason for ignoring it completely: though this must
be at the risk of sometimes blundering and confusing goodness accessible
only with difficulty with the bad and imperfect. Only he who can do nothing
better should assault the basenesses of the world as a warrior of culture. But
the teachers and promoters of culture destroy themselves when they desire to
go about in arms and through precautions, night watches and evil dreams
transform the tranquillity of their house and calling into an uncanny lack of
tranquillity.
184
How natural history should be narrated. - Natural history, as the history
of the war of the spiritual-moral forces against fear, imaginings, inertia,
superstition, folly, and their victory over them, ought to be narrated in such a
way that everyone who hears it is irresistibly inspired to strive after spiritual
and bodily health and vigour, to the glad feeling of being the heir and
continuator of mankind, and to an ever nobler need for practical activity. Up
to now it has not yet discovered its proper language, because artists inventive
in language and eloquence - for these are what is needed - refuse to
relinquish an obstinate mistrust of it and above all refuse to learn from it.
Nonetheless, it must be allowed that the English have taken admirable steps
in the direction of that ideal with their natural science textbooks for the lower
strata of the people: the reason is that they
258
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
are written by their most distinguished scholars - whole, complete and
fulfilling natures - and not, as is the case with us, by mediocrities.
185
Genius of humanity. - If genius consists, according to Schopenhauer's
observation, in the connected and lively recollection of experience, then in
the striving for knowledge of the entire historical past - which ever more
mightily distinguishes the modern age from all others and has for the first
time demolished the ancient walls between nature and spirit, man and animal,
morality and the physical world - it may be possible to recognize a striving
for the genius of humanity as a whole. History perfect and complete would
be cosmic self-consciousness.
186
Cult of culture. - To great spirits there has been joined the repellent all-
too- human aspects of their nature, their blindnesses, deformities,
extravagances, so that their mighty influence, that can easily grow all too
mighty, shall be kept within bounds by the mistrust these qualities inspire.
For the system of all that which humanity has need of for its continued
existence is so comprehensive, and lays claim to so many and such varying
forces, that humanity as a whole would have to pay heavily for any onesided
preference, whether it be science or the state or art or trade, to which these
individuals would entice it. It has always been the greatest fatality for culture
when men have been worshipped: in which sense one may even feel in
accord with the Mosaic law which forbids us to have other gods beside God.
- Next to the cult of the genius and his force tnere must always be placed, as
its complement and palliative, the cult of culture: which knows how to accord
to the material, humble, base, misunderstood, weak, imperfect, onesided,
incomplete, untrue, merely apparent, indeed to the evil and dreadful, a proper
degree of understanding and the admission that all this is necessary; for the
harmonious endurance of all that is human, attained through astonishing
labours and lucky accidents and as much the work of ants and cyclops as of
genius, must not be lost to us again: how, then, could we dispense with the
common, deep and often uncanny groundbass without which melody cannot
be melody?
187
Joy in the ancient world. - The men of the world of antiquity knew better
how to rejoice: we how to suffer less; the former employed all their
abundance of ingenuity and capacity to reflect for the continual creation of
new occasions for happiness and celebration: whereas we employ our minds
rather towards the amelioration of suffering and the removal of sources of
pain. In regard to an existence of suffering the ancients sought forgetfulness
or some way or other of converting their feelings into pleasurable ones: so
that in this matter they sought palliatives, while we attack the cause of
suffering and on the whole prefer prophylactic measures. - Perhaps we are
only constructing the foundations upon which men of the future will again
erect the temple of joy.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
188
The muses as liars. - 'We are capable of telling many lies' - thus the
muses once sang when they revealed themselves to Hesiod. - Many vital
discoveries can be made if we for once apprehend the artist as a deceiver.
189
How paradoxical Homer can be. - Is there anything more audacious,
uncanny or unbelievable shining down on the destiny of man like a winter
sun than that idea we find in Homer:
then did the gods make resolve and ordain unto men destruction, that in after
times too there might be matter for song.
Thus we suffer and perish so that the poets shall not lack material - and
this according to the decree of the gods of Homer, who seem to be very much
concerned about the pleasures of coming generations but very indifferent to
us, the men of the present. - That such ideas should ever have entered the
head of a Greek!
190
Subsequent justification of existence. - Many ideas have entered the
world as errors and fantasies but have become truths, because men have
afterwards foisted upon them a substratum of reality.
191
Need for pro and contra. - Whoever has not grasped that every great man
has not only to be supported but, for the good of the general wellbeing, also
opposed, is certainly still a great child - or himself a great man.
192
Injustice on the part of genius. - Genius is most unjust towards geniuses,
when they happen to be its contemporaries: in the first place it believes it has
no need of them and thus regards them as superfluous - for it is what it is
without them - then their influence clashes with the effect of its electric
current: on which account it even calls them harmful.
193
The worst fate that can befall a prophet. - He laboured for twenty years
at persuading his contemporaries to believe in him - finally he succeeded; but
in the meantime his adversaries had also succeeded: he no longer believed in
himself.
194
Three thinkers equal a spider. - In every philosophical sect three
thinkers follow one after the other in the following way: the first produces
out of himself the seed and sap, the second draws it out into threads and spins
an artificial web, the third lurks in this web for victims who get caught in it -
and tries to live off philosophy.
195
Trafficking with authors. - To seize an author by the nose is as bad man-
260
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
nered as to take him by the horns - and every author has his horns.
196
Two-horse team. - Unclear thinking and sentimental emotionalism are as
frequently united with a ruthless will to self-assertion, to ascendancy at all
cost, as is a warm benevolence and desire to help with the drive to clean and
clear thinking, to moderation and restraint of feeling.
197
That which unites and that which divides. - Does that which unites men -
their understanding of what constitutes their common advantage and
disadvantage - not lie in the head, and that which divides them - their blind
groping and selectivity in love and hatred, their preference for one at the
expense of all others and the contempt for the general wellbeing that arises
from it - not lie in the heart?
198
Marksmen and thinkers. - There are curious marksmen who, though they
miss the target, depart from the range complacently proud of the fact that
their bullet did at any rate fly a great distance (well beyond the target in any
event), or that, though they did not hit the target, they did at any rate hit
something. And there are thinkers like this.
199
From two sides. - We are hostile to an intellectual tendency and
movement if we are superior to it and disapprove of its objectives, or if its
objectives are too remote and we cannot understand them, that is to say when
they are superior to us. Thus a party can be opposed from two sides, from
above and below; and it is no rare thing for both opponents to form an
alliance grounded in their common hatred that is more repulsive than
anything they join in hating.
200
Originality. - Not that a man sees something new as the first one to do
so, but that he sees something old, familiar, seen but overlooked by everyone,
as though it were new, is what distinguishes true originality. The first
discoverer is usually that quite commonplace and mindless fantasist - chance.
201
Error of philosophers. - The philosopher believes that the value of his
philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the
bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better
building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and
nonetheless possess value as material.
202
Witticism. - A witticism is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
203
The moment before the solution. - In the realm of science it happens every
261
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
hour that someone stands immediately before the solution of a problem
convinced that all his efforts have been in vain - like one untying a bow who,
at just the moment before it is about to come apart, hesitates: for it is
precisely then that it looks most like a knot.
204
Going among fanatics. - The thoughtful man who is sure of his reason
can profit by going among fantasists for a decade and, within this torrid zone,
surrendering himself to a modest degree of folly. By doing so he has gone a
good stretch of the way towards that cosmopolitanism of the spirit which can
say without presumption: 'nothing of the spirit is any longer alien to me'.
205
Keen air. - The finest and healthiest element in science is, as in the
mountains, the keen air that wafts through it. - The spiritually delicate (such
as the artists) avoid and slander science on account of this air.
206
Why scholars are nobler than artists. - Science requires nobler natures
than does poetry: they have to be simpler, less ambitious, more abstemious,
quieter, less concerned with posthumous fame, and able to lose themselves in
contemplation of things few would consider worthy of such a sacrifice of the
personality. In addition they are conscious of another deprivation: the nature
of their occupation, its constant demand for the greatest sobriety, enfeebles
their will, the fire is not maintained at such heat as it is in the hearth of the
poetic nature: and that is why they often lose the best of their energy and
efflorescence earlier in life than do the latter - and, as aforesaid, they know of
this danger. Under all circumstances they seem less gifted because they
glitter less, and will be accounted less than they are.
207
To what extent piety obscures. - In later centuries, the great man is made
a present of all the great qualities and virtues of his own century - and thus all
that is best is continually obscured by piety, which sees it as a sacred image
to which votive offerings are brought and before which they are set up, until
in the end it is completely covered and concealed by them and is henceforth
an object of faith rather than of observation.
208
Standing on one's head. - When we set truth on its head we usually fail
to notice that our head too is not standing where it ought to stand.
209
Origin and utility of fashion. - The obvious self-contentment of the
individual with his form excites imitation and gradually produces the form of
the many, that is to say fashion: the many want through fashion to attain to
precisely that pleasing self-contentment with one's form and they do attain it.
- If one considers how much reason every person has for anxiety
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
and timid self-concealment, and how three-quarters of his energy and
goodwill can be paralysed and made unfruitful by it, one has to be very
grateful to fashion, insofar as it sets that three-quarters free and
communicates self-confidence and mutual cheerful agreeableness to those
who know they are all bound by its law. Even foolish laws bestow freedom
and quietness of heart provided many have agreed to be subject to them.
210
Tongue-loosener. - The value of many books and people lies solely in
their ability to constrain everyone to express what is most concealed and
deeply buried within them: they are tongue-looseners and crowbars for even
the most clenched teeth. Many events and ill-deeds, too, which seem to exist
merely to be the curse of mankind, possess a similar value and utility.
211
Free-ranging spirits. - Which of us would dare to call himself a free
spirit if he would not wish to pay homage in his own way to those men to
whom this name has been applied as an insult by taking on to his own
shoulders some of this burden of public disapprobation and revilement?
What, however, we may call ourselves in all seriousness (and without being
in any way defiant) is 'free-ranging spirits', because we feel the tug towards
freedom as the strongest drive of our spirit and, in antithesis to the fettered
and firm-rooted intellects, see our ideal almost in a spiritual nomadism - to
employ a modest and almost contemptuous expression.
212
Yes, the favour of the muses! - What Homer says of it is so true and so
terrible it pierces us through: 'the muse loved him dearly and gave to him
good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet
song'. - This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good and evil,
that is her way of loving dearly! And everyone will interpret for himself why
it is we thinkers and poets have to give our eyes in exchange.
213
Against the cultivation of music. - The artistic education of the eye from
childhood on through drawing and painting, and the sketching of landscapes,
people and events, brings with it in later life the invaluable attendant benefit
of rendering the eye sharp, tranquil and persevering in the observation of
men and situations. No similar attendant advantage is to be derived from the
artistic cultivation of the ear: for which reason schools would in general do
well to give the art of the eye preference over that of the ear.
214
The discoverers of trivialities. - Subtle spirits to whom nothing could be
more alien than a triviality often discover one after all kinds of roving about
and mountain-climbing, and take great pleasure in it - much to the
amazement of the non-subtle.
263
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
215
Morality of the learned. - Regular and rapid progress in the sciences is
possible only when the individual is not obliged to be too mistrustful in the
testing of every account and assertion made by others in domains in which he
is a relative stranger: the condition for this, however, is that in his own held
everyone must have rivals who are extremely mistrustful and are accustomed
to observe him very closely. It is out of this juxtaposition of 'not too
mistrustful' and 'extremely mistrustful' that the integrity of the republic of the
learned originates.
216
Ground of unfruitfulness. - There are highly gifted spirits who are always
unfruitful simply because, from a weakness in their temperament, they are too
impatient to wait out the term of their pregnancy.
217
Upside-down world of tears. - The manifold discomforts imposed upon
men by the claims of higher culture at last distort nature so far that they
usually bear themselves stiffly and stoically and have tears only for rare
attacks of good fortune, so that many, indeed, are constrained to weep merely
because they have ceased to feel pain: - only when they are happy do their
hearts beat again.
218
The Greeks as interpreters. - When we speak of the Greeks we
involuntarily speak of today and yesterday: their familiar history is a polished
mirror that always radiates something that is not in the mirror itself. We
employ our freedom to speak of them so as to be allowed to remain silent
about others - so that the latter may now say something into the thoughtful
.reader's ear. Thus the Greeks make it easier for modern man to communicate
much that is delicate and hard to communicate.
219
On the acquired character of the Greeks. - The celebrated clarity,
transparency, simplicity and orderliness of the Greeks, the crystalline
naturalness and at the same time crystalline artisticality of their works, can
easily mislead us into believing that all this was simply handed to the Greeks:
that, for example, they were incapable of not writing well, as Lichtenberg16
did in fact say. But nothing could be more untenable or hasty. The history of
prose from Gorgiast to Demosthenes shows a labouring and struggling to
emerge out of obscurity, floridity and tastelessness into the light that recalls
the efforts of heroes breaking a first pathway through forest and swamp. The
dialogue of tragedy is the actual achievement of the dramatists, on account of
its uncommon definiteness and clarity against a background of a people who
revelled in symbolism and allusions and who

16 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-94): German writer and aphorist. t Gorgias (fl. 430
BC): Greek philosopher and teacher of rhetoric.
were educated away from this especially by the great choral lyrics of the
tragedy: just as it is the achievement of Homer to have liberated the Greeks
from Asiatic pomp, vagueness and obscurity and to have attained to
architectural clarity on a large scale and a small. It was, moreover, by no
means accounted easy to say something with true distinctness and lucidity;
how else would there have been such great admiration for the epigram of
Simonides, which presents itself so plainly, without gilded figures or witty
arabesques but saying what it has to say clearly, with the reposefulness of the
sunlight, not the snatching at effects of a flash of lightning. It is because
striving towards the light out of an as it were inborn twilight characterizes the
Greeks that a cry of rejoicing goes through the people when they hear a
laconic maxim, the language of the elegy, the sayings of the Seven Wise
Men. That is why the promulgation of laws in verse, which we find
offensive, was so well loved: it represented the actual Apollonian task for the
Hellenic spirit of triumphing over the perils of metre, over the darkness and
obscurity that otherwise characterizes the poetic. Simplicity, suppleness,
sobriety were extorted from the people, they were not inherent in them - the
danger of a relapse into the Asiatic hovered over the Greeks at all times, and
now and then they were in fact as though inundated by a stream of mysticism
and elemental savagery and darkness. We see them sink, we see Europe as it
were flushed away and drowned - for Europe was very small in those days -
but always they come to the surface again, excellent swimmers and divers
that they are, the nation of Odysseus.
220
The real paganism. - Perhaps nothing astonishes the observer of the
Greek world more than when he discovers that from time to time the Greeks
made as it were a festival of all their passions and evil natural inclinations
and even instituted a kind of official order of proceedings in the celebration
of what was all-too-human in them: this constitutes the real paganism of their
world, uncomprehended by and incomprehensible to Christianity, which has
always despised and combatted it with the greatest severity. - They took this
all-too-human to be inescapable and, instead of reviling it, preferred to
accord it a kind of right of the second rank through regulating it within the
usages of society and religion: indeed, everything in man possessing power
they called divine and inscribed it on the walls of their Heaven. They do not
repudiate the natural drive that finds expression in the evil qualities but
regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered sufficient prescriptive
measures to provide these wild waters with the least harmful means of
channeling and outflow, confine them to definite cults and days. This is the
root of all the moral free-mindedness of antiquity. One granted to the evil and
suspicious, to the animal and backward, likewise to the barbarian, the pre-
Greek and Asiatic, that still lived on in the foundations of the Hellenic
nature, a moderate discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation.
The entire system of such procedures was comprehended in the
265
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
state, which was constituted to accommodate, not individual people or
castes, but the ordinary qualities of mankind. In its construction the Greeks
demonstrated that wonderful sense for the factual and typical that later
qualified them to become natural scientists, historians, geographers and
philosophers. The constitution of the state and of the state religion was
determined, not by a circumscribed priestly or caste-dominated moral code,
but by the most comprehensive regard for all human actuality. - Where did
the Greeks acquire this freedom, this sense for the actual? Perhaps from
Homer and the poets before him; for it is precisely the poets, whose natures
are not commonly the most sagacious or judicious, who possess by way of
compensation a joy in the actual and active of every kind and have no desire
to deny even evil altogether: they are satisfied if it keeps itself within bounds
and refrains from wholesale slaughter or inner subversion - that is to say, they
think in much the same way as the creators of the Greek states, and were their
instructors and pathfinders.
221
Exceptions among the Greeks. - In Greece the profound, thorough,
serious spirits were the exceptions: the instinct of the people was inclined,
rather, to regard seriousness and thoroughness as a kind of distortion. Not to
create forms but to borrow them from abroad and transform them into the
fairest appearance of beauty - that is Greek: imitation, not for use but for the
end of artistic deception, the repeated defeating of an imposed seriousness,
ordering, beautifying, making shallow and superficial - that is the course they
pursued, from Homer to the sophists of the third and fourth centuries of the
Christian era, who are wholly surface, pompous phrases, animated gestures,
and address themselves to hollowed-out souls thirsting for mere noise, effect
and appearance. - And now try to assess the greatness of those exceptional
Greeks who created science! He who tells of them, tells the most heroic story
in the history of the human spirit!
222
The simple comes neither first nor last in time. - In the history of the
religious conceptions, much false evolution and graduality has been invented
in the case of things which in truth grew up, not out of and after one another,
but side by side and separately; the simple, especially, is still much too much
reputed to be the oldest and primary. Not a little that is human originates
through subtraction and division, not through duplication, addition, growing
together. - One still believes, for example, in a gradual evolution of
representations of gods from clumsy stones and blocks of wood up to
complete humanization: and yet the fact of the matter is that, so long as the
divinity was introduced into trees, pieces of wood, stones, animals, and felt to
reside there, one shrank from a humanization of their form as from an act of
godlessness. It required the poets, existing outside the religious cult and the
spell of religious awe, to accustom the imagination of men to acceding to
such a thing: overweighed again by
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
more pious moods and moments, however, this liberating influence of
the poets again withdrew and the sacred remained, as before, in the realm of
the monstrous, uncanny and quite specifically non-human. But even much of
that which the imagination dares to construct for itself would, translated into
outward, bodily representation, nonetheless produce a painful effect: the
inward eye is very much bolder and less bashful than the outward (which is
why it is difficult, and in part impossible, to convert epic material into
dramatic). The religious imagination for a long time refuses absolutely to
believe in the identity of the god and an image: the image is supposed to be
the visible evidence that the rtumen of the divinity is, in some mysterious, not
fully comprehensible way, active in this place and bound to it. The oldest
image of the god is supposed to harbour and at the same time conceal the
god - to intimate his presence but not expose it to view. No Greek ever truly
beheld his Apollo as a wooden obelisk, his Eros as a lump of stone; they were
symbols whose purpose was precisely to excite fear of beholding him. The
same applies to those wooden idols furnished with paltry carvings of
individual limbs, sometimes an excess of them: such as a Spartan Apollo with
four hands and four ears. In the incompleteness, allusiveness or
overladenness of these figures there lies a dreadful holiness which is
supposed to fend off any association of them with anything human. It is not at
an embryonic stage of art at which such things are fashioned: as though in the
ages when such figures were revered men were incapable of speaking more
clearly, representing more accurately. What was the case, rather, was that one
thing was specifically avoided: direct statement. As the cella contains the
holy of holies, the actual numen of the divinity, and conceals it in mysterious
semi-darkness, but does not wholly conceal it; as the peripteral temple in turn
contains the cella and as though with a canopy and veil shelters it from
prying eyes, but does not wholly shelter it: so the image is the divinity and at
the same time the divinity's place of concealment. - Only when, in the secular
world of competition outside the religious cult, joy in the victory in the
contest had risen so high that the waves here produced flooded over into the
lake of the religious sensations; only when the statue of the victor was set up
in the courts of the temples and the eye and the soul of the pious frequenter of
the temple had, willingly or unwillingly, to accustom itself to this inescapable
sight of human strength and beauty, so that, standing thus close to one
another, spatially and in the soul, reverence for man and reverence for god
came to blend together: only then was the fear of an actual humanization of
the divine image also overcome and the great arena for plastic art in the grand
style opened up: yet still with the restriction that wherever worship was to be
conducted the ancient forms and ugliness were preserved and scrupulously
imitated. But the sanctifying and bestowing Hellene might now pursue to his
heart's content his desire to let god become man.
223
Whither we have to travel. - Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient
267
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
for us to know ourselves: we require history, for the past continues to
flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that
which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing. It may even
be said that here too, when we desire to descend into the river of what seems
to be our own most intimate and personal being, there applies the dictum of
Heraclitus: we cannot step into the same river twice. - This is, to be sure, a
piece of wisdom that has gradually grown stale, but it has nonetheless
remained as true and valid as it ever was: just as has this other piece of
wisdom, that to understand history we have to go in quest of the living
remnants of historical epochs - we have to travel, as the father of history,
Herodotus, travelled, to other nations - for these are only earlier stages of
culture grown firm upon which we can take a stand - to the so-called savage
and semi-savage peoples, and especially to where man has taken off the garb
of Europe or has not yet put it on. But there exists a subtler art and object of
travel which does not always require us to move from place to place or to
traverse thousands of miles. The last three centuries very probably still
continue to live on, in all their cultural colours and cultural refractions, close
beside us: they want only to be discovered. In many families, indeed in
individual men, the strata still lie neatly and clearly one on top of the other:
elsewhere there are dislocations and faults which make understanding more
difficult. A venerable specimen of very much older sensibility could certainly
have been more easily preserved in remoter regions, in less travelled
mountain valleys, in more self-enclosed communities: while it is improbable
that such discoveries would be made in, for example, Berlin, where people
come into the world washed and scalded clean. He who, after long practice in
this art of travel, has become a hundred-eyed Argos, will in the end be
attended everywhere by his lo* - I mean his ego - and will rediscover the
adventurous travels of this ego in process of becoming and transformation in
Egypt and Greece, Byzantium and Rome, France and Germany, in the age of
the nomadic or of the settled nations, in the Renaissance and the
Reformation, at home and abroad, indeed in the sea, the forests, in the plants
and in the mountains. - Thus self-knowledge will become universal
knowledge with regard to all that is past: just as, merely to allude to another
chain of reflections, self-determination and self-education could, in the freest
and most far-sighted spirits, one day become universal determination with
regard to all future humanity.
224
Balm and poison. - This fact can never be sufficiently pondered:
Christianity is the religion of antiquity grown old, its presupposition is
degenerated ancient cultures; on these it could and can act as a balm. In ages
in which ears and eyes are 'filled with mud', so that they are no longer
capable of hearing the voice of reason and philosophy, or of seeing wisdom
in bodily form, whether it bear the name of Epictetus or of Epi-
* to: in Greek mythology, daughter of King Inachos and lover of Zeus turned into a cow by
Hera and given to the giant Argos.
268
curus: in such ages the cross of martyrdom and the 'trumpet of the last
judgement' may perhaps still move the peoples to live a decent life. If one
thinks of the Rome of Juvenal,* that poison-toad with the eyes of Venus, one
learns what it means to confront the 'world' with a Cross, one comes to
respect the quiet Christian community and is grateful that it overran the
Graeco-Roman world. When most people were bom as though with the souls
of slaves and the sensuality of old men, what a blessing it must have been to
encounter beings who were more soul than body and seemed to be an
actualisation of the Greek conception of the shades of Hades: modest,
elusive, benevolent figures living in expectation of a 1>etter life' and thereby
become so undemanding, so silently contemptuous, so proudly patient! - This
Christianity as the evening-bell of good antiquity, a bell broken and weary
yet still sweet-sounding, is a balm to the ears even for him who now wanders
through these centuries only as a historian: what must it have been for the
men of these centuries themselves! - On the other hand, for youthful,
vigorous barbarians Christianity is poison; to implant the teaching of
sinfulness and damnation into the heroic, childish and animal soul of the
ancient German, for example, is nothing other than to poison it; a quite
tremendous chemical fermentation and decomposition, a confusion of
feelings and judgements, a rank exuberance of every kind of fantasy must
have been the outcome, and thus in the longer run a fundamental
enfeeblement of such barbarians. - One must, to be sure, ask what, without
this enfeeblement, there would have been left to us of Greek culture! of the
entire cultural past of the human race! - for the barbarian races untouched by
Christianity were capable of doing away with ancient cultures altogether: as,
for example, was demonstrated with fearful clarity by the pagan conquerors
of Romanized Britain. Christianity was obliged against its will to assist in
making the 'world' of antiquity immortal. - Here too there still remains
another counter-question and the possibility of a counter-reckoning: if it had
not been enfeebled by the poison referred to, would one or other of these
vigorous peoples, the German possibly, have perhaps been capable of
gradually finding a higher culture for themselves, one of their own, a new
one? - of which, as things are, mankind has not now the remotest conception?
- Thus it is the same here as everywhere: one does not know, to speak the
language of Christianity, whether God owes more gratitude to the Devil or
the Devil more gratitude to God for everything having turned out as it has.
225
Belief makes blessed and damns. - A Christian who ventured upon
forbidden pathways of thought might well ask himself one day: is it really
necessary that there should actually be a God, and a deputizing Lamb of God,
if belief in the existence of these beings suffices to produce the same effects?
Are they not superfluous beings, even supposing they do exist? For all the
benefits, consolations and moral improvements, as likewise all the
* Juvenal (60 to 140 AD): Roman satirical poet
269
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
darkenings and prostrations, bestowed by the Christian religion upon the
human soul proceed from this belief and not from the objects of this belief.
The case here is no different from that other celebrated case: there were, to be
sure, no witches, but the terrible effects of the belief in witches were the same
as they would have been if there really had been witches. For all those
occasions on which the Christian expects the direct intervention of a God but
does so in vain - because there is no God - his religion is sufficiently
inventive in reasons and excuses to pacify him: in this it is certainly an
ingenious religion. - Faith has hitherto been unable to move any real
mountains, to be sure, even though I know not who asserted it could; but it is
able to place mountains where there were none before.
226
Tragi-comedy of Regensburg.* - Now and then we have a frighteningly
clear view of Fortuna's farcical comedy: how she takes a few days, a single
place, the condition and opinions of one head, and attaches to them the rope
along which she intends the coming centuries to dance. Thus the destiny of
modern Germany lies in the days of disputation of Regensburg: a peaceful
outcome of ecclesiastical and moral contentions, without religious wars or
Counter-reformation, seemed guaranteed, as did the unity of the German
nation; the conciliatory spirit of Contarinit hovered for a moment over the
theological wrangling, victorious as the representative of a more mature
Italian piety upon whose pinions was reflected the daybreak of spiritual
freedom. But Luther's bony head, full of suspicions and uncanny fears,
bristled up: because justification through grace seemed to him his great
discovery and motto, he did not credit this proposition when it was uttered by
Italians: whereas, as is well known, the latter had discovered it much earlier
and, in profound quietness, had propagated it throughout all Italy. Luther saw
in this apparent accord a trick of the Devil and hindered the work of peace as
well as he could: thereby considerably furthering the aims of the enemies of
the Reich. - And now, to get the full flavour of the horrible farcicality of these
proceedings, consider in addition that none of the propositions over which
they were then contending in Regensburg - neither that of original sin, nor
that of redemption by proxy, nor that of justification by faith - is in any way
true or has anything whatever to do with truth, that they are now all
recognized as undiscussable: - and yet on their account the world was set in
flames, that is to say on account of opinions to which nothing real
corresponds; whereas contention is permitted least regarding purely
philological questions, for example the declaration of the sacramental words
of the Eucharist, because here it is possible to speak the truth. But where there
is nothing, truth too has lost its rights. - Finally, however, nothing remains to
be said but that these days saw the appearance of
* Regensburg: theological and political conference of 1541.
i Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542): a reformer in the Catholic Church who was sent
to Regensburg to achieve reconciliation with the Lutherans; despite his celebrated diplomacy, the
conference failed.
270
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
sources of energy by which the mills of the modern world were driven
more powerfully than they otherwise would have been. And energy comes
first, and only then, and a long way after, truth - isn't that true, my dear
contemporaries?
227
Goethe's errors. - Goethe is the great exception among the great artists in
that he did not live within the narrow-mindedness of his actual ability, as
though it were, for himself and for all the world, the essence and excellence,
the be-all and end-all of everything. Twice he thought he possessed
something higher than he actually did possess - and in the second half of his
life went astray in apparently being overwhelmingly convinced he was one of
the greatest scientific discoverers and illuminators. And likewise in the first
half of his life too: he wanted of himself something higher than poetry
appeared to him to be - and in this he was already in error. Nature had wanted
to make of him a plastic artist - that was the glowing and burning secret that
finally drove him to Italy so that he might truly revel in this illusion and bring
to it every sacrifice. At last, reflective man that he was and one genuinely
hostile to all creations of illusion, he realized what a deceitful little demon of
desire it was that had enticed him to believe this was his calling, and how he
had to liberate himself from the greatest passion of his will and say farewell
to it. The agonizing conviction that it was necessary to say farewell is finally
exhausted in the mood of Tasso: over him, the 'intensified Werther',* there
lies the presentiment of something that is worse than death, as when one says
to himself: 'now all is over - after this farewell; how can I go on living
without going mad!' - It was these two fundamental errors of his life that, in
the face of a purely literary posture towards poetry such as was at that time
the only attitude towards it, bestowed on Goethe a demeanour apparently so
independent and almost capricious. Except for the time in which Schiller -
poor Schiller, who had no time and wasted no time - drew him out of his
abstemious coyness towards poetry, his fear of all literary activity and
professionalism, Goethe seems like a Greek who now and then visits a
mistress but does so wondering whether she may not be a goddess he is not
quite able to name. In all his poetry there is perceptible the breath of the
plastic arts and of nature: the lineaments of these forms as they hovered
before him - and he perhaps always believed that he was only tracing the
transformations of a goddess - became, without his knowing or desiring it, the
lineaments of all the children of his art. Without this digression through error
he would not have become Goethe: that is to say, the only German literary
artist who has not yet become antiquated - because he desired to be a writer
by profession just as little as he desired to be a German by profession.
228
Grades of traveller. - We can distinguish five grades of traveller: those of
* Goethe's epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, a tale of disappointed love,
appeared in 1774; Torquato Tasso (final version 1789) represents the Italian poet drawing comfort
from the company of a pure woman.
271
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
the first and lowest grade are those who travel and, instead of seeing, are
themselves seen - they are as though blind; next come those who actually see
the world; the third experience something as a consequence of what they have
seen; the fourth absorb into themselves what they have experienced and bear
it away with them; lastly there are a few men of the highest energy who, after
they have experienced and absorbed all they have seen, necessarily have to
body it forth again out of themselves in works and actions as soon as they
have returned home. - It is like these five species of traveller that all men
travel through the whole journey of life, the lowest purely passive, the highest
those who transform into action and exhaust everything they experience.
229
Climbing higher. - As soon as we climb higher than those who have
hitherto admired us we appear to them to have sunk and fallen lower: for they
thought they had hitherto been standing with us (even if through us) on the
heights.
230
Measure and moderation. - Of two very exalted things - measure and
moderation - it is best never to speak. Some few know their significance and
power through inner sacred paths of experience and conversion: they revere
in them something divine and refuse to speak of them aloud. All the rest
hardly listen when they are spoken of, and confuse them with boredom and
mediocrity: except perhaps for those who did once hear a premonitory echo
from that domain but closed their ears to it. The recollection of it now makes
them agitated and angry.
231
Humanity in friendship and mastery. - 'If you are going towards the
morning I shall draw towards evening' - to feel thus is a high sign of
humanity in closer association with others: in the absence of this feeling
every friendship, every discipleship and pupilage, becomes sooner or later a
piece of hypocrisy.
232
The profound. - Men who think deeply appear as comedians when they
traffic with others, because in order to be understood they always have first to
simulate a surface.
233
For the despisers of 'herd humanity'. - He who regards men as a herd and
flees from them as fast as he can will certainly be overtaken by them and
gored by their horns.
234
Capital sin against the min. - He who gives another an opportunity to
display to society his knowledge, feelings or experiences, sets himself above
him and thus, in the event that the latter does not regard him as definitely
272
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
his superior, commits an assault on his vanity - whereas what he thought
he was doing was gratifying it.
2
35
Disappointment. - When a long and active life has, together with
speeches and writings, borne public witness to the nature of a person,
association with him is usually disappointing, and this for two reasons: firstly
because one expects too much from a brief period of acquaintanceship -
namely all that which only the thousand occasions of a lifetime could make
visible - and then because a person who has won general recognition makes
no effort to solicit recognition anew from every separate individual. He is too
indolent - and we are too eager.
236
Two sources of goodness. - To treat all men with equal benevolence and
to be kind to everyone irrespective of who he is can be just as much an
emanation of a profound cynicism as of a thorough philanthropy.
237
The wanderer in the mountains addresses himself. - There exist definite
signs to show that you have advanced forwards and climbed higher: the view
around you is more open and extensive than it was, the air that wafts upon
you is cooler but also more gentle - you have unlearned the folly of confusing
gentleness with warmth - your step has grown firmer and more lively,
courage and thoughtfulness have grown together: - for all these reasons your
path may now be more solitary, and in any event more perilous, than the one
you trod before, though certainly not to the extent those who watch you from
the misty valley below believe it to be.
238
Except for my neighbour. - It is obvious that my head does not stand
properly on my shoulders; for it is well known that everyone else knows
better than I what I should do and not do: only I, poor rogue, do not know
what I should be at. Are we not all like statues with the wrong heads on
them? Isn't that so, my dear neighbour? - But no, you, precisely you, are the
exception.
239
Caution. - With people who lack respect for what is private and personal
one should not associate or, if one does associate with them, first pitilessly
snap on them the handcuffs of propriety.
240
The desire to appear min. - To express only thoughts of a choice and
distinguished nature when conversing with people one does not know, or does
not know very well, to talk to them of one's celebrated acquaintances and
interesting travels and experiences, is a sign one is not proud, or at least that
one does not desire to appear so. Vanity is the proud man's mask of
politeness.
273
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
241
A good friendship. - A good friendship originates when one party has a
great respect for the other, more indeed than for himself, when one party
likewise loves the other, though not so much as he does himself, and when,
finally, one party knows how to facilitate the association by adding to it a
delicate tinge of intimacy while at the same time prudently withholding actual
and genuine intimacy and the confounding of I and Thou.
242
Friends as ghosts. - If we greatly transform ourselves, those friends of
ours who have not been transformed become ghosts of our past: their voice
comes across to us like the voice of a shade - as though we were hearing
ourself, only younger, more severe, less mature.
243
One eye and two glances. - Those people in whose eye there is the
pleading glance asking for charity and favours are, because of their frequent
humiliation and consequent feeling of revengefulness, also capable of the
impudent glance.
244
In the blue distance. - A child all his life - that sounds very moving, but
is only a judgement from a distance; seen and experienced close to, it always
means: boyish all his life.
245
Advantage and disadvantage in the same misunderstanding. - When a
subtle head is struck dumb with embarrassment the unsubtle usually interpret
it as silent superiority and greatly fear it: whereas if they perceived it was
embarrassment they would feel well disposed towards him.
246
The wise man pretending to be a fool. - The wise man's philanthropy
sometimes leads him to pose as excited, angry, delighted, so that the coldness
and reflectiveness of his true nature shall not harm those around him.
247
Compelling oneself to pay attention. - As soon as we notice that anyone
has to compel himself to pay attention when associating and talking with us,
we have a valid proof that he does not love us or loves us no longer.
248
Path to a Christian virtue. - To learn from one's enemies is the best path
to loving them: for it puts us in a grateful mood towards them.
249
Stratagem of the importunate. - The importunate give gold coins in
exchange for our conventional coins, their object being to compel us
afterwards to treat our conventions as a mistake and them as exceptions.
274
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
250
Ground of aversion. - We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not
because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no
subtler means were required to ensnare us.
251
In parting. - It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it
distances itself from it that I recognize their affinity and relatedness.
252
Silentium. - One should not talk about one's friends: otherwise one will
talk away the feeling of friendship.
253
Impoliteness. - Impoliteness is frequently the sign of a clumsy diffidence
which loses its head when surprized and tries to conceal the fact through
rudeness.
254
Miscalculation in honesty. - What we have previously kept silent about
we sometimes first reveal to our most recent acquaintances: we foolishly
believe that this demonstration of our trust is the strongest chain by which we
could fetter them to us - but they do not know enough of us to appreciate the
sacrifice we are making, and, without any thought of betrayal, betray our
secrets to others: so that as a consequence we perhaps lose our old
acquaintances.
255
In the antechamber of favour. - People whom we keep standing a long
time in the antechamber of our favour start to ferment and turn sour.
256
Warning to the despised. - If you have unmistakably sunk in the
estimation of men you should hold on like grim death to decorum in society
with others: otherwise you will betray to them that you have sunk in your
own estimation too. When a man is cynical in society it is a sign that he treats
himself like a dog when he is alone.
257
Ennobling ignorance. - In regard to one's standing in the estimation of
those who accord estimation it is more advantageous clearly not to
understand certain things. Ignorance too bestows privileges.
258
Opponents of gracefulness. - The arrogant and impatient do not like
gracefulness and sense in it a bodily visible reproach; for gracefulness is
tolerance of the heart as movement and gesture.
259
On meeting again. - When old friends meet again after a long separation
it often happens that they feign an interest in things mentioned to which
275
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
they have in fact grown quite indifferent: and sometimes both of them
notice this but dare not lift the veil - from a sad apprehension of what they
might see. Thus conversations arise like those in the realm of the dead.
260
Make friends only with the industrious. - The idle man is a danger to his
friends: for, because he does not have enough to do, he talks about what his
friends do and do not do, finally involves himself in it and makes a nuisance
of himself: for which reason it is prudent to form friendships only with the
industrious.
261
One weapon twice as good as two. - It is an unequal contest when one
urges his cause with head and heart, the other only with his head: the former
has as it were both sun and wind against him and his two weapons get in the
way of one another: he forfeits the prize - in the eyes of truth. On the other
hand, the victory of the latter with his one weapon is seldom a victory of the
kind admired by all other spectators and it loses him their sympathy.
262
Deep waters and troubled waters. - The public easily confuses him who
fishes in troubled waters with him who plumbs the depths.
263
Demonstrating one's vanity on friend and foe alike. - Many people
mistreat even their friends out of vanity when there are witnesses present to
whom they want to demonstrate their superiority: and others exaggerate the
worth of their foes so as to be able to show with pride that they are worthy of
such foes.
264
Cooling. - The heating up of the heart is commonly associated with a
sickness of the head and the judgement. He who is for a time concerned with
the health of the latter must therefore know what it is he has to cool down:
unconcerned about the future of his heart! For if one is capable of warming
up at all, one will surely grow warm again and have one's summer season.
265
Mixed feelings. - Women and selfish children feel against science
something compounded of envy and sentimentality.
266
When danger is greatest. - It is rare to break one's leg when in the course
of life one is toiling upwards - it happens much more often when one starts to
take things easy and to choose the easy paths.
267
Not too early. - One must take care not to become sharp too early -
because one will at the same time become thinly honed too early.
276
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXI MS
268
Joy in recalcitrance. - A good educator knows cases in which he is
proud of the fact that his pupil remains true to himself in opposition to him: in
those cases, that is to say, in which the youth ought not to understand the man
or would be harmed if he did understand him.
269
Experiment with honour and honesty. - Youths who aspire to increase
their reputation for honour and honesty first seek out a man recognized as a
man of honour and attack him, their purpose being to be considered his equal
by scolding and abusing him - and all the time with the thought that this first
experiment at any rate presents no danger, inasmuch as this man of honour
would be the last to censure or punish effrontery in pursuit of honesty and
honour.
270
The eternal child. - We think that play and fairy tales belong to
childhood: how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time of
life to live without play and fairy tales! We give these things other names, to
be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that
they are the same things - for the child too regards play as his work and fairy
tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic
division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new -
and a poet ought for once to present a man of two hundred: one, that is, who
really does live without play and fairy tales.
271
Every philosophy is a philosophy of a certain stage of life. - The stage of
life at which a philosopher discovered his teaching is audible within it: he
cannot prevent it, however exalted above time and the hour he may feel
himself to be. Thus Schopenhauer's philosophy remains the reflected image
of passionate and dejected youth - it is not a mode of thinking proper to men
of older years; thus Plato's philosophy recalls the midthirties, when a cold and
hot current are accustomed to buffet against one another, so that spray and
delicate little clouds are thrown up and, under favouring circumstances and
sunlight, the enchanting image of a rainbow.
272
Of the spirit of women. - The spiritual power of a woman is best
demonstrated by her sacrificing her own spirit to that of a man out of love of
him and of his spirit but then, despite this sacrifice, immediately evolving a
new spirit within the new domain, originally alien to her nature, to which the
man's disposition impels her.
273

Sexual elevation and degradation. - The tempest of the desires
sometimes draws a man up to a height where all desire ceases: to that height
where
2 77
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
he truly loves and dwells in a better state of being even more than in a
better state of volition. And, again, a good woman will often descend from
true love down to desire and thereby degrade herself in her own eyes. The
latter especially is among the most heart-moving things that can accompany
the idea of a good marriage.
274
Woman fulfils, man promises. - Through the woman nature shows the
point it has by now reached in its work on the image of mankind; through the
man it shows what it had to overcome in attaining to this point, but also what
its intentions are with respect to mankind. - The complete woman of every
era is the idleness of the creator on that seventh day in the creation of culture,
the repose of the artist in his work.
275
Transplantation. - If we have employed our spirit to master the
intemperance of the affects, we have perhaps achieved this at the expense of
transferring such intemperance to the spirit and are henceforth dissolute in
thinking and the desire for knowledge.
276
Laughter as treason. - How and when a woman laughs is a mark of her
culture: but in the sound of her laughter there is disclosed her nature, in the
case of very cultured women perhaps even the last inextinguishable remnant
of her nature. - That is why the psychologist will say with Horace, though for
a different reason: ridete puellae.17
2 77
From the souls of youths. - In their attitude towards one and the same
person, youths alternate between devotion and impudence: the reason is that
at bottom it is only themselves they are revering and despising and until
experience has taught them the measure of their own will and ability they
cannot help reeling from one of these sensations to the other in their attitude
towards themselves.
278
For the improvement of the world. - If we prevented the discontented,
atrabilious and sullen from propagating themselves we could magically
transform the earth into a garden of happiness. - This proposition belongs in
a practical philosophy for the female sex.
279
Trusting ones feelings. - The female expression that one ought to trust
one's feelings means hardly more than that one ought to eat what one likes
the taste of. This may be a good everyday rule, especially for sober natures.
Other natures, however, have to live according to a different principle: 'you
must eat, not only with your mouth, but also with your head, so that you shall
not perish by the mouth's love of sweetmeats'.

17 ridete puellae: laugh, maidens.
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
280
Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of
killing the object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all
from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it does
destruction.
281
Doors. - The child sees, just as the man does, in everything he learns and
experiences doors: but to the former they are entrances, to the latter only
through-ways.
282
Sympathizing women. - The sympathy of women, which is garrulous,
bears the sick man's bed into the public market-place.
283
Precocious merit. - He who acquires merit while still young usually
thereby forgets how to be respectful to age and to what is older and thus to his
profound disadvantage excludes himself from the society of the mature and
that which bestows maturity: so that in spite of his precocious merit he
remains green, importunate and boyish longer than others do.
284
Wholesale souls. - Women and artists think that when one does not
contradict them one could not contradict them; reverence on ten points and
silent disapprobation on ten others seems to them impossible at the same
time, because they possess wholesale souls.
285
Youthful talents. - In regard to youthful talents one must act strictly in
accordance with Goethe's maxim that it is often necessary to refrain from
attacking error so as not to attack truth. Their condition resembles the
sicknesses of pregnancy and is attended by strange appetites: these one must
satisfy and look after as far as one can for the sake of the fruit one hopes they
will produce. As sick-nurse to these curious invalids one must, to be sure,
understand the difficult art of self-abasement.
286
Disgust at truth. - Women are so constituted that all truth regarding men,
love, children, society, the aim of life, disgusts them - and that they seek to
revenge themselves upon anyone who opens their eyes.
287
The source of great love. - Whence is the origin of the sudden passion -
the passion of the profound and inward kind - that a man feels for a woman?
Least of all from sensuality alone: but when a man encounters weakness and
need of assistance and at the same time high spirits together in the same
being, then something takes place in him like the sensation of his soul
wanting to gush over: he is at the same moment moved and offended. At this
point there arises the source of great love.
279
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
288
Cleanliness. - The sense for cleanliness should be kindled in a child to
the point of passion: later it will flame up in ever new transformations almost
to the height of every virtue and at last appear, as an attendant to all talents,
like an aureole of purity, moderation, gentleness, character - bearing
happiness within it, spreading happiness around it.
289
Of vain old men. - Deep thought pertains to youth, clear thought to age:
when old men nonetheless sometimes speak and write in the manner of deep
thinkers they do so out of vanity, in the belief that they will thereby assume
the charm of enthusiastic youth, evolving and full of hope and presentiment.
290
Employment of novelties. - Men employ something newly learned or
experienced henceforth as a ploughshare, perhaps also as a weapon: but
women straightway turn it into an ornament for themselves.
291
How the two sexes act when they are in the right. - If you admit to a
woman that she is in the right, she cannot refrain from setting her heel
triumphantly on the neck of the defeated - she has to enjoy victory to the full;
while between men in such a case being in the right usually produces a
feeling of embarrassment. As a consequence the man is accustomed to
victory, while to the woman it comes as an exception.
292
Renunciation in the will to beauty. - If she is to become beautiful a
woman must not want to be considered pretty: that is to say, in ninety-nine
cases when she could please she must disdain to please so as on the hundredth
occasion to harvest as a reward the ravishment of him the portal of whose
soul is great enough to admit greatness.
293
Inexplicable, insupportable. - A youth cannot grasp that an older man
has already lived through his raptures, daybreaks of feeling, turns and flights
of thought, once before: it even offends him to think they could have existed
twice - but he grows altogether hostile when he hears that, if he is to become
fruitful, he will have to lose these blossoms and do without their fragrance.
294
Party with the air of the sufferer. - Every party that knows how to give
itself the air of the sufferer draws the hearts of the goodnatured over to it and
thereby itself acquires an air of goodnaturedness - to its profound advantage.
295
Assertion safer than proof. - An assertion produces a stronger effect than an
280
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
argument, at least among the majority of mankind: for argument arouses
mistrust. That is why public speakers seek to hammer home their party's
arguments with assertions.
296
The best concealers. - All those who regularly enjoy success possess a
profound skill in always exposing their errors and weaknesses only as
apparent strengths; for which reason they have to know these errors and
weaknesses uncommonly well and with uncommon clarity.
297
From time to time. - He sat himself at the city gate and said to one who
passed through it that this was the city gate. The latter responded that this
was true, but that one should not want to be too much in the right if one
wanted to be thanked for it. Oh, the former replied, I desire no thanks; but
from time to time it is nonetheless very pleasant not only to be in the right
but to be acknowledged to be right as well.
298
Virtue was not invented by the Germans. - Goethe's nobility and freedom
from envy, Beethoven's noble hermit's resignation, Mozart's charm and
graciousness of the heart, Handel's inflexible manliness and freedom under
the law, Bach's confident and transfigured inner life which did not even need
to renounce fame and success - are these supposed to be German qualities? -
If not, however, it at least shows what Germans should strive after and what
they can attain to.
299
Pia fraus or something else.18 - I may be wrong, but it seems to me that
in contemporary Germany a twofold kind of hypocrisy has been made the
duty of the moment for everyone: what is demanded is a Germanism out of
care for the political interests of the Reich and a Christianity out of fear for
the interests of society, both however only in words and demeanour and
especially in the ability to keep silent. It is the gloss and varnish that now
costs so much, is paid for at such a rate: it is the spectators on whose account
the nation's face is assuming a German- and Christian-looking expression.
300
To what extent the half can be more than the whole even in the realm of
the good. - In the case of all things intended to endure and demanding the
service of many people much that is less good has to be made the rule, even
though the organizer is very well aware of what is better and more difficult:
but he will calculate on there never being any lack of people able to be
adequate to the rule - and he knows that a middling degree of strength is the
rule. - A youth is seldom able to comprehend this, and then, as a newcomer,
he is amazed at how much in the right he is and how strangely blind others
are.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
301
The party man. - The genuine party man no longer learns, he only
experiences things and judges them: whereas Solon, who was never a party
man but pursued his aims beside and above the parties or in opposition to
them, is significantly the father of that simple saying in which there lies

18 Pia fraus: pious fraud
enclosed the health and inexhaustibility of Athens: T grow old and still I go
on learning.'
302
What, according to Goethe, is German. - The truly unendurable, from
whom one does not like to receive even what is good, are those who,
possessing freedom of mind, fail to notice they lack freedom of taste and
spirit. But precisely this is, according to Goethe's well-considered opinion,
German. - His voice and his example indicate that a German has to be more
than a German if he wants to be useful, indeed even endurable, to other
nations - and in what direction he ought to strive in order to emerge above
and beyond himself.
303
When it is necessary to stand still. - When the masses begin to rage and
reason grows dark, one does well, if one is not quite sure of the health of
one's soul, to step into a doorway and take stock of the weather.
304
Possessors and revolutionaries. - The only weapon against socialism
you still have at your command is not to challenge it: that is to say,
yourselves to live modestly and moderately, as far as you can prevent the
public display of extravagance and assist the state when it imposes heavy
taxes on all superfluities and things that resemble luxuries. Do you feel
disinclined to employ this weapon? In that case, you wealthy bourgeois who
call yourselves 'liberal', admit to yourselves that it is the desires of your own
heart that you find so fearful and threatening in the socialists, though in
yourselves you consider them inevitable, as though there they were
something quite different. If, as you are now, you did not have your property
and your worries about preserving it, these desires of yours would make of
you socialists: possession of property is the only thing that distinguishes you
from them. You must first of all conquer yourselves if you want any kind of
victory over the enemies of your wealth and comfort. - And if only this
wealth and comfort were true wellbeing! It would be less external and less of
an incitement to envy, it would be shared more, be more benevolent, more
minded of the demands of equity, more willing to lend a helping hand. But
what is ungenuine and histrionic in your pleasures, which derive more from a
sense of contrast (that others do not have them and envy you) than from a
sense of a fulfilment and enhancement of your powers - your houses, clothes,
carriages, shop-windows, gustatory demands, your noisy enthusiasm for
music and opera, finally your women, patterned and moulded but out of base
metal, gilded but without the ring of gold, chosen by you as showpieces.
282
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
offering themselves as showpieces: - these are the poison-bearing
propagators of that sickness of the people which, as socialist scabies of the
heart, is now spreading faster and faster among the masses but has its primary
seat and incubator in you. And who is there now who can arrest this
pestilence?
305
Party tactics. - When a party notices that a member has changed from
being an unconditional adherent to a conditional one, it is so little capable of
enduring this that it tries, through incitements and insults of all kinds, to bring
him to the point of outright defection and turn him into an opponent: for it has
the suspicion that the intention of seeing in their faith something of relative
value that admits of a For and Against, a weighing and distinguishing, is more
dangerous to it than a wholesale opposition.
306
Strengthening a party. - If you want to strengthen the inner constitution
of a party you should give it the opportunity of being treated with obvious
injustice; it will thereby accumulate a capital of good conscience that it
perhaps previously lacked.
307
Taking care of one's past. - Because men really respect only that which
was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after
his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past:
which is why tyrants of every kind (including tyrannical artists and
politicians) like to do violence to history, so that it may appear as preparation
for and step-ladder to them.
308
Party writers. - The drumbeat from which young writers in the service of
a party derive such satisfaction sounds to him who does not belong to the
party like the rattling of chains and inspires pity rather than admiration.
309
Taking sides against ourself. - Our adherents never forgive us if we take
sides against ourself: for in their eyes this means, not only to repulse their
love, but also to compromise their intelligence.
310
Danger in riches. - Only he who has spirit ought to have possessions:
otherwise possessions are a public danger. For the possessor who does not
know how to make use of the free time which his possessions could purchase
him will always continue to strive after possessions: this striving will
constitute his entertainment, his strategy in his war against boredom. Thus in
the end the moderate possessions that would suffice the man of spirit are
transformed into actual riches - riches which are in fact the glittering product
of spiritual dependence and poverty. They only appear quite different from
what their wretched origin would lead one to expect because they are able to
mask themselves with art and culture: for they
283
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
are, of course, able to purchase masks. By this means they arouse envy
in the poorer and the uncultivated - who at bottom are envying culture and fail
to recognize the masks as masks - and gradually prepare a social revolution:
for gilded vulgarity and histrionic self-inflation in a supposed 'enjoyment of
culture' instil into the latter the idea 'it is only a matter of money' - whereas,
while it is to some extent a matter of money, it is much more a matter of
spirit.
3
Pleasure in commanding and obeying. - Commanding and obeying both
give pleasure: the former when it has not yet become a habit, the latter
however when it has become a habit. Old servants under new masters
promote pleasure in one another.
312
Ambition for the advanced post. - There is an ambition to occupy the
advanced post which impels a party to venture into extreme danger.
313
When asses are needed. - You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna
until you ride into town on an ass.
3M
Party custom. - Every party tries to represent everything significant that
has evolved outside itself as being insignificant; if it fails in this endeavour,
however, its animosity towards it is the more virulent the more excellent it is.
315
Becoming empty. - Of him who surrenders himself to events there
remains less and less. Great politicians can thus become completely empty
men and yet once have been rich and full.
316
Wished-for enemies. - The socialist movements are now more welcome
than fear-inspiring to the dynastic governments, because through them the
latter can get into their hands the right and the weapons for taking the
exceptional measures with which they are able to strike at the figures that
really fill them with terror, the democrats and anti-dynasts. - For all that such
governments publicly hate they now have a secret inclination and affinity:
they are obliged to veil their soul.
317
Possessions possess. - It is only up to a certain point that possessions
make men more independent and free; one step further - and the possessions
become master, the possessor becomes a slave: as which he must sacrifice to
them his time and his thoughts and henceforth feel himself obligated to a
society, nailed to a place and incorporated into a state none of which perhaps
meets his inner and essential needs.
318
On the hegemony of men of knowledge. - It is easy, ridiculously easy, to erect
284
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
a model for the election of a lawgiving body. First of all the honest and
trustworthy men of a country who are at the same time masters and experts in
one or another subject have to select one another through a process of mutual
scenting out and recognition: in a narrower election those experts and men of
knowledge of the first rank in each department of life must again choose one
another, likewise through mutual recognition and guaranteeing. If these
constituted the lawgiving body, then finally in each individual case only the
voices and judgements of those expert in this specific matter would be
decisive and all the rest would, as a matter of honour and simple decency,
leave the vote to them alone: so that in the strictest sense the law would
proceed out of the understanding of those who understand best. - Now it is
parties who vote: and at every vote there must be hundreds of abashed
consciences - those of the ill- informed and incapable of judgement, of those
who merely repeat what they have heard, are drawn along and borne away.
Nothing debases the dignity of every new law so much as this clinging blush
of dishonesty to which every party vote constrains. But, as aforesaid, it is
easy, ridiculously easy, to erect such a thing: no power in the world is at
present strong enough to bring anything better - unless, that is, a belief in the
supreme utility of science and the man of knowledge finally dawns even upon
the most malevolent and comes to be preferred to the now dominant belief in
numbers. In the sense of this future let our watchword be: 'More respect for
the man of knowledge! And down with all parties!'
319
On the 'nation of thinkers' (or of bad thinking). - The obscure, undecided,
ominous, elemental, intuitive elements - to employ unclear expressions for
unclear things - that are attributed to the German nature, would, if they in fact
existed, be a proof that its culture was many steps retarded and still enclosed
within the spell and atmosphere of the Middle Ages. - There are, to be sure,
certain advantages too to be found in such a retardedness: with these qualities
- if, to repeat, they should still possess them - the Germans would be qualified
for certain things, and especially to understand certain things, for which other
nations have lost all capacity. And much is lost, certainly, if lack of
rationality - and that is what these qualities have in common - is lost: but
here, however, there is no loss without the highest compensatory gain, so that
no ground at all exists for grief, presupposing one does not, like children and
dainty eaters, want to enjoy the fruits of every season at the same time.
320
Owls to Athens. - The governments of the great states have in their hands
two means of keeping the people subject to them in fear and obedience: a
cruder one, the army, and a more refined one, the school. With the aid of the
former they enlist on their side the ambition of the higher and the energy of
the lower strata, insofar as both are usually composed of active and vigorous
men of moderate and inferior gifts; with the aid of the other means they win
for themselves the gifted poor, and especially the
285
intellectually ambitious semi-poor of the middle classes. Above all, they
make of the teachers of every grade a spiritual princely household that
involuntarily looks 'upwards': by placing obstacle after obstacle in the way of
the private school, not to speak of education at home, which they greatly
disfavour, they secure to themselves the disposal of a very significant
number of teaching posts upon which there are certainly directed five times
the number of hungry and obsequious eyes than can ever be satisfied. These
posts, however, must offer their occupants only meagre nourishment: thus
there will be maintained in them a feverish thirst for advancement and they
will become even more closely attached to the aims of the government. For it
is always more advantageous to cultivate a moderate discontent than to
encourage contentedness, which is the mother of courage and the
grandmother of freethinking and presumption. Through the agency of this
teaching body thus physically and spiritually curbed all the youth of the land
are, as far as can be, raised to a certain level of culture graded according to
the needs and objectives of the state: above all, however, the immature and
ambitious spirits of all classes are almost imperceptibly imbued with the idea
that only a life- course recognized and authorized by the state can bring
immediate social distinction. The effect of this belief in state examinations
and state titles is so extensive that even those who have remained
independent, men who have risen through trade or craft, are still plagued by
a thorn of discontent until their position too has been noted and recognized
from above through the gracious bestowal of ranks and orders - until they
'have no need to be ashamed'. Finally the state attaches to all those countless
official posts and positions of profit in its possession the obligation to be
educated and certificated by the state schools if one wishes to pass through
these portals: the respect of society, bread for oneself, the possibility of a
family, protection from above, the feeling of solidarity shared by those with
a common upbringing - all this constitutes a net of expectations within which
every young man is caught: who is there to warn him against it! If, after all
this, the obligation upon everyone to be a soldier for some years has during
the course of generations become an unthinking habit and natural event in
accordance with which one tailors the programme of one's life, then the state
can go on to venture the masterstroke of weaving together school and army,
giftedness, ambition and energy through the offering of advantages: that is to
say, by enticing the more highly gifted and cultivated into the army with
more favourable conditions and imbuing them with the soldierly spirit of
cheerful obedience, so that they will perhaps join the colours for an extended
period and with their talents create for them a new and ever more glittering
reputation. - Nothing is then lacking but opportunities for great wars: and
this will be taken care of, as a professional matter and thus in all innocence,
by the diplomats, together with the newspapers and stock exchanges: for the
'nation', as a nation of soldiers, always has a good conscience when it comes
to wars, there is no need to worry about that.
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
321
The press. - If we consider how even now all great political occurrences
creep on to the stage silent and shrouded, how they are concealed by
insignificant events and seem small in proximity to them, how it is not until
long after they have happened that their profound effects are felt and the
ground trembles - what significance can we then accord the press as it is now,
with its daily expenditure of lungpower on exclaiming, deafening, inciting,
shocking - is it anything more than the permanent false alarm that leads ears
and senses off in the wrong direction?
322
After a great event. - A man or a nation whose soul has come to light on
the occasion of a great event usually feels afterwards the need for a piece of
childishness or coarseness, as much out of embarrassment as for the purpose
of recovery.
323
To be a good German means to degermanize oneself. - That in which
national differences are seen to consist is to a far greater degree than has yet
been realized only a difference between varying stages of culture and to a
very small extent something permanent (and even this not in a strict sense).
. That is why all argumentation on the basis of national character is so
little incumbent upon him who labours at the transformation of convictions,
that is to say at culture. If we consider, for example, all that has been German,
we shall at once improve the theoretical question 'what is German?' into the
counter-question 'what is now German?' - and every good German will give it
a practical answer precisely by overcoming his German qualities. For
whenever a people goes forward and grows it bursts the girdle that has
hitherto given it its national appearance; if it remains stationary, if it
languishes, a new girdle fastens itself about its soul, the crust forming ever
more firmly around it constructs as it were a prison whose walls grow higher
and higher. If, therefore, a people possesses a great deal that is firm, this is a
proof that it wants to become petrified and would like to turn itself into a
monument: as from a certain point of time onwards happened with Egypt. He
therefore who has the interests of the Germans at heart should for his part see
how he can grow more and more beyond what is German. That is why a
change into the ungermanic has always been the mark of the most able of our
people.
324
What a foreigner said. - A foreigner travelling in Germany gave offence
and pleasure through certain things he said according to where he was when
he said them. All Swabians with intelligence - he used to say - are coquettish.
- The other Swabians, however, still thought that Uhland had been a poet and
Goethe had been immoral. - The best thing about the German novels now so
highly praised was that you did not need to read them: you knew them
already. - The Berliner seemed more goodnatured than
287
the South German, for he was very fond of a joke and could therefore
take one against himself, which was not so with the South German. - The
minds of the Germans were being kept down by their beer and newspapers:
he recommended to them tea and pamphlets, though only as a cure of course.
- He advised taking a look at how the various nations of aged Europe each
had a special knack of displaying some particular quality of old age, to the
enjoyment of those sitting before this great stage: how well the French
represented the prudence and amiability of old age, the English its experience
and restraint, the Italians its innocence and ingenuousness. Was it likely that
the other masks of old age would not be represented? Where was arrogant
old age? Where tyrannical old age? Where avaricious old age? - The most
dangerous region of Germany was Saxony and Thuringia: nowhere else was
there more intellectual activity and knowledge of human nature, together
with free-spiritedness, and yet it was all so modestly concealed by the ugly
dialect of the populace and their eagerness to be of service that you hardly
noticed that what you were dealing with was the intellectual sergeant-majors
of Germany and its instructors in good and evil. - The arrogance of the North
Germans was kept within bounds by their inclination to obedience, that of the
South Germans by their inclination to indolence. - It seemed to him that
German men had in their women inept but very self-confident housewives:
they persistently spoke so well of themselves they had convinced almost all
the world, and in any event their men, of the existence of a peculiarly
German housewifely virtue. - When conversation then turned to Germany's
internal and external politics, he was accustomed to say - or, as he put it, to
disclose - that Germany's greatest statesman did not believe in great
statesmen. - The future of the Germans he found threatened and threatening:
for they had forgotten how to enjoy themselves (which the Italians
understand so well) but through the great game of chance of wars and
dynastic revolutions became accustomed to emotion, consequently they
would one day have an uprising. For this was the strongest emotion a people
could procure for itself. - The reason the German socialist was the most
dangerous was that he was driven by no definite need; he suffered from not
knowing what he wanted; thus, even if he achieved a great deal, he would
languish from desire even in the midst of plenty just like Faust, though
presumably like a very plebeian Faust. 'For Bismarck has driven out of the
cultivated Germans the Faust Deoil that plagued them so', he cried in
conclusion: 'but now the Devil has entered into the swine and is worse than
ever he was!'
325
Opinions. - Most people are nothing and count for nothing until they
have clad themselves in general convictions and public opinions - in
accordance with the tailor's philosophy: clothes make the man. In regard to
exceptional men, however, the saying should read: only the wearer creates
the costume; here opinions cease from being public and become something
other than masks, finery and camouflage.
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
326
Two kinds of sobriety. - So as not to confuse sobriety out of exhaustion
with sobriety out of moderation one has to observe that the former is ill-
tempered, the latter cheerful.
327
Adulteration of joy. - Not to call something good a day longer than it
seems to us good, and above all: not a day sooner - that is the only way of
preserving the genuiness of joy: which otherwise all too easily grows pale
and insipid to the palate and is now among the adulterated provisions of life
for whole strata of the people.
328
The scapegoat of virtue. - When a man does the best he can, those who
wish him well but are not adequate to his deed promptly seek out a goat so as
to slaughter it, believing it to be the scapegoat - but it is in fact the scapegoat,
not of sin, but of virtue.
329
Sovereignty. - To revere the bad, too, and to embrace it, if it pleases us,
and to have no idea that we might be ashamed of being thus pleased, is the
mark of sovereignty, in great things and small.
330
Effect a phantom, not reality. - The significant man gradually learns that
insofar as he produces an effect he is a phantom in the heads of others, and
perhaps his soul begins to torment him with the subtle question whether he is
not obliged to preserve and maintain this phantom of himself for the benefit
of his fellow men.
331
Giving and taking. - If we have taken from someone the slightest thing
(or prevented him from having it), he is blind to the fact that we have given
him much greater, indeed even the greatest things.
332
The fruitful field. - All rejection and negation points to a lack of
fruitfulness: if only we were fruitful fields, we would at bottom let nothing
perish unused and see in every event, thing and man welcome manure, rain or
sunshine.
333
Society as enjoyment. - If a man deliberately renounces others and keeps
himself in solitude, he can thereby make of the society of men, enjoyed
rarely, a rare delicacy.
334
Knowing how to suffer publicly. - We must display our unhappiness and
from time to time be heard to sigh, be seen to be impatient: for if we let
others see how happy and secure in ourselves we are in spite of suffering
289
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and deprivation, how malicious and envious we would make them! - We
have to take care not to corrupt our fellow men; moreover, they would in the
instance referred to impose upon us a heavy impost, and our public suffering
is in any event also our private advantage.
335
Warmth in the heights. - It is warmer in the heights than people in the
valleys think, especially in winter. The thinker will know what is meant by
this metaphor.
336
Willing the good, achieving the beautiful. - It is not enough to practise
the good, one must have willed it and, in the words of the poet, receive the
divinity into one's will. But one may not will the beautiful, one must be able
to achieve it, in blindness and innocence, without anything of the
inquisitiveness of Psyche. He who lights his lantern to seek out perfect men
should take note of this sign: they are those who always act for the sake of
the good and in doing so always attain to the beautiful without giving
thought to it. For many of the better and nobler sort present, for all their good
will and good works, an unpleasant and ugly aspect for lack of a beautiful
soul and its capacities; we recoil from them, and even virtue is done harm to
by the repellent garb in which their bad taste dresses it.
337
Danger in renunciation. - We must take care not to establish our life on
too narrow an area of desires: for if we renounce the joys that position,
honours, companionship, sensual pleasures, comforts, the arts afford, the day
may come when we discover that through doing without these things we
have acquired for a neighbour, not wisdom, but boredom with life.
338
Final opinion about opinions. - One should either conceal one's opinions
or conceal oneself behind one's opinions. He who does otherwise does not
know the ways of the world or belongs to the order of holy foolhardiness.
339
'Gaudeamus igitur'.* - Joy must contain edifying and healing powers for
the moral nature of man too: how otherwise could it happen that, as soon as
it reposes in the sunlight of joy, our soul involuntarily promises itself 'to be
good', 'to become perfect', and that as it does so it is seized as though by a
blissful shudder with a presentiment of perfection?
340
To one who is praised. - So long as you are praised think only that you
are not yet on your own path but on that of another.
341
Loving the master. - The apprentice loves the master differently from
the way the master loves him.
*'Gaudeamus igiturLe t us t he n r e j oi c e .
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
342
All too beautiful and human. - 'Nature is too beautiful for you, poor
mortal' - this feeling is by no means rare: yet once or twice, when 1 have
intimately observed all that is human, all its abundance, strength, tenderness,
complicatedness, it has seemed to me as though I had to say in all humility:
man too is too beautiful for the man who reflects on him!' - and I do not
mean some particular kind of man, moral man for instance, but every man.
343
Movable goods and landed property. - If life has treated a man like a
brigand, and has taken from him all it could in the way of honours, friends,
adherents, health, possessions of all kinds, he may perhaps, after the first
shock, discover that he is richer than before. For it is only now that he knows
what is truly his, what no brigand is able to get his hands on; so that he
perhaps emerges out of all this plundering and confusion wearing the noble
aspect of a great landed proprietor.
344
Involuntarily an ideal. - The most painful feeling there is, is to discover
that one is always taken for something higher than one is. For one is then
obliged to admit to oneself: something in you is lies and deception, your
words, the impression you make, your glance, your actions - and this
deceptive something is as necessary as your honesty in other matters but
continually undermines the effect of this honesty and devalues it.
345
Idealist and liar. - We should not let ourselves be tyrannized over by our
fairest ability - that of elevating things into the ideal: otherwise one day truth
will depart from us with the angry words: 'you liar from the very heart, what
have I to do with you?'
346
Being misunderstood. - If we are misunderstood as a whole, it is
impossible completely to eradicate misunderstanding on any one individual
point. We have to realize this if we are not to squander superfluous energy on
our own defence.
347
The water-drinker speaks. - Go on drinking the wine that has refreshed
you all your life - what is it to you that I have to be a water-drinker? Are wine
and water not peaceable, fraternal elements which dwell side by side in
harmony?
348
From the land of the cannibals. - In solitude the solitary man consumes
himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him. Now choose.
349
At the freezing-point of the will. - 'It will come, one day, that hour that will
291
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
envelope you in a golden cloud where there is no pain: where the soul
has the enjoyment of its own weariness and, happy in a patient game with its
own patience, is like the waves of a lake which, reflecting the colours of an
evening sky on a quiet summer's day, lap and lap against the bank and then
are still again - without end, without aim, without satiation, without desire -
all repose that rejoices in change, all ebbing back and flooding forward with
the pulsebeat of nature.' This is how all invalids feel and speak: but if they do
attain to that hour there arrives, after brief enjoyment, boredom. This,
however, is a thawing wind for the frozen will: it awakens, stirs itself, and
again engenders wish upon wish. - To wish is a sign of recovery or
improvement.
350
The disavowed ideal. - It happens exceptionally that a man achieves his
highest flight only when he disavows his ideal: for this ideal has hitherto
driven him too impetuously, so that he has got out of breath half way along
every path he has taken and has had to come to a standstill.
351
Revealing propensity. - It should be regarded as a sign that a man suffers
from envy but is striving for higher things when he feels drawn by the idea
that in face of the man of excellence there is only one way of escape: love.
352
Bonheur de I'escalier* - Just as many people's wit fails to keep pace with
the opportunity for it, so that the opportunity has already gone out of the door
while the wit is still standing on the stairs: so others experience a kind of
bonheur de I'escalier which runs too slowly always to stay by the side of
fleet-footed time: the best they get to enjoy of an event, or of an entire period
of their life, falls to them only a long time afterwards, and then often only as
a feeble, spicy fragrance that awakens sorrow and longing - as though it had
once been possible to imbibe this element to the full, though now it is too
late.
353
Worms. - It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few
worms.
354
The seat of victory. - A good posture on a horse robs your opponent of
his courage and your audience of their hearts - why do you need to attack? Sit
like one who has conquered!
355
Danger in admiration. - Through too great admiration for the virtues of
others it is possible to lose interest in one's own and from lack of practice
finally lose them altogether without acquiring those of others in return.
* Bonheur de Iescalier-. Nietzsche's play on Tesprit de Iescalier, the disposition to
react only late after the event.
292
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
356
Usefulness of sickliness. - He who is often sick does not only have a
much greater enjoyment of health on account of the frequency with which he
gets well: he also has a greatly enhanced sense of what is healthy and what
sick in works and actions, his own and those of others: so that it is precisely
the sickliest writers, for example - and almost all the great writers are,
unfortunately, among them - who usually evidence in their writings a much
steadier and more certain tone of health, because they understand the
philosophy of psychical health and recovery better and are better acquainted
with its teachers - morning, sunshine, forests and springs - than the physically
robust.
357
Disloyalty, condition of mastership. - There is nothing to be done about
it: every master has only one pupil - and he becomes disloyal to him - for he
too is destined for mastership.
358
Never in vain. - In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain:
either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to
be able to get up higher tomorrow.
359
Before an ancient window. - Is what you see of the world through this
window so beautiful, then, that you have lost all desire to look through any
other - and even try to prevent others from doing so?
360
Indication of violent changes. - If we dream of people we have long
since forgotten or who have for long been dead, it is a sign that we have gone
through a violent change within ourself and that the ground upon which we
live has been completely turned over: so that the dead rise up and our
antiquity becomes our modernity.
361

Medicine of the soul. - Lying still and thinking little is the cheapest
medicine for all sicknesses of the soul and, if persisted with, grows more
pleasant hour by hour.
362
On spiritual order of rank. - It ranks you far beneath him that you seek
to establish the exceptions while he seeks to establish the rule.
363
The fatalist. - You have to believe in fate - science can compel you to.
What then grows out of this belief in your case - cowardice, resignation or
frankness and magnanimity - bears witness to the soil upon which that
seedcorn has been scattered but not, however, to the seedcorn itself - for out
of this anything and everything can grow.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
364
Ground of much ill-humour. - He who prefers the beautiful in life to the
useful will, like a child who prefers sweets to bread, certainly end by ruining
his digestion and will look out on the world very ill-humouredly.
365

Excess as cure. - One can reacquire a taste for one's own talents by
revering and enjoying antithetical talents for a long time to excess. - The
employment of excess as a cure is one of the more refined artifices in the art
of living.
366
'Will a self. - Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum
'know thyself', but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a
self and thou shalt become a self. - Fate seems to have left the choice still up
to them; whereas the inactive and contemplative cogitate on what they have
already chosen, on one occasion, when they entered into life.
367
Living without followers. - We grasp how little adherents are worth only
when we have ceased to be an adherent of our adherents.
368
Darkening ourselves. - If we are to get free of the troublesome gnat-
swarms of our admirers we have to know how to darken ourselves.
369
Boredom. - There is a boredom known to the most refined and cultivated
beads to whom the best the earth has to offer has become stale: accustomed
to eating choice and ever choicer food and to disgust with the coarser, they
are in danger of starving to death - for of the very best there is very little, and
sometimes it has become inaccessible or rock-hard, so that even good teeth
cannot bite into it.
370
Danger in admiration. - Admiration for a quality or an art can be so
great it can hinder us from striving to possess it.
371
What we desire of art. - One man wants to enjoy his own nature by
means of art, another wants with its aid to get above and away from his
nature for a time. In accordance with both needs there exists a twofold
species of art and artist.
372
Apostasy. - He who reneges on us perhaps does not thereby offend us but
he certainly offends our adherents.
373
After death. - Usually it is only long after a man's death that we find it in-
294
ASSORTED OPINIONS AND MAXIMS
comprehensible that he is no longer here: in the case of very great men
often only after decades. He who is honest usually feels when someone dies
that he has really been deprived of very little and that the solemn funeral
orator is a hypocrite. Only when we need him do we learn the necessity of an
individual, and his true epitaph is a late sigh.
374
Leaving in Hades. - There are many things we must leave in the Hades
of half-conscious feeling, and not desire to redeem them out of their shadow
existence, otherwise they will, as thoughts and words, become our demonic
masters and cruelly demand our blood of us.
375
Closeness of beggary. - Even the richest spirit occasionally loses the key
to the chamber where his hoarded treasure lies, and is then no different from
the poorest, who has to beg merely to stay alive.
376
Chain-thinkers. - To him who has thought a great deal every new
thought he hears or reads at once appears in the form of a link in a chain.
377
Pity. - In the gilded sheath of pity there is sometimes stuck the dagger of
envy.
378
What is genius? - To will an exalted end and the means to it.
379
Fighter's vanity. - He who has no hope of winning a fight, or has plainly
lost it, is all the more anxious to secure admiration for the way in which he
has fought it.
380
The philosophical life is misinterpreted. - At the moment when anyone
begins to take philosophy seriously all the world believes the opposite.
381
Imitation. - The bad acquires esteem by being imitated, the good loses it
- especially in art.
382
Ultimate lesson of history. - 'Ah, if only I had lived in those days!' - that
is the speech of foolish and trifling men. Every piece of history one has
studied seriously, though it be that of the most lauded land of the past, will
rather lead one to exclaim at last: 'Anything rather than back to that! The
spirit of that age would press upon you with the weight of a hundred
atmospheres, the good and beautiful in it you would not enjoy, the bad in it
you would not be able to digest.' - Posterity can be relied on to pass the same
judgement on our own age: it will have been intolerable, life in it unliveable.
- And yet does not everyone endure it in his own age? - Yes,
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and the reason is that the spirit of his age does not only lie upon him but
is also within him. The spirit of the age offers resistance to itself, bears up
against itself.
383
Nobility as mask. - With nobility of bearing we provoke our enemies,
with unconcealed envy we almost reconcile them with us: for envy compares,
equates, it is an involuntary and groaning kind of modesty. - Has, on account
of this advantage, envy ever been assumed as a mask by those who were in
fact not envious? Perhaps; it is certain, however, that nobility of bearing is
often employed as a mask for envy by ambitious people who would rather
suffer disadvantages and provoke their enemies than let it be seen that
inwardly they equate themselves with them.
384
Unforgivable. - You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of
character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.
385
Anti-theses. - The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained
in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish in the
even more celebrated 'love thy neighbour as thyself'. - In the former
knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even
begun.
386
The missing ear. - 'So long as one always lays the blame on others one
still belongs to the mob, when one always assumes responsibility oneself one
is on the path of wisdom; but the wise man blames no one, neither himself
nor others.' - Who says this? - Epictetus, eighteen hundred years ago. - It was
heard but forgotten. - No, it was not heard and forgotten: not everything gets
forgotten. But there was lacking an ear for it, the ear of Epictetus. - So did he
say it into his own ear? - Yes, that is how it is: wisdom is the whispering of
the solitary to himself in the crowded marketplace.
387
Error of standpoint, not of eye. - We always stand a few paces too close
to ourselves, and always a few paces too distant from our neighbour. So it
happens that we judge him too much wholesale and ourselves too much by
individual, occasional, insignificant traits and occurrences.
388
Ignorance in arms. - How little we mind whether another knows or does
not know something - whereas he perhaps sweats blood at the very idea of
being thought ignorant in the matter. There are, indeed, egregious fools who
go about armed with a quiver full of anathemas and peremptory decrees,
ready to shoot down anyone who exposes the fact that there are things in
which his judgement does not count.
296
ASSORTED OPI NI ONS AND MAXI MS
389
At the inn-table of experience. - People who, out of inborn moderation,
leave every glass standing only half-emptied refuse to admit that everything
in the world has its dregs and sediment.
390
Singing birds. - The adherents of a great man are accustomed to blind
themselves the better to sing his praises.
391
Not up to it. - The good displeases us when we are not up to it.
392
The rule as mother or as child. - The condition that gives birth to the
rule is different from the condition the rule gives birth to.
393
Comedy. - We sometimes harvest love and honour for deeds or works
which we have long since cast from us like a skin: and then we are easily
tempted to play the comedians of our own past and throw our old hide back
over our shoulders - and not only out of vanity but also from goodwill
towards our admirers.
394
Biographers' error. - The small amount of force required to push a boat
into the river should not be confused with the force of this river that
thereafter bears it along: but this confusion exists in almost all biographies.
395
Do not buy too dear. - What we buy too dear we usually make bad use
of, because we do so without love and with painful recollections - and thus
we suffer a twofold disadvantage from it.
396
Which philosophy society is always in need of. - The pillars of the social
order rest on this foundation: that everyone cheerfully regards that which he
is, does and strives after, his health or sickness, his poverty or prosperity, his
honour or insignificance, and feels as he does so 7 would not change places
with anyone.' - He who wants to influence the order of society has only to
implant into people's hearts this philosophy of cheerful rejection of changing
places and absence of envy.
397
Mark of the noble soul. - A noble soul is not that which is capable of the
highest flights but that which rises little and falls little but dwells
permanently in a free, translucent atmosphere and elevation.
398
Greatness and those who see it. - The finest effect of greatness is that it
bestows on those who see it a magnificatory and discriminating eye.
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
399
Being satisfied. - That maturity of understanding has been attained is
manifested in the fact that one no longer repairs to where rare flowers stand
among the thorniest hedgerows of knowledge but is satisfied with garden,
forest, field and meadow, in the knowledge that life is too short for the rare
and extraordinary.
400
Advantage in privation. - He who dwells always in warmth and fullness
of heart and as it were in the summer air of the soul can have no idea of that
shuddery rapture which seizes on wintery natures who are by way of
exception touched by rays of love and the cool breath of a sunny February
day.
401
Recipe for the sufferer. - Is the burden of living becoming too heavy for
you? - Then you must increase the burden of your life. When the sufferer at
last thirsts for the river of Lethe and seeks it - he must become a hero if he is
to be sure of finding it.
402
The judge. - He who has beheld anyone's ideal is his inexorable judge
and as it were his bad conscience.
403
Utility of great renunciation. - The most useful thing about a great
renunciation is that it communicates to us that pride in virtue through which
we are from then on able easily to demand of ourselves many petty
renunciations.
404
How duty acquires lustre. - The means of transforming your iron duty
into gold in everyone's eyes is: always to perform a little more than you
promise.
405
Prayer to men. - 'Forgive us our virtues' - that is how one should pray to
men.
406
Those who create and those who enjoy. - Everyone who enjoys believes
the tree was concerned about the fruit; but it was, in fact, concerned about the
seed. - It is in this that there lies the difference between all who create and all
who enjoy.
407
The glory of the great. - Of what account is genius if it does not
communicate to him who contemplates and reveres it such freedom and
elevation of feeling that he no longer has need of genius! - Rendering
themselves superfluous - that is the glory of all great men.
298
408
Descent into Hades. - I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus,
and will often be there again; and I have not sacrificed only rams to be able
to talk with the dead, but have not spared my own blood as well. There have
been four pairs who did not refuse themselves to me, the sacrificer: Epicurus
and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and
Schopenhauer. With these I have had to come to terms when I have wandered
long alone, from them will I accept judgement, to them will I listen when in
doing so they judge one another. Whatever I say, resolve, cogitate for myself
and others: upon these eight I fix my eyes and see theirs fixed upon me. -
May the living forgive me if they sometimes appear to me as shades, so pale
and ill-humoured, so restless and, alas! so lusting for life: whereas those
others then seem to me so alive, as though now, after death, they could never
again grow weary of life. Eternal liveliness, however, is what counts: what
do "eternal life", or life at all, matter to us!
299
PART TWO
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
The Shadow: As it is so long since I heard your voice, I would like to
give you an opportunity of speaking.
The Wanderer: Someone said something: - where? and who? It almost
seems as though it were I myself speaking, though in an even weaker voice
than mine.
The Shadow (after a pause): Are you not glad to have an opportunity of
speaking?
The Wanderer: By God and all the things I do not believe in, it is my
shadow speaking; I hear it but I do not believe it.
The Shadow: Let us accept it and think no more about it: in an hour it
will all be over.
The Wanderer: That is just what I thought when, in a wood near Pisa, I
saw first two and then five camels.
The Shadow: It is well we are both indulgent if our understanding for
once comes to a stop: thus we shall converse together without recriminations
and not press one another too hard if we fail to understand something the
other has said. If we know not what to reply, it will be enough to say
something: it is under this reasonable condition that I agree to converse with
anyone. In a long discussion even the wisest of us is once a fool and three
times a simpleton.
The Wanderer: Your modesty is not flattering to him you confess it to.
The Shadow: Ought I, then, to flatter?
The Wanderer: I thought a man's shadow was his vanity: but his vanity
would never ask: 'ought I, then, to flatter?'
The Shadow: Neither does a man's vanity, insofar as I know it, ask, as I
have asked twice already, whether it may speak; it never ceases from
speaking.
The Wanderer: Only now do I notice how impolite I am towards you,
my beloved shadow: I have not yet said a word of how very much I rejoice to
hear you and not merely to see you. You will know that I love shadow as
much as I love light. For there to be beauty of face, clarity of speech,
benevolence and firmness of character, shadow is as needful as light. They
are not opponents: they stand, rather, lovingly hand in hand, and when light
disappears, shadow slips away after it.
The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: night. I love mankind
because they are disciples of light, and I rejoice in the gleam that bums in
their eyes when they discover and acquire knowledge, indefatigable knowers
and discoverers that they are. That shadow all things cast whenever the
sunlight of knowledge falls upon them - that shadow too am I.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
The Wanderer. I believe I understand you, even though your expressions
are somewhat shadowy. But you were right: good friends now and then
exchange an obscure word as a sign of agreement which to any third party is
intended for an enigma. And we are good friends. And so enough preamble!
There are a couple of hundred questions pressing upon my soul, and the time
you have in which to answer them is perhaps only brief. Let us hasten to see
what there is we can peaceably agree upon.
The Shadow: But shadows are more bashful than men: promise you will
tell no one how we talked together!
The Wanderer: How we talked together? Heaven defend me from
longspun-out literary conversations! If Plato had taken less pleasure in
spinning-out his readers would take more pleasure in Plato. A conversation
that gives delight in reality is, if transformed into writing and read, a painting
with nothing but false perspectives: everything is too long or too short. - But
shall I perhaps be permitted to tell what it was we were in accord over?
The Shadow: That I am content with; for they will all recognize in it
only your opinions: no one will think of the shadow.
The Wanderer: Perhaps you are wrong, my friend! Up to now people
have perceived in my opinions more shadow than me.
The Shadow: More shadow than light! Is it possible?
The Wanderer: Be serious, dear fool! My very first question demands
seriousness. -
1
Of the tree of knowledge. - Probability but no truth: appearance of
freedom but no freedom - it is on account of these two fruits that the tree of
knowledge cannot be confounded with the tree of life.
2
The rationality of the world. - That the world is not the epitome of an
eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that that piece of the
world which we know - I mean our own human rationality - is not so very
rational. And if it is not always perfectly wise and rational, then the rest of
the world will not be so either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a
parte ad totum* applies, and does so with decisive force.
3
In the beginning'. - To glorify the origin - that is the metaphysical
aftershoot that breaks out when we meditate on history and makes us believe
that what stands at the beginning of all things is also what is most valuable
and essential.
4
Standard for the value of truth. - The effort required to climb a mountain
is certainly not the standard by which to assess its height. And are things
supposed to be different in the case of science! - do some who would like * 'a
minori... ad totum: from the less to the greater, from the part to the whole.
302
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
to be accounted initiates tell us that the effort required to attain to truth is
to decide the value of truth! This mad morality derives from the idea that
'truths' are really nothing more than gymnastic apparatus upon which we are
supposed bravely to work ourselves to exhaustion - a morality for athletes
and gymnasts of the spirit.
5
Linguistic usage and reality. - There exists a feigned disrespect for all
the things which men in fact take most seriously, for all the things closest to
them. One says, for example, 'one eats only in order to live' - which is a
damned lie, as is that which speaks of the begetting of children as the real
objective of all voluptuousness. Conversely, the high esteem in which the
'most serious things' are held is almost never quite genuine: the priests and
metaphysicians, to be sure, have in these domains altogether accustomed us
to a feignedly exaggerated linguistic usage, but they have not converted the
feeling which refuses to take these most serious things as seriously as those
despised closest things. - An unfortunate consequence of this twofold
hypocrisy, however, is always that the closest things, for example eating,
housing, clothing, social intercourse, are not made the object of constant
impartial and general reflection and reform: because these things are
accounted degrading, they are deprived of serious intellectual and artistic
consideration; so that here habit and frivolity easily carry off the victory over
the unthinking, especially over inexperienced youth: while on the other hand
our continual offences against the most elementary laws of the body and the
spirit reduce us all, young and old, to a disgraceful dependence and bondage
- I mean to that, at bottom wholly unnecessary dependence on physicians,
teachers and curers of souls who still lie like a burden on the whole of
society.
6
Earthly frailty and its chief cause. - When we look around us we can
always encounter people who have eaten eggs all their lives and have never
noticed that the longer ones are the best tasting, who do not know that a
thunderstorm is beneficial to the bowels, that pleasant odours smell stronger
in cold clear air, that our sense of taste differs with differing phases of the
moon, that speaking well or listening intently at mealtimes is harmful to the
stomach. Even if these examples of a lack of the power of observation may
seem inadequate, one is bound to admit that most people see the closest
things of all very badly and very rarely pay heed to them. And is this a matter
of indifference? - One should consider that almost all the physical and
psychical frailties of the individual derive from this lack: not knowing what
is beneficial to us and what harmful in the institution of our mode of life, in
the division of the day, in for how long and with whom we enjoy social
intercourse, in profession and leisure, commanding and obeying, feeling for
art and nature, eating, sleeping and reflecting; being unknowledgeable in the
smallest and most everyday things and failing to keep an eye on them - this it
is that transforms the earth for so many into a 'vale of tears'. Let it not be said
that, here as everywhere, it is
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
a question of human lack of understanding: on the contrary - there exists
enough, and more than enough understanding, only it is employed in the
wrong direction and artificially diverted away from these smallest and
closest things. Priests and teachers, and the sublime lust for power of idealists
of every description, the cruder and the more refined, hammer even into
children that what matters is something quite different: the salvation of the
soul, the service of the state, the advancement of science, or the accumulation
of reputation and possessions, all as the means of doing service to mankind
as a whole; while the requirements of the individual, his great and small
needs within the twenty-four hours of the day, are to be regarded as
something contemptible or a matter of indifference. - Already in ancient
Greece Socrates was defending himself with all his might against this
arrogant neglect of the human for the benefit of the human race, and loved to
indicate the true compass and content of all reflection and concern with an
expression of Homer's: it comprises, he said, nothing other than 'that which I
encounter of good and ill in my own house'.
7
Turn means of consolation. - Epicurus, the soul-soother of later
antiquity, had that wonderful insight, which is still today so rarely to be
discovered, that to quieten the heart it is absolutely not necessary to have
solved the ultimate and outermost theoretical questions. Thus to those
tormented by 'fear of the gods' it sufficed him to say: 'if the gods exist they
do not concern themselves with us' - instead of indulging in fruitless and
distant disputation over the ultimate question whether the gods do in fact
exist. This position is much more favourable and much stronger: one gives
the other a few steps advantage and thus makes him more willing to listen
and ponder. As soon, however, as he sets about demonstrating the opposite -
that the gods do concern themselves with us - into what wrong paths and
thorny thickets the poor fellow must stray, entirely of his own volition and
not through any cunning of his interlocutor, who needs only to possess
sufficient humanity and subtlety to conceal the pity he feels at this spectacle.
At last this other will arrive at a feeling of disgust, the strongest argument
against any proposition, disgust at his own assertion; he will cool down and
depart in the same mood as that which characterizes the pure atheist: 'what do
the gods matter to me anyway! The devil take them!' - In other instances,
especially when some hypothesis belonging half to physics and half to
morals had cast gloom over someone's spirits, he refrained from refuting this
hypothesis and admitted it might well be true: but he added that there was yet
another hypothesis to explain the same phenomenon; perhaps this second
hypothesis represented the truth. A multiplicity of hypotheses, for example as
to the origin of the bad conscience, suffices still in our own time to lift from
the soul that shadow that so easily arises from a laborious pondering over a
single hypothesis which, being the only one visible, is a hundredfold
overrated. - Thus he who wishes to offer consolation - to the unfortunate.
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THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
ill-doers, hypochondriacs, the dying - should call to mind the two
pacifying formulae of Epicurus, which are capable of being applied to very
many questions. Reduced to their simplest form they would perhaps become:
firstly, if that is how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may
be thus but they may also be otherwise.
8
In the night. - As soon as night falls our perception of the most
immediate things changes. The wind goes along as though on forbidden
pathways, whispering as though seeking something, ill-humoured because it
does not find it. The lamplight shines with a dull ruddy glow, gazing wearily,
unwillingly struggling against the night, an impatient slave of wakeful man.
The sleeper lies breathing fitfully, a shuddery beat to which ever- recurring
care seems to play the melody - we cannot hear it, but when the sleeper's
breast rises we feel our heart tighten, and when his breath sinks down and
almost dies away into deathly silence we say to ourself 'rest, rest, poor
perturbed spirit!' - we desire for all that lives, because it lives so oppressed,
an eternal rest; night lures us over to death. - If men had to do without the
sun, and waged war against the night with moonlight and oil, what
philosophy would envelop them in its veil! One can see only too well, as
things are, how the darkness and deprivation of sun that enshrouds half his
life has rendered the spiritual and psychical nature of man on the whole dark
and gloomy.
9
Where the theory of freedom of will originated. - Over one man necessity
stands in the shape of his passions, over another as the habit of hearing and
obeying, over a third as a logical conscience, over a fourth as caprice and a
mischievous pleasure in escapades. These four will, however, seek the
freedom of their will precisely where each of them is most firmly fettered: it
is as if the silkworm sought the freedom of its will in spinning. How does this
happen? Evidently because each considers himself most free where his
feeling of living is greatest; thus, as we have said, in passion, in duty, in
knowledge, in mischievousness respectively. That through which the
individual human being is strong, wherein he feels himself animated, he
involuntarily thinks must also always be the element of his freedom: he
accounts dependence and dullness, independence and the feeling of living as
necessarily coupled. - Here an experience in the social-political domain has
been falsely transferred to the farthest metaphysical domain: in the former the
strong man is also the free man; the lively feeling of joy and sorrow, high
hope, boldness in desire, powerfulness in hatred is the property of the rulers
and the independent, while the subjected man, the slave, lives dull and
oppressed. - The theory of freedom of will is an invention of ruling classes.
10
Feeling no new chains. - So long as we do not feel that we are dependent
on anything we regard ourselves as independent: a false conclusion that
305
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
demonstrates how proud and lusting for power man is. For he here
assumes that as soon as he experiences dependence he must under all
circumstances notice and recognize it, under the presupposition that he is
accustomed to living in independence and if, exceptionally, he lost it, he
would at once perceive a sensation antithetical to the one he is accustomed
to. - But what if the opposite were true: that he is always living in manifold
dependence but regards himself as free when, out of long habituation, he no
longer perceives the weight of the chains? It is only from new chains that he
now suffers: - 'freedom of will' really means nothing more than feeling no
new chains.
11
Freedom of will and isolation of facts. - Our usual imprecise mode of
observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between
this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates
every fact. In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession
of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux. Now, belief in freedom of
will is incompatible precisely with the idea of a continuous, homogeneous,
undivided, indivisible flowing: it presupposes that every individual action is
isolate and indivisible; it is an atomism in the domain of willing and
knowing. - Just as we understand characters only imprecisely, so do we also
facts: we speak of identical characters, identical facts: neither exists. Now,
we praise and censure, however, only under this false presupposition that
there are identical facts, that there exists a graduated order of classes of facts
which corresponds to a graduated world-order: thus we isolate, not only the
individual fact, but also again groups of supposedly identical facts (good,
evil, sympathetic, envious actions, etc.) - in both cases erroneously. - The
word and the concept are the most manifest ground for our belief in this
isolation of groups of actions: we do not only designate things with them, we
think originally that through them we grasp the true in things. Through words
and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as being
simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in
and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which
breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise.
Belief in freedom of will - that is to say in identical facts and in isolated facts
- has in language its constant evangelist and advocate.
12
The fundamental errors. - For man to feel any sort of psychical pleasure
or displeasure he must be in the grip of one of these two illusions: either he
believes in the identity of certain facts, certain sensations: in which case he
experiences psychical pleasure or displeasure through comparing his present
states with past ones and declaring them identical or not identical (as happens
in all recollection); or he believes in freedom of will, for instance when he
thinks 'I did not have to do this', 'this could have happened differently', and
likewise gains pleasure or displeasure. Without the errors which are active in
every psychical pleasure and displeasure a
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
humanity would never have come into existence - whose fundamental
feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the
eternal miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing
exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which
cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler
over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world
history! - Vanitas vanitatum homo.*
13
Saying a thing twice. - It is good to repeat oneself and thus bestow on a
thing a right and a left foot. Truth may be able to stand on one leg; but with
two it can walk and get around.
14
Man, the comedian of the world. - Let us hope there really are more
spiritual beings than men are, so that all the humour shall not go to waste that
lies in the fact that man regards himself as the goal and purpose of the
existence of the whole universe and that mankind will not seriously rest
satisfied with itself as anything less than the accomplisher of a universal
mission. If a god created the world then he created men as the apes of god, so
as always to have on hand something to cheer him up in his all-too-
protracted eternities. The music of the spheres encompassing the earth would
then no doubt be the mocking laughter of all other creatures encompassing
man. That bored immortal tickles his favourite animal with pain, so as to take
pleasure in the proud and tragic way this vainest of all creatures displays and
interprets his sufferings and in his spiritual inventiveness in general - as the
inventor of this inventor. For he who devised man for his amusement
possessed more spirit than man, and more enjoyment of spirit. Yet even here,
where we are for once willing to see our humanity humiliated, our vanity is
playing a trick on us, inasmuch as we men would like to be something quite
incomparable and miraculous at least in possessing this vanity. Our
uniqueness in the universe! alas, it is all too improbable an idea! The
astronomers, to whom there is sometimes given a horizon that really is free
of the earth, give us to understand that the drop of life in the universe is
without significance for the total character of the tremendous ocean of
becoming and passing away: that uncounted stars possess similar conditions
for the production of life as the earth does - very many thus do, though they
constitute only a handful compared with the limitless number which have
never experienced the eruption of life or have long since recovered from it;
that measured against the duration of their existence life on each of these
stars has been a moment, a sudden flickering up, with long, long spaces of
time afterwards - and thus in no sense the goal and ultimate objective of their
existence. Perhaps the ant in the forest imagines it is the goal and objective of
the forest just as firmly as we do when in our imagination we almost
involuntarily associate the destruction of mankind with the destruction of the
earth: indeed, we are being modest if we halt at that * Vanitas vanitatum homo:
man is the vanity of vanities
307
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and do not organize a general twilight of the gods and the universe for
the funeral rites of the last man. Even the most unprejudiced astronomer
himself can hardly imagine the earth without life other than as the luminous
and floating grave-mound of mankind.
15
Modesty of man. - How little pleasure most people need to make them
find life good, how modest man is!
16
Where indifference is needed. - Nothing could be more wrongheaded
than to want to wait and see what science will one day determine once and
for all concerning the first and last things and until then continue to think
(and especially to believe!) in the customary fashion - as we are so often
advised to do. The impulse to desire in this domain nothing but certainties is
a religious after-shoot, no more - a hidden and only apparently sceptical
species of the 'metaphysical need', coupled with the consideration that there
is no prospect of these ultimate certainties being to hand for a long time to
come and that until then the 'believer' is right not to trouble his head about
anything in this domain. We have absolutely no need of these certainties
regarding the furthest horizon to live a full and excellent human life: just as
the ant has no need of them to be a good ant. What we need, rather, is to
become clear in our minds as to the origin of that calamitous weightiness we
have for so long accorded these things, and for that we require a history of
the ethical and religious sensations. For it is only under the influence of these
sensations that those finest of all questions of knowledge have acquired for
us such consequence and dreadfulness: into the outermost regions to which
the spiritual eye is strained but into which it is unable to penetrate we have
displaced such concepts as guilt and punishment (and everlasting punishment
moreover!): and this the more incautiously the darker these regions have
been. Where we could establish nothing for a certainty it has been our
practice from of old boldly to fantasize, and we have persuaded our posterity
to take these fantasies seriously and for truth, when all else has failed by
resorting to the detestable assertion that faith is worth more than knowledge.
What is now needed in regard to these last things is not knowledge against
faith but indifference against faith and supposed knowledge in those
domains! - Everything else must be of more concern to us than that which has
hitherto been preached to us as the most important of all things - I mean the
questions: what is the purpose of man? What is his fate after death? How can
he be reconciled with God? - and all the rest of these curiosa. Just as little as
with these questions of the religious are we concerned with the questions of
the philosophical dogmatists, whether they be idealists or materialists or
realists. Their object, one and all, is to compel us to a decision in domains
where neither faith nor knowledge is needed; it is more useful, even for the
greatest lovers of knowledge, if around everything accessible to reason and
investigation there lies a misty and deceptive girdle of quagmire, a band of
the impenetrable, in-
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
definable, and eternally fluid. It is precisely through the contrast it
presents to the realm of darkness at the edge of the world of knowledge that
the bright world of knowledge close to us is continually enhanced in value. -
We must again become good neighbours to the closest things and cease from
gazing so contemptuously past them at clouds and monsters of the night. In
forests and caves, in swampy regions and under cloudy skies - this is where
man has lived all too long, and lived poorly, as on the cultural steps of whole
millennia. There he has learned to despise the present and neighbourhood
and life and himself - and we, who dwell in the brighter fields of nature and
the spirit, we too have inherited in our blood something of this poison of
contempt for what is closest.
17
Deep explanations. - He who explains a passage in an author 'more
deeply' than the passage was meant has not explained the author but obscured
him. This is how our metaphysicians stand in regard to the text of nature;
indeed, they stand much worse. For in order to apply their deep explanations
they frequently first adjust the text in a way that will facilitate it: in other
words, they spoil it. As a curious example of the spoiling of a text and the
obscuring of its author let us here consider Schopenhauer's thoughts on the
pregnancy of women. The sign of the continued existence in time of the will
to live is, he says, coitus; the sign that there has again been allied to this will
the possibility of redemption held open by the light of knowledge, and
knowledge indeed of the highest degree of clarity, is the renewed incarnation
of the will to live. The mark of this latter is pregnancy, which thus goes about
freely and openly, indeed proudly, while coitus crawls away and hides like a
criminal. He asserts that every woman if surprised in the act of procreation
would like to die of shame, but 'displays her pregnancy without a trace of
shame, indeed with a kind of pride'. The first thing to remark is that this
condition could hardly be displayed more than it displays itself; but inasmuch
as Schopenhauer emphasizes only the intentionality of this displaying he is
preparing the text for himself so as to harmonize it with the 'explanation' he
is about to bring forward. Then we must add that what he says as to the
universality of the phenomenon to be explained is untrue: he speaks of 'every
woman': but many, especially younger women, often evidence a painful
embarrassment, even before their closest relations, when in this condition;
and if women of more mature or the maturest years, in particular those of the
lower orders, do in fact pride themselves on being in such a condition, then it
is no doubt because it provides evidence that they are still desired by their
men. That at the sight of it her neighbour or his wife or a passing stranger
should say or think: 'can it be possible - ': female vanity is, at a low level of
intelligence, always happy to receive this alms. On the other hand, it would
have to follow from Schopenhauer's propositions that precisely the cleverest
and most intelligent women would openly rejoice the most at their condition:
for they have the greatest prospect of bearing a prodigy of intellect in whom
'the will' can, to the general
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
wellbeing, again 'deny' itself; stupid women, on the contrary, would
have every reason to conceal their pregnancy more bashfully than anything
else they conceal. It cannot be said that these things derive from reality.
Supposing, however, that Schopenhauer were in a quite general sense right to
say that in a condition of pregnancy women evidence a greater self-
contentment than they otherwise do, there is an explanation lying closer to
hand than his does. One can imagine a hen cackling before she has laid an
egg, the content of the cackling being: 'Look! Look! I am going to lay an
egg! I am going to lay an egg!'
18
The modern Diogenes. - Before one seeks men one must have found the
lantern. Will it have to be the lantern of the cynic?
19
Immoralists. - Because they dissect morality, moralists must now be
content to be upbraided as immoralists. But he who wants to dissect has to
kill; yet only for the sake of better knowledge, better judgement, better
living; not so that all the world shall start dissecting. Unhappily, however,
people still believe that every moralist has to be a model and ideal in all he
does and that others are supposed to imitate him: they confuse him with the
preacher of morals. The older moralists dissected too little and preached too
much: which is why the moralists of today experience this confusion and its
unpleasant consequences.
20
Not to be confused. - Moralists who treat the grandiose, mighty, self-
sacrificing disposition such as is evidenced by Plutarch's heroes, or the pure,
enlightened, heat-conducting state of soul of truly good men and women, as
weighty problems and seek to discover their origin by exhibiting the
complexity in the apparent simplicity and directing the eye to the interlacing
of motives, to the delicate conceptual illusions woven into it, and to the
individual and groups of sensations inherited from of old and slowly
intensified - these moralists are most different from precisely those moralists
with whom they are most confused: from the trivial spirits who have no
belief at all in these dispositions and states of soul and suppose that greatness
and purity are only an outward show concealing behind them a paltriness
similar to their own. The moralists say: 'here there are problems', and these
wretches say: 'here there are deceivers and deceptions'; they thus deny the
existence of that which the former are intent upon explaining.
21
Man as the measurer. - Perhaps all the morality of mankind has its
origin in the tremendous inner excitement which seized on primeval men
when they discovered measure and measuring, scales and weighing (the word
'Mensch', indeed, means the measurer, he desired to name himself after his
greatest discovery!). With these conceptions they climbed into realms
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THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
that are quite unmeasurable and unweighable but originally did not seem
to be.
22
Principle of equilibrium. - The brigand and the man of power who
promises to defend a community against the brigand are probably at bottom
very similar beings, except that the latter obtains what he wants in a different
way from the former: namely through regular tributes paid to him by the
community and not by imposts levied by force. (It is the same relationship as
that between merchant and pirate, who are for a long time one and the same
person: where one function does not seem to him advisable he practises the
other. Even now, indeed, merchant's morality is really only a more prudent
form of pirate's morality: to buy as cheap as possible - where possible for no
more than the operational costs - to sell as dear as possible). The essential
thing is: this man of power promises to maintain an equilibrium with the
brigand; in this the weaker perceive a possibility of living. For they must
either combine together to produce an equivalent power or subject
themselves to one already possessing this equivalent power (perform services
for him in exchange for his protection). The latter proceeding is easily the
preferred one, because at bottom it holds two dangerous beings in check: the
former through the latter, the latter through considerations of advantage; for
the latter derives benefit from treating the subject community with kindness
or restraint so that they may feed not only themselves but their master too. In
reality the people can still have a hard enough time of it even under this
arrangement, but when they compare it with the perpetual possibility of
complete destruction that preceded it they find even this condition endurable.
- The community is originally the organization of the weak for the production
of an equilibrium with powers that threaten it with danger. An organization
to produce preponderance would be more advisable if the community could
thereby become strong enough to destroy the threatening power once and for
all: and if it were a matter of a single powerful depredator this would
certainly be attempted. If, however, he is the head of a clan or has a large
following his speedy and decisive destruction is unlikely to be accomplished
and what is to be expected is a long-drawn-out feud: but this state of things is
the least desirable one for the community, since it must deprive them of the
time they need for the provision of their subsistence with the regularity it
requires and be attended by the ever-present threat that they will be deprived
of all the products of their labours. That is why the community prefers to
bring its power of defence and attack up to precisely the point at which the
power possessed by its dangerous neighbour stands and then to give him to
understand that the scales are now evenly balanced: why, in that event,
should they not be good friends with one another? - Equilibrium is thus a
very important concept for the oldest theory of law and morality; equilibrium
is the basis of justice. When in ruder ages justice says: 'An eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth', it presupposes that equilibrium has been attained and seeks
through this
3
11

retribution to preserve it: so that when one man now transgresses against
another, the other no longer takes on him the revenge of blind animosity. On
the contrary, by virtue of the jus talionis19 the equilibrium of the disturbed

19 jus talionis: right of retribution
power relationship is restored: for in such primeval conditions one eye, one
arm more is one piece of power more, one weight more in the scales. -
Within a community in which all regard themselves as equivalent there exist
disgrace and punishment as measures against transgressions, that is to say
against disruptions of the principle of equilibrium: disgrace as a weight
placed in the scales against the encroaching individual who has procured
advantages for himself through his encroachment and now through the
disgrace he incurs experiences disadvantages which abolish these earlier
advantages and outweigh them. The same applies to punishment: against the
preponderance which every criminal promises himself it imposes a far
greater counter-weight, enforced imprisonment for acts of violence,
restitution and punitive fines for theft. In this way the transgressor is
reminded that through his act he has excluded himself from the community
and its moral advantages: the community treats him as one who is not
equivalent, as one of the weak standing outside it; that is why punishment is
not only retribution but contains something more, something of the harshness
of the state of nature; it is precisely this that it wants to recall.
23
Have the adherents of the theory of free-will the right to punish? -
People who judge and punish as a profession try to establish in each case
whether an ill-doer is at all accountable for his deed, whether he was able to
employ his intelligence, whether he acted for reasons and not unconsciously
or under compulsion. If he is punished, he is punished for having preferred
the worse reasons to the better: which he must therefore have known. Where
this knowledge is lacking a man is, according to the prevailing view, unfree
and not responsible: except if his lack of knowledge, his ignorantia legisf for
example, is a result of an intentional neglect to learn; in which case, when he
failed to learn what he should have learned he had already preferred the
worse reasons to the better and must now suffer the consequences of his bad
choice. If, on the other hand, he did not see the better reasons, perhaps from
dull-wittedness or weakness of mind, it is not usual to punish him: he lacked,
one says, the capacity to choose, he acted as an animal would. For an offence
to be punishable presupposes that its perpetrator intentionally acted contrary
to the better dictates of his intelligence. But how can anyone intentionally be
less intelligent than he has to be? Whence comes the decision when the
scales are weighted with good and bad motives? Not from error, from
blindness, not from an external nor from an internal compulsion? (Consider,
moreover, that every so-called 'external compulsion' is nothing more than the
internal compulsion of fear and pain.) Whence? one asks again and
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
again. The intelligence is not the cause, because it could not decide
against the better reasons? And here one calls 'free-will' to one's aid: it is
pure wilfulness which is supposed to decide, an impulse is supposed to enter
within which motive plays no part, in which the deed, arising out of nothing,
occurs as a miracle. It is this supposed wilfulness, in a case in which
wilfulness ought not to reign, which is punished: the rational intelligence,
which knows law, prohibition and command, ought to have permitted no
choice, and to have had the effect of compulsion and a higher power. Thus
the offender is punished because he employs 'free-will', that is to say,
because he acted without a reason where he ought to have acted in

t ignorantia legis: ignorance of the law
accordance with reasons. Why did he do this? But it is precisely this question
that can no longer even be asked: it was a deed without a 'for that reason',
without motive, without origin, something purposeless and non-rational. -
But such a deed too ought, in accordance with the first condition of all
punishability laid down above, not to be punishedi It is not as if something
had not been done here, something omitted, the intelligence had not been
employed: for the omission is under all circumstances unintentional. and
only the intentional omission to perform what the law commands counts as
punishable. The offender certainly preferred the worse reasons to the better,
but without reason or intention: he certainly failed to employ his intelligence,
but not for the purpose of not employing it. The presupposition that for an
offence to be punishable its perpetrator must have intentionally acted
contrary to his intelligence - it is precisely this presupposition which is
annulled by the assumption of 'free-will'. You adherents of the theory of
'free-will' have no right to ppnish, your own principles deny you that right! -
But these are at bottom nothing but a very peculiar conceptual mythology;
and the hen that hatched it sat on her eggs in a place far removed from
reality.
24
Towards an assessment of the criminal and his judge. - The criminal,
who is aware of all the circumstances attending his case, fails to find his deed
as extraordinary and incomprehensible as his judges and censurers do; his
punishment, however, is meted out in accordance with precisely the degree
of astonishment the latter feel when they regard the incomprehensible nature
of his deed. - If the knowledge the criminal's defending counsel possesses of
the case and its antecedents is sufficiently extensive, then the so-called
extenuating circumstances he presents one by one must end by extenuating
away his client's entire guilt. Or, more clearly: the defending counsel will
step by step ameliorate that astonishment which condemns his client and
metes out his punishment, and finally expunge it altogether, by compelling
every honest auditor to confess to himself: 'he had to act as he did; if we were
to punish, what we would be punishing would be eternal necessity'. - To
determine the degree of punishment according to the degree of knowledge
one possesses, or can in any way acquire, of the history of a crime - does this
not conflict with every idea of fairness?
3i3
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
25
A fair exchange. - An exchange is honest and just only when each of
those participating demands as much as his own object seems worth to him,
including the effort it cost to acquire it, its rarity, the time expended, etc.,
together with its sentimental value. As soon as he sets the price with
reference to the need of the other he is a subtler brigand and extortioner. - If
money is the exchange object it must be considered that a shilling in the hand
of a rich heir, a day-labourer, a shop-keeper, a student are quite different
things: according to whether he did almost nothing or a great deal to get it,
each ought to receive little or a great deal in exchange for it: in reality it is, of
course, the other way round. In the great world of money the shilling of the
laziest rich man is more lucrative than that of the poor and industrious.
26
Rule of law as a means. - Law, reposing on compacts between equals,
continues to exist for so long as the power of those who have concluded
these compacts remains equal or similar; prudence created law to put an end
to feuding and to useless squandering between forces of similar strength. But
fust as definitive an end is put to them if one party has become decisively
weaker than the other: then subjection enters in and law ceases, but the
consequence is the same as that previously attained through the rule of law.
For now it is the prudence of the dominant party which advises that the
strength of the subjected should be economized and not uselessly squandered:
and often the subjected find themselves in more favourable circumstances
than they did when they were equals. - The rule of law is thus a temporary
means advised by prudence, not an end.
27
Explanation of Schadenfreude. - Schadenfreude originates in the fact
that, in certain respects of which he is well aware, everyone feels unwell, is
oppressed by care or envy or sorrow: the harm that befalls another makes
him our equal, it appeases our envy. - If, on the other hand, he happens to
feel perfectly well, he nonetheless gathers up his neighbour's misfortune in
his consciousness as a capital upon which to draw when he himself faces
misfortune: thus he too experiences 'Schadenfreude'. The disposition bent
upon equality thus extends its demands to the domain of happiness and
chance as well: Schadenfreude is the commonest expression of the victory
and restoration of equality within the higher world-order too. It is only since
man has learned to see in other men beings like and equal to himself, that is
to say only since the establishment of society, that Schadenfreude has
existed.
28
Capriciousness in the apportionment of punishment. - Most criminals
acquire punishment in the way women acquire children. They have done the
same thing hundreds of times without noticing any ill consequences:
suddenly there is a disclosure, and at its heels punishment. Habituation,
however, ought to make the guiltiness of the deed on account of which
3M
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
the criminal is punished seem less culpable: for it happened as the result
of a tendency the criminal has acquired and which he would have found it
hard to resist. Instead of that, a suspicion of habitual crime procures him
severer punishment; habituation is seen as a ground for refusing any
amelioration of his sentence. A previously exemplary life in contrast with
which the crime stands out all the more fearsomely ought to make its
guiltiness seem all the greater! But its customary effect is to ameliorate the
punishment. Thus everything is meted out, not with an eye to the criminal,
but with an eye to society and the harm and danger it has incurred: the
previous serviceability of a man is weighed against his single harmful act, his
previous harmfulness added to that at present disclosed and his punishment
intensified accordingly. But if one in this way punishes or rewards a man's
past as well (in the case of a serviceable past a lighter punishment is a
reward), one ought to go back even further and reward or punish the causes
of such or such a past, I mean parents, educators, society, etc.: in many cases
the judges will then be found to be in some way involved in the guilt. It is
capricious to halt at the criminal if what one is punishing is the past: if one is
not willing to accede to the absolute guiltlessness of all guilt, one should at
least halt at each individual case and look no further back: that is to say,
isolate the guilt and refrain from connecting it in any way with the past -
otherwise one will come to sin against logic. Draw the necessary conclusion
from your doctrine of 'freedom of the will', you free-willers, and boldly
decree: 'no deed possesses a past'.
29
Envy and its nobler brother. - Where equality really has prevailed and
been permanently established there arises that tendency which is on the
whole accounted immoral and can hardly be conceived of in a state of nature:
envy. The envious man is conscious of every respect in which the man he
envies exceeds the common measure and desires to push him down to it - or
to raise himself up to the height of the other: out of which there arise two
different modes of action which Hesiod designated as the evil and the good
Eris. There likewise arises in a state of equality a sense of indignation that
one man should fare badly beneath his dignity and equal rights, while
another fares well above his equal rights: these affects are felt by nobler
natures. They suffer from the absence of justice and equity in those things
that are independent of the despotism of man: that is to say, they demand that
that equality recognized by man shall now also be recognized by nature and
chance; it angers them that the equal are not accorded an equal fate.
30
Envy of the gods. - The 'envy of the gods' arises when he who is
accounted lower equates himself with him who is accounted higher (as Ajax
does) or who is made equal to him by the favour of fortune (as Niobe is as a
mother too abundantly blessed). Within the social order of rank this envy
imposes the demand that no one shall enjoy rewards that exceed his station,
and
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
that his happiness too shall accord with his station, and especially that
his self-conceit shall not grow beyond these bounds. The victorious general
often experiences the 'envy of the gods', as does the pupil who produces a
masterly piece of work.
Vanity as an offshoot of the antisocial. - For the sake of their security,
men have founded the community on the basis of positing themselves as
being equal to one another; but this conception is at bottom repugnant to the
nature of the individual and something imposed upon him; and so it happens
that, the more the general security is guaranteed, the more do new shoots of
the ancient drive to domination assert themselves: in the division of classes,
in the claim to special dignities and privileges, and in vanity in general (in
mannerisms, costume, modes of speech, etc.). As soon as the communality
comes to feel itself in danger again, the majority, who were unable to assert
their domination when a state of general calm obtained, reimpose a condition
of equality: the absurd special privileges and vanities disappear for a time. If,
however, the communality collapses completely and everything dissolves
into anarchy, then there at once breaks through that condition of unreflecting,
ruthless inequality that constitutes the state of nature: as, according to the
report of Thucydides, happened on Coreyra.* There exists neither a natural
right nor a natural wrong.
32
Fairness. - A further development of justice is fairness, arising among
those who do not offend against the community's principle of equality: to
cases upon which the law does not touch there is applied that subtler regard
for equilibrium which looks before and behind and whose motto is 'as thou to
me, so I to thee'. Aequumi means precisely 'it is in conformity with our
equality; this ameliorates our little differences too down to an appearance of
equality and desires that we overlook many things we do not have to'.
33
Elements of revenge. - The word 'revenge' is said so quickly it almost
seems as if it could contain no more than one conceptual and perceptional
root. And so one continues to strive to discover it: just as our economists
have not yet wearied of scenting a similar unity in the word 'value' and of
searching after the original root-concept of the word. As if every word were
not a pocket into which now this, now that, now several things at once have
been put! Thus 'revenge', too, is now this, now that, now something more
combined. Distinguish first of all that defensive return blow which one
delivers even against lifeless objects (moving machinery, for example) which
have hurt us: the sense of our counter-action is to put a stop to the injury by
putting a stop to the machine. To achieve this the
* Corcyra: the most northern of the Ionian islands, suffered from savage civil
war in the fifth century BC
+ Aequum: equitable
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THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
violence of the counter-blow sometimes has to be so great as to shatter
the machine; if, however, it is in fact too strong to be instantly destroyed by a
single individual, the latter will nonetheless still deliver the most vigorous
blow of which he is capable - as a last-ditch effort, so to speak. One behaves
in a similar way towards people who have harmed us when we feel the injury
directly; if one wants to call this an act of revenge, all well and good; only let
it be considered that self-preservation alone has here set its clockwork of
reason in motion, and that one has fundamentally been thinking, not of the
person who caused the injury, but only of oneself: we act thus without
wanting to do harm in return, but only so as to get out with life and limb. -
One needs time if one is to transfer one's thoughts from oneself to one's
opponent and to ask oneself how he can be hit at most grievously. This
happens in the second species of revenge: its presupposition is a reflection
over the other's vulnerability and capacity for suffering: one wants to hurt. To
secure himself against further harm is here so far from the mind of the
revenger that he almost always brings further harm upon himself and very
often cold-bloodedly anticipates it. If in the case of the first species of
revenge it was fear of a second blow which made the counter-blow as
vigorous as possible, here there is almost complete indifference to what the
opponent will do; the vigour of the counter-blow is determined only by that
which he has done to us. What, then, has he done? And of what use is it to us
if our opponent now suffers after we have suffered through him? It is a
question of restitution: while the act of revenge of the first species serves
only self-preservation. Perhaps we lost property, rank, friends, children
through our opponent - these losses are not made good by revenge, the
restitution applies only to an attendant loss occasioned by the other losses
referred to. Restitution- al revenge does not protect one from further harm, it
does not make good the harm one has suffered - except in one case. If our
honour has suffered through our opponent revenge is capable of restoring it.
But our honour has suffered harm in every case in which someone has done
us a deliberate injury: for our opponent proved thereby that he did not fear
us. By revenging ourself on him we prove that we do not fear him either: it is
in this that the compensation, the restitution lies. (The objective of
demonstrating the complete absence olfear goes so far in the case of some
people that the danger to themselves involved in the revenge - loss of health
or life or other deprivations - counts as an indispensable condition of the
revenge. That is why they choose the path of the duel even when the courts
offer them a means of acquiring compensation for the offence they have
sustained: they refuse to regard as sufficient a restitution of their honour that
involves no risk because it cannot serve to demonstrate their lack of fear.) -
In the first species of revenge it is precisely fear which directs the counter-
blow: here, on the contrary, it is the absence of fear which, as stated, wants to
prove itself through the counter-blow. - Nothing, therefore, could appear
more different than the inner motives of these two modes of action which are
called by the common word 'revenge': and yet it very often happens that the
revenger is unclear as to
317
what has really determined his action; perhaps he delivered the
counterblow out of fear and to preserve himself but afterwards, when he has
had time to reflect on the motive of wounded honour, convinces himself he
has exacted revenge on account of his honour; - this motive is, after all,
nobler than the other. An essential element in this is whether he sees his
honour as having been injured in the eyes of others (the world) or only in the
eyes of him who injured it: in the latter case he will prefer secret revenge, in
the former public. His revenge will be the more incensed or the more
moderate according to how deeply or weakly he can think his way into the
soul of the perpetrator and the witnesses of his injury; if he is wholly lacking
in this kind of imagination he will not think of revenge at all, since the
feeling of 'honour' will not be present in him and thus cannot be wounded.
He will likewise not think of revenge if he despises the perpetrator and the
witnesses: because, as people he despises, they cannot accord him any
honour and consequently cannot take any honour from him either. Finally, he
will refrain from revenge in the not uncommon case that he loves the
perpetrator: he will thus lose honour in the perpetrator's eyes, to be sure, and
will perhaps become less worthy of being loved in return. But to renounce
even all claim to love in return is a sacrifice which love is prepared to make
if only it does not have to hurt the beloved being: this would mean hurting
oneself more than any sacrifice hurts. - Thus: everyone will revenge himself,
except if he is without honour or full of contempt or full of love for the
person who has harmed and offended him. Even when he turns to the courts
he desires revenge as a private person: additionally, however, as a
forethoughtful man of society, he desires the revenge of society on one who
does not honour it. Through judicial punishment, private honour as well as
the honour of society is thus restored: that is to say - punishment is revenge.
- Undoubtedly there is also in it those other elements of revenge already
described, insofar as through punishment society serves its own self-
preservation and delivers a counter-blow in self-defence. Punishment serves
to prevent further injury, it wishes to deter. Two such various elements of
revenge are thus actually united in punishment, and the main effect of this
may be to sustain the confusion of concepts referred to by virtue of which the
individual who takes revenge usually does not know what he really wants.
34
The virtues that incur loss. - As members of society we believe we
ought not to practise certain virtues from which as private persons we acquire
the highest honour and a certain satisfaction, for example mercy and
consideration for transgressors of all kinds - in general any action by which
the interests of society would suffer through our virtue. No bench of judges
may conscientiously practise mercy: this privilege is reserved to the king as
an individual; one rejoices when he makes use of it, as proof that one would
like to be merciful, even though as a society one absolutely cannot be.
Society thus recognizes only those virtues that are advantageous, or at least
not harmful to it (those that can be practised
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THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
without its incurring loss, for example justice). Those virtues that incur
loss cannot, consequently, have come into existence within society, since
even now there is opposition to them within every society, however
circumscribed. They are thus virtues belonging among non-equals, devised
by the superior, the individual; they are the virtues of rulers bearing the
sense; 'I am sufficiently powerful to put up with a palpable loss, this is a
proof of my power' - and are thus virtues related to pride.
35
Casuistry of advantage. - There would be no casuistry of morality if
there were no casuistry of advantage. The freest and subtlest reason is often
inadequate to choosing between two things in such a way that its choice must
necessarily fall on the one offering the greatest advantage. In such cases we
choose because we have to choose and afterwards suffer from a kind of
seasickness of the feelings.
36
Becoming a hypocrite. - Every beggar becomes a hypocrite; as does
anyone who makes a profession of displaying a lack, a state of distress
(whether it be of a personal or a public kind). - The begger does not feel his
lack nearly as acutely as he must make it felt if he wants to live by begging.
37
A kind of cult of the passions. - In order to raise an accusation against
the whole nature of the world, you dismal philosophical blindworms speak of
the terrible character of human passions. As if wherever there have been
passions there had also been terribleness! As if this kind of terribleness was
bound to persist in the world! - Through a neglect of the small facts, through
lack of self-observation and observation of those who are to be brought up, it
is you yourselves who first allowed the passions to develop into such
monsters that you are overcome by fear at the word 'passion'! It was up to
you, and is up to us, to take from the passions their terrible character and thus
prevent their becoming devastating torrents. - One should not inflate one's
oversights into eternal fatalities; let us rather work honestly together on the
task of transforming the passions [Leiden- schaften] of mankind one and all
into joys [Freudenschaften].
38
Sting of conscience. - The sting of conscience is, like a snake stinging a
stone, a piece of stupidity.
39
Origin of rights. - Rights can in the first instance be traced back to
tradition, tradition to some agreement. At some time in the past men were
mutually content with the consequences of the agreement they had come to,
and at the same time too indolent formally to renew it; thus they lived on as
though it were continually being renewed and, as forgetfulness spread its veil
over its origin, gradually came to believe they were in possession of a sacred,
immutable state of affairs upon which every generation had to
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
continue to build. Tradition was now a compulsion, even when it no
longer served the purpose for which the agreement had originally been
concluded. - The weak have at all times found here their sure stronghold:
they tend to regard that single act of agreement, that single act of grace, as
valid eternally.
40
The significance of forgetting for the moral sensation. - The same
actions as within primitive society appear to have been performed first with a
view to common utility have been performed by later generations for other
motives: out of fear of or reverence for those who demanded and
recommended them, or out of habit because one had seen them done all
around one from childhood on, or from benevolence because their
performance everywhere produced joy and concurring faces, or from vanity
because they were commended. Such actions, whose basic motive, that of
utility, has been forgotten, are then called moral actions: not because, for
instance, they are performed out of those other motives, but because they are
not performed from any conscious reason of utility. - Where does it come
from, this hatred of utility which becomes visible here, where all
praiseworthy behaviour formally excludes behaviour with a view to utility? -
It is plain that society, the hearth of all morality and all eulogy of moral
behaviour, has had to struggle too long and too hard against the self-interest
and self-will of the individual not at last to rate any other motive morally
higher than utility. Thus it comes to appear that morality has not grown out
of utility; while it is originally social utility, which had great difficulty in
asserting itself against all the individual private utilities and making itself
more highly respected.
41
The heritage of morality. - In the domain of morality too there is a rich
heritage: it is possessed by the gentle, the good-natured, the sympathizing
and charitable, who have all inherited from their forefathers the good mode
of action but not the reasons for it (its source). The pleasant thing about this
wealth is that it has to be continually expended and spread abroad if it is to
be felt to exist at all, and that it thus involuntarily works to reduce the
distance between the morally rich and the morally poor: and, what is best and
most remarkable, it does so not for the sake of producing some future mean
and average between poor and rich, but for the sake of a universal
enrichment and over-enrichment. - The foregoing is perhaps an adequate
summary of the dominant view of what constitutes the moral heritage: but it
seems to me that this view is maintained more in majorem gloriam* of
morality than out of respect for truth. Experience at least advances a
proposition which, if it does not contradict that universal opinion, at any rate
imposes upon it significant limitations. Without the most refined
understanding (so says experience), without the capacity for the most
delicate choice and a strong inclination to moderation, the inheritors of
morality become squanderers of morality: by surrendering * in majorem gloriam:
to the greater glory
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
themselves unrestrainedly to their sympathetic, charitable, reconciliat-
ory, ameliorating drives they render all the world around them more indolent,
covetous and sentimental. That is why the children of such highly moral
squanderers can easily - and, sad to say, at best - become pleasant, feeble
good-for-nothings.
42
The judge and extenuating circumstances. - 'You should play fair even
with the Devil and pay him what you owe him', said an old soldier after they
had told him the story of Faust in a little more detail. 'Faust belongs in Hell!'
- 'Oh, you frightful man!' exclaimed his wife. 'How can that be? All he did
was to have no ink in his inkwell! To write with blood is a sin, I know, but is
that any reason why such a handsome man should burn?'
43
Problem of duty towards truth. - Duty is a compulsive feeling which
impels us to some action and which we call good and regard as undiscussable
(- we refuse to speak of its origin, limitation and justification or to hear them
spoken of). The thinker, however, regards everything as having evolved and
everything that has evolved as discussable, and is thus a man without a sense
of duty - as long, that is, as he is functioning as a thinker. As such he will
thus fail to feel a sense of duty with respect to seeing and telling the truth and
will not recognize any such duty; he asks: whence does it come? what is its
purpose? - but these questions themselves he will regard as questionable. But
is the consequence of this not that the thinker's machine will no longer work
properly if, in the act of knowing, he really is able to feel free of a sense of
duty? Insofar as here the element required to heat the machine seems to be
the same element as is to be investigated by means of the machine. - The
formula would perhaps be: assuming there existed a duty to know the truth,
in what relation would truth then stand to any other species of duty? - But is
a hypothetical sense of duty not a contradiction? -
44
Stages of morality. - Morality is first of all a means of preserving the
community and warding off its destruction; then it is a means of preserving
the community at a certain height and in a certain quality of existence. Its
motive forces are fear and hope: and they are applied the more severely,
powerfully and coarsely the stronger the inclination to perversity,
onesidedness and the purely personal remains. The most dreadful means of
inspiring fear have to be pressed into service here for as long as milder ones
fail to produce any effect and that twofold species of preservation cannot be
achieved in any other way (one of the very strongest is the invention of a
Beyond with an everlasting Hell). Further stages of morality, and thus of
means of attaining the objectives described, are the commands of a god (such
as the Mosaic law); further and higher still the commands of the concept of
unconditional duty with its 'thou shalt' - all still somewhat coarsely hewn but
broad stages and steps, because men do
321
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not yet know how to place their feet on narrower, more delicate steps.
Then comes a morality of inclination, of taste, finally that of insight - which
is above and beyond all illusionary motive forces of morality but has a clear
realization of why for long ages mankind could possess no other.
45
Morality of pity in the mouth of the intemperate. - All those who do not
have themselves sufficiently under their own control and do not know
morality as a continual self-command and self-overcoming practised in great
things and in the smallest, involuntarily become glorifiers of the good,
pitying, benevolent impulses, of that instinctive morality which has no head
but seems to consist solely of heart and helping hands. It is, indeed, in their
interest to cast suspicion on a morality of rationality and to make of that
other morality the only one.
46
Cloaca of the soul. - The soul too has to have its definite cloaca into
which it allows its sewage to flow out: what can serve as these includes
people, relationships, classes, or the Fatherland or the world or finally - for
the truly fastidious (I mean our dear modern 'pessimists') - God.
47
A kind of repose and contemplativeness. - Take care that your repose
and contemplativeness does not resemble that of a dog in front of a butcher's
shop, whom fear will not permit to go forward and desire not permit to go
back and who stands with his eyes gaping like mouths.
48
Prohibition without reasons. - A prohibition whose reason we do not
understand or admit is not only for the obstinate man but also for the man
thirsty for knowledge almost the injunction: let us put it to the test, so as to
learn why this prohibition exists. Moral prohibitions such as those of the
Decalogue are suitable only for ages when reason is subjugated: nowadays a
prohibition 'thou shalt not kill', 'thou shalt not commit adultery', presented
without reasons, would produce a harmful rather than a beneficial effect.
49
Portrait from life. - What kind of a man is he who can say of himself: 'I
find it very easy to despise, but I never hate. In everyone I meet I
immediately discover something that can be respected and on account of
which I respect him: the so-called amiable qualities possess little attraction
for me.'
50
Pity and contempt. - To show pity is felt as a sign of contempt because
one has clearly ceased to be an object of fear as soon as one is pitied. One
has sunk below the level of equilibrium, whereas human vanity is not
satisfied even with that, the sensation most desired being one of
predominance and the inspiration of fear. That is why the high value pity has
come
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THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
to be accorded presents a problem, just as the praise now accorded
selfless disinterestedness needs to be explained: originally it was despised, or
feared as a deception.
51
The ability to be small. - One has still to be as close to the flowers, the
grass and the butterflies as is a child, who is not so very much bigger than
they are. We adults, on the other hand, have grown up high above them and
have to condescend to them; I believe the grass hates us when we confess our
love for it. - He who wants to partake of all good things must know how to
be small at times.
52
Content of the conscience. - The content of our conscience is everything
that was during the years of our childhood regularly demanded of us without
reason by people we honoured or feared. It is thus the conscience that excites
that feeling of compulsion ('I must do this, not do that') which does not ask:
why must I? - In every case in which a thing is done with 'because' and 'why'
man acts without conscience; but not yet for that reason against it. - The
belief in authorities is the source of the conscience: it is therefore not the
voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man.
53
Overcoming of the passions. - The man who has overcome his passions
has entered into possession of the most fertile ground; like the colonist who
has mastered the forests and swamps. To sow the seeds of good spiritual
works in the soil of the subdued passions is then the immediate urgent task.
The overcoming itself is only a means, not a goal; if it is not so viewed, all
kinds of weeds and devilish nonsense will quickly spring up in this rich soil
now unoccupied, and soon there will be more rank confusion than there ever
was before.
54
Aptitude for serving. - All so-called practical people possess an aptitude
for serving: it is this that makes them practical, indeed, whether on their own
behalf or that of others. Robinson possessed an even better servant than
Friday was: and that was Crusoe.
55
Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom. - Every word is a prejudice.
56
Spirit and boredom. - The saying The Magyar is much too lazy to feel
bored' is thought-provoking. Only the most acute and active animals are
capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on
the seventh day of creation.
57
Our traffic with animals. - The origination of morality can also be observed
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
in our behaviour towards animals. Where utility or harm do not come
into consideration we have a feeling of complete irresponsibility; we kill and
injure insects, for example, or let them live, usually without giving the
slightest thought to the matter. We are so clumsy that even our acts of
kindness towards flowers and small creatures are almost always murderous;
which in no way diminishes the pleasure we take in them. - Today is the
festival of the small creatures, the sultriest day of the year: all around us there
is swarming and creeping, and we crush to death now a little worm, now a
little winged beetle; we do it without wanting to, but also without care or
concern. - If an animal harms us we seek any means of destroying it, and the
means are often sufficiently cruel without our really wanting them to be: it is
the cruelty of thoughtlessness. If it is useful we exploit it: until a subtler
prudence teaches us that certain animals richly repay a different kind of
treatment, namely being cared for and disciplined. It is only here that a sense
of responsibility comes into being. Tormenting is not practised against
domestic animals; one man is indignant if another is merciless towards his
cow, quite in accordance with the primitive communal morality which sees
the common welfare imperilled whenever an individual transgresses.
Whoever in the community perceives a transgression fears that harm will
come to him indirectly: and we fear for the quality of our meat, our
husbandry and our currency when we see domestic animals mistreated. In
addition to this, he who is cruel towards animals arouses the suspicion that he
is also cruel towards weak, subordinate people incapable of revenge; he
counts as ignoble, as lacking refinement in pride. Thus there come about the
beginnings of moral sensation and judgement: the best is then added by
superstition. Many animals, through the way they look, sound and comport
themselves, inspire men imaginatively to transport themselves into them, and
many religions teach that, under certain circumstances, the souls of men and
gods may dwell in animals: for which reason they recommend a noble
caution, indeed a reverential awe, in traffic with animals in general. Even
after this superstition has vanished, the sentiments it has given rise to
continue to operate, mature and flourish. - As is well known, on this point
Christianity has proved to be a barren and regressive religion.
58
New actors. - There is among men no greater banality than death;
second in line stands birth, since all are not born who nonetheless die; then
follows marriage. But these worn-out little tragi-comedies are at each of their
uncounted and uncountable performances played by ever new actors and thus
do not cease to have interested spectators: whereas one would have thought
that the entire audience at the world-theatre would have long since hanged
itself from the trees out of satiety with them - which goes to show how much
depends on new actors, how little on the play.
59
What does 'obstinate' mean? - The shortest route is not the most direct but
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
that upon which the most favourable winds swell our sails: thus do
seafarers teach us. Not to follow this teaching is to be obstinate: firmness of
character is here polluted by stupidity.
60
The word 'vanity'. - It is troublesome that certain words which we
moralists cannot avoid using bear within them a kind of moral censure
deriving from those ages in which the most immediate and natural impulses
in man were made heretical. Thus that fundamental conviction that we make
good headway or suffer shipwreck on the ocean of society much more
through what we count as than through what we are - a conviction that has to
be our rudder in all we do that has a bearing on society - is branded with the
most general word 'vanity', 'vanitas', one of the most abundantly content-full
of all things with an expression that designates it as emptiness and nullity,
something large with a diminutive, indeed with the penstrokes of caricature.
There is no help for it, we are obliged to use such words, but when we do so
we must close our ears to the whisperings of ancient habits.
61
Mohammedan fatalism. - Mohammedan fatalism embodies the
fundamental error of setting man and fate over against one another as two
separate things: man, it says, can resist fate and seek to frustrate it, but in the
end it always carries off the victory; so that the most reasonable thing to do is
to resign oneself or to live just as one pleases. In reality every man is himself
a piece of fate; when he thinks to resist fate in the way suggested, it is
precisely fate that is here fulfilling itself; the struggle is imaginary, but so is
the proposed resignation to fate; all these imaginings are enclosed within fate.
- The fear most people feel in face of the theory of the unfreedom of the will
is fear in face of Mohammedan fatalism: they think that man will stand before
the future feeble, resigned and with hands clasped because he is incapable of
effecting any change in it: or that he will give free rein to all his impulses and
caprices because these too cannot make any worse what has already been
determined. The follies of mankind are just as much a piece of fate as are its
acts of intelligence: that fear in face of a belief in fate is also fate. You
yourself, poor fearful man, are the implacable moira enthroned even above
the gods that governs all that happens; you are the blessing or the curse and in
any event the fetters in which the strongest lies captive; in you the whole
future of the world of man is predetermined: it is of no use for you to shudder
when you look upon yourself.
62
Devil's advocate. - 'Only when we are hurt ourselves do we become
wise, only when others are hurt do we become good - so goes that curious
philosophy which derives all morality from pity and all intellectuality from
the isolation of man: it thereby unconsciously becomes the advocate of all
3*5
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
the hurt and injury on earth. For pity has need of suffering and isolation
has need of the contempt of others.
63
Moral fancy-dress. - In those ages when the fancy-dress worn by the
different classes is considered as firmly fixed as the classes themselves are,
moralists are tempted to regard moral fancy-dress too as absolute and to
depict it as such. Thus Moltere is comprehensible as a contemporary of the
society of Louis XIV; in our society, which is characterized by transitional
forms and halfway stages, he would seem, though still a man of genius, a
pedant.
64
The noblest virtue. - In the first era of higher humanity bravery is
accounted the noblest of the virtues, in the second justice, in the third
moderation, in the fourth wisdom. In which era do we live? In which do you
live?
65
What is needed first. - A man who refuses to become master over his
wrath, his choler and revengefulness, and his lusts, and attempts to become a
master in anything else, is as stupid as the farmer who stakes out his field
beside a torrential stream without protecting himself against it.
66
What is truth? - Schwarzert (Melanchthon):* 'One often preaches one's
faith precisely when one has lost it and is looking for it everywhere - and at
such a time one does not preach it worst!' - Luther: Thou speak'st true today
like an angel, brother! - Schwarzert: 'But it is thy enemies who think this
thought and they apply it to thee.' - Luther: Then it's a lie from the Devil's
behind.
67
Habit of seeing opposites. - The general imprecise way of observing sees
everywhere in nature opposites (as, e.g., 'warm and cold') where there are, not
opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to
comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in
terms of such opposites. An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance,
harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because
we think we see opposites instead of transitions.
68
Whether we are able to forgive. - How can one forgive them at all, if
they know not what they do! One has nothing whatever to forgive. - But does
a man ever know completely what he does? And if this must always remain at
least questionable, then men never do have anything to forgive one
* Philipp Melanchthon (Greek rendition of the German name 'Schwarzert'); a
professor of classical philosophy who made contact with Luther at Wittenberg and
identified with his cause. He wrote the first major work of protestant theology and
represented the Lutherans at Regensburg
326
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
another and pardoning is to the most rational man a thing impossible.
Finally: if the ill-doers really did know what they did - we would have a right
to forgive them only if we had a right to accuse and to punish them. But this
we do not have.
69
Habitual shame. - Why do we feel shame when we are rendered
something good and distinguishing which, as we put it, we 'have not
deserved? It seems to us that we have forced our way into a domain where
we do not belong, from which we ought to be excluded, into a sanctuary or
holy of holies, as it were, where our feet are forbidden to tread. Yet it is
through the error of others that we have arrived there: and now we are
overcome partly by fear, partly by reverence, partly by surprise; we know not
whether we ought to flee or to enjoy the blessed moment and its undeserved
advantages. Whenever we feel shame there exists a mystery which seems to
have been desecrated, or to be in danger of desecration, through us; all
undeserved grace engenders shame. - If we consider, however, that we have
never 'deserved' anything at all, then if one acquiesces to this proposition
within the Christian total view of things the feeling of shame will become
habitual: because such a god seems to be continually blessing and bestowing
undeserved grace. But, quite apart from this Christian interpretation, to a
completely godless being who firmly adhered to the total unaccountability
and undeservingness of all behaviour and being this condition of habitual
shame would be possible: if he was treated as though he had deserved this or
that, it would seem to him that he had forced his way into a higher order of
beings who are able to deserve something, who are tree and really capable of
bearing responsibility for their own desires and actions. He who says to him
'you deserved it' seems to exclaim to him 'you are not a man, but a god'.
70
The ineptest educator. - In the case of one man all his real virtues have
been cultivated in the soil of his spirit of contradiction, in the case of another
in his inability to say no, that is in his spirit of assent; a third has developed
all his morality out of his lonely pride, a fourth his out of his strong drive to
sociability. Suppose, now, that in each of these four cases the seeds of virtue
had, through the ineptitude of teachers and the vagaries of chance, not been
sown in that region of his nature where the topsoil was richest and most
plentiful, then they would be without morality and weak and joyless men.
And who would have been the ineptest of all educators and the evil fatality of
these four men? The moral fanatic, who believes that the good can grow only
out of the good and upon the basis of the good.
7
Stylistic caution. - A: But if everyone knew this most would be harmed
by it. You yourself call these opinions dangerous for those exposed to danger,
and yet you express them in public? B: I write in such a way that neither the
mob, nor the populi, nor the parties of any kind want to read me.
327
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
the hurt and injury on earth. For pity has need of suffering and isolation
has need of the contempt of others.
63
Moral fancy-dress. - In those ages when the fancy-dress worn by the
different classes is considered as firmly fixed as the classes themselves are,
moralists are tempted to regard moral fancy-dress too as absolute and to
depict it as such. Thus Moli&re is comprehensible as a contemporary of the
society of Louis XIV; in our society, which is characterized by transitional
forms and halfway stages, he would seem, though still a man of genius, a
pedant.
64
The noblest virtue. - In the first era of higher humanity bravery is
accounted the noblest of the virtues, in the second justice, in the third
moderation, in the fourth wisdom. In which era do we live? In which do you
live?
65
What is needed first. - A man who refuses to become master over his
wrath, his choler and revengefulness, and his lusts, and attempts to become a
master in anything else, is as stupid as the farmer who stakes out his field
beside a torrential stream without protecting himself against it.
66
What is truth? - Schwarzert (Melanchthon):* 'One often preaches one's
faith precisely when one has lost it and is looking for it everywhere - and at
such a time one does not preach it worst!' - Luther: Thou speak'st true today
like an angel, brother! - Schwarzert: 'But it is thy enemies who think this
thought and they apply it to thee.' - Luther: Then it's a lie from the Devil's
behind.
67
Habit of seeing opposites. - The general imprecise way of observing sees
everywhere in nature opposites (as, e.g., 'warm and cold') where there are, not
opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to
comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in
terms of such opposites. An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance,
harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because
we think we see opposites instead of transitions.
68
Whether we are able to forgive. - How can one forgive them at all, if
they know not what they do! One has nothing whatever to forgive. - But does
a man ever know completely what he does? And if this must always remain at
least questionable, then men never do have anything to forgive one
* Philipp Melanchthon (Greek rendition of the German name 'Schwarzert'); a
professor of classical philosophy who made contact with Luther at Wittenberg and
identified with his cause. He wrote the first major work of protestant theology and
represented the Lutherans at Regensburg
326
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
another and pardoning is to the most rational man a thing impossible.
Finally: if the ill-doers really did know what they did - we would have a right
to forgive them only if we had a right to accuse and to punish them. But this
we do not have.
69
Habitual shame. - Why do we feel shame when we are rendered
something good and distinguishing which, as we put it, we 'have not
deserved'? It seems to us that we have forced our way into a domain where
we do not belong, from which we ought to be excluded, into a sanctuary or
holy of holies, as it were, where our feet are forbidden to tread. Yet it is
through the error of others that we have arrived there: and now we are
overcome partly by fear, partly by reverence, partly by surprise; we know not
whether we ought to flee or to enjoy the blessed moment and its undeserved
advantages. Whenever we feel shame there exists a mystery which seems to
have been desecrated, or to be in danger of desecration, through us; all
undeserved grace engenders shame. - If we consider, however, that we have
never 'deserved' anything at all, then if one acquiesces to this proposition
within the Christian total view of things the feeling of shame will become
habitual: because such a god seems to be continually blessing and bestowing
undeserved grace. But, quite apart from this Christian interpretation, to a
completely godless being who firmly adhered to the total unaccountability
and undeservingness of all behaviour and being this condition of habitual
shame would be possible: if he was treated as though he had deserved this or
that, it would seem to him that he had forced his way into a higher order of
beings who are able to deserve something, who are free and really capable of
bearing responsibility for their own desires and actions. He who says to him
'you deserved it' seems to exclaim to him 'you are not a man, but a god'.
7
The ineptest educator. - In the case of one man all his real virtues have
been cultivated in the soil of his spirit of contradiction, in the case of another
in his inability to say no, that is in his spirit of assent; a third has developed
all his morality out of his lonely pride, a fourth his out of his strong drive to
sociability. Suppose, now, that in each of these four cases the seeds of virtue
had, through the ineptitude of teachers and the vagaries of chance, not been
sown in that region of his nature where the topsoil was richest and most
plentiful, then they would be without morality and weak and joyless men.
And who would have been the ineptest of all educators and the evil fatality of
these four men? The moral fanatic, who believes that the good can grow only
out of the good and upon the basis of the good.
71
Stylistic caution. - A: But if everyone knew this most would be harmed
by it. You yourself call these opinions dangerous for those exposed to danger,
and yet you express them in public? B: I write in such a way that neither the
mob, nor the populi, nor the parties of any kind want to read me.
327
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
Consequently these opinions of mine will never become public. A: But
how do you write, then? B: Neither usefully nor pleasantly - to the trio I have
named.
72
Divine missionaries. - Socrates too feels himself to be a divine
missionary: but even here there is perceptible I know not what touch of Attic
irony and sense of humour through which that unfortunate and presumptuous
concept is ameliorated. He speaks of it without unction: his images, of the
brake and the horse, are simple and unpriestly, and the actual religious task to
which he feels himself called, that of putting the god to the test in a hundred
ways to see whether he has told the truth, permits us to imagine that here the
missionary steps up to his god with a bold and candid deportment. This
putting of the god to the test is one of the subtlest compromises between piety
and freedom of spirit that has ever been devised. - Nowadays we no longer
have need even of this compromise.
73
Honest painter. - Raphael, who was much concerned with the church
(when it was capable of paying) but, like the best men of his age, little
concerned with the objects of the church's faith, did not compromise by so
much as an inch with the pretentious, ecstatic piety of many of his patrons: he
preserved his honesty even in that exceptional picture, originally intended for
a processional banner, the Sistine Madonna. He wanted for once to paint a
vision: but it was to be such a one as noble young men without 'faith' too
might and would have, the vision of a future wife, of a clever, noble-souled,
silent and very beautiful woman bearing her first-born in her arms. Let the
old, who are accustomed to prayer and worship, here revere something
suprahuman, like the venerable greybeard to the left of the picture: we
younger men, so Raphael seems to cry to us, shall go along with the lovely
girl on the right, who with her challenging and in no way devout expression
says to the viewer of the picture: 'This mother and her child - a pleasant,
inviting sight, isn't it?' This face and this expression reflects the joy in the
faces of the viewers; the artist who invented it all in this way has the
enjoyment of his own joy and adds it to the joy of the recipients of his art. -
With regard to the 'saviour-like' expression in the head of a child Raphael, the
honest painter who had no wish to paint a state of soul in whose existence he
did not believe, has outwitted his believing viewers in a very cunning fashion;
he has painted that natural phenomenon which is not all that rare an
occurrence, the eyes of a man in the head of a child, and in this instance the
eyes of a valiant man ready to assist in some emergency or difficulty. To
these eyes there belongs a beard; that it is missing, and that two different ages
of life here speak out of one face, is the pleasing paradox which the faithful
have interpreted in the sense of their belief in miracles: which the artist was
entitled to anticipate from their art of interpretation and imposition of what
they wish to see.
328
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
74
Prayer. - Only under two presuppositions does prayer - that custom of
earlier ages which has not yet completely died out - make any sense: it would
have to be possible to induce or convert the divinity to a certain course of
action, and the person praying would himself have to know best what he
needed, what was truly desirable for him. Both presuppositions, assumed true
and established by custom in all other religions, are however denied precisely
by Christianity; if it nonetheless adheres to prayer in face of its belief in an
omniscient and all-provident rationality in God which renders prayer at
bottom senseless and, indeed, blasphemous - in this it once again
demonstrates its admirable serpent cunning; for a clear commandment 'thou
shalt not pray' would have led Christians into unchristianity through boredom.
For in the Christian ora et labora* the ora occupies the place of pleasure:
and what would those unfortunates who had renounced labora, the saints,
have found to do if deprived of oral - but to converse with God, to demand of
him all kinds of nice things, to laugh at oneself a little for being so foolish as
still to harbour desires in spite of having so excellent a father - this was for
the saints a very fine invention.
75
A holy lie. - The lie which Arriat died with on her lips (Paete, non
dolet)% darkens all the truths that have ever been spoken by the dying. It is
the only holy lie that has become famous; whereas the odour of sanctity has
otherwise adhered only to errors.
76
The most necessary apostle. - Among twelve apostles there must always
be one as hard as a rock, so that the new church may be erected upon him.
77
What is the more perishable, the spirit or the body? - In matters of law,
morality and religion, the most external aspect, that which can be seen, has,
as usage, deportment, ceremony, the most durability: it is the body to which a
new soul is always being added. The cult is, like a fixed word-text, always
being subjected to new interpretations; concepts and sensations are the liquid
element, customs the solid.
78

Belief in the sickness as sickness. - It was Christianity which first painted
the Devil on the world's wall; it was Christianity which first brought sin into
the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to its
deepest roots: but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated
continues to exist.
79
Speech and writing of the religious. - If the style and total manner of * ora et
labora: prayer and work
t Arria: the wife of Caecina Peatus (see Martial: Epigrams 113)
| Paete.. dole!: It hardly hurts at all
329
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
expression of the priest, in both speech and writing, do not already
proclaim the religious man, then one no longer needs to take his opinions on
religion and in favour of religion seriously. They have become invalid for
their possessor himself if, as his style betrays, he is given to irony,
presumption, malice, hatred and all the confusions and changes the feelings
are subject to, just like the most irreligious man; - how much more invalid
they must be for his auditors and readers! In short, he will serve to make them
more irreligious.
80
Danger in personality. - The more God has counted as a discrete person,
the less faithful one has been to him. Men are far more attached to their ideas
than they are to their most beloved beloved: that is why they sacrifice
themselves for the state, the church, and also for God - so long as he remains
their own production, their idea, and is not taken all too much for a person. In
the latter case they almost always wrangle with him: even the most devout of
men gave vent, indeed, to the bitter exclamation: 'my God, why hast thou
forsaken me!'
81
Secular justice. - It is possible to lift secular justice off its hinges - with
the doctrine that everyone is wholly unaccountable and innocent: and an
attempt has already been made to do something of the sort, though on the
basis of the antithetical doctrine that everyone is wholly accountable and
culpable. It was the founder of Christianity who wanted to abolish secular
justice and remove judging and punishing from the world. For he understood
all guilt as 'sin', that is to say as an offence against God and not as an offence
against the world; on the other hand, he regarded everyone as being in the
greatest measure and in almost every respect a sinner. The guilty, however,
ought not be the judges of their own kind: thus his sense of equity dictated.
All judges of the realm of secular justice were thus in his eyes as guilty as
those they condemned, and the air of innocence they assumed seemed to him
hypocritical and pharisaical. He had eyes, moreover, only for the motives of
an action and not for its consequences, and considered there was only one
sole person sufficiently sharpsighted to adjudicate on motives: he himself (or,
as he himself put it, God).
82
An affectation on departing. - He who wants to desert a party or a
religion believes it is incumbent upon him to refute it. But this is a very
arrogant notion. All that is needed is that he should be clear as to the nature of
the bonds that formerly tied him to this party or religion and to the fact that
they no longer do so; that he should understand what kind of outlook
impelled him to them and that it now impels him elsewhere. We did not
attach ourself to this party or religion on strictly rational grounds: we ought
not to affect to have done so when we leave it.
83
Saviour and physician. - The founder of Christianity was, as goes without
330
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
saying, not without the gravest shortcomings and prejudices in his
knowledge of the human soul, and as a physician of the soul devoted to that
infamous and untutored faith in a universal medicine. At times his methods
seem like those of a dentist whose sole cure for pain is to pull out the teeth;
as, for example, when he combats sensuality with the advice: 'If thy eye
offend thee, pluck it out.' - But there is this difference, that the dentist at least
attains his object, the cessation of pain in his patient; in so clumsy a way, to
be sure, as to be ludicrous: while the Christian who follows that advice and
believes he has killed his sensuality is deceiving himself: it lives on in an
uncanny vampire form and torments him in repulsive disguises.
84
The prisoners. - One morning the prisoners entered the workyard: the
warder was missing. Some of them started working straightaway, as was their
nature, others stood idle and looked around defiantly. Then one stepped
forward and said loudly: 'Work as much as you like, or do nothing: it is all
one. Your secret designs have come to light, the prison warder has been
eavesdropping on you and in the next few days intends to pass a fearful
judgement upon you. You know him, he is harsh and vindictive. But now pay
heed: you have hitherto mistaken me: I am not what I seem but much more: 1
am the son of the prison warder and I mean everything to him. I can save you,
I will save you: but, note well, only those of you who believe me that I am the
son of the prison warder; the rest may enjoy the fruit of their unbelief.' - 'Well
now', said one of the older prisoners after a brief silence, 'what can it matter
to you if we believe you or do not believe you? If you really are his son and
can do what you say, then put in a good word for all of us: it would be really
good of you if you did so. But leave aside this talk of belief and unbelief!' -
'And', a younger man interposed, 'I don't believe him: it's only an idea he's got
into his head. I bet that in a week's time we shall find ourselves here just like
today, and that the prison warder knows nothing'. - 'And if he did know
something he knows it no longer', said the last of the prisoners, who had only
just come into the yard; 'the prison warder has just suddenly died'. - 'Holla!'
cried several together; 'holla! Son! Son! What does the will say? Are we
perhaps now your prisoners?' - 'I have told you', he whom they addressed
responded quietly, 'I will set free everyone who believes in me, as surely as
my father still lives'. - The prisoners did not laugh, but shrugged their
shoulders and left him standing.
85
The persecutor of God. - Paul conceived the idea, and Calvin
appropriated the idea, that countless numbers have from all eternity been
condemned to damnation and that this lovely universal plan was thus
instituted so that the glory of God might be revealed in it; Heaven and Hell
and humanity are thus supposed to exist so as to - gratify the vanity of God!
What a cruel and insatiable vanity must have flickered in the soul of him
33*
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
who first conceived or first appropriated such a thing! - Paul thus
remained Saul after all - the persecutor of God.
86
Socrates. - If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the
memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason,
and when Montaigne and Horace will be employed as forerunners and
signposts to an understanding of this simplest and most imperishable of
intercessors. The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life
lead back to him; at bottom they are the modes of life of the various
temperaments confirmed and established by reason and habit and all of them
directed towards joy in living and in one's own self; from which one might
conclude that Socrates' most personal characteristic was a participation in
every temperament. - Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able
to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that
constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed the finer
intellect.
8 7
Learning to write well. - The age of speaking well is past, because the
age of the city cultures is past. The extreme limit Aristotle allowed for the
size of a city - it must be possible for the herald to make himself audible to
the whole assembled community - this limit is of as little concern to us as is
the city community itself: we want to make ourself understood, not merely
beyond the city, but out over the nations. That is why everyone who is a good
European now has to learn to write well and ever better: this is still so even if
he happens to have been born in Germany, where writing badly is regarded as
a national privilege. To write better, however, means at the same time also to
think better; continually to invent things more worth communicating and to
be able actually to communicate them; to become translatable into the
language of one's neighbour; to make ourselves accessible to the
understanding of those foreigners who learn our language; to assist towards
making all good things common property and freely available to the free-
minded; finally, to prepare the way for that still distant state of things in
which the good Europeans will come into possession of their great task: the
direction and supervision of the total culture of the earth. - Whoever preaches
the opposite and sets no store by writing well and reading well - both virtues
grow together and decline together - is in fact showing the peoples a way of
becoming more and more national: he is augmenting the sickness of this
century and is an enemy of all good Europeans, an enemy of all free spirits.
88
Teaching of the best style. - The teaching of style can on the one hand be
the teaching that one ought to discover the means of expression by virtue of
which every state of mind can be conveyed to the reader or auditor; on the
other hand, it can be the teaching that one ought to discover the means of
expression for the most desirable state of mind, the state, that is
332
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
to say, which it is most desirable should be communicated and conveyed:
that of the spiritually joyful, luminous and honest man who has overcome his
passions. This will be the teaching that there exists a best style: the style
corresponding to the good man.
89
Paying attention to pace. - The pace of his sentences shows whether the
author is tired; the individual phrase can still be good and strong
notwithstanding, because it was discovered earlier and independently when
the idea first dawned on the author. This is frequently so in the case of
Goethe, who too often dictated when he was tired.
90
Already and still. - A: German prose is still very young: Goethe says that
Wieland was its father. B: So young and already so ugly! C: But I believe it is
true that Bishop Ulfilas* was already writing German prose; it is therefore
getting on for 1500 years old. B: So old and still so ugly!
91
Original German. - German prose, which is in fact not based on some
foreign model and ought no doubt to be accounted an original product of
German taste, might offer a signpost to the zealous advocates of a future
original German culture as to how, without imitation of foreign models, a
truly German costume, for instance, a German social gathering, a German
furnishing of a room, a German luncheon, would look. - Someone who had
reflected long on this prospect finally cried out in horror: 'But, for heaven's
sake, perhaps we already have this original culture - only we don't like to talk
about it!'
92
Forbidden books. - Never to read anything written by those arrogant
know- alls and muddle-heads who indulge in that most revolting form of ill-
breeding, that of logical paradox: they employ the forms of logic in precisely
those places where at bottom everything is impudently improvised and
constructed in air. ('Thus' should in their case mean 'you ass of a reader, for
you there is no "thus" - though there is for me' - to which the answer is: 'you
ass of a writer, whatever do you write for then?')
93
Demonstrating spirit. - Anyone who wants to demonstrate his spirit
makes sure everyone notices that he is abundantly supplied with its reverse.
That ill-breeding on the part of gifted Frenchmen with which they add to their
finest notions a touch of didaini has its origin in the intention of seeming
richer than they are: they want to bestow languidly, as though wearied by
constant dispensing from overfull treasure-houses.
94
German and French literature. - The misfortune for the German and French
* Bishop Ulfilas: Gothic apostle (c. 311 to 383), who translated the Bible into
Gothic, sometimes referred to as 'the father of Teutonic literature', t d(dain: disdain
333
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
literature of the past hundred years lies in the fact that the Germans left
the French school too soon - and that later the French entered the German
school too soon.
95
Our prose. - None of the present-day cultural nations has such bad prose
as the German; and if gifted and pampered Frenchmen say there is no
German prose - then we ought not really to be angry, for it is meant more
politely than we deserve. When we look for reasons we arrive at last at the
curious conclusion that the German knows only improvised prose and has no
idea at all that there is any other. It sounds to him simply incomprehensible if
an Italian says that writing prose is as much harder than writing poetry as the
representation of naked beauty is harder to the sculptor than that of beauty
draped. One has to toil honestly at verse, image, rhythm and rhyme - even the
German knows that, and is not inclined to accord improvisatory composition
an especially high value. But to work on a page of prose as on a statue? - it
sounds to him like something from the land of fable.
96
Grand style. - Grand style originates when the beautiful carries off the
victory over the monstrous.
97
Avoidance. - One does not know in what the refinement of a turn of
phrase or an expression employed by a distinguished spirit consists until one
can say what word every mediocre writer would unavoidably have hit upon to
express the same thing. All great artists display when driving their vehicle a
tendency to avoidance, to running off the road - without thereby having an
accident.
98
Something like bread. - Bread neutralizes the taste of other foods,
expunges it; that is why it is part of every more extended meal. In all works
of art there has to be something like bread, so that they can contain varying
effects: if the latter followed directly one upon the other undivided by any
rest or pause they would soon exhaust the spectator and arouse in him
repugnance, so that a more extended artistic meal would be an impossibility.
99
Jean Paul.* - Jean Paul knew a great deal but had no science, was skilled
in all kinds of artistic artifices but had no art, found almost nothing unen-
joyable but had no taste, possessed feeling and seriousness but when he
offered a taste of them poured over them a repulsive broth of tears, he had
indeed wit - but unhappily far too little to satisfy his ravenous
Jean Paul: pen-name of Jean Paul Freidrich Richter (1763-1825): German novelist and man
of letters.
334
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
hunger for it: which is why it is precisely through his lack of wit that he
drives the reader to despair. On the whole he was a motley, strongsmelling
weed that shot up overnight in the delicate fruitfields of Schiller and Goethe;
he was a complacent, good man, and yet a fatality - a fatality in a dressing-
gown.
100
Knowing how to taste the opposite too. - To enjoy a work of the past in
the way its contemporaries enjoyed it one has to have on one's tongue the
taste prevailing at that time against which it was contrasted.
101
Spirits-of-wine authors. - Many writers are neither spirit nor wine but
spirits-of-wine: they can catch fire and then they give off heat.
102
The mediating sense. - The sense of taste has, as the true mediating
sense, often persuaded the other senses over to its own view of things and
imposed upon them its laws and habits. One can obtain information about the
subtlest mysteries of the arts at a mealtable: one has only to notice what tastes
good, when it tastes good, what it tastes good after and for how long it tastes
good.
103
Lessing. - Lessing possessed a genuine French virtue and was in general
as a writer the most diligent pupil of the French: he knows how to arrange
and exhibit his things well in the shop-window. Without this art his ideas
would, like the objects of them, have remained somewhat in darkness, and
without this having been any very great loss. But many (especially the last
generation of German scholars) have learned much from his art and countless
numbers have taken pleasure in it. These learners, to be sure, did not also
have to learn from him, as so many of them did, his unpleasant tone of voice,
with its mixture of quarrelsomeness and honest probity. - As to Lessing the
'lyricist' everyone is now unanimous: as to the 'dramatist' everyone will be.
104
Unwanted readers. - How an author is tormented by those gallant readers
with thick, clumsy souls who, whenever they knock against anything, fall
over and hurt themselves!
105
Poets thoughts. - The real thoughts of real poets all go about veiled, like
the women in Egypt: only the deep eyes of the thought gaze out over the veil.
- Poets' thoughts are on average not worth as much as they are accepted as
being: for one is also paying for the veil and for one's own curiosity.
106
Write simply and serviceably. - Transitions, amplifications, colourful
335
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
emotions - all these we will allow the author and his book provided he
lets us have something solid in return.
107
Wieland.*- Wieland wrote German better than anyone (his translations of
Cicero's letters and of Lucian are the best German translations), but for all
that his thoughts no longer offer us material for thought. We can endure his
cheerful moralities as little as his cheerful immoralities: both belong so well
together. The people who took pleasure in them were no doubt at bottom
better people than we are - but also a good deal slower and more ponderous
people of the kind such a writer had need of. - Goethe had no need of the
Germans, which is why they in turn have no idea what use to make of him.
Look at even the best of our statesmen and artists: none of them had Goethe
for his educator - or can have.
108
Rare feasts. - Pithy compactness, reposefulness and maturity - where you
find these qualities in an author stop and celebrate a long feast in the midst of
the wilderness: it will be a long time before you experience such a sense of
wellbeing again.
109
The treasury of German prose. - Apart from Goethe's writings, and in
particular Goethe's conversations with Eckermann,t the best German book
there is, what is there really of German prose literature that it would be
worthwhile to read over and over again? Lichtenberg's aphorisms, the first
book of Jung-Stilling's autobiography,^ Adalbert Stifter's Nachsom- mer%
and Gottfried Keller's Leute von Seldwyla - and that for the present is all.
110
Written style and oral style. - The art of writing demands above all
substitutes for the modes of expression available only to the speaker: that is to
say, for gestures, emphases, tones of voice, glances. That is why written style
is quite different from oral style and something much more difficult: - it
wants to make itself just as comprehensible as the latter but with fewer
means. Demosthenes delivered his orations differently from the way in which
we read them: he revised them for reading. - Cicero's orations ought to be
demosthenized for the same purpose: at present there is much more Roman
forum in them than the reader can take.
111
Caution in quoting. - Young authors do not know that a fine expression, a
* Wieland: Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813): German novelist, poet and man of
letters.
t Goethe's conversations with Eckermann: Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with
Goethe was published 1837-48.
t Jung-Stilling: Heinrich jung-Stilling (1740-1817) published his autobiography in six
volumes between 1777 and the year of his death.
Adalbert Stifter (1805-68) published his novel Nachsommer in 1857.
Gottfried Keller (1819-90): Swiss poet and story-writer; his collection of novellas. Die
Leute von Seldwyla, appeared in two volumes in 1856 and 1874.
336
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
fine idea, looks fine only among its like and equals, that an excellent
quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns
the reader and seems to cry out to him: 'Beware, I am the jewel and around
me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!' Every word, every idea, wants to
dwell only in its own company: that is the moral of high style.
112
How should errors be spoken? - One may dispute whether it is more
harmful when errors are spoken badly or as well as the finest truths. What is
certain is that in the former case they injure the head twofold and are harder
to remove from it; on the other hand, their effect is not as certain as in the
latter case: they are not so infectious.
Circumscribing and enlarging. - Homer circumscribed the compass of
his material and reduced it, but let the individual scenes expand and enlarged
them - and so, later on, do the tragedians: each takes the material in smaller
portions than his predecessors, but each obtains a richer abundance of blooms
within this hedged-off garden enclosure.
114
Literature and morality casting light on one another. - Greek literature
can be employed to demonstrate through what forces the Greek spirit
developed and expanded, how it divided on to different paths and what it was
that made it grow weak. All this provides a picture of what at bottom
happened to Greek morality too, and of what must happen to every morality:
how it was at first compulsion and enforced with harshness, then gradually
grew gentler; how at last men came to take pleasure in certain actions, in
certain forms and conventions, and how there grew out of that a tendency to
appropriate the practice and possession of these things to oneself; how the
course becomes filled and overfilled with competitors, how satiety
supervenes, new objects of contest and ambition are sought and old ones
recalled to life, how the spectacle is repeated and the spectators grow weary
of watching because the entire circle now seems to have been run through
and then comes a stop, a last breath: the streams lose themselves in the sand.
The end has come, at least an end.
115
Which regions give lasting pleasure. - This region would be well suited
to a painting, yet I cannot find the formula for it, I cannot seize it as a whole.
I have noticed that all landscapes that make a lasting appeal to me possess
beneath all their multiplicity a simple geometrical shape. No region can give
artistic pleasure if it lacks such a mathematical substratum. And perhaps this
rule may also be applied metaphorically to men.
116
Reading aloud. - The ability to read aloud presupposes the ability to
337
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
present: one has only pale colours to employ, but has to determine the
exact proportions in which they shall appear before the full and deep colours
of the ever-present and determining background, that is to say to determine
their presentation. One therefore has to be capable of this art.
117
The dramatic sense. - He who lacks the four more refined senses of art
seeks to understand everything with the coarsest, the fifth: this is the
dramatic sense.
118
Herder. 20 - Herder is none of the things he induced others to suppose
he was (and which he himself wished to suppose he was): no great poet and
inventor, no new fruitful soil full of fresh primeval energy as yet
unemployed. He did possess, however, and in the highest degree, the ability
to scent the wind; he perceived and plucked the firstlings of the season earlier
than anyone else, so that others could believe it was he who made them
grow: his spirit lay in wait like a hunter between light and dark, old and
young, and wherever there were bridges, hollows, landslips, signs of hidden
springs and new growth: the restlessness of spring drove him hither and
thither, but he himself was not spring! - No doubt he was aware of this at
times but certainly did not want to believe it, ambitious priest that he was
who would have so liked to have been the intellectual pope of his age! This is
what he suffers from: he seems to have lived for a long time as the pretender
to several kingdoms, indeed to a universal empire, and he had adherents who
believed in him: the youthful Goethe was among them. But whenever crowns
were in the last resort conferred he went away empty: Kant, Goethe, then the
first real German historians and philologists took away from him what he
supposed had been reserved for him - yet often secretly and silently did not
suppose had been. It was precisely when he doubted himself that he liked to
drape himself in dignity and enthusiasm: these were all too often a cloak
designed to conceal many things and to deceive and console him himself. He
really did possess fire and enthusiasm, but his ambition was much greater!
This last blew impatiently on the flame and made it flicker, crackle and
smoke - his style flickers, crackles and smokes - but he desired a great flame,
and this never broke forth! He never sat at the table of the actual creators:
and his ambition did not allow him to seat himself modestly among the actual
partakers. Thus he was a restless guest, tasting in advance every spiritual dish
the Germans raked together over a half-century from all the realms of space
and time. Never truly happy and satisfied. Herder was moreover all too
frequently ill: then envy sometimes came and sat on his bed, and hypocrisy
too paid him a visit. Something injured and unfree continued to adhere to
him: and he lacks simple sturdy manliness more than any other of our so-
called 'classics'.

20 Herder: Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803): German critic and aesthetician.
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
119
Odour of words. - Every word has its odour: there exists a harmony and
disharmony of odours and thus of words.
120
Fine style. - The invented style is an offence to the friend of fine style.
121
Vow. -1 intend never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that
he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally
became a book.
122
Artistic convention. - Three-quarters of Homer is convention; and the
same is true of all Greek artists, who had no reason to fall prey to the modern
rage for originality. They lacked all fear of convention; it was through this,
indeed, that they were united with their public. For conventions are the
achieved artistic means, the toilsomely acquired common language, through
which the artist can truly communicate himself to the understanding of his
audience. Especially when, like the Greek poets and musicians, he wants to
conquer immediately with each of his works - since he is accustomed to
contend publicly with one or two rivals - the first condition is that he shall
also be understood immediately: which is possible, however, only through
convention. That which the artist invents that goes beyond convention he
adds of his own volition and puts himself at risk with it, the most favourable
outcome being that he creates a new convention. As a rule what is original is
admired, sometimes idolized, but rarely understood; obstinately to avoid
convention means wanting not to be understood. To what, then, does the
modern rage for originality point?
123
Affectation of scientificality on the part of artists. - Schiller believed, like
other German artists, that if one possesses spirit one is free to improvize with
the pen on all kinds of difficult subjects. And now his prose essays lie there -
in every respect a model of how not to tackle scientific questions of aesthetics
and morals - and a danger to young readers who in their admiration for
Schiller the poet lack the courage to think ill of Schiller the thinker and
essayist. - The temptation to which the artist so readily and so
comprehensively succumbs for once to enter fields barred expressly to him
and to put a word in with regard to science - for even the best worker
sometimes finds his trade and his workplace unendurable - this temptation
draws the artist so far as to show all the world what it has no reason to see at
all, namely that his thinking-room looks narrow and in disorder - and why
not? he doesn't live in it! - that the storecupboards of his knowledge are in
part empty, in part filled with a medley of junk - and why not? this state of
things is at bottom not at all ill-suited to the artist- child - but especially that
even for the simplest tools and tricks of scientific method with which the
merest beginners are familiar his wrists are too thick and unpractised - and of
this too he truly has no cause to be
339
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
ashamed! - On the other hand, he often displays no little art in imitating
all the blunders, bad habits and bogus scholarliness to be found in the
scientific guild, in the belief that those things belong, if not to the heart of the
matter, at any rate to its outward appearance; and this, precisely, is what is
comical about such artists' writings: without wishing to, the artist here
nonetheless does what it is his office to do - to parody the scientific and
inartistic nature. For a parodistic posture is the only posture he ought to adopt
towards science, insofar, that is, as he remains an artist and only an artist.
124
The Faust idea. - A little seamstress is seduced and dishonoured; a great
scholar of all the four faculties is the miscreant. But that surely cannot
happen in the right nature of things? No, by no means! Without the
assistance of the Devil in person the great scholar could not have brought it
about. - Is this really supposed -to be the greatest German 'tragic idea', as
Germans say it is? - But even this idea was still too dreadful for Goethe; after
the little seamstress, 'the good soul who erred but once', had suffered an
involuntary death, his gentle heart could not refrain from transporting her
into the proximity of the saints; indeed, in due course he even sent to Heaven
the great scholar, the 'good man' with the 'impulse obscure', through a trick
played on the Devil at the decisive moment: - up in Heaven the lovers find
one another again. - Goethe once said that his nature was too conciliatory for
real tragedy.
125
Is there such a thing as a 'German classic'? - Sainte-Beuve* once
remarked that the word 'classic' altogether refused to sound right when
applied to certain literatures: who, for example, would find it easy to speak of
a 'German classic'! - What is the view of our German booksellers, who are on
their way to augmenting the fifty German classics in whom we are already
supposed to believe with a further fifty? Does it not seem that an author
needs only to have been dead thirty years and to lie there in public as
permitted prey for him suddenly to hear the trumpet of the resurrection
summoning him to rise as a classic? And this in an age and among a nation
where even of the six great ancestors of its literature five are unmistakably
becoming or have already become antiquated - without this age or this nation
needing to be ashamed on precisely that account! For it is in face of the
strong of this age that they have receded - this much must in all fairness be
admitted! - Goethe, as already indicated, I except; he belongs in a higher
order of literatures than 'national literatures': that is why he stands towards
his nation in the relationship neither of the living nor of the novel nor of the
antiquated. Only for a few was he alive and does he live still: for most he is
nothing but a fanfare of vanity blown from time to time across the German
frontier. Goethe, not only a good and great human being but a culture,
Goethe is in the history of the Germans an episode without consequences:
who could, for example, produce a * Sainte-Beuve: Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
(1804-69): French critic.
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
piece of Goethe from the world of German politics over the past seventy
years! (whereas a piece of Schiller at any rate has been active there, and
perhaps even a little piece of Lessing). But the other five! Klopstock became,
in a very respectable way, antiquated even during his own lifetime: and so
thoroughly that the reflective book of his later years, the Gelehrten-Republik,
has to the present day been taken seriously by no one. Herder suffered the
misfortune that his writings were always either novel or antiquated, to
stronger and more refined heads (as to Lichten- berg) even Herder's chief
work, his Ideert zur Geschichte der Menschheit, was something antiquated as
soon as it appeared. Wieland, who lived abundantly and bestowed abundant
life, was shrewd enough to realize that his influence would vanish with his
death. Lessing is perhaps still alive today - but among young and ever
younger scholars! And Schiller has by now fallen out of the hands of youths
into those of boys, of all German boys! To descend down to ever more
immature readers is, indeed, a familiar way for a book to become antiquated.
- And what is it that has repelled these five, so that well-educated and
industrious men no longer read them? An improved taste, an improved
knowledge, an improved respect for the true and real: thus nothing but virtues
which precisely these five (and ten or twenty others with less audible names)
first again implanted in Germany and which now stand about their graves as a
tall forest and spread over them, together with the shadow of reverence, also
something of the shadow of oblivion. - But classics are not implanters of
intellectual and literary virtues, they are perfecters of them and their highest
points of light, which remain standing above the nations after these nations
themselves have perished: for they are lighter, freer, purer than they. An
exalted condition of mankind is possible in which the Europe of nations will
be lost in dark oblivion, but in which Europe will live on in thirty very old but
never antiquated books: in the classics.
126
Interesting but not beautiful. - This region conceals its meaning; but it
has a meaning and one would like to discover what it is: wherever I look I
read words and hints of words, but I do not know where the sentence begins
that will unravel the riddle contained in all these hints, and I become wry-
necked in searching for its starting place.
127

Against innovators in language. - To employ innovations or quaint old
terms in language, to favour the rare and strange, to be concerned to augment
vocabulary rather than to restrict it, is always a sign of an immature or
corrupted taste. A noble poverty, but a masterly freedom within this
unpretentiousness, is what distinguishes the Greek artists of speech: they
want to have less than the people have - for it is they who are richest in old
and new terms - but they want to have this less in better shape. Their
archaisms and uncommon terms are soon added up, but there is no end to our
admiration if we have an eye for the light and delicate way they
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have with the everyday and seemingly long since exhausted in words and
phrases.
128
Melancholy and serious authors. - He who reduces to paper what he is
suffering will be a melancholy author, a serious author, however, is one who
tells us what he has suffered and why he is now reposing in joy.
129
Healthy taste. - Why is it that health is not as infectious as sickness - in
general but especially in matters of taste? Or are there epidemics of health? -
130
Resolution. - Never again to read a book which was born and baptized
(with ink) simultaneously.
131
Improving ones thoughts. - To improve one's style - means to improve
one's thoughts and nothing else! - If you do not straightaway agree with this it
will be impossible to convince you of it.
132

Classic books. - The weakest side of every classic book is that it is
written too much in its author's mother tongue.
133
Bad books. - A book ought to long for pen, ink and writing-desk: but as a
rule pen, ink and writing-desk long for a book. That is why books are
nowadays of so little account.
134
Presence of interest. - When it reflects on pictures, the public becomes a
poet, and when it reflects on poems it becomes a researcher. At the moment
the artist calls to it, it never has the right kind of interest: presence of interest,
not presence of mind, is what it lacks.
135
.
Choice thoughts. - The choice style of an age of significance chooses not
only the words but also the thoughts - and chooses them both out of what is in
current use: daring and all too fresh-smelling thoughts are no less repugnant
to the more mature taste than are rash new expressions and images. Both of
them - the choice thought and the choice word - can later easily smell of
mediocrity, because the odour of choice things quickly evaporates, and then
all that is left to taste in them is the current and everyday.
136
Chief reason for corruption of style. - To desire to demonstrate more
feeling for a thing than one actually has corrupts one's style, in both language
and all the arts. All great art has, rather, the opposite tendency: like every
man of
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THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
moral consequence, it likes to arrest the feelings on their course and not
allow them to run quite to their conclusion. This modesty which keeps the
feelings only half-visible can be observed at its fairest in, for example,
Sophocles; and it seems to transfigure the features of the feelings when they
present themselves as being more sober than they are.
137
In defence of ponderous stylists. - What is said lightly seldom falls as
heavily upon the ear as the subject really weighs - the fault, however, lies
with the ill-schooled ear, which has to progress from education through what
has hitherto been called music on to the school of higher composition, that is
to say that of speech.
138

Bird's-eye view. - Here torrential streams plunge from many directions
into a gorge: their motion is so violent, and draws the eyes so vigorously after
it, that the bare and wooded cliffs all around seem, not to sink, but to flee
down. The prospect arouses in us an anxious fear, as though something
inimical lay behind it all from which everything had to take flight and against
which the abyss would lend us protection. This region cannot in any way be
painted unless one is hovering above it in the air like a bird. Here the so-
called bird's-eye view is for once not an artistic caprice but the sole
possibility.
139
Daring comparisons. - When daring comparisons are not proof of the
writer's wanton mischievousness they are proof of the exhaustion of his
imagination. In any case, however, they are proof of his very bad taste.
140
Dancing in chains. - With every Greek artist, poet and writer one has to
ask: what is the new constraint he has imposed upon himself and through
which he charms his contemporaries (so that he finds imitators)? For that
which we call 'invention' (in metrics, for example) is always such a self-
imposed fetter. 'Dancing in chains', making things difficult for oneself and
then spreading over it the illusion of ease and facility - that is the artifice they
want to demonstrate to us. Already in Homer we can perceive an abundance
of inherited formulae and epic narrative rules within which he had to dance:
and he himself created additional new conventions for those who came after
him. This was the school in which the Greek poets were raised: firstly to
allow a multiplicity of constraints to be imposed upon one; then to devise an
additional new constraint, impose it upon oneself and conquer it with charm
and grace: so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed and
admired.
141
Plentiful authors. - The last thing a good author acquires is plentifulness;
he who brings it with him will never be a good author. The noblest racehorses
are lean until they have won the right to rest and recover from their victories.
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142
Panting heroes. - Poets and artists who suffer from asthmatic narrow-
chestedness of the feelings are most liable to make their heroes pant: they do
not know how to breathe easily.
143
The half-blind. - The half-blind are the mortal foes of authors who let
themselves go. They would like to vent on them the wrath they feel when
they slam shut a book whose author has taken fifty pages to communicate
five ideas: their wrath, that is, at having endangered what is left of their
eyesight for so little recompense. - A half-blind man said: all authors let
themselves go. - 'Even the Holy Ghost?' - Even the Holy Ghost. But with him
it was all right; he wrote for the totally blind.
144
The style of immortality. - Thucydides and Tacitus21 - both when they
composed their works did so with a view to their enduring immortally: if one
did not know this from other sources, the fact would already be apparent
from their style. One believed he could bestow durability through salting and
pickling, the other through boiling and preserving; and neither, it seems, was
wrong.
145
Against images and similes. - With images and similes one can persuade
and convince but not prove. That is why there is such an aversion to images
and similes within science; here the persuasive and convincing, that which
makes credible, is precisely what is not wanted; one challenges, rather, the
coldest mistrust, and does so even in the means of expression one employs
and the bare walls it presents: because mistrust is the touchstone for the gold
of certainty.
146
Caution. - He who lacks thorough knowledge should take care not to
publish a book in Germany. For the good German then says, not 'he is
ignorant', but 'he is of doubtful character'. - This precipitate conclusion,
moreover, does credit to the Germans.
147
Painted skeletons. - Painted skeletons are those authors who would like
to compensate with artificial colouring for what they lack in flesh.
148
The grandiloquent style and what is higher. - One learns how to write
grandiloquently more quickly than one learns how to write simply and easily.
The reasons for this merge into the realm of morality.
149
Sebastian Bach. - Insofar as one does not listen to Bach's music as a com-

21 Tacitus: Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (c. 55 to 120): Roman historian.
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
plete and experienced expert in counterpoint and every species of the
fugal style of composition, and must consequently do without the actual
artistic pleasure it affords, it will seem to us when we hear his music as
though (to employ a grandiose expression of Goethe's) we were present as
God was creating the world. That is to say, we feel that here something great
is in process of becoming but does not yet exist: our great modern music. It
has already conquered the world because it has conquered the church,
national characteristics, and counterpoint. In Bach there is still too much
crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the
threshold of European (modern) music, but from here looks behind him back
towards the Middle Ages.
150
Handel. - Handel, in the invention of his music bold, innovative, true,
strong, capable of heroism - often becomes in its working out cold and
restrained, indeed weary of himself; he employed certain tested methods of
execution, wrote quickly and a great deal, and was glad when he was finished
- but not glad in the way God and other creators have been in the evening of
their working day.
Haydn. - To the extent that genius can be united with an altogether good
man, Haydn possessed it. He goes precisely as far as the limits morality
draws for the intellect; the music he composes is all music with 'no past'.
Beethoven and Mozart. - Beethoven's music often seems like a deeply
affected meditation on unexpectedly hearing again a piece, 'Innocence in
Sound', long believed to have been lost; it is music about music. In the songs
of beggars and children in the streets, in the montonous tunes of travelling
Italians, at the dances in the village inn or on carnival nights - that is where
he discovers his 'melodies': he collects them together like a bee, by seizing a
sound here, a brief resolution there. To him they are recollections of a 'better
world', in much the same way as Plato conceived of Ideas. - Mozart's relation
to his melodies is quite different: he finds his inspirations, not in listening to
music, but in looking at life, at the liveliest life of the south: he was always
dreaming of Italy when he was not there.
1
53
Recitative. - Formerly recitative was dry; now we live in the age of wet
recitative: it has melted away and now flows about it knows not where or
whither.
154
Cheerful music. - If one has gone without music for a long time it
afterwards enters the blood all too quickly like a heavy southern wine, and
leaves behind a soul narcotically dulled, half-awake and longing for sleep;
this is especially the effect of cheerful music, which produces bitterness and a
sense of hurt, satiety and homesickness all at the same time.
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and compels one to gulp down everything again and again as though in a
sugared draught of poison. The joyful hall then seems to close in, the light to
lose its brightness and become browner: at last it is as though the music were
penetrating into a prison cell where a poor wretch lies sleepless from
homesickness.
155
Franz Schubert. - Franz Schubert, a lesser artist than the other great
composers, nonetheless possessed the greatest inherited wealth of music of
any of them. He squandered it with liberal generosity: so that composers will
have his ideas and inspirations to feast on for another couple of centuries. In
his works we have a treasury of unemployed inventions; others will find their
greatness in employing them. - If one may call Beethoven the ideal audience
for a music-maker, then Schubert has a right to be called the ideal music-
maker himself.
156
The most modern musical execution. - The grand tragic-dramatic mode
of musical execution acquires its character through imitating the demeanour
of the great sinner as Christianity imagines him and desires him to be: the
slow pace, the passionate brooding, the agitation through torment of
conscience, the terrified praying and pleading, the enraptured grasping and
seizing, the halting in despair - and whatever else marks a man as being in a
state of great sin. Only the presupposition of Christianity that all men are
great sinners and do nothing whatever except sin could justify applying this
style of execution to all music: insofar, that is, that music is taken to be an
image of all human life and action and as such has continually to speak the
gesture-language of the great sinner. A listener who was insufficient of a
Christian to comprehend this logic might, to be sure, exclaim in horror when
witnessing such a performance: 'For Heaven's sake, however did sin get into
music!'
157
Felix Mendelssohn. - Felix Mendelssohn's music is the music of the
enjoyment of whatever is good and is precedented: it always points back
behind itself. How could it have much 'before it', much future!But then did
he want a future? He possessed a virtue rare among artists, that of gratitude
without mental reservations: and this virtue too always points back behind
itself.
158
A mother of the arts. - In our sceptical age actual devotions require an
almost brutally heroic ambitiousness; fanatical eye-closing and knee-bending
are no longer enough. Might it not be possible that the ambition to be the last
of all the ages in the matter of devotion could become the father of a last
Catholic church music, as it has already been the father of the last Catholic
style of architecture? (It is called the Jesuit style.)
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
159
Freedom in fetters - a princely freedom. - The last of the modern
composers to behold and worship beauty as Leopardi did, the inimitable
Pole, Chopin - no one before or after him has a claim to this epithet - Chopin
possessed the same princely nobility in respect of convention as Raphael
shows in the employment of simplest, most traditional colours - not with
regard to colours, however, but in regard to traditional forms of melody and
rhythm. These, as born to etiquette, he admits without dispute, but does so
playing and dancing in these fetters like the freest and most graceful of spirits
- and does so, moreover, without turning them to ridicule.
160
Chopin's Barcarole. - Almost all conditions and ways of life have a
blissful moment, and good artists know how to fish it out. Such is possessed
even by a life spent beside the beach, a life that unwinds tediously, insa-
lubriously, unhealthily in the proximity of the noisiest and greediest rabble -
this blissful moment Chopin has, in his Barcarole, expressed in sound in such
a way that the gods themselves could on hearing it desire to spend long
summer evenings lying in a boat.
161
Robert Schumann. - The 'youth' as the Romantic lyricists of France and
Germany dreamed of him in the first third of this century - this youth has
been completely translated into sound and song - by Robert Schumann, the
eternal youth so long as he felt himself to be in the fullness of his own
strength: there are, to be sure, moments when his music recalls the eternal
'old maid'.
162
Dramatic singers. - 'Why is this beggar singing?' - He probably doesn't
know how to wail. - 'Then he is doing right: but our dramatic singers who
wail because they don't know how to sing - are they too doing the right thing
too?'
163
Dramatic music. - To him who does not see what is taking place on the
stage, dramatic music is an absurdity, just as a continuous commentary to a
lost text is an absurdity. What it is really demanding is that one's ears should
be where one's eyes are; that, however, constitutes a rape on Euterpe:* this
poor muse wants her eyes and ears left where all the other muses have them.
164
Victory and rationality. - As in the case of other wars, so in that of the
aesthetic wars which artists provoke with their works and their apologias for
them the outcome is, unhappily, decided in the end by force and not by
* Euterpe: muse of music
347
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
reason. All the world now accepts it as an historical fact that Gluck* was
in the right in his struggle with Piccini: in any event, he won; force was on
his side.
165
On the principles of musical performance. - Do our present-day artists of
musical performance really believe, then, that the supreme commandment of
their art is to give every piece as much high relief AS they possibly can, and
make it speak in dramatic language at all cost? Is this, when applied for
instance to Mozart, not simply a sin against the spirit, against the cheerful,
sunny, tender, frivolous spirit of Mozart, whose seriousness is a goodnatured
and not a dreadful seriousness, whose pictures do not desire to leap out of the
wall so as to drive his audience away in terror. Or do you think that
Mozartian music means the same thing as 'the music of the stone guest'? And
not only Mozartian but all music? - But you retort that the greater effect
speaks in favour of your principle - and you could be right, provided that no
one asked the counter-question upon whom the effect was supposed to be
produced and upon whom a noble artist ought to want to produce an effect at
all! Never upon the people! Never upon the immature! Never upon the
sentimental! Never upon the sickly! But above all: never upon the dull and
stupefied!
166
Music of today. - This latest music, with its strong lungs and weak
nerves, is terrified above all of itself.
167
Where music is at home. - Music achieves great power only among
people who cannot or are not allowed to discourse. Its principal promoters
are therefore princes who want little criticism, indeed little thought at all, to
take place in their vicinity; then societies which, under some repression or
other (princely or religious), have to accustom themselves to silence but
therefore seek all the most powerful charms against emotional boredom
(usually everlasting love-affairs and everlasting music); thirdly entire nations
in which there exists no 'society' but for that reason all the more individuals
with an inclination to solitude, to half-obscure cogitations and to a reverence
for everything ineffable: these are the true musical souls. - The Greeks, as a
voluble and disputatious people, could therefore endure music only as a
seasoning for those arts that could actually be talked about and disputed over:
whereas it is hardly possible even to think clearly about music. The
Pythagoreans, those exceptions among the Greeks in many respects, were
reportedly also great musicians: they who invented the five-year silence but
did not invent dialectics.
Gluck ... Piccini: Christopher Willibald von Gluck (1714-87), German operatic composer; Nicola
Piccini (1728-1800), Italian operatic composer. The supporters of each clashed in Paris in the 1780's over
which of their respective compositions of lphigenie en Tauride was superior, Gluck's 'reform' opera or
Piccini's traditional style.
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THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
168
Sentimentality in music. - However favourably inclined we may be
towards serious and opulent music, there are perhaps, and for that very
reason, hours when we are overcome, enchanted and almost melted away by
its opposite: I mean by those utterly simple Italian operatic melismas which,
in spite of all their rhythmic monotony and harmonic childishness,
sometimes seem to sing to us like the soul of music itself. Whether you admit
it or not, you pharisees of good taste, it is so, and it is now my concern to
discuss the riddle presented by the fact that it is so and to offer a few guesses
at its solution. - When we were still children we tasted the virgin honey of
many things for the first time, and the honey never again tasted so good, it
seduced us to life, to living as long as we could, in the shape of our first
spring, our first flowers, our first butterflies, our first friendship. At that time
- it was perhaps about the ninth year of our life - we heard the first music that
we actually understood, the simplest and most childish music therefore, not
much more than a spinning-out of our nurse's song or the organ-grinder's
tune. (For one has first to be prepared and instructed even for the most
trifling 'revelations' of art: there is no such thing as a 'direct' effect of art,
however much the philosophers may have fabled of it.) It is to these first
musical delights - the strongest of our life - that our sensibilities connect
when we hear those Italian melismas: childhood happiness and the loss of
childhood, the feeling that what is most irrecoverable is our most precious
possession - this too touches the strings of our soul and does so more
powerfully than art alone, however serious and opulent, is able to do. - This
mixture of aesthetic joy with a moral grief which it is now customary to call
'sentimentality' - somewhat too haughtily, it seems to me (it is the mood of
Faust at the end of the first scene) - this 'sentimentality' on the part of the
listener, which experienced connoisseurs of art, the pure 'aes- theticians', like
to ignore, works in favour of Italian music. - Almost all music, moreover,
produces a magical effect only when we hear the language of our own past
speaking out of it: and to this extent all old music seems to the layman to get
better and better and that only just bom to be of little worth: for the latter
does not yet excite that 'sentimentality' which, as aforesaid, constitutes the
essential element of pleasure in music for anyone incapable of taking
pleasure in this art purely as an artist.
169
As friends of music. - In the last resort we are and remain well disposed
towards music for the same reason we are and remain well disposed towards
moonlight. Neither wishes to supplant the sun, after all - both desire only to
the best of their ability to illumine our nights. And yet - may we not make
fun of them and laugh at them nonetheless? Just a little, at least? And from
time to time? At the man in the moon! At the woman in music!
349
170
Art in the age of work. - We possess the conscience of an industrious
age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and
mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts
as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time
and energies. - This is the most general circumstance through which the
relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands
on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of the
industrious and able against it, it is directed to the conscienceless and lazy,
who, however, are in accordance with their nature unfavourably inclined
precisely towards grand art and feel the claims it makes to be presumptuous.
It may therefore be that grand art is facing its end from lack of air and the
room to breathe it: unless, that is, grand art tries, through a kind of
coarsening and disguising, to become at home in (or at least to endure) that
other air which is in reality the natural element only of petty art, of the art of
recreation and distraction. And this is now happening everywhere; artists of
grand art too now promise recreation and distraction, they too direct their
attentions to the tired and weary, they too entreat of them the evening hours
of their working day - just as do the artists of entertainment, who are content
to have achieved a victory over the serious brow and the sunken eye. What
artifices, then, do their greater comrades employ? They have in their
dispensary the mightiest means of excitation capable of terrifying even the
half-dead; they have narcotics, intoxicants, convulsives, paroxysms of tears:
with these they overpower the tired and weary, arouse them to a fatigued
overliveliness and make them beside themselves with rapture and terror. On
account of the perilousness of these means it employs, ought one to
denounce grand art in the forms in which it now exists - opera, tragedy and
music - as the most deceitful of sinners? Not at all: for it would a hundred
times prefer to dwell in the pure element of the quietness of morning and
address itself to the expectant, wakeful, energetic soul. Let us be grateful to it
that it has consented to live as it does rather than flee away: but let us also
admit to ourselves that an age which shall one day bring back true festivals
of joy and freedom will have no use for our art.
171
The employees of science and the others. - The truly efficient and
successful scholars could one and all be described as 'employees'. When in
their youth they had perfected their skills and crammed their memories, when
hand and eye had acquired certainty, they were directed by an older scholar
to a place in science where their qualities would be useful; later on, after they
themselves had become accomplished enough to detect the gaps and faults in
their science, they posted themselves of their own accord to where they were
needed. These natures one and all exist for the sake of science: but there are
rarer, rarely successful and wholly mature natures 'for the sake of whom
science exists' - at least that is what they themselves think - : frequently
unpleasant, frequently arrogant, fre-
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW
quently wrong-headed but almost always to a certain extent bewitching
men. They are not employees, neither are they employers, they avail
themselves of that which these have laboured to ascertain and do so with a
certain princely composure and rarely with more than a modicum of praise:
as though, indeed, those employees and employers belonged to a lower
species of beings. And yet they possess precisely the same qualities as these
employers and employees do, and sometimes even in an inferior state of
development: they are, moreover, characterized by a narrow limitedness
foreign to the former, on account of which it is impossible to appoint them to
a post or see in them usable instruments - they can live only in their own
atmosphere and on their own soil. This limitedness proffers them all of a
science that 'belongs to them', that is to say all they can bear home with them
to their atmosphere and dwelling; they fancy they are collecting together
their scattered 'property'. If they are prevented from constructing their own
nest they perish like houseless birds; unfreedom is phthisis to them. If they
cultivate individual regions of science in the way the others do, it is always
only those regions where the fruit and seeds they themselves need will
prosper; what is it to them if science as a whole has regions unfilled and ill
cultivated? They lack all impersonal interest in a problem; just as they
themselves are personalities through and through, so all their insights and
acquirements in the field of knowledge coalesce together into a personality,
into a living multiplicity whose individual parts are dependent on one
another, cleave to one another, are nourished by the same food, and as a
whole possesses its own atmosphere and its own odour. - Natures such as
this produce, with their personality-informed structures of knowledge, that
illusion that a science (or even the whole of philosophy) is finished and has
reached its goal; it is the life in their structure that performs this magic,
which has at times been very fateful for science and misleading for those
able and efficient workers of the spirit just described, though at other times,
when aridity and exhaustion have reigned, it has acted as a balm and like the
breath of a cool, refreshing oasis. - The name usually give to such men is
philosophers.
172
Recognition of talent. - As I was going through the village of S. a boy
began cracking a whip with all his might - he had already advanced far in
this art, and knew it. I threw him a glance of recognition - in my heart,
however, I found it very painful. - So it is with the recognition of many
talents. We are well disposed towards them when they cause us pain.
173
Laughing and smiling. - The more joyful and secure the spirit becomes,
the more man unlearns loud laughter; on the other hand, a spiritual smile is
continually welling up in him - a sign of his astonishment at the countless
hidden pleasures existence contains.
174
Entertainment for invalids. - Just as grief of soul can lead us to tear at our
35i
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
hair, beat our brows, rend our cheeks or even, as Oedipus did, pluck out
our eyes, so when we experience violent physical pain we sometimes call to
our aid a violent feeling of rancour by recalling acts of slander and
inculpation committed against us, by viewing our future darkly, by acts of
malice and stabs-in-the-back we perpetrate in imagination against invisible
enemies. And occasionally it is true that one devil drives out another - but
one then has this other. - Thus what is to be recommended to the invalid is
that other form of entertainment that seems to diminish the pain: to reflect on
acts of kindness and consideration one might perform for friend and foe.
175
Mediocrity as mask. - Mediocrity is the most successful mask the
superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, that is to say the
mediocre, it will not seem a mask - : and yet it is on precisely their account
that he puts it on - so as not to provoke them, indeed often out of
benevolence and pity.
176
The patient. - The pine-tree seems to listen, the fir-tree to wait: and both
without impatience: - they give no thought to the little people beneath them
devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
177
The best joke. - The joke I welcome most is that which stands in place of
a weighty, not altogether harmless thought, at once a cautionary gesture of
the finger and a flashing of the eyes.
178
Accessories of reverence. - Wherever the past is venerated the clean and
the cleaners should not be admitted. Piety is uncomfortable without a little
dust, dirt and refuse.
179
The great danger for scholars. - It is precisely the ablest and most
thoroughgoing scholars who are in danger of seeing their life set narrower
and narrower limits and, in the feeling that this is so, of becoming in the
second half of their life more and more disgruntled and intolerant. At first
they swim into their science with wide hopes and apportion themselves
bolder tasks whose goals they sometimes already anticipate in their
imagination: then there are moments such as occur in the life of the great
discovering sea-voyagers - knowledge, presentiment and strength raise one
another even higher, until a new distant coast dawns upon the eye. Now,
however, the rigorous man recognizes more clearly year by year how vital it
is that the individual items of research should be as circumscribed as possible
so that they can be resolved without remainder and that unendurable
squandering of energy avoided from which earlier periods of science
suffered: every task is done ten times, and then the
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
eleventh still offers the best result. But the more the scholar gets to know
and practise this resolving of riddles without remainder the greater will be his
pleasure in it: but the strictness of his demands in regard to that which is here
called 'without remainder' will likewise increase. He sets aside everything
that must in this sense remain incomplete, he acquires a repugnance and a
keen nose for the half-resolvable - for everything that can yield a kind of
certainty only in a general and more indefinite sense. The plans of his youth
collapse before his eyes: all that remains of them is the merest few knots in
the unknotting of which the master now takes pleasure and demonstrates his
power. And now, in the midst of all this useful and restless activity, the older
man is suddenly and then repeatedly assailed by a profound disgruntlement,
by a kind of torment of conscience: he gazes upon himself as upon one
transformed, as though he had been diminished, debased, changed into a
skilful dwarf-, he is harassed by the thought of whether his mastery in small
things is not a piece of indolence, an evasion of the admonition to greatness
in living and working. But he can no longer attain it - the time has gone by.
180
The teacher in the age of books. - Now that self-education and fraternal
education are becoming more general, the teacher must, in the form he now
normally assumes, become almost redundant. Friends anxious to learn who
want to acquire knowledge of something together can find in our age of
books a shorter and more natural way than 'school' and 'teacher' are.
181
The great utility of vanity. - Originally the strong individual treats not
only nature but society and weaker individuals too as objects of plunder: he
exploits them as much as he can and then goes on. Because his life is very
insecure, alternating between hunger and satiety, he kills more animals than
he can eat, and pillages and mistreats men more than is necessary. His
demonstrations of power are at the same time demonstrations of revenge
against the painful and fear-ridden state of his existence: then again, he wants
through his actions to count as being more powerful than he is: when the fear
he engenders increases, his power increases. He soon notices that what bears
him up or throws him down is not that which he is but that which he counts
as being: here is the origin of vanity. The powerful man tries by every means
to augment belief in his power. - Those he subjects, who tremble before him
and serve him, know in turn that they are worth precisely as much as he
counts them as being worth: so that it is at this estimation that they work, and
not at the satisfaction of their own needs as such. We know vanity only in its
feeblest forms, in its sublimations and small doses, because we live in a late
and very ameliorated state of society: originally it is the most useful of all
things, the mightiest means of preservation. And the degree of vanity will,
moreover, be the greater the more prudent and intelligent the individual is:
because it is easier to augment belief in power than to augment power itself,
but is so
353
only for him who possesses spirit - or, as must be the case in these
primeval conditions, for him who is cunning and deceitful.
182
Signs of cultural weather. - There are so few decisive signs of the
cultural weather we must be glad if we find we have at any rate one reliable
one in our hands for use in our house and garden. To test whether someone is
one of us or not -1 mean whether he is a free spirit or not - one should test his
feelings towards Christianity. If he stands towards it in any way other than
critically then we turn our back on him: he is going to bring us impure air
and bad weather. - It is no longer our task to teach such people what a sirocco
is; they have Moses and the weather-prophets and the prophets of the
Enlightenment: if they will not pay heed to these, then -
183
Wrath and punishment has had its time. - Wrath and punishment is a
present to us from the animal world. Man will have come of age only when
he returns this birthday gift to the animals. - Here there lies buried one of the
greatest ideas mankind can have, the idea of progress to excel all progress. -
Let us go forward a few thousand years together, my friends! There is a great
deal of joy still reserved for mankind of which men of the present day have
not had so much as a scent! And we may promise ourselves this joy, indeed
testify that it must necessarily come to us, only provided that the evolution of
human reason does not stand still] One day we shall not be able to find it in
our heart to commit the logical sin that lies concealed in wrath and
punishment, whether an individual's or society's: one day, when heart and
head have learned to dwell as close to one another as now they still stand far
apart. That they no longer stand as far apart as they originally did is fairly
apparent if we look at the total course of mankind; and the individual who
has behind him a lifetime of inner labour will have a proud and joyful
awareness of distance overcome and closer proximity achieved, and will thus
feel entitled to venture to harbour even greater expectations.
184
Origin of the 'pessismists'. - A little decent food often makes all the
difference to whether we look into the future hopefully or hollow-eyed: this
applies even in the highest and most spiritual regions. When the present
generation is dissatisfied with the world and blackens it, these qualities have
been inherited from earlier hungry generations. It is often to be observed in
our artists and poets too that, however luxuriously they themselves may live,
their antecedents are not of the best, that much of their blood and brain that
reemerges as the subject and chosen colours of their works has been acquired
from downtrodden and ill nourished forefathers. The culture of the Greeks is
a culture of the wealthy, and of the wealthy from of old moreover: for a
couple of centuries they lived better than we (better in every sense, especially
on much simpler food and drink): as a result their brains at length became at
once so full and deli-
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THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
cate, the blood flowed so rapidly through them like a joyful and
sparkling wine, that the good and best things they could do emerged from
them no longer gloomy, enraptured and with violence, but fair and bathed in
sunlight.
185
Of rational death. - What is more rational, to stop the machine when the
work one demands of it has been completed - or to let it run on until it stops
of its own accord, that is to say until it is ruined? Is the latter not a
squandering of the cost of maintenance, a misuse of the energy and
attentiveness of those who service it? Does it not mean throwing away that
which is badly needed elsewhere? Will the fact that many of them are
maintained and serviced to no productive end not even propagate a kind of
contempt for machines in general? - 1 am speaking of involuntary (natural)
and of voluntary (rational) death. Natural death is death independent of all
reason, actual irrational death, in which the wretched substance of the husk
determines how long the kernel shall or shall not continue to exist: in which
therefore the stunted, often sick and thick- witted prison warder is the master
who decides the moment at which his noble prisoner shall die. Natural death
is the suicide of nature, that is to say the annihilation of the rational being by
the irrational to which it is tied. Only in the light of religion can the opposite
appear to be the case: because then it is the higher reason (God's) which gives
the command which the lower reason has, fairly enough, to submit to.
Outside the religious mode of thinking natural death is worthy of no
glorification. - The wise regulation and disposal of death belongs to that
morality of the future, at present quite ungraspable and immoral sounding,
into the dawn of which it must be an indescribable joy to gaze.
186
Retrogressive. - All criminals force society back to a stage of culture
earlier than the one at which it happens to be standing: they have a
retrogressive effect. Consider the instruments society is obliged to create and
maintain for itself for the sake of its own defence: the sly police agents, the
prison warders, the executioners; do not overlook the public prosecutors and
defence lawyers; and ask yourself, finally, whether the judges themselves,
and punishment, and the whole process of the courts, are not phenomena
much more likely to produce a depressive than an elevating effect on the non-
criminal: for no one will ever succeed in covering self- defence and revenge
with the cloak of innocence; and whenever man is employed and sacrificed
as a means to an end of society's all higher humanity mourns.
187
War as remedy. - To nations growing wretched and feeble war may be
recommended as a remedy, assuming they want to continue on living at all:
for national consumption is also susceptible to a brutal cure. The desire to
live for ever and inability to die is, however, itself already a sign
355
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of senility of the faculties: the more fully and ably one lives, the readier
one is to relinquish one's life for a single good sensation. A nation that lives
and feels in this way has no need of wars.
188
Spiritual and physical transplantation as remedy. - The various cultures
are various spiritual climates each of which is especially harmful or healthful
to this or that organism. History as a whole, as knowledge of the various
cultures, is pharmacology but not the science of medicine itself. The
physician is still needed who will avail himself of this pharmacology to send
each person to the climate favourable precisely to him - for a period of time
or for ever. To live in the present, within a single culture, does not suffice as
a universal prescription: too many people of the highest utility who cannot
breathe properly in it would die out. With the aid of history one can give
them air and try to preserve them; men of retarded cultures also have their
value. - This spiritual regimen is paralleled by a physical one through which,
by a medicinal geography, mankind has to discover to what sicknesses and
degenerations each region of the earth gives rise, and conversely what
curative factors it offers: and then nations, families and individuals must
gradually be transplanted for as long and continuously as is needed for our
inherited physical infirmities to be conquered. In the end, the whole earth will
be a collection of health resorts.
189
Reason and the tree of humanity. - That which in senile short-
sightedness you call the overpopulation of the earth is precisely what proffers
the more hopeful their greatest task: mankind shall one day become a tree
that overshadows the whole earth bearing many milliards of blossoms that
shall all become fruit one beside the other, and the earth itself shall be
prepared for the nourishment of this tree. That the still small beginnings of
this shall increase in strength and sap, that the sap shall flow around for the
nourishment of the whole and the individual parts through numberless canals
- it is from this and similar tasks that the standard is to be derived as to
whether a man of the present is useful or useless. The task is unspeakably
great and bold: let us all see to it that the tree does not untimely rot away!
Human life and action is no doubt capable of presenting itself to the historical
mind in the way in which the life of the ant, with its cunningly raised up hills,
stands exposed to all our eyes. Judged superficially, all human existence
would, like the existence of the ant, suggest the presence of 'instinct'. A more
rigorous examination lets us perceive how whole nations, whole centuries toil
to discover and thoroughly to test new methods for promoting a great human
collective and finally the great collective fruit-tree of humanity; and whatever
individuals, nations and ages may suffer in the course of this testing,
individuals have always become wise and prudent through this suffering, and
wisdom and prudence slowly flows out from them to influence the measures
adopted by whole nations and whole ages. Even the ants make mistakes;
mankind may well be ruined and untimely wither through folly
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THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
in its choice of methods; neither for the one nor the other is there an
infallible instinct. What we must do, rather, is to look in the face our great
task of preparing the earth for the production of the greatest and most joyful
fruitfulness - a task for reason on behalf of reason!
190
Commendation of unselfishness and its origin. - For many years two
neighbouring petty chieftains had been at strife with one another: they
devastated one another's crops, abducted sheep, burned down houses; but
neither obtained a decisive victory over the other, because their power was
roughly equal. A third, who because of the secluded situation of his domain
was able to stand aside from this feud but had reason to fear the day one of
his quarrelsome neighbours should come out decisively on top, finally
stepped between the contestants and solemnly offered his good offices: and in
private he attached to his peace proposal a weighty condition: he gave each of
them to understand that henceforth if one of them offended against the peace
he would make common cause with the other. They came together before
him, hesitantly laid in his hands the hands that had hitherto been the
instruments and all too often the cause of hatred - and seriously undertook to
attempt to keep the peace. They both saw with astonishment how their
prosperity and wellbeing suddenly increased, how each had in his neighbour
a willing trading-partner instead of a crafty or openly mocking illdoer, how
each could even assist and rescue the other in times of need instead of
exploiting and augmenting this need of his neighbour as heretofore; it
seemed, indeed, as though in both their domains the race of man had grown
fairer since that day: for their eyes had become brighter, their brows had lost
their brooding look, all had acquired confidence in the future - and nothing is
so beneficial to the soul and body of man than is this confidence. They met
together every year on the day of their treaty, the chieftains together with
their followers: and did so in the presence of the mediator whose mode of
dealing they increasingly admired and revered the greater the benefits they
owed to it grew. They called this mode of dealing unselfish - their eyes were
fixed far too firmly on the benefits they themselves had harvested from it to
see of their neighbour more than that his condition had changed far less as a
consequence of it than theirs had: it had, rather, remained the same, and thus
it seemed that the latter had had no eye on acquiring benefits for himself. For
the first time one told oneself that unselfishness was a virtue: such a thing
might, of course, have been practised often and on a small scale in private,
but this virtue became truly noticeable only when for the first time it was
painted on the wall in large letters legible to the whole community. The
moral qualities are recognized as virtues, accorded value and an honoured
name, and recommended for acquisition only from the moment when they
have visibly determined the fate and fortune of whole societies: for then
height of feeling and excitation of the inner creative energies has become so
great in many that each brings the best he has and bestows it upon this
quality: the serious man lays his
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
seriousness at its feet, the dignified man his dignity, the women their
gentleness, the young all the hopefulness and future-directedness of their
nature; the poet lends it words and names, inserts it in the round- dance of
other beings like it, accords it a pedigree and, as is the way with artists, at last
worships the creature of his fantasy as a new divinity - he teaches worship of
it. Thus, because the love and gratitude of everyone has worked on it as on a
statue, a virtue at last becomes an assemblage of all that is good and worthy
of reverence, a kind of temple and at the same time divine personage.
Henceforth it stands as an individual virtue, as a distinct entity, which it was
not before, and exercises the rights and the power of something sanctified and
suprahuman. - In the Greece of later antiquity the cities were full of such
abstracts made into human deities (this bizarre expression must be excused
for the sake of the bizarre concept it describes); the people had in its own way
erected for itself a Platonic 'ideational heaven' in the midst of the earth, and I
do not believe that its inhabitants were felt to be less alive than any of the old
Homeric divinities.
191
Times of darkness. - 'Times of darkness' is the expression in Norway for
those times when the sun remains below the horizon the whole day long: at
these times the temperature falls slowly but continuously. - This is a nice
simile for all thinkers for whom the sun of humanity's future has for a time
disappeared.
192
The philosopher of sensual pleasure. - A little garden, figs, little cheeses
and in addition three or four good friends - these were the sensual pleasures
of Epicurus.
193

The epochs of life. - The true epochs in life are those brief periods of
standstill between the ascent and decline of a ruling idea or feeling. Here one
has attained a state of satisfaction: all else is hunger and thirst - or satiety.
194
The dream. - Our dreams are, on the rare occasions when they are for
once successful and perfect - usually the dream is a bungled product - chains
of symbolic scenes and images in place of the language of poetic narration;
they paraphrase our experiences or expectations or circumstances with such
poetic boldness and definiteness that in the morning we are always astonished
at ourselves when we recall our dreams. In dreaming we use up too much of
our artistic capacity - and therefore often have too little of it during the day.
195
Nature and science. - Just as in nature, so in science it is the poorer, less
fruitful regions that are first properly cultivated - because it is precisely for
this that the means available to budding science are approximately
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adequate. The cultivation of the most fruitful regions presupposes a
carefully developed and tremendous quality of methods, individual
conclusions already gained, and an organized host of well schooled workers -
and all these come together only late in the day. - Impatience and ambition
often make too soon for these most fruitful regions; but the results are then
almost nil. In nature the revenge for such losses would be that the colonists
starved to death.
196
The simple life. - Nowadays a simple mode of life is difficult: it requires
much more reflection and inventive talent than is possessed even by very
clever people. The most honest of them will perhaps say moreover: T haven't
sufficient time to reflect on it. The simple mode of life is too noble a goal for
me, I shall wait until wiser men than I have discovered it.'
197
Great peaks and little peaks. - The meagre fruitfulness of the highest and
most cultivated spirits and the classes that pertain to them, the circumstance
that they are frequently unmarried and are sexually cool in general, is
essential to the economy of mankind: reason recognizes and makes use of the
fact that at the outermost point of spiritual evolution the danger of a
nervously unsound posterity is very great: such people are the great peaks of
mankind - they must not taper off into little peaks.
198
Nature never makes a leap. - However vigorously a man may develop
and seem to leap over from one thing into its opposite, closer observation will
nonetheless discover the dovetailing where the new building grows out of the
old. This is the task of the biographer: he always has to bear in mind the
fundamental principle that nature never makes a leap.
199
Clean, certainly. - He who dresses himself in clean-washed rags is
wearing clean clothes, certainly, but looks like a ragamuffin nonetheless.
200
The solitary speaks. - As a recompense for much ennui, ill-humour and
boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must
entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in
oneself and in nature. He who completely entrenches himself against
boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink
the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.
201
False celebrity. - I hate those supposed beauties of nature which derive
their significance fundamentally only from knowledge, especially a
knowledge of geography, but in themselves leave the mind thirsting for
beauty unsatisfied: for example the view of Mont Blanc from Geneva - a
thing without meaning unless knowledge hurry to assist the brain; the
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
mountains closer to us are all more beautiful and impressive - but 'not
nearly so high', as that absurd knowledge adds with the aim of diminishing
them. The eye here contradicts knowledge: how can it truly rejoice if its
rejoicing is grounded in contradiction!
202
Pleasure tourists. - They climb the hill like animals, stupid and
perspiring; no one has told them there are beautiful views on the way.
203
Too much and too little. - Everyone nowadays lives through too much
and thinks through too little: they are ravenously hungry but at the same time
suffer from colic, so that they get thinner and thinner however much they eat.
- He who says nowadays 'I have experienced nothing' - is an idiot.
204
End and goal. - Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its
goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have
reached its goal either. A parable.
205
Neutrality of grand nature. - The neutrality of grand nature (in
mountain, sea, forest and desert) pleases us, but only briefly; afterwards we
grow impatient. 'Won't these things say anything at all to us, then? Don't we
exist for them?' There arises the feeling of crimen laesae majestatis
humanae*
206
Forgetting our objectives. - During the journey we commonly forget its
goal. Almost every profession is chosen and commenced as a means to an
end but continued as an end in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most
frequent of all acts of stupidity.
207
Elliptic of an idea. - When an idea has just risen above the horizon the
temperature of the soul is usually very cold. The idea engenders its heat only
gradually, and it is at its hottest (that is to say, it is exercising its greatest
influence) when belief in the idea is already on the decline.
208
How to have everyone against you. - If anyone nowadays ventured to
say: 'he who is not for me is against me', he would at once have everyone
against him. - This way of feeling does credit to our age.
209
Being ashamed of wealth. - Our age tolerates only one species of
wealthy man, him who is ashamed of his wealth. If we hear of anyone 'he is
very rich', we at once experience a sensation similar to that which we
experience at the sight of a repulsive swelling sickness, of obesity or dropsy:
we have forcibly to remind ourselves of our humanity if we are to be able to *
crimen ... humanae: crime of lese majesty against the human race.
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
associate with such a wealthy man without his noticing the disgust we
feel. Should he go so far as to plume himself on his riches, however, our
feeling is mingled with an almost pitying amazement at so high a degree of
human unreason: so that we feel like raising our hands to heaven and crying:
'poor disfigured, overburdened, hundredfold fettered man, to whom every
hour brings or can bring something unpleasant, whose limbs are set
trembling by every event in twenty nations, how can you make us believe you
are happy in your state of life! Wherever you appear in public, we know it is
a kind of running the gauntlet under eyes that have in them nothing but cold
hatred or importunity or silent derision. It may be easier for you to acquire
things than it is for others: but your acquisitions are superfluous and give you
little pleasure; and to store up what you have acquired is now in any event a
more wearisome thing than any wearisome acquiring could be. You suffer
continually, for you lose continually. What good is it if you have a constant
supply of new artificial blood: the cupping-glasses that sit, constantly sit, on
your neck are no less painful! - But, to be fair to you, it is hard, perhaps
impossible, for you not to be rich: you have to store up, have to go on
acquiring, the tendency of your nature you have inherited is the yoke imposed
upon you - so therefore do not deceive us, be honestly and visibly ashamed of
the yoke you bear: since at the bottom of your soul you are in fact weary of it
and bear it unwillingly. This shame will not dishonour you.'
210
Intemperance in presumptuousness. - There are men who are so
presumptuous that when they publicly commend something great they know
no other way of doing so than by representing it as a preliminary stage of and
bridge to themselves.
211
In the ground of ignominy. - He who wants to rid men of an idea usually
does not halt at refuting it and drawing out the worm of illogicality that
resides within it: he then, after the worm is dead, goes on to hurl the entire
fruit too into the mud, so that men will find it indecent and experience disgust
at it. He believes that in this way he has found the means of preventing that
'resurrection on the third day' so common among refuted ideas. - He is in
error, for it is precisely in the ground of ignominy, among the filth, that the
kernel of an idea geminates new seeds most speedily. - Therefore: do not
deride and befoul that which you want to do away with for good but
respectfully lay it on ice-, and, in as much as ideas are very tenacious of life,
do so again and again. Here it is necessary to act in accordance with the
maxim: 'One refutation is no refutation.'
212
Free of morality. - Now that minds are becoming freer and less narrow,
it is certain that morality (inherited, handed down, instinctual acting in
accordance with moral feelings) is on the decline: but the individual virtues,
moderation, justice, repose of soul, are not - for when the conscious
361
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
mind has attained its highest degree of freedom it is involuntarily led to
them and comes to recognize how useful thay are.
213
The fanatic of mistrust and his warranty. - The old man: You want to
venture on the tremendous task of educating men? Where is your warranty? -
Pyrrho:* Here it is: I shall warn men against myself, I shall confess publicly
all the faults of my nature and expose to every eye my precipitancies,
contradictions and acts of stupidity. Do not listen to me, I shall say to them,
until I have become like unto the least of you, and less even than him; resist
and strive against truth as long as ever you can, out of disgust at him who is
its advocate. I shall mislead and deceive you so long as you perceive in me
the slightest trace of dignity and respectability. - The old man: You promise
too much, you cannot bear this burden. - Pyrrho: Then I shall tell men this
too, and say I am too weak and cannot perform what I promise. The greater
my unworthiness, the more they will mistrust truth when it proceeds from my
mouth. - The old man: Do you want to be the teacher of mistrust of truth,
then? - Pyrrho: Of mistrust such as there has never yet been on earth before,
of mistrust of all and everything. It is the only path to truth. The right eye
may not trust the left, and light will for a time have to be called darkness: this
is the path you must tread. Do not believe it will lead you to fruit-trees and
fair meadows. You shall find hard little grains of corn upon it - these are
truths: for many decades you will have to consume lies by the handful so as
not to die of hunger, even though you know them to be lies. Those grains of
corn, however, will be sown and buried, and perhaps, perhaps, there will at
some future time be a harvest-day: no one dare promise it, unless he be a
fanatic. - The old man: Friend! Friend! Your words too are those of the
fanatic! - Pyrrho: You are right! I shall be mistrustful of all words. - The old
man: Then you will have to stay silent. - Pyrrho: 1 shall tell men that 1 have
to stay silent, and that they should mistrust my silence. - The old man: So you
are retreating from your undertaking? - Pyrrho: On the contrary - you have
just shown me the gate through which I must pass. - The old man: I do not
know -: do we still understand one another completely? - Pyrrho: Probably
not. - The old man: Do you still understand yourself completely? - Pyrrho
turns around and laughs. - The old man: Alas, friend! Laughing and staying
silent - is that now your whole philosophy? - Pyrrho: It wouldn't be the worst
one. -
214
European books. - When reading Montaigne, Larochefoucauld, La Bruy-
ere, Fontenelle (especially the Dialogues des Morts), Vauvenargues and
Chamfort we are closer to antiquity than in the case of any other group of six
authors of any other nation.t Through these six the spirit of the final
* Pyrrho of Elis (c. 36$ to c. 270 BC), founder of the school of philosophical Skepticism.
The conversation with the old man is modelled on the dialogue Python written by Pyrrho's pupil
Timon of Phleius (c. 320 to c. 230 BC).
t La Bruytre (1645-96), Fontenelle (1657-1757), Vauvenargues (1715-47), Chamfort (1741-
94): French moralists.
362
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
centuries of the old era has risen again - together they constitute an
important link in the great, still continuing chain of the Renaissance. Their
books are above the changes of national taste and philosophical colouring
which as a rule every book nowadays radiates and has to radiate if it is to
become famous: they contain more real ideas than all the books of German
philosophers put together: ideas of the kind that produce ideas and which - I
am at a loss to finish the definition; it is enough that they seem to me authors
who have written neither for children nor for dreamers, neither for young
ladies nor for Christians, neither for Germans nor for - I am again at a loss to
complete my list. - But to state a clear commendation: if they had been
written in Greek the Greeks would have understood them. How much, on the
other hand, would even Plato have been able to understand at all of the
writings of our finest German thinkers, those of Goethe and Schopenhauer,
for example, to say nothing of the repugnance their style would have evoked
in him, namely its obscurity, exaggeration and occasional thinness and
dryness - faults from which the above named suffer least among German
thinkers and yet suffer all too much (as a thinker Goethe liked to embrace the
clouds more than he should have and it is not with impunity that
Schopenhauer almost always wanders among images of things instead of
among the things themselves). - On the other hand, what clarity and delicate
precision those Frenchmen possess! Even the most acute-eared of the Greeks
must have approved of this art, and one thing they would even have admired
and adored, the French wittiness of expression: they loved such things very
much without themselves being especially gifted in them.
215'
Fashion and modernity. - Wherever ignorance, uncleanliness and
superstition are still the order of the day, wherever communications are poor,
the landscape is meagre and the priesthood powerful, there we still also
discover national costumes. Where signs of the opposite of these are to be
discovered, on the other hand, fashion reigns. Fashion is thus to be
discovered next to the virtues of present-day Europe: could it actually be their
shadow-side? - In the first place, male dress that is fashionable and no longer
national says of him who wears it that the European wishes to cut a figure
neither as an individual nor as a member of a class or nation, that he has
made a deliberate quenching of this species of vanity into a law for himself:
then that he is industrious and has little time for dressing and self-adornment,
likewise that he finds that everything costly and luxurious in material and
design accords ill with the work he has to do; finally, that through his
costume he indicates the more learned and intellectual callings as those to
which as a European he stands closest or would like to stand closest: whereas
it is the brigand, the herdsman or the soldier who shine through the still
existent national costumes as being the leading and most desirable situations
in life. Within this overall character of male fashion there then exist those
little variations produced by the vanity of the young men, the dandies and
idlers of the big cities, by those, that is to
363
say, who have not yet come to maturity as a European. - European
women have done so much less, which is why with them the variations are
much greater: they too have no desire for national dress and hate to be
recognized as German, French, Russian by their clothing, but they very much
like to make an impression as individuals; likewise their clothing is supposed
to leave no one in any doubt that they belong to one of the more reputable
classes (that they are 'respectable' or in the 'world of society'), and their
desire to create this effect is indeed the stronger the more tenuous, or even
illusory, their membership of the said classes. Above all, however, the young
woman refuses to wear anything the older woman wears, because she
believes her value will fall if she is thought to be older than she is: the older
woman, conversely, would like to deceive as long as she can through more
youthful looking costume - as a result of which contest temporary fashions
continually appear in which youthfulness is inescapably and inimitably
visible. When the inventive spirit of these youthful artists has revelled for a
time in such exposures of youthfulness, or, to tell the whole truth, when the
inventive spirit of ancient courtly cultures, of the still extant nations and of
the whole world of costume in general has been consulted and the Spanish,
the Turkish and the ancient Greek for instance have been coupled together
for the presentation of these fair forms, the discovery is invariably made that
one has had an ill perception of where one's advantage truly lies; that an
effect is more readily produced upon men by playing hide-and-seek with the
beautiful body than by naked or semi-naked honesty; and then the wheel of
taste and vanity again turns in the opposite direction: the somewhat older
young women find they have entered into their kingdom, and the contest
between these most charming and absurdest of creatures goes raging on
again. The more women grow inwardly, however, and cease among
themselves to give precedence to the immature as they have done hitherto,
the smaller these variations in their costume and the simpler their adornment
will become: as to which a correct judgement would take its standards, not
from the models of antiquity, not, that is to say, from the garments worn by
southerly sea-dwellers, but paying regard to the climatic conditions obtaining
in northern and central Europe, the regions in which the inventive genius of
Europe now has its preferred homeland. - On the whole, therefore, it is not
change that will characterize fashion and the modem, for change is a sign of
backwardness and that the men and women of Europe are still immature:
what will characterize it is repudiation of national, class and individual
vanity. One must, consequently, approve - because it economizes on time and
energyif individual cities and regions of Europe undertake to reflect and
devise on behalf of all the rest in the matter of clothing, inasmuch as a sense
of form has not been bestowed on everyone; likewise, so long as these
variations continue to exist it is really no excessive ambition if Paris, for
example, lays claim to being the sole inventor and innovator in this realm. If,
out of hatred for this claim by a French city, a German elects to dress
differently, as Albrecht Durer dressed for example, let him consider that the
costume he
is wearing, though Germans formerly wore it, they invented it just as
little as they invented the fashions of Paris - there has never been a costume
which denoted a German as a German; he should also consider what he looks
like in this costume and whether the really modem mind, with all the lines
and folds the nineteenth century has inscribed in it, might not take exception
to someone's wearing clothes like Diirer's. - Here, where the concepts
'modern' and 'European' are almost equivalent, what is understood by Europe
comprises much more territory than geographical Europe, the little peninsula
of Asia: America, especially, belongs to it, insofar as it is the daughter-land
of our culture. On the other hand, the cultural concept 'Europe' does not
include all of geographical Europe; it includes only those nations and ethnic
minorities who possess a common past in Greece, Rome, Judaism, and
Christianity.
216
'German virtue'. - It cannot be denied that from the beginning of the last
century on a stream of moral awakening has flowed through Europe. It was
only then that virtue again became eloquent; it taught men to discover
unforced gestures of exaltation and emotion, it ceased to be ashamed of itself
and devised philosophies and poems for its own glorification. If we seek the
source of this stream we find first of all Rousseau, but the mythical Rousseau
constructed out of the impression produced by his writings - one might
almost say, out of his mythically expounded writings - and out of the
indications he himself provided (- he and his public worked continually on
this ideal figure). Its other origin lies in that resurrection of the Stoicism of
the greatest days of Rome through which the French have continued on in the
worthiest way the task of the Renaissance. From a gloriously successful
imitation of the forms of antiquity they went on to an imitation of its
characters: so that they will always have a right to the highest honours as the
nation which has up to now given modem mankind its finest books and its
finest men. How these two models - the mythical Rousseau and the
reawakened spirit of Rome - affected their weaker neighbours can be
observed especially in the case of Germany: which, as the result of a novel
and wholly unprecedented impetus to seriousness and greatness in willing
and self- command, was at last consumed with amazement at its own new
virtue and cast into the world the concept 'German virtue' as though nothing
more primeval than this had ever been inherited. The first great men who
transfused to themselves that French stimulus to greatness and consciousness
of moral will were more honest and did not forget where gratitude lay. The
moralism of Kant - whence does it come? He gives the answer again and
again: from Rousseau and the reawakened Stoicism of Rome. The moralism
of Schiller: the same source, the same glorification of the source. The
moralism in tones of Beethoven: it is the everlasting hymn of praise of
Rousseau, of the French revivers of antiquity, and of Schiller. It was 'German
youth' that first forgot gratitude, for in the meantime men had given ear to the
preachers of francophobia: that German
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
youth which for a time stepped into the foreground with more self-
confidence than is considered permissible in other youths. When this youth
sought after its forefathers it was no doubt right to think of the proximity to
Schiller, Fichte* and Schleiermacher: but it ought to have looked for its
grandfathers in Paris and Geneva, and it was very shortsighted of it to believe
what it in fact believed: that virtue was no more than thirty years old. In those
days they accustomed themselves to demanding that the word 'German'
should quite casually inspire a misunderstanding of the nature of virtue: and
we have not quite disaccustomed ourselves to it even to the present day. -
Incidentally, this said moral awakening resulted, it almost goes without
saying, only in disadvantages and retrogression for knowledge of moral
phenomena. What is the whole of German moral philosophy from Kant
onwards, with all its French, English and Italian branches and parallels? A
semi-theological assault on Helvetius and a rejection of the open views or
signposts to the right path which, gained by long and wearisome struggle, he
at last assembled and gave adequate expression to. Helvetius is in Germany to
the present day the most reviled of all good moralists and good men.
217
Classic and romantic. - Both those spirits of a classical and those of a
romantic bent - these two species exist at all times - entertain a vision of the
future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its
weakness.
218
The machine as teacher. - The machine of itself teaches the mutual
cooperation of hordes of men in operations where each man has to do only
one thing: it provides the model for the party apparatus and the conduct of
warfare. On the other hand, it does not teach individual autocracy: it makes of
many one machine and of every individual an instrument to one end. Its most
generalized effect is to teach the utility of centralization.
219
Not settled. - We like to live in a small town; but from time to time it is
precisely the small town that drives us out into the deepest solitudes of veiled
and mysterious nature: it does so when it has again become too transparent to
us. Finally, to recover from this nature in turn we go to the big city. One or
two draughts of the latter - and we taste the dregs of its cup - and the circle
that starts with the small town begins over again. - This is the life of modem
men: they are in everything somewhat too thorough to be settled, like the
men of other ages.
220
Reaction against machine-culture. - The machine, itself a product of the
highest intellectual energies, sets in motion in those who serve it almost
nothing but the lower, non-intellectual energies. It thereby releases a vast
quantity of energy in general that would otherwise lie dormant, it is true; *
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814): German philosopher.
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THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
but it provides no instigation to enhancement, to improvement, to
becoming an artist. It makes men active and uniform - but in the long run this
engenders a counter-effect, a despairing boredom of soul, which teaches them
to long for idleness in all its varieties.
221
The perilousness of the Enlightenment. - All the semi-insanity,
histrionicism, bestial cruelty, voluptuousness, and especially sentimentality
and selfintoxication, which taken together constitutes the actual substance of
the Revolution and had, before the Revolution, become flesh and spirit in
Rousseau - this creature then went on with perfidious enthusiasm to set the
Enlightenment too on its fanatical head, which thereby itself began to glow as
though in a transfigured light: the Enlightenment, which is fundamentally so
alien to the Revolution and, left to itself, would have passed quietly along like
a gleam in the clouds and for long been content to address itself only to the
individual: so that it would have transformed the customs and institutions of
nations only very slowly. Now, however, tied to a violent and impulsive
companion, the Enlightenment itself became violent and impulsive. Its
perilousness has thereby become almost greater than the liberating
illumination it brought to the great revolutionary movement. He who grasps
this will also know out of what compound it has to be extracted, of what
impurity it has to be cleansed: so as then to continue the work of the
Enlightenment in himself, and to strangle the Revolution at birth, to make it
not happen.
222
Passion in the Middle Ages. - The Middle Ages are the era of the greatest
passions. Neither antiquity nor our own age possesses this breadth of soul: its
spaciousness has never been greater and never have men measured on a
larger scale. The jungle physique of the barbarian and the over-soulful, over-
wakeful, hecticly glittering eyes of the disciple of the Christian mysteries,
extreme childishness and youthfulness and likewise extreme over-ripeness
and weariness of age, the savagery of the beast of prey and the effeminacy
and tenuousness of the spirit of late antiquity - at that time all these not
infrequently came together in a single person: when he got into a passion, the
heart's current had to spread more violently, its eddies whirl more rapidly, its
falls be more precipitate than ever before. - We modern men should be happy
to have sustained some loss in this domain.
223
Plunder and economy. - All spiritual movements as a consequence of
which the great hope to be able to plunder and the small to economize go
forward. That, for example, is why the German Reformation went forward.
224
Rejoicing souls. - Whenever drink, drunkenness and ill-smelling
lewdness beckoned, even from afar, the souls of the ancient Germans rejoiced
- at other times they were morose; but of these they had, in their own way, a
profound appreciation.
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HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
225
Debauchery in Athens. - Even when the fishmarket of Athens had
acquired its thinkers and poets, Greek debauchery still wore a more refined
and idyllic appearance than Roman or German ever did. The voice of Juvenal
would there have sounded like a hollow trumpet: a polite and almost childlike
laughter would have been the response to it.
226
Greek prudence. - Since the desire for victory and eminence is an
inextinguishable trait of nature, older and more primitive than any respect for
and joy in equality, the Greek state sanctioned gymnastic and artistic contest
between equals, that is to say marked off an arena where that drive could be
discharged without imperilling the political order. With the eventual decline
of the gymnastic and artistic contest the Greek state disintegrated into inner
turmoil.
227
'Eternal Epicurus'. - Epicurus has been alive at all times and is living
now, unknown to those who have called and call themselves Epicureans, and
enjoying no reputation among philosophers. He has, moreover, himself
forgotten his own name: it was the heaviest pack he ever threw off.
228
Style of superiority. - Student-German, the dialect of the German student,
has its origin among those students who do not study and who know how to
attain a kind of ascendency over their more serious colleagues by exposing
everything that is masquerade in education, decency, erudition, orderliness,
moderation, and, though employing the terms belonging to these domains just
as continually as their better and more learned colleagues, do so with malice
in their eyes and an accompanying grimace. It is in this language of
superiority - the only one original to Germany - that our statesmen and
newspaper critics too now involuntarily speak; it is a continual resort to
ironical imitation, a restless, discontented furtive squinting to left and right, a
German of quotation-marks and grimaces.
229
The buried. - We withdraw into concealment: but not out of any kind of
personal ill-humour, as though the political and social situation of the present
day were not good enough for us, but because through our withdrawal we
want to economize and assemble forces of which culture will later have great
need, and more so if this present remains this present and as such fulfils its
task. We are accumulating capital and seeking to make it secure: but, as in
times of great peril, to do that we have to bury it.
230
Tyrants of the spirit. - In our age anyone who was so completely the
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THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
expression of a single moral trait as are the characters of Theophrastus*
or Molifcre would be regarded as sick and one would in his case speak of an
'idiefixe'. The Athens of the third century would, if we could pay it a visit,
seem to us populated by fools. Nowadays the democracy of concepts rules in
every head - many together are master: a single concept that wanted to be
master would now, as aforesaid, be called an idee fixe". This is our way of
disposing of tyrants - we direct them to the madhouse.
231
Most dangerous form of emigration. - In Russia there is an emigration of
intelligence: one crosses the frontier to read and write good books. In this
way, however, one helps to turn the spirit of the deserted fatherland into the
extended jaws of Asia that would like to devour little Europe.
232
The state-worshippers. - The almost religious love the Greeks felt for
their kings passed over to the polis when kings came to an end. And because
a concept can endure more love than a person, and as in particular it gives
offence to its lover less often than people who are loved do ( - for the more
they know they are loved the more inconsiderate they usually become, until
in the end they are no longer worthy of love and a rupture occurs), reverence
for the polis and state was greater than reverence for princes had ever been.
The Greeks are the state-worshippers of ancient history - in modern history
that role is played by other nations.
233
Against neglecting the eyes. - Could a diminution of eyesight every ten
years not perhaps be demonstrated in the educated classes of England who
read the Times?
234
Great works and great faith. - This man had the great works but his
companion had the great faith in these works. They were inseparable: but it
was obvious that the former depended wholly on the latter.
235
The socialiser. - T am not fond of myself', someone said in explanation
of his love of society. 'Society's stomach is stronger than mine, it can digest
me.'
236
Closing the eyes of one's mind. - Even if one is accustomed to and
practised in reflecting on one's actions, when one is actually acting (though
the action be no more than writing a letter or eating and drinking) one must
nonetheless close one's inward eye. In conversation with average men,
indeed, one must understand how to think with the eyes of one's thinking
closed - so as to attain and thus comprehend the average man's
* Theophrastus: Greek Peripatetic philosopher (372-288 BC). He began as Plato's pupil, and
succeeded Aristotle as President of the School; his Characters attempts a typology of human
characteristics.
369
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
thinking. This closing of the eyes is a perceptible act achievable by an
act of will.
237
The most fearful revenge. - If one wants to revenge oneself on an
opponent as completely as possible one should wait until one has a complete
set of truths and justifications in one's hand and can play them out against
him with composure: so that exacting revenge and exacting justice coincide.
It is the most fearful kind of revenge: for there is no instance above it to
which an appeal can be made. That was how Voltaire revenged himself on
Piron, with five lines that condemn his entire life and work: as many truths as
there are words; that is how he revenged himself on Friedrich the Great (in a
letter to him from Ferney).
238
Luxury tax. - People buy their necessities in shops and have to pay dearly
for them because they have to assist in paying for what is also on sale there
but only rarely finds purchasers: the luxury and amusement goods. So it is
that luxury continually imposes a tax on the simple people who have to do
without it.
239
Why beggars go on living. - If alms were bestowed only out of pity all
the beggars would have starved to death.
240
Why beggars go on living. - The greatest bestower of alms is cowardice.
241
How the thinker uses a conversation. - Without being a listener it is still
possible to hear a great deal provided one knows how to see well yet also
how to lose sight of oneself for the time being. But people do not know how
to make use of a conversation; they pay much too much attention to what
they themselves intend to say in response, whereas the true listener often
contents himself with a brief answer, plus a little for politeness' sake, by way
of speech, while on the other hand bearing away in his retentive memory all
the other has said, together with the tone and gestures with which he said it. -
In the normal conversation each thinks he is leading the way, as if two ships
sailing side by side and now and then gently bumping into one another each
faithfully believed the neighbouring ship was following or even being pulled
along by it.
242
The art of apologizing. - If anyone apologizes to us he has to do so very
well: otherwise we can easily feel that we ourselves are the guilty party and
are affected unpleasantly.
243
Impossible company. - The ship of your thoughts moves too deep for you
to be able to sail in it on the waters of these decent, friendly, amicable
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THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
people. There are too many shallows and sandbanks there: you would
have to turn and twist and would be in constant embarrassment, and soon
they too would be in embarrassment - over your embarrassment, whose cause
they cannot divine.
244
Fox of foxes. - A true fox calls sour not only those grapes he is unable to
reach but also those he has reached and deprived others of.
245
With our closest acquaintances. - However closely people may belong to
one another their common horizon nonetheless still includes all four points of
the compass, and there are times when they notice this.
246
The silence of disgust. - Someone undergoes, as thinker and man, a
profound transformation and bears public witness to it. And his hearers notice
nothing! believe him to be just as he was! - This common experience has
already disgusted many writers: they had had too great a respect for the
intellectuality of men, and when they perceived their error vowed themselves
to silence.
247
Occupied seriously. - The occupations of many rich and noble men are
their way of recuperating from habitual and too protracted leisure: that is
why they take them as seriously and intensely as other people take their rare
leisure hours and hobbies.
248
Ambiguity of the eyes. - Just as a sudden, scaly trembling passes over the
water at your feet, so there are in the human eyes too similar sudden
uncertainties and ambiguities which make one ask: is it a shudder of dread? is
it a smile? is it both?
249
Positive and negative. - This thinker needs no one to refute him: he does
that for himself.
250
Revenge for empty nets. - One should beware of anyone who is filled
with the embitterment of the fisherman who after a hard day's work returns
home in the evening with empty nets.
251
Not to assert one's rights. - To exercise power costs effort and demands
courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly
entitled - because a right is a kind of potver but they are too lazy or too
cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called
patience and forbearance.
252
Light-bearers. - There would be no sunshine in society if the born flatterers
37i
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
and wheedlers, I mean the so-called amiable, did not bring it in with
them.
253
At one's most charitable. - When a man has just been greatly honoured
and has eaten a little he is at his most charitable.
254
Towards the light. - Men press towards the light, not so as to see better,
but so as to shine better. - Him before whom we shine we are glad to regard
as light.
2 55
Hypochondriacs. - The hypochondriac is a man with just enough spirit
and pleasure in spirit to take his sufferings, his disadvantages, his faults in
earnest: but the region in which he feeds himself is too small; he crops it so
fine that in the end he has to look for individual blades of grass. In this way
he finally becomes a curmudgeon and miser - and only then is he
unendurable.
256
Restitution. - Hesiod advises us that, when a neighbour has helped us
out, we should restore to him what he has given us in generous measure, and
where possible more abundantly, as soon as we can. For in this way our
neighbour is gratified, since his former generosity has proved profitable to
him, but we too are also gratified, inasmuch as by giving back a little more
than we received we have repurchased the little humiliation we incurred
through having to be helped out.
257
More subtle than necessary. - Our capacity for observing whether others
perceive our weakness is much more subtle than our capacity for observing
the weaknesses of others: from which it therefore follows that it is more
subtle than it needs to be.
258
A light kind of shadow. - Close beside dark and gloomy men there is to
be found, almost as a rule and as though tied to them, a soul of light. It is as it
were the negative shadow they cast.
259
Can we refrain from revenge? - There are so many refined forms of
revenge that one who had occasion to revenge himself could at bottom do or
refrain from doing whatever he liked: all the world would in time nonetheless
come to believe that he had revenged himself. Not to revenge himself is thus
an option scarcely open to a man: he may not even say that he does not want
to do so, since contemptuously to refrain from revenge is considered and felt
to be a sublime, very grievous form of revenge. - From which it follows that
one ought not to do anything superfluous - -
372
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
260
Error in honouring. - Everyone believes he is saying something to the
honour of a thinker and pleasant for him to hear if he indicates how he
himself has hit upon precisely the same ideas as the thinker's and even upon
the same form of expression; and yet the thinker is seldom delighted at such
communications: often they make him distrust his ideas and their form of
expression, and he secretly resolves to revise both. - If one wishes to honour
somebody, one must guard against expressions of agreement: they set both
parties on the same level. - In many instances it is a matter of social propriety
to listen to an opinion as though it were not our own, as though indeed it
belonged outside our horizon: as, for example, when an elderly man of long
experience for once opens to us the shrine of his accumulated knowledge.
261
Letter. - A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude
surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and
afterwards take a bath.
262
Prejudiced. - Someone said: I have been prejudiced against myself ever
since I was a child: that is why I find some truth in all blame and some
stupidity in all praise. I usually esteem praise too little and blame too highly.
263
Path to equality. - A few hours' mountain climbing make of a rogue and
a saint two fairly equal creatures. Tiredness is the shortest path to equality
and fraternity - and sleep finally adds to them liberty.
264
Slander. - If one encounters a truly infamous accusation, one should
never seek its origin among one's simple and straightforward enemies; for if
they were to invent anything of the sort about us they would, as our enemies,
inspire no belief. But those to whom we have for a time been of most use but
who have for any reason secretly decided there is nothing more they need
demand of us - people such as these are in a position to put the infamy into
circulation: they inspire belief firstly because it is assumed they would invent
nothing that could injure them themselves, then because they have come to
know us more intimately. - He who has been thus sorely slandered may
console himself with the reflection: slanders are other people's illnesses that
have broken out on your body; they demonstrate that society is a (moral)
body, so that you can undertake a cure on yourself that will be of benefit to
others.
265
The child's Kingdom of Heaven. - The happiness of the child is just as
mythical as the happiness of the Hyperboreans* of whom the Creeks related.
If
* Hyperboreans: 'the people living beyond the north wind', represented in Greek legend as
enjoying a utopian existence; Nietzsche later refers to free spirits as 'we Hyperboreans'.
373
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
happiness dwells on earth at all, thought the latter, then it is certainly as
far away from us as it can be, perhaps yonder at the edge of the earth. This is
likewise the view of older people: if man can be happy at all then it is
certainly as far away from our age as it can be, at the border-line and
beginnings of life. For many people the sight of children viewed through the
veil of this myth is the greatest happiness of which they can partake; they
themselves enter the forecourt of the Kingdom of Heaven when they say
'suffer little children to come unto me, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven'. -
Wherever in the modern world there is some degree of sentimentality the
myth of the child's Kingdom of Heaven is somehow active.
266
The impatient. - It is precisely he who is becoming who cannot endure
the state of becoming: he is too impatient for it. The youth refuses to wait
until, after long study, suffering and deprivation, his picture of men and
things is completed: instead he accepts on trust another that stands finished
and is offered to him as though it is bound to provide him in advance with the
lines and colours of his picture; he casts himself on to the bosom of a
philosopher or poet and then has for long to deny himself and serve as a
vassal. He learns much in the process: but often a youth forgets while doing
so what is most worth learning and knowing: himself; he remains a partisan
all his life. Alas, much boredom has to be overcome, much sweat expended,
before we discover our own colours, our own brush, our own canvas! - And
even then we are far from being a master of our own art of living - but at least
we are master in our own workshop.
267
There are no educators. - As a thinker one should speak only of self-
education. The education of youth by others is either an experiment carried
out on an as yet unknown and unknowable subject, or a levelling on principle
with the object of making the new being, whatever it may be, conform to the
customs and habits then prevailing: in both cases therefore something
unworthy of the thinker, the work of those elders and teachers whom a man
of rash honesty once described as nos ennemis naturels. - One day, when one
has long since been educated as the world understands it, one discovers
oneself: here begins the task of the thinker; now the time has come to call on
him for assistance - not as an educator but as one who has educated himself
and who thus knows how it is done.
268
Pity for youth. - We are greatly distressed if we hear that a youth has
already lost his teeth or has become blind. If we knew all that is irreparable
and hopeless in his whole being how much greater our distress would be! -
Why is it really that we suffer over this? Because youth is supposed to
continue what toe have begun, and every diminution of its powers will be
harmful to our work when it devolves upon it. It is distress
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that our immortality should be so ill guaranteed: or, if we feel ourselves
to be only fulfillers of the mission of mankind, distress that this mission must
pass into hands weaker than ours.
269
The ages of life. - The comparison of the four seasons of the year with
the four ages of life is a piece of worthy silliness. Neither the first twenty nor
the last twenty years of life correspond to a season of the year: assuming, that
is, that the said comparison is not supposed to refer merely to white hair and
white snow and similar colour effects. The first twenty years are a preparation
for life as a whole, for the entire life-year, and are thus a kind of protracted
New Year's Day; and the last twenty oversee, absorb, order and codify
whatever has been experienced previously: just as, on a small scale, one does
with the preceding year every New Year's Eve. Between these, though, there
does lie a space of time which can to some extent be compared with the
seasons of the year: the time between the twentieth and the fiftieth years (to
reckon wholesale in decades - it goes without saying that each individual
must refine these crude calculations in accordance with his own experience).
These three times ten years correspond to three seasons: summer, spring and
autumn - human life does not have a winter, unless one wants to call those
cold recurring seasons of solitude, hopelessness and unfruitfulness, our
periods of illness, the winter seasons of man. The twenties: hot, burdensome,
thundery, voluptuous, wearying; years in which we praise the day in the
evening when it is over with and mop our brow as we do so; years in which
we regard work as hard but necessary - these years of our twenties are the
summer of life. The thirties, on the other hand, are its spring: the air now too
warm, now too cold, always disturbing and provoking; sap, abundance of
leaves, odour of blossom rising everywhere; many enchanting nights and
mornings, the work to which the singing of birds awakens us a true labour of
love, a kind of enjoyment of our own vigour, enhanced by present pleasure in
future expectations. Finally, the forties: mysterious, like everything
stationary; resembling a high, wide mountain plateau wafted by a fresh
breeze; above it a clear, cloudless sky which gazes down all day and into the
night with the same unchanging gentleness: the time of harvest and the
heartiest cheerfulness - it is the autumn of life.
270
The female mind in contemporary society. - What women nowadays
think of the male mind can be divined from the fact that when they adorn
themselves the last thing they have in mind is to emphasize the intellectual
qualities of their face: they conceal them, rather, and prefer - for example by
a certain arrangement of the hair over the forehead - to give the impression of
a lively and lustful sensuality and mindlessness, and this especially when they
possess little of these qualities. Their conviction that men are terrified of
intellect in a woman is so firm that they are even ready to deny they have any
sharpness of mind at all and deliberately
375
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
impose on themselves a reputation for shortsightedness; their objective,
no doubt, is to make men more confiding and trusting: it is though a gentle,
inviting twilight were spread all around them.
271
Great and transitory. - It moves the observer to tears to see the admiring
look of happiness with which a pretty young wife gazes up at her husband.
One is filled with autumnal melancholy to think of the greatness as well as
the transitoriness of human happiness.
272
Sacrificial disposition. - Many a woman has an intelletto del sacrifizio22
and can no longer enjoy life when her husband refuses to sacrifice her: she
then no longer knows where to direct her mind, and changes unawares from
the sacrificial beast into the sacrificial priest.
273
The unwomanly. - 'Stupid as a man' say the women: 'cowardly as a
woman' say the men. Stupidity is in woman the unwomanly.
274
Male and female temperament and mortality. - That the male sex has a
worse temperament than the female is also evidenced in the fact that male
children are more exposed to mortality than female, plainly because they
more easily 'blow their top': their wildness and quarrelsomeness easily
exacerbates every ill into something fatal.
275
The age of cyclopean building. - The democratization of Europe is
irresistible: for whoever tries to halt it has to employ in that endeavour
precisely the means which the democratic idea first placed in everyone's
hands and makes these means themselves more wieldy and effective: and
those who oppose democracy most on principle (I mean the spirits of
revolution) appear to exist merely to impel the various parties ever faster
forwards along the democratic path through the fear they inspire. Yet one can
in fact feel anxious for those who are working consciously and honestly for
this future: there is something desolate and monotonous in their faces, and
grey dust seems to have got even into their brain. Nonetheless, it is possible
that posterity will one day laugh at this anxiety of ours and regard the
democratic work of a succession of generations somewhat as we regard the
building of stone dams and protective walls - as an activity that necessarily
gets a lot of dust on clothes and faces and no doubt also unavoidably makes
the workers a little purblind and stupid; but who would wish such a work
undone on that account! The democratization of Europe is, it seems, a link in
the chain of those tremendous prophylactic measures which are the
conception of modern times and through which we separate ourselves from
the Middle Ages. Only now is it the age of cyclopean building! We finally
secure the foundations, so that the whole

22 intelletto del sacrifizio: the spirit of sacrifice
future can safely build upon them! We make it henceforth impossible for
the fruitful fields of culture again to be destroyed overnight by wild and
senseless torrents! We erect stone dams and protective walls against
barbarians, against pestilences, against physical and spiritual enslavement
1
.
And all this coarsely and literally at first, but gradually in a higher and more
spiritual sense, so that all the measures here indicated seem to be an inspired
collective preparation for the supreme artist of horticulture, who will be able
to apply himself to his real task only when these preparations have been fully
carried out! - To be sure, given the great length of time which lies between
means and end, and given the very great effort of mind and body, an effort
spanning the centuries, needed even to create or procure each one of these
means, we must not hold it too much against those who are working on the
present-day if they loudly decree that the wall and the trellis are the end and
final goal; since no one, indeed, can yet see the gardener or the fruit-trees for
whose sake the trellis exists.
276
The right of universal suffrage. - The people did not give themselves
universal suffrage; wherever it is now in vogue it has been bestowed upon
them and they have provisionally accepted it: in any event, they have the
right to hand it back if it does not come up to their expectations. And this
seems everywhere now to be the case: for if whenever the occasion for using
the vote arises hardly two-thirds of those entitled to vote, perhaps indeed not
even a majority of them, come to the ballot-box, this is a vote against the
entire voting-system as such. - An even sterner judgement is, indeed,
justified here. A law which decrees that the majority shall have the decisive
voice in determining the wellbeing of all cannot be erected upon a foundation
which is first provided by that law itself; an even broader foundation is
necessarily required, and this is the unanimity of all. Universal suffrage may
not be an expression of the will merely of the majority: the whole country
must desire it. The objection of even only a very small minority must thus
suffice to render it invalid and to abolish it: and non-participation in an
election constitutes precisely such an objection and thus brings about the
downfall of the entire voting-system. The 'absolute veto' of the individual or,
not to trivialize the problem, the veto of a few thousand hangs over this
system as a requirement of justice: whenever it is employed it must first be
demonstrated by the nature of the participation whether or not it is still valid.
2 77
Bad reasoning. - How badly we reason in domains where we are not at
home, however well we may be accustomed to reasoning as men of science!
It is disgraceful! But it is also clear that in the great world, in affairs of
politics, it is precisely this bad reasoning that arrives at decisions on all those
sudden and pressing questions such as arise almost every day: for no one is
completely at home in that which has newly developed overnight; all
political thinking, even in the case of the greatest statesmen, is random
improvization.
377
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
278
Premises of the machine age. - The press, the machine, the railway, the
telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared
to draw.
279
A brake on culture. - Whenever we hear: in that place the men have no
time for productive occupations; weapon-practice and parades occupy their
days, and the rest of the population have to feed and clothe them; but the
costume they wear is striking, often brightly coloured and full of amusing
follies; few distinguishing qualities are recognized, individuals resemble one
another more than they do elsewhere, or if they do not are treated as though
they did; yet they demand and accord obedience without understanding: they
command but take care not to persuade; they have few punishments, but
these few are harsh and are quickly carried to their dreadful last extremity;
treason is accounted the greatest of crimes, and even criticism of ills and
wrongs is ventured on only by the most courageous; human life is cheap
there, and ambition often assumes a form that involves putting one's life in
danger; - whenever we hear all this we say at once: 'it is a picture of a
barbaric, endangered society'. Perhaps one of us may add: 'it is a description
of Sparta'; another, however, will reflect a little and opine that what has been
described is our modern military machine existing in the midst of our
differently constituted culture and society as a living anachronism, as a
picture, as aforesaid, of a barbaric, endangered society, as a posthumous
work of the past which for the wheels of the present can have only the value
of a brake. - Sometimes, however, a culture is in the greatest need of a brake:
namely, when it is going too fast downhill or, as in the present case perhaps,
too fast uphill.
280
More respect for those who know! - Given the present competitive
nature of selling, the public is necessarily the judge of the product of work:
but the public has no particular specialist knowledge and judges according to
the appearance of quality. As a consequence, the art of producing an
appearance (and perhaps that of developing taste) is bound to be enhanced,
and the quality of the product to decline, under the dominance of the
competitive market. Consequently, if we are to continue to be reasonable we
shall at some time have to put an end to this competitive market and replace
it with a different principle. Only the skilled producer of the product ought to
be the judge of the product, and the public ought to rely on their faith in him
and his integrity. Therefore, no anonymous work! At the very least a
knowledgeable expert in the product would have to be at hand as guarantor
and place his name upon it if the name of its originator was unavailable or
without significance. The cheapness of a product is another way of deceiving
the layman, inasmuch as it is only durability that can determine whether or
not a thing is cheap; but that is hard to assess, and for the layman impossible.
- From all of which it fol-
378
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
lows that what is attractive to the eye and costs little now commands the
market - and that can, of course, only be the product of the machine. For its
part, again, the machine - that is to say, the means of great rapidity and
facility of production - also favours the most saleable type of product;
otherwise there is no great gain to be made from it; it would be too little used
and too often silent. But what is most saleable is, as aforesaid, decided by the
public: it will be the most deceptive product, that is to say that which appears
to be of good quality and also appears to be cheap. Thus in this domain of
work too our watchword must be: 'More respect for those who know!'
281
The danger facing kings. - Democracy has the capacity, without
employing any kind of violence but simply by applying continual
constitutional pressure, to render the offices of king and emperor hollow:
until all that remains is a nought, though a nought perhaps, if that is what one
wants, possessing the significance of every nought that, in itself nothing, if
placed in the right position it multiplies the effect of a number by ten. The
office of king and emperor would remain a splendid ornament on the simple
and practical garment of democracy, the fair superfluity it allows itself, the
remnant of all the historically venerable ornaments of its grandfathers, indeed
the symbol of history itself - and in this unique quality something of the
highest effectiveness, provided, as aforesaid, it does not stand for itself alone
but is correctly positioned. - To obviate this danger of being hollowed out,
kings now cling with their teeth to their dignity as warlords: for this they
require wars, that is to say states of emergency in which that slow
constitutional pressure of the forces of democracy lets up.
282
The teacher a necessary evil. - As few people as possible between the
productive spirits and the spirits who hunger and receive! For mediators
almost involuntarily falsify the nourishment they mediate: in addition they
want too much for themselves as payment for their mediation, and this must
be taken from the originating, productive spirits: namely interest, admiration,
time, money and other things. - Thus we must always regard the teacher as a
necessary evil, just like the tradesman: as an evil we must make as small as
possible! - If the principal reason for the distressing condition Germany is
now in perhaps lies in the fact that far too many want to live, and live well,
by trade (that is to say, to try to buy as cheaply as possible from the
producers and to sell as dearly as possible to the consumers, and thus to
profit at the greatest possible expense of both), then a principal reason for its
distressing spiritual condition is certainly to be found in the over-abundance
of teachers: it is on their account that so little is learned and that little so
badly.
283
The respect-tax. - When someone we know and honour, whether he be a
379
physician, artist or artisan, does or makes something for us, we are
happy to pay him as much as we can, often indeed beyond our real
capacities: on the other hand, we will pay someone unknown to us as little as
we can get away with; this is a struggle in which everyone fights for every
foot of land and for which he makes everyone fight him. In the case of work
done for us by someone we know there is something beyond price, the
feeling and invention he has put into his work on our account: we believe we
can express our sensibility of this in no other way than through a kind of
sacrifice on our part. - The highest tax is the respect-tax. The more the
competitive market dominates and we buy from strangers and work for
strangers, the lower this tax will be: whereas it is in fact the standard of
measurement of the degree of commerce between human souls.
284
The means to real peace. - No government nowadays admits that it
maintains an army so as to satisfy occasional thirsts for conquest; the army is
supposed to be for defence. That morality which sanctions selfprotection is
called upon to be its advocate. But that means to reserve morality to oneself
and to accuse one's neighbour of immorality, since he has to be thought of as
ready for aggression and conquest if our own state is obliged to take thought
of means of self-defence; moreover, when our neighbour denies any thirst for
aggression just as heatedly as our state does, and protests that he too
maintains an army only for reasons of legitimate self-defence, our declaration
of why we require an army declares our neighbour a hypocrite and cunning
criminal who would be only too happy to pounce upon a harmless and
unprepared victim and subdue him without a struggle. This is how all states
now confront one another: they presuppose an evil disposition in their
neighbour and a benevolent disposition in themselves. This presupposition,
however, is a piece of inhumanity as bad as, if not worse than, a war would
be; indeed, fundamentally it already constitutes an invitation to and cause of
wars, because, as aforesaid, it imputes immorality to one's neighbour and
thereby seems to provoke hostility and hostile acts on his part. The doctrine
of the army as a means of self-defence must be renounced just as completely
as the thirst for conquest. And perhaps there will come a great day on which
a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development
of military discipline and thinking, and accustomed to making the heaviest
sacrifices on behalf of these things, will cry of its own free will: 'we shall
shatter the sword - and demolish its entire military machine down to its last
foundations. To disarm while being the best armed, out of an elevation of
sensibility - that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a
disposition for peace: whereas the so-called armed peace such as now
parades about in every country is a disposition to fractiousness which trusts
neither itself nor its neighbour and fails to lay down its arms half out of
hatred, half out of fear. Better to perish than to
380
hate and fear, and twofold better to perish than to make oneself hated
and feared - this must one day become the supreme maxim of every
individual state! - As is well known, our liberal representatives of the people
lack the time to reflect on the nature of man: otherwise they would know that
they labour in vain when they work for a 'gradual reduction of the military
burden'. On the contrary, it is only when this kind of distress is at its greatest
that the only kind of god that can help here will be closest at hand. The tree
of the glory of war can be destroyed only at a single stroke, by a lightning-
bolt: lightning, however, as you well know, comes out of a cloud and from
on high. -
285
Can property be reconciled with justice? - If there is a strong feeling
that the possession of property is unjust - and the hand of the great clock has
again come round to this point - two ways of remedying the situation are
proposed: firstly an equal distribution, then the abolition of property and its
reversion to the community. The latter remedy is especially beloved of our
socialists, who bear a grudge against that Jew of antiquity for saying: thou
shalt not steal. In their view the seventh commandment should read rather:
thou shalt not possess. - Attempts to act in accordance with the first recipe
were often made in antiquity, always only on a small scale, to be sure, yet
with a lack of success from which we too can still gain instruction. 'Equal
allotment of land' is easily said, yet how much acrimony is produced by the
divisions and separations this necessitates, by the loss of ancient valued
property, how much reverence is injured and sacrificed! One digs up
morality when one digs up boundary-stones. And how much more acrimony
among the new owners, how much jealousy and enviousness, since two
allotments of land have never been truly equal, and even if such a thing were
possible human envy of one's neighbour would still not believe in their
equality. And for how long would this equality, unhealthy and poisoned at
the roots as it is, endure! Within a few generations inheritance would here
have divided one allotment among five people, there given one person five
allotments: and if stem laws of inheritance obviated such improper
arrangements there would still be equal allotment of land, to be sure, but at
the same time an abundance of the unprovided-for and discontested who
possessed nothing except feelings of envy towards their neighbours and
relations and a desire that all things should be overturned. - If, however, one
wishes to follow the second recipe and restore property to the community,
with the individual as no more than a temporary tenant, then one will destroy
the land. For upon that which he possesses only in passing man bestows no
care or self-sacrifice, he merely exploits it like a robber or a dissolute
squanderer. When Plato opines that with the abolition of property egoism too
will be abolished the reply to him is that, in the case of man at any rate, the
departure of egoism would also mean the departure of the four cardinal
virtues - for it has to be said that the foulest pestilence could not do so much
harm to mankind as would be done him if his vanity
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
disappeared. Without vanity and egoism - what are the human virtues?
Which is not intended remotely to imply that these are merely names and
masks of such virtues. Plato's utopian basic tune, continued on in our own
day by the socialists, rests upon a defective knowledge of man: he lacked a
history of the moral sensations, an insight into the origin of the good and
useful qualities of the human soul. Like the whole of antiquity he believed in
good and evil as in white and black: thus in a radical difference between
good and evil men, good and bad qualities. - If property is henceforth to
inspire more confidence and become more moral, we must keep open all the
paths to the accumulation of moderate wealth through work, but prevent the
sudden or unearned acquisition of riches; we must remove from the hands of
private individuals and companies all those branches of trade and
transportation favourable to the accumulation of great wealth, thus especially
the trade in money - and regard those who possess too much as being as great
a danger to society as those who possess nothing.
286
The value of work. - If we wanted to determine the value of work by
how much time, effort, good or ill will, compulsion, inventiveness or
laziness, honesty or deception has been expended on it, then the valuation
can never be just; for we would have to be able to place the entire person on
the scales, and that is impossible. Here the rule must be 'judge not!' But it is
precisely to justice that they appeal who nowadays are dissatisfied with the
evaluation of work. If we reflect further we find that no personality can be
held accountable for what it produces, that is to say its work: so that no merit
can be derived from it; all work is as good or bad as it must be given this or
that constellation of strengths and weaknesses, knowledge and desires. The
worker is not free to choose whether he works, nor how he works. It is only
from the standpoint of utility, narrower and wider, that work can be
evaluated. That which we now call justice is in this field very much in place
as a highly refined instrument of utility which does not pay regard only to the
moment or exploit opportunities as they occur but reflects on the enduring
advantage of all conditions and classes and therefore also keeps in mind the
wellbeing of the worker, his contentment of body and soul - so that he and
his posterity shall work well for our posterity too and be relied on for a
longer span of time than a single human life. The exploitation of the worker
was, it has now been realized, a piece of stupidity, an exhausting of the soil
at the expense of the future, an imperilling of society. Now we already have
almost a state of war: and the cost of keeping the peace, of concluding
treaties and acquiring trust, will henceforth in any event be very great,
because the folly of the exploiters was very great and of long duration.
287
On the study of the body politic. - The worst ill-fortune for him who
nowadays wants to study economics and politics in Europe, and especially in
Germany, lies in the fact that, instead of exemplifying the rule, conditions
382
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
actually obtaining exemplify the exception or transitional and terminal
states. For this reason one has first to learn to see past the immediate factual
data and to direct one's eyes, for example, to North America - where one can
still see and seek out the inaugural and normal motions of the body politic, if
only one wants to - whereas in Germany this can be done only through
arduous historical study or, as aforesaid, with a telescope.
288
To what extent the machine abases us. - The machine is impersonal, it
deprives the piece of work of its pride, of the individual goodness and
faultiness that adheres to all work not done by a machine - that is to say, of
its little bit of humanity. In earlier times all purchasing from artisans was a
bestowing of a distinction on individuals, and the things with which we
surrounded ourselves were the insignia of these distinctions: household
furniture and clothing thus became symbols of mutual esteem and personal
solidarity, whereas we now seem to live in the midst of nothing but an
anonymous and impersonal slavery. - We must not purchase the alleviation
of work at too high a price.
289
Hundred-year quarantine. - Democratic institutions are quarantine
arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they
are very useful and very boring.
290
The most dangerous follomr. - The most dangerous follower is he whose
defection would destroy the whole party: that is to say, the best follower.
291
Destiny and the stomach. - One slice of bread and butter more or fewer
in the stomach of a jockey can occasionally decide the outcome of the race
and the betting and thus affect the fortunes and misfortunes of thousands. -
So long as the destiny of nations continues to depend on the diplomats, the
diplomats' stomachs will continue to be the object of patriotic anxiety.
Quousque tandem* -
292
Victory of democracy. - All political powers nowadays try to exploit the
fear of socialism in order to strengthen themselves. But in the long run it is
democracy alone that derives the advantage: for all parties are nowadays
obliged to flatter the 'people' and to bestow on it alleviations and liberties of
every kind through which it will in the end become omnipotent. As socialism
is a doctrine that the acquisition of property ought to be abolished, the people
are as alienated from it as they could be: and once they have got the power of
taxation into their hands through their great parliamentary majorities they
will assail the capitalists, the merchants and the princes of the stock
exchange with a progressive tax and
* Quousque tandem: How much l onge r . . . ? (the beginning of Cicero's outburst in the
Senate against the conspirator Catiline).
383
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
slowly create in fact a middle class which will be in a position to forget
socialism like an illness it has recovered from. - The practical outcome of
this spreading democratization will first of all be a European league of
nations within which each individual nation, delimited according to
geographical fitness, will possess the status and rights of a canton: in this
process the historical recollections of the former nations will be of little
account, since the sense of reverence for such things will gradually be totally
uprooted by the domination of the democratic principle, which thirsts for
innovations and is greedy for experiments. The corrections of frontiers which
prove necessary will be so executed as to serve the interests of the large
cantons and at the same time those of the whole union, but not to honour the
memory of some grizzled past. The task of discovering the principles upon
which these frontier corrections should be made will devolve upon future
diplomats, who will have to be at once cultural scholars, agriculturalists and
communications experts, and who will have behind them, not armies, but
arguments and questions of utility. Only then will foreign policy be
inseparably tied to domestic policy: whereas now the latter still has to run
after its proud master and gather up in a pitiful little basket the stubble left
behind after the former has reaped its harvest.
293
End and means of democracy. - Democracy wants to create and
guarantee as much independence as possible: independence of opinion, of
mode of life and of employment. To that end it needs to deprive of the right
to vote both those who possess no property and the genuinely rich: for these
are the two impermissible classes of men at whose abolition it must work
continually, since they continually call its task into question. It must likewise
prevent everything that seems to have for its objective the organization of
parties. For the three great enemies of independence in the above-named
threefold sense are the indigent, the rich and the parties. - I am speaking of
democracy as of something yet to come. That which now calls itself
democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives
with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are
likewise the same old wheels. - Have things really got less perilous because
the wellbeing of the nations now rides in this vehicle?
294
Circumspection and success. - That great quality of circumspection
which is at bottom the virtue of virtues, their great-grandmother and queen,
is by no means always crowned with success in everyday life: and he who
had wooed this virtue merely for the sake of achieving success would end up
disappointed. For practical people hold it in suspicion and confuse it with
cunning deceitfulness and hypocritical slyness: he, on the other hand, who
obviously lacks circumspection - the man who acts precipitately and
therefore sometimes acts wrongly - has in his favour the prejudice that he is a
worthy, reliable fellow. Practical people do not like the circumspect man and
think he is a danger to them. On the other hand, the circum-
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
spect man can easily be taken for timid, narrow-minded, pedantic -
impractical and easy-living people especially find him uncomfortable
because he does not live superficially as they do, heedless of duty and
practical affairs: he appears among them as their embodied conscience and
the sight of him makes the daylight grow pale. If he thus lacks success and
popularity, however, he can always console himself with the reflection: 'this
is the high tax you have to pay for possessing something of great value - it is
worth it!'
295
Et in Arcadia ego* -1 looked down, over waves of hills, through fir-trees
and spruce trees grave with age, towards a milky green lake: rocky crags of
every kind around me, the ground bright with flowers and grasses. A herd of
cattle moved and spread itself out before me; solitary cows and groups of
cows farther off, in vivid evening light close to the pinewood; others nearer,
darker; everything at peace in the contentment of evening. The clock
indicated nearly half-past five. The bull of the herd had waded into the white,
foaming brook and was slowly following its precipitate course, now resisting
it, now yielding: no doubt this was its kind of fierce enjoyment. The herders
were two dark-brown creatures Bergamask in origin: the girl clad almost as a
boy. To the left mountain slopes and snowfields beyond broad girdles of
woodland, to the right, high above me, two gigantic ice-covered peaks
floating in a veil of sunlit vapour - everything big, still and bright. The beauty
of the whole scene induced in me a sense of awe and of adoration of the
moment of its revelation; involuntarily, as if nothing were more natural, I
inserted into this pure, clear world of light (in which there was nothing of
desire or expectation, no looking before and behind) Hellenic heroes; my
feeling must have been like that of Poussin and his pupikt at one and the
same time heroic and idyllic. - And that is how individual men have actually
lived, that is how they have enduringly felt they existed in the world and the
world existed in them; and among them was one of the greatest of men, the
inventor of an heroic-idyllic mode of philosophizing: Epicurus.
296
Calculation and measuring. - To see many things, to weigh them one
against the other, to add and subtract among them and to arrive rapidly at a
fairly accurate sum - that produces the great politician, general, merchant: it
is speed in a kind of mental calculation. To see one thing, to find in it the sole
motive for action and the judge over all other actions, produces the hero, also
the fanatic - it is facility in measuring according to a standard.
297
Do not want to see prematurely. - For as long as one is experiencing
* Et in Arcadia ego: And I, too, in Arcadia; employed by Goethe as the motto of his Italian
Journey.
t Poussin and his pupil: probably Claude Lorraine (1600-82), who lived in Rome after 1620
where he was a contemporary of Poussin's (1593-1665). The poetic lighting of Claude's Mannerist
landscapes forms an obvious contrast with the heroic drama of Poussin's.
385
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
something one must give oneself up to the experience and close one's
eyes: that is to say, not be an observer of it while still in the midst of it. For
that would disturb the absorption of the experience: instead of a piece of
wisdom one would aquire from it indigestion.
298
From the practice of the sage. - To become wise one must want to
experience certain experiences, that is to say run into their open jaws. This is
very dangerous, to be sure; many a 'sage' has been gobbled up in the process.
299
Fatigue of spirit. - Our occasional indifference and coldness towards
men, which is interpreted as harshness and deficiency of character in us, is
often only a weariness of spirit: when we are afflicted with this other people
are burdensome or a matter of indifference to us, as we are to ourselves.
300
'One thing is needful. - If we are sensible the only thing that need
concern us is that we should have joy in our hearts. - Alas, someone added, if
we are sensible the best thing we can do is to be wise.
301
A testimony to love. - Someone said: 'There are two people upon whom I
have never thoroughly reflected: it is the testimony to my love for them.'
302
How we try to improve bad arguments. - Many people throw a piece of
their personality after their bad arguments, as though this will make them run
a straighter course and transform them into good arguments; just as even
after he has thrown the ball the skittle-player continues to try to direct its
course with gestures and wavings of the hands.
303
Integrity. - It is still very little if one is an exemplary person with regard
to rights and property; if, for example, one never steals fruit from other
people's gardens as a boy, never walks across unmown fields as a man - to
cite small things which, as is well known, offer a better demonstration of this
kind of exemplariness than do big ones. It is still very little: one is still only a
'juridical person' with that degree of morality of which even a 'society', a
cluster of men, is capable.
304

Man\ - What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity
which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world,
he feels himself to be 'man'!
305
The most needful gymnastic. - A lack of self-mastery in small things
brings about a crumbling of the capacity for it in great ones. Every day is ill
386
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
employed, and a danger for the next day, in which one has not denied
oneself some small thing at least once: this gymnastic is indispensable if one
wants to preserve in oneself the joy of being one's own master.
306
Losing oneself. - Once one has found oneself one must understand how
from time to time to lose oneself - and then how to find oneself again:
supposing, that is, that one is a thinker. For to the thinker it is
disadvantageous to be tied to one person all the time.
307
When it is necessary to depart. - From that which you want to know and
assess you must depart, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town
can you see how high its towers rise above the houses.
308
At noon. - He who has been granted an active and storm-filled morning
of life is overcome at the noontide of life by a strange longing for repose that
can last for months or years. It grows still around him, voices recede into the
distance; the sun shines down on him from high overhead. Upon a concealed
woodland meadow he sees great Pan sleeping; all things of nature have fallen
asleep with him, an expression of eternity on their face - that is how it seems
to him. He wants nothing, he is troubled by nothing, his heart stands still,
only his eyes are alive - it is a death with open eyes. Then the man sees many
things he never saw before, and for as far as he can see everything is
enmeshed in a net of light and as it were buried in it. He feels happy as he
gazes, but it is a heavy, heavy happiness. - Then at length the wind rises in
the trees, noon has gone by, life again draws him to it, life with unseeing
eyes, its train of followers sweeping along behind it: desire, deception,
forgetfulness, destruction, transience. And thus evening rises up, more active
and more storm-filled even than the morning. - To truly active men the more
long enduring states of knowledge seem almost uncanny and morbid, but not
unpleasant.
309
Beware of your portraitist. - A great painter who has unveiled and set
down in a portrait the completest expression of the moment of which a man
is capable will, if he afterwards meets him again in real life, almost always
believe he is seeing only a caricature of him.
310
The two principles of the new life. - First principle: life should be
ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as
hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud
on the horizon. Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest
and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain,
should be firmly established before one orders one's life and gives it a
definitive direction.
3
11

Dangerous susceptibility. - Talented people who are indolent will always
387
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
appear somewhat irritated when one of their friends completes a sound
piece of work. Their jealousy is aroused, they are ashamed of their laziness -
or rather, they fear that the active man will now despise them even more than
before. It is in this mood that they criticize the new work - and their criticism
becomes an act of revenge through which they completely alienate its author.
312

Destruction of illusions. - Illusions are certainly expensive amusements:
but the destruction of illusions is even more expensive - regarded as a source
of amusement, which is what it undeniably is for many people.
313
The monotony of the sage. - Cows sometimes wear an expression of
wonderment halted on the way to a question. In the eye of the higher
intelligence, on the other hand, the nil admirari23 lies extended like the
monotony of a cloudless sky.
314
Do not be ill too long. - One should take care not to be ill too long: for
the conventional obligation to manifest signs of sympathy will soon make the
witnesses of one's illness impatient, since it costs them too much effort to
maintain this condition in themselves for long - and then they will pass
directly over to doubting your character and will arrive at the conclusion 'he
deserves to be ill, and we no longer need to exert ourselves to feel
sympathetic'.
315
Hint for enthusiasts. - He who likes to be carried away and wants to be
borne along easily on top should see to it that he does not become too heavy:
which means, for example, that he does not learn a great deal and in
particular does not let himself be filled with science. For this makes one
ponderous! - take care, enthusiasts!
316
Knowing how to surprise oneself. - He who wants to see himself as he is
must understand how to surprise himself, torch in hand. For it is with the
spiritual as it is with the bodily: he who is accustomed to looking at himself
in a mirror always forgets how ugly he is: it is only through the painter that
he recovers an impression of it. But he then grows accustomed to the painting
and forgets how ugly he is a second time. - This happens in accordance with
the universal law that man cannot endure the unchange- ingly ugly; or if he
can, it is only for a moment: in every case he forgets it or denies that it is
ugly. - It is upon this moment that moralists have to count if they are to
display their truths.
3J7
Opinions and fish. - One possesses one's opinions in the way one pos-
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
sesses fish - insofar, that is, that one posseses a fishpond. One has to go
fishing and be lucky - then one has one's own fish, one's own opinions. I am
speaking here of living opinions, of living fish. Others are content to possess
a cabinet of fossils - and, in their heads, 'convictions'. -
318
Tokens of freedom and unfreedom. - To satisfy one's necessary
requirements as completely as possible oneself, even if imperfectly, is the

23 nil admirari: admire nothing
road to freedom of spirit and person. To let others satisfy many of one's
requirements, even superfluous ones, and as perfectly as possible - is a
training in unfreedom. The sophist Hippias, who had himself acquired,
himself produced, everything he wore, within and without, represents in
precisely this the road to the highest freedom of spirit and person. It does not
matter if everything is not equally well made, pride will patch up the tattered
spots.
319
Belief in oneself. - In our age we distrust everyone who believes in
himself; in former ages it sufficed to make others believe in us. The recipe for
obtaining belief now is: 'Do not spare yourself! If you want to place your
opinions in a believable light first set fire to your own house!'
320
At once richer and poorer. -1 know a man who had already as a child
accustomed himself to think well of the intellectuality of men - that is to say,
of their genuine devotion to things of the spirit, their unselfish preference for
what is known to be true, and the like - but on the other hand to have a
modest, indeed a poor idea of his own brain (his judgement, memory,
presence of mind, imagination). When he compared himself with others he
always came out badly. In the course of years, however, he was compelled, at
first once then a hundred times, to learn otherwise on this point - a fact which
would, one might think, have given him great joy and satisfaction. And he did
indeed experience something of this; but 'nonetheless', as he once said, 'there
is in it also a bitterness of the bitterest kind which I did not know in earlier
life: for since I have come to assess men and myself more justly my mind
seems to me to be of less use; I seem to be unable to do any good with it,
because the minds of others do not know how to accept it: I now see always
before me the terrible gulf between those who can offer help and those who
need it. And thus I am tormented by having to enjoy the fruits of my mind all
by myself, so far as they are enjoyable at all. But to give is more blessed than
to have: and what is the richest of men in the solitude of a desert!'
321
Modes of attack. - The grounds upon which we believe or do not believe
in something are with very few people indeed nearly as strong as they could
be. To shatter belief in something it is as a rule in no way necessary at once to
bring out one's heaviest cannon; with many people it is enough simply to
launch an attack with a certain amount of noise: so that often a popgun
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
will do. Against very vain people all that is required is the appearance of
a heavy attack: they see themselves being taken very seriously - and are glad
to give in.
322
Death. - The certain prospect of death could introduce into every life a
precious, sweet-smelling drop of levity - and yet you marvellous apothecary
souls have made of it an ill-tasting drop of poison through which all life is
made repulsive!
323
Remorse. - Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse
would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second. - If we have
done harm we should give thought to how we can do good. - If we are
punished for our actions, let us endure our punishment with the feeling that
we are thereby already doing good: we are deterring others from falling
victim to the same folly. Every ill-doer who has been punished is entitled to
feel he is a benefactor of mankind.
324
To become a thinker. - How can anyone become a thinker if he does not
spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?
325
The best remedy. - A little health now and again is the invalid's best
remedy.
326
Don't touch! - There are dreadful people who, instead of solving a
problem, tie it in knots and make it harder for others to solve. He who does
not know how to hit the nail on the head ought to be asked not to hit it at all.
327
Forgotten nature. - We speak of nature and forget to include ourselves:
we ourselves are nature, quand meme* - . It follows that nature is something
quite different from what we think of when we speak its name.
328
Profundity and tedium. - With profound men, as with deep wells, it takes
a long time for anything that has fallen into them to reach the bottom. The
spectators, who usually fail to wait long enough, can easily come to regard
such men as harsh and immovable - or as tedious.
329
When it is time to vow loyalty to oneself. - Sometimes we stray on to a
spiritual course that contradicts our talents; for a time we struggle heroically
against wind and tide, at bottom
1
against ourself: we grow weary, gasping;
what we achieve brings us no real joy, we feel we have paid too highly for it.
Indeed, we despair of our fruitfulness and of our future, per-
* quand mime: nonetheless
390
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
haps in the midst of victory. At long last we turn round - and now the
wind is blowing into our sails and driving us into our own channel. What
happiness! How sure of victory we feel! Only now do we know what we are
and what we want, now we vow to be loyal to ourselves and have a right to
do so - because we know what it means.
330
Weather prophets. - Just as the clouds tell us the direction of the wind
high above our heads, so the lightest and freest spirits are in their tendencies
foretellers of the weather that is coming. The wind in the valley and the
opinions of the market-place of today indicate nothing of that which is
coming but only of that which has been.
331
Steady acceleration. - People who start slowly and find it hard to feel at
home in a thing sometimes possess afterwards the quality of steady
acceleration - so that in the end no one knows whither the current will yet
carry them.
332
The three good things. - Greatness, repose, sunlight - these three things
embrace everything a thinker desires and demands of himself: his hopes and
duties, his claims in the intellectual and moral spheres, even in the way he
lives day by day and the quality of the landscape where he dwells. They
answer firstly to elevating thoughts, then to quietening, thirdly to
enlightening - fourthly, however, to thoughts which participate in all three
qualities, in which everything earthly comes to transfiguration: it is the
kingdom where there reigns the great trinity of joy.
333
Dying for 'truth'. - We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our
opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that. But perhaps for the right to
possess our opinions and to change them.
334
Having one's fixed price. - If one wants to count for precisely what one
is, one has to be something that has its fixed price. But only the commonplace
has its fixed price. Thus this desire is either the result of an intelligent
modesty - or an unintelligent immodesty.
335
Moral for house-builders. - One must remove the scaffolding once the
house has been built.
336
Sophoclism. - Who has ever put more water into their wine than the
Greeks! Sobriety and gracefulness combined - that was the privilege of the
nobility of Athens at the time of Sophocles and after him. Imitate them who
can! In life and in works!
337
The heroic. - The heroic consists in doing a great thing (or in not doing a
39i
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
thing in a great fashion) without feeling oneself to be in competition with
others before others. The hero always bears the wilderness and the sacred,
inviolable borderline within him wherever he may go.
338
Nature as Doppelgdnger. - There is many a spot in nature where, with a
pleasurable shudder, we rediscover ourself; it is nature as the fairest kind of
Doppelgdnger. - What happiness awaits him who experiences such a
sensation in just this spot, in this continual sunny October air, in this roguish
play of the breeze from morn till night, in this purest brightness and
temperate coolness, in the whole charm and gravity of the hills, lakes and
forests of this high plateau that has fearlessly stretched itself out beside the
terrors of the eternal snow, here where Italy and Finland have entered into a
union and all the silvery tones of nature seem to have made their home: - how
happy he who can say: 'there are certainly greater and fairer things in nature,
but this is mine and known to me, a blood relation, and more indeed than
that'.
339
Geniality of the sage. - The sage will involuntarily mingle with other
people as genially as a prince and, all differences of talent, rank and morality
notwithstanding, easily be inclined to treat them as equals: which, as soon as
it is noticed, causes great offence.
340
Gold. - All that is gold does not glisten. A gentle radiance pertains to the
noblest metal.
341
Wheel and brake. - The wheel and the brake have differing duties, but
also one in common: to hurt one another.
342
Disturbances while thinking. - The thinker must regard everything that
interrupts his thoughts (disturbs them, as we say) with equanimity, as though
it were a new model coming in to offer herself to the artist. Interruptions are
the ravens which bring food to the solitary.
343
Possessing much spirit. - To possess much spirit keeps one young: but in
exchange one must endure being thought older than one is. For men read the
characters inscribed by the spirit as signs of experience of life, that is to say
of having experienced many, and many bad things, of suffering, error and
remorse. Thus, one is thought not only older but worse than one is when one
possesses much spirit and shows it.
344
The proper way to win. - One ought not to want to win if one has the
prospect of overtaking one's opponent by only a hair's breadth. The good
392
THE WANDERER AND HI S SHADOW
victory must put the conquered into a joyful mood, it must possess
something divine that does not put to shame.
345
Illusion of superior spirits. - Superior spirits have difficulty in freeing
themselves from an illusion: they imagine they excite envy among the
mediocre and are felt to be exceptions. In fact they are felt to be something
quite superfluous which if it did not exist no one would miss.
346
Demand of cleanliness. - Changing one's opinions is to one nature just as
much a demand of cleanliness as changing one's clothes: for another,
however, it is only a demand of vanity.
347
This, too, is worthy of a hero. - Here is a hero who has done nothing but
shake the tree as soon as the fruit was ripe. Do you think this too little? Then
take a look at the tree he shook.
348
Measure of wisdom. - Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by
decline in bile.
349
Calling error unpleasant. - It is not to everyone's taste that truth should
be called pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth
when it is called unpleasant.
350
The golden watchword. - Many chains have been laid upon man so that
he should no longer behave like an animal: and he has in truth become
gentler, .more spiritual, more joyful, more reflective than any animal is.
Now, however, he suffers from having worn his chains for so long, from
being deprived for so long of clear air and free movement: - these chains,
however, I shall never cease from repeating, are those heavy and pregnant
errors contained in the conceptions of morality, religion and metaphysics.
Only when this sickness from one's chains has also been overcome will the
first great goal have truly been attained: the separation of man from the
animals. - We stand now in the midst of our work of removing these chains,
and we need to proceed with the greatest caution. Only the ennobled man
may be given freedom of spirit; to him alone does alleviation of life draw
near and salve his wounds; only he may say that he lives for the sake of joy
and for the sake of no further goal; and in any other mouth his motto would
be perilous: Peace all around me and goodwill to all things closest to me. -
With this motto for individuals he recalls an ancient great and moving saying
intended for all which has remained hanging over all mankind as a sign and
motto by which anyone shall perish who inscribes it on his banner too soon -
by which Christianity perished. The time has, it seems, still not yet come
when all men are to share the experience of those shepherds who saw the
heavens brighten above them and heard the
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
words: 'On earth peace, good will toward men'. - It is still the age of the
individual.
The Shadow: Of all you have said nothing has pleased me more than a
promise you have made: you want again to become a good neighbour to the
things closest to you. This will benefit us poor shadows, too. For - admit it -
you have hitherto been only too happy to slander us.
The Wanderer: Slander? But why have you never defended yourselves?
You were close enough to our ear, after all.
The Shadow: It seemed to us we were much too close to venture to
speak of ourselves.
The Wanderer: How very tactful! You shadows are 'better men' than we
are, that I can see.
The Shadow: And yet you called us 'importunate' - us, who understand at
any rate one thing well: to stay silent and wait - no Englishman understands it
better. It is true we are to be found very, very often following behind man,
yet we are not his slaves. When man shuns the light, we shun man: our
freedom extends that far.
The Wanderer: Alas, the light shuns man much more often, and then you
too desert him.
The Shadow: It is often with sorrow that I have deserted you: it seems to
me, who am greedy for knowledge, that much that is dark still adheres to
man because I cannot always be with him. If the reward were a perfect
knowledge of man I might even agree to be your slave.
The Wanderer: But do you know, do I know, whether you would not
then change unawares from slave to master? Or, though still a slave, come to
despise your master and live a life of abasement and disgust? Let us both be
content with such freedom as you have - you and me! For the sight of one
unfree would embitter for me all my joy; I would find even the best things
repulsive if someone had to share them with me - I want no slaves around
me. That is why I will not have even a dog, that lazy, tail-wagging parasite
who has become 'doglike' only through being the slave of man and who is
even commended for loyalty to his master and willingness to follow him like
his -
The Shadow: Like his shadow, that is how they put it. Perhaps today too
I have already been following you too long? It has been the longest day, but
we have reached its end, be patient a little while longer! The grass is damp, I
am getting cold.
The Wanderer: Oh, is it already time for us to part? And I had to end by
hurting you; I saw it, you grew darker as I did it.
The Shadow: I blushed, in the colour in which I am able to blush. It
occurred to me that I have often lain at your feet like a dog, and that you then
-
The Wanderer: And could I not, in all haste, do something to please
you? Is there nothing you want?
The Shadow: Nothing, except perhaps that which the philosophical 'dog'
desired of the great Alexander: that you should move a little out of
394
the sunlight, 1 am feeling too cold.
The Wanderer: What shall I do?
The Shadow: Step under these trees and look out at the mountains; the
sun is sinking.
The Wanderer: - Where are you? Where are you?
395
INDEX
38, 52; aesthetic 11:133; intellectual II:P:6; 11:26,98,215; WS43 culture 1:3, 25,
42,43,224-92,439,444 465,474,477, 480,481,520,614,632; 11:13, 179, 183,186, 323;
WS:i88, 220, 226, 279
custom 1:20, 24,25,96,97,224; 11:89; WS:77
death 1:80; 11:88; W&58,185, 322 Democritus (4607-362? BC) 1:15 democracy
WS:275,281, 289, 292,293 dreams 1:5,12,13; WS:i94
education 1:224,242,254 265-7,
2
7
2
, 274,409,467; 11:180,181,184 213, 268;
WS:i8o, 213,267,282 egoism 1:101; 11:91
enlightenment 1:26,55,110,150,463; W&221
Epictetus (6o?-i2o?) 11:224 386 Epicurus (3427-270 BC) 1:68; 11:224,408;
WS7,192,227 Erasmus, Desiderius (14667-1536) 1:26 error 1:9,11,33,34,187
ethics, see morality Euripides (480-406 BC) 1:170 Europe i:P:2; 1:265; n:P:6; WS:2i5
evil 1:45
faith, 1:225-7
fathers, see mothers and fathers Frederick the Great (1712-86) 1:248 free spirit(s)
i:P:2-7; 1:30, 34,131, 225, 229-32,282,291,432,464, 595,637,
action 1:106,107, 293, 596; 11:34, 51, 394; WS:236
Aeschylus (525-456 bc) 1:125,
1
7 aesthetic sensibility 1:23 appearance 1:10,16,
51 Aristotle (384-322 BC) 1:212, 261, 264 art (and artists) 1:3,4, 6,10,13, 29,108,
126,145-223, 236, 239, 272, 276, 486; 11:28,100,102,103,109,115-26,
131-3,136,146,148,150,151,154, 169,173-8,182,284, 371,406;
WS:i36,170 asceticism 1:76,136-44
Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750) 1:219; 11:298; WS:i49 beauty 1:3,145,149,
218; 11:101,118, 336 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827) 1:153,155-173; 11:298;
W&152,155 Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord (1788-1824) 1:109, 221,422
causality 1:18 character 1:228
Chopin, Frederic Francois (1810-49) WS:i59,160 Christ, Jesus (4? BC-29 ad)
1:235,475;
11:94,98; WS:8i, 83, 84, 86 Christianity 1:26, 27, 47, 55,68,101,110, 113-
19,130,132,134-6,141,144, 226, 227, 237,244, 247, 396, 555; 11:8, 33, 92-8,224-6;
WS:57,69, 74, 78, 81,84, 85,156,182 comedy 1:169
conscience 1:597; 11:42,43,87,90; WS7,
In this index Nietzsche's section/aphorism numbers are used, rather than page
numbers. Because he published the various parts of Human, All Too Human on three
different occasions, restarting his numbering each time, it is necessary to indicate in
the parts: Y indicates what is now the first volume, 'n' indicates what is now the first
part of the second volume (published separately but as a continuation of the work
under the title Assorted Opinions and Maxims) and 'WS' indicates what is now the
second part of the second volume (published separately under the title The Wanderer
and His Shadow). 'P' indicates Nietzsche's 1886 preface to the specified volume of the
two-volume edition. R.S.
396
idealism, idealists, idealizing 1:279;
11:86,157, 345, 350 irony 1:372
Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825) WS:99 Jesus, see Christ
Jews 1:475
justice 1:69,92,446,451,452,629;
W&28,32,64,285
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804) 1:19,21,
25; 11:27; WS:2i6 Kepler, Johann (1571-1630) 1:157 knowledge
1:6,7,9,11,15,16,18,29, 31-4,107,157,195,252,271,278,291,
292,486,500,513,554,578,618,621, 630,631, 635-8; n:P:6; 11:2-4, 7, 8,13, 26, 27, 30-
2, 49, 86, 98,185, 223,318, 399; WS:i, 6,16,17; see also philosophy; science; and truth
language 1:11, 216, 267; 11:105; WS:5,11,
55
La Rochefoucauld, Francois de (1613- 80) 1:35,36,50,133; W&214 law 1:459
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-81) 1:221; WS:i03 logic 1:6,11,13,18, 31,32
love 1:48,58,69,77,389,392,396,397, 401,410,413,415,418,523,566,601, 603;
11:75,95,273,280,287,341 Luther, Martin (1483-1546) 1:26,237; 11:226
Macchiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527) 1:224 man, i:P:7; 1:2,25,29,31,36, 37,40-3,
56,107,160,169,224,234, 239,247, 251,258,292,585,608,624; 11:17,33' 36,49, 342,
385; WS:i2,14,21,183, 189,269,275, 304,327,335; see also humanity, higher and
women (and men)
marriage 1:378,389,393,394,399,402, 406,421,424,426,427,436,596 mathematics
1:11,19 men, see women (and men) Mendelssohn, Felix (1809-47) W&157 Merimee,
Prosper (1803-70) 1:50 metaphysics 1:1,5,8-10,15-17,20,21, 30,108; 11:12,14,17
Montaigne, de, Michel Eyquem (1533- 92) 1:176; 11:408; WS:86,214 moralists
11:5,33,72; W&19,20 morality, i:P:i; 1:4,14,23,25,28,37,39, 40,42,45,48,49,52-7,
59,60,68,78,
638; II:P:I; 11:4,11,21,113, 211, 223, 237; WS:87 freedom i:P:3-5;
1:18,34,39,106,107, 288; WS:i, 9-12,23,28,61,69,81, 318 friendship 1:354,3^8-
376,378, 390,406, 499; 11:241,242,251,252,259,260
genius, 1:126,157,162-5,168,231, 233- 5,241,461; 11:155, !85,186,192, 378, 407
Germans i:P:i, 8; 1:203; n-P:i; 11:170,
298,299,302,319,323,324; WS:87,
90,91,94,95,107,109,124,125,146, 214,216,224,228 God(s) 1:5,25,28,108-
10,133,134,143, 238,245; 11:22,225; WS:7,46,80 Goethe, von, Johann Wolfgang
(1749- 1832) 1:110,111,125,162,221,265,
272,279,626,631; 11:99,170,173,227, 298,302,408; WS:89,90,99,107,109,
118,124,125,149,214 good (and evil) 1:45 government 1:450,472; 11:318, 320;
W&284 grand style WS:g6 gratitude 1:44
greatness 1:158,163,460,488,496,521, 588; 11:191,207, 398,407; WS:332
Greeks i:P:i; 1:111,114,154,170,195, 214, 221, 223, 259, 261, 262,264, 354, 474,475;
11:112,169,170,172,177,
187,189, 218-24; W&114,122,140,
167,184,190, 225, 226, 230-2
Handel, George Frederick (1685-1759) 11:298; WS:i50 happiness 1:49, 591,
611; WS:265, 271 Haydn, (Franz) Joseph (1732-1809) WS:i5i
health i:P:4, 5; II:P:2, 4-6; 11:356 Helvetius, Claude Adrien (1715-71) WS:2i6
Heraclitus (5357-475? BC) 11:223 herd (humanity) 11:223 Herder, von, Johann
Gottfried (1744- 1803) WS:n8,125 Hesiod (fl. 8th c. BC) WS:256 higher humanity,
see humanity, higher history 1:2, 37; 11:10,17, 223 Holderlin, Friedrich (1770-1843)
1:259 Homer (fl. 9th c. BC) 1:45,125, 211, 262;
11:189, 212, 219, 220; WS:ii3,122,140 humanity, higher 1:3, 20, 94, 95,107,
224,234,239,240, 245, 246, 248, 258, 263, 272,274,285, 292,509; 11:62,99, 180,183-
7,223; WS:i97, 335, 345, 350; see also greatness and nobility
INDEX
397
R6e, Paul (1849-1901) 1:36,37,133 Reformation 1:26, 237,633 religion 1:4,10,14,27, 29,108-44,22b, 280, 472;
11:222 Renaissance 1:26,125, 237 responsibility 1:70,103,106,107; 11:33, 51, 78; WS:69,81 revenge 1:44, 60, 62; WS:33,
2
37-
2
59 revolution 1:454, -03 rights 1:93; WS:39, 251 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78) 1:463, 617; 11:408; WS:22i,
216
scepticism 1:21; 11:71 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich (1759-1805) 1:176, 221; 11:126,227; WS:99,123,125,
216 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel (1768-1834) 1:132 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860) i:P:i; 1:21, 26,
39,57,103,110,236, 238, 271; u:P:i; 11:5, 33,185, 271,408; WS:i7, 214 Schubert, Franz (1797-1828) WS:i55 Schumann,
Robert (1810-1856) W&161 science (Wissenschafl) 1:3,6,7,16,18,19, 22, 27,29,37,38,128,182,222,237,
251,256,257,264,272,276,635; 11:31, 90,203-6,215,221,318; WS:i7i, 179, 195
selfhood 11:366; higher, 1:624,629 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) 1:61, 125,162,176; 11:162 socialism
1:446,451,452,473,480;
11:304,316; W&292 Socrates (469-399 BC) 1:102,126,261, 361,433; n:94; WS:6,72,86 Sophodes (4967-406 BC)
11:61,162,173 soul 1:5,100; 11:17,26 Spinoza, Baruch (1632-77) 1:157,4751 11:408 spirit 1:3; 11:11
state (the) 1:235,472-474; W&232,284 Sterne, Laurence (1713-68) 11:113 suffering 1:46,81,157,462,591 suicide
1:80,88
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745) 1:44,54 sympathy 1:46,47
talent 1:263,264 theology 1:28 thing-in-itself 1:10,16 Thucydides (4717-400? BC) 1:92 tradition
1:23,96,111,225,552; WS:39 tragedy 1:166,169,170,212; n:23; WS:i24
truth 1:3,11,15,22,34,131,146,161,
91, 94-6, 99,102-5,107,138,228,455, 475- 509- 512- 524; 11=35- 4- 51- 55- 56, 71,73, 89-91,197,220,236,300;
WS:2i, 22, 26,31,35,40-5,48, 57,62- 4, 70,77,114,136,148,183,185,190, 212, 216, 256, 305, 310, 350 mothers and fathers
1:379-82,385-7,
392,423,434 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-91) 11:171, 298; WS:i52,165 music 1:177,198- 215-17, 219,222;
ii:P:3; 11:134,144-159-171- 213; WS:i49-69
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) 1:164,
472
nature 1:8,19; 11:9
nobility 1:366,440,451,479,493,497, 504; 11:73,206,383,397 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1722-1801)
1:142
paganism 11:220, 222 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da (15267-94) 1:219 Pascal, Blaise (1623-62) 11:408
passion(s) 1:61, 72,584,629; WS:37,53, 222
patriotism 1:442 perspective i:P:6; 11:86 pessimism 1:28; n:P:3, 5, 7 Petrarch, Francesco (1304-74) 1:26
philosophy 1:1,2,6, 7, iy, 188,638; 11:1, 5,10, 31,142,143,180,182,194,201, 271,380; WS:i6; see also knowledge;
science; andtruth pity 1:50,103,212; 11:68; W&50,62 Plato (4277-347 bc) 1:50,102,164,212, 261,473,474,628;
11:271,408; WS:285 pleasure 1:98,99,103,104,213,252,501, 606
Plutarch (467-120?) 1:36 poetry (and poets) 1:13,33,148,207, 221; 11:99,105,111,114,135,162,172, 176; WS:i05
politics 1:438,445,449,450,453,458, 460,472,481; 11:305-18,320 power 1:44,446,465,595; WS:i8i progress 1:24
promising 1:58 psychology, 1:35-8,293-376 punishment 1:66,103
Raphael (1483-1520) 1:162; WS:73 reality 1:9-11,15,16,19,28,214; 11:3,19, 27,32,33,49,114,135,220; WS:2,5,
11,17,67 reason 1:11,13; WS:2
INDEX
398
187, 220, 225, 227, 251, 257, 27O, 271, 506, 517, 519, 609, 630-6; 11:7, 13, 19, 20, 26, 32, 79, 190,
208, 286, 345, 358; WS:i, 4,13, 66, 316; see also knowledge; philosophy; and science
value i:P:6, 7; 1:17,42, 77,92,585,586, 628,629; 11:1,16,98,190; WS:3, 4, 33, 204, 206; of life, 1:32, 33, 287,586
vanity 1:79,82,89,162, 313, 338,545, 574, 583, 593; 11:38,46,240, 263, 289, 379; WS:3i, 60,181,285 virtue(s) i:P:6; 1:75,
76,83,99, 221, 240;
11:91; WS:34, 64,65, 70, 212, 216,285 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de
(1694-1778) 1:26, 204,438, 463; 11:4; WS:237
Wagner, Richard (1813-83) i:P:i; II:P:I, 3; 11:134,171 war 1:444,477,481; WS:i87, 281, 284 Wieland, Christoph
Martin (1733-1813) WS:io7 will 11:5, 50; see also freedom women (and men) 1:64, 259, 377, 380, 383,385, 390-2,
398,400,401,405, 410-20,424,425,431-5,492; 11:265, 272-4, 276,282, 284, 286, 287, 290-2; WS:215, 270-4 work
WS:286 world, see reality
399
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