Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 02 - Why I Am So Clever - Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche

Transcript

02 - Why I Am So Clever - Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche · The Philosophy Insights Collection

• Why I am so clever one? Why do I know more things than other people? Why in fact am I so clever? I have never pondered over questions that are not questions. I have never squandered my strength of actual religious difficulties. For instance, I have no experience. I have never known what it is to feel sinful. In the same way, I completely lack any reliable criterion for ascertaining what constitutes a brick of conscience. From all accounts, a brick of conscience does not seem to be a very estimable thing once it was done. I should hate to leave an action of mine in the lurch. I should prefer completely to omit the evil outcome, the consequences from the problem concerning the value of an action. In the face of evil consequences, one is too ready to lose the proper standpoint from which one's deeds ought to be considered. A brick of conscience strikes me as a sort of evil eye. Something that has failed should be honored all the more jealously, precisely because it has failed. This is much more in keeping with my morality God, the immorality of the soul salvation, a beyond to all these notions, even as a child, I never paid any attention whatsoever, nor did I waste any time upon them. Maybe I was never naive enough for that. I am quite unacquainted with atheism as a result, and still less an event in my life. In me, it is inborn instinctive. I am too inquisitive, too incredulous, too high spirited to be satisfied with such a palpably clumsy solution of things. God is a too palpably clumsy solution of things, a solution which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers. At bottom, he is really no more than a coarse and root prohibition of us. Ye shall not think I am much more interested in another question, a question upon which the salvation of humanity depends to a far greater degree than it does upon any piece of theological curiosity. I refer to nutrition. For ordinary purposes. It may be formulated as follows, how precisely must thou feed thyself in order to attain to thy maximum power or virtue in the Renaissance style, a virtue free from moralic acid. My experiences in regard to this matter have been as bad as they possibly could be. I am surprised that I said myself this question so late in life, and that it took me so long to draw rational conclusions from my experiences. Only the absolute worthlessness of German culture its idealism, can to some extent explain how it was that precisely in this matter I was so backward that my ignorance was almost saintly. This culture, which from first to last teaches one to lose sight of actual things and to hunt after thoroughly problematic and so called ideal aims, as for instance, classical culture, as if it were not hopeless from the start. To try to unite classical and German in one concept it is even a little comical. Try and imagine a classically cultured citizen of Leipzig. Indeed, I can say, up to a very mature age, my food was entirely bad. Expressed morally, it was impersonal, selfless, altruistic to the glory of cooks and all other fellow Christians. It was though the cooking in vogue at Leipzig, for instance, together with my first study of Schopenhauer eighteen sixty five, that I earnestly renounced my will to live to spoil one's stomach by absorbing insufficient nourishment. This problem seemed to my mind solved with admirable felicity by the above mentioned cookery. It is said that in the year eighteen sixty six changes were introduced into this department. But as to German cookery in general, what has it not got on its conscience? Soup before the meal still called a la tedesca in the Venetian cookery books of the sixteenth century, meat boiled to shreds, vegetables cooked with fat and flour, the degeneration of pastries into paperweights, and if you add thereto the absolutely bestial, post prandile drinking habits of the ancients are not alone of the ancient Germans, you will understand where German intellect took its origin. That is to say, in sadly disordered intestines, a German intellect is indigestion. It can assimilate nothing but even English diet, which, in comparison with German and indeed with French elementation, seems to me to constitute a return to nature, that is to say, to cannibalism, is profoundly opposed to my own instincts. It seems to me to give the intellect heavy feet, in fact, englishwoman's feet. The best cooking is that of Piedmont. Alcoholic drinks do not agree with me. A single glass of wine or beer a day is amply sufficient to turn life into a valley of tears. For me, in Munich lived my antipods. Although I admit that this knowledge came to me somewhat late, it already formed part of my experience even as a child. As a boy, I believed that the drinking of wine and the smoking of tobacco were, at first but the vanities of youth, and later merely bad habits. Maybe the poor wine of Numburg was partly responsible for this poor opinion of wine in general. In order to believe that wine was exhilarating, I should have to have been a Christian. In other words, I should have had to believe in what, to my mind is an absurdity, strange to say. Whereas small quantities of alcohol, taking with plenty of water, succeeded in making me feel out of sorts, large quantities turned me almost into a rollicking tar even as a boy. I showed my bravado in this respect to compose a long Latin essay in one night to revise and recopy it, to a spy with my pen, to emulating the exactitude and the terseness of my model Cellust, and to pour a few very strong grogs over it. All. This mode of procedure, while I was a pupil at the venerable old School of Forta, was not in the least out of keeping with my physiology, nor perhaps with that of Sallust, however much it may have seemed alien to dignified Perforta. Later on, towards the middle of my life, I grew more and more opposed to alcoholic drinks. I an opponent of vegetarianism, who have experienced what vegetarianism is, just as Wagner, who could inverted me back to meet experienced it, cannot, with sufficient earnestness advise all more spiritual natures to abstain absolutely from alcohol. Water answers the purpose. I have a predilection in favor of those places where in all directions one has opportunities of drinking from running Brooks, Niece, Turin Sills, in vino veritas. It seems that here once more I am at variance with the rest of the world about the concept truth with me spirit moves on the face of the waters. Here are a few more indications as to my morality. A heavy meal is digested more easily than an inadequate one. The first principle of a good digestion is that the his stomach should become active as a whole. A man ought therefore to know the size of his stomach. For the same reasons, all those interminable meals, which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts, and which are to be had at any tabla de hute, are strongly to be depreciated. Nothing should be eaten between meals. Coffee should be given up. Coffee makes one gloomy. Tea is beneficial only in the morning. It should be taken in small quantities, but very strong. It may be very harmful and interspose you for the whole day if it is taken for the least bit too weak. Everybody has his own standard in this matter, often between the narrowest and most delicate limits. In an inerviating climate, tea d is not a good beverage with which to start the day. An hour before taking it, an excellent thing is to drink a cup of thick cocoa freed from oil remain seated as little as possible. Put no trust in any thought that is not borne in the open to the accompaniment of free bodily motion, nor in one in which even the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in the intestines. A sedentary life, as I have already said, elsewhere, is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Two to the question of nutrition, that of locality and climate is next of kin. Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere, And he who has greatest duties to perform, which lay claim to all his strength, has in this respect a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions, affecting their acceleration or retardation, extends so far that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it. Animal vigor never acquires enough strength in him in order to reach that pitch of artistic freedom which makes his own soul whisper to him. I alone can do that. Ever so slight, a tendency to laziness in the intestines. Once it has become a habit is quite sufficient to make something mediocre, something German, out of a genius. The climate of Germany alone is enough to discourage the strongest and most heroically disposed intestines. The temper of the body's functions is closely bound up with the agility or the clumsiness of the spirit's feet. Spirit itself is indeed only a form of these organic functions. Let anybody make a list of the places in which men of great intellect have been found and are still found. Where wit, subtlety, and malice constitute happiness, where genius is almost necessarily at home. All of them rejoice in exceptionally dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athyn. These names prove something, namely, that genius is conditioned by dry air, by a pure sky, that is to say, by rapid organic functions, by the constant and ever present possibility of procuring for on self great and even enormous quantities of strength. I have a certain case in mind in which a man of remarkable intellect and independent spirit became a narrow, craven specialist and a grumpy old crank simply owing to a lack of subtlety in his instincts for climate, and I myself might have been an example of the same thing if illness had not compelled me to reason and to reflect upon reason realistically. Now that I have learned, through long practice to read the effects of climate and meteor prological influences from my own body as though from a very delicate and reliable instrument, and that I am able to calculate the change in degrees of atmospheric moisture by means of physiological observations upon myself, even on so short a journey as that from Turin to Milan, I think with horror of the ghastly fact that my whole life, until the last ten years, the most perilous years, has always been spent in the wrong and what to me ought to have been the most forbidden places Naumburg, Forta, Turingia in general, Leipzig, bala, Venice, so many ill starred places for a constitution like mine. If I cannot recall one single happy reminiscence of my my childhood and youth, it is nonsense to suppose that so called moral causes could account for this, as for instance, the incontestible fact that I lacked companions that could have satisfied me. For this fact is the same today as ever it was, and it does not prevent me from being cheerful and brave. But it was ignorance in physiological matters that confounded idealism that was the real curse on my life. This was the superfluous and foolish element in my existence, something from which nothing could spring, and for which there can be no settlement and no compensation. As the outcome of this idealism, I regard all the blunders, the great aberrations of instinct, the modern spaceecialization which drew me aside from the task of my life, as for instance, the fact that I became a philologist, why not at least a medical man, or anything else which might have opened my eyes. My days at Balah, the whole of my intellectual routine, including my daily time table, was an absolutely senseless abuse of extraordinary powers, without the slightest compensation for the strength that I spent without even a thought of what I was squandering and how its place might be filled. I lacked all subtlety in egotism, all the fostering care of an imperative instinct. I was in a state in which one is ready to regard one's self as anybody's equal, a state of disinterestedness, a forgetting of one's distance from others, something in short, for which I can never forgive myself. When I had well nigh reached the end of my tether, simply because I had almost reached my end, I began to reflect upon the fundamental absurdity of my life idealism. It was illness that first brought me to reason three. After the choice of nutrition, the choice of climate and locality. For the third matter concerning which one must not, on any account make a blunder is the choice of the manner in which one recuperates one's strength. Here, again, according to the extent to which the spirit is sui generis, the limits of which he can allow himself. In other words, the limits of that which is official to him become more and more confined as far as I in particular am concerned. Reading in general belongs to my means of recuperation. Consequently, it belongs to that which rids me of myself, to that which enables me to wander in strange sciences and strange souls to that in fact, about which I am no longer in earnest. Indeed, it is while reading that I recovered from my earnestness. During the time that I am deeply absorbed in my work, no books are found within my reach. It would never occur to me to allow anyone to speak or even think in my presence, for that is what reading would mean. Has anyone ever actually noticed that, during the period of profound tension, to which the state of pre condemns not only the mind, but also, at bottom the whole organism, accident and every kind of external stimulus acts too acutely and strikes too deep accident an external stimuli must as far as possible, be avoided. A sort of walling of one's self in is one of the primary instinctive precautions of spiritual pregnancy. Shall I allow a strange thought to steal secretly over the wall, For that is what reading would mean. The periods of work and fruitfulness are followed by periods of recuperation. Come hither, ye, delightful, intellectual, intelligent books. Shall I read German books? I must go back six months to catch myself with a book in my hand. What was it? An excellent study by Victor Brouschard upon the Greek skeptics, in which my la Tertiana was used to advantage translator's footnote. Nietzsche, as is well known, devoted much time, when a student at Leipzig, to the study of three Greek philosophers, Theogenis, Diogenes, Laertius and Democritus. This study first bore fruit in the case of a paper Zurgeschichte der tiordignier shin Spruchschmlog, which was subsequently published by the most influential journal of classical philology in Germany. Later, however, it enabled Nietzsche to enter for the prize offered by the University of Leipzig for an essay De Fontibus Dionigius Leerti. He was successful in gaining the prize, and the treatise was afterwards published in the Raneschez Museum and is still quoted as an authority. It is to this essay, written when he was twenty three years of age, that he here refers and translator's note. The skeptics the only honorable types among that double faced and sometimes sequintable faced throng. The philosophers. Otherwise, I almost always take refuge in the same books. Altogether. The number is small. They are books which are precisely my proper fare. It is not perhaps in my nature to read much and of all sorts a library makes me ill. Neither is it my nature to love much or many kinds of things. Suspicion or even hostility towards new books is much more akin to my instinctive feeling then toleration, lager de cerres and other forms of neighbor love. It is to a small number of old French authors that I always return again and again. I believe only in French culture, and regard everything else in Europe which calls itself culture as a misunderstanding. I do not even take the German kind into consideration. The few instances of higher culture with which I have met in Germany were all French in their origin. The most striking example of this was Madame Cosima Wagner, by far the most decisive voice in matters of taste that I have ever heard. If I do not read, but literally love Pascal as the most instinctive sacrifice to Christianity, killing himself inch by inch, first bodily, then spiritually according to the terrible consistency of this most appalling of inhuman cruelty. If I have something of Montaigneur's mischievousness in my soul, and who knows, perhaps also in my body, if my artist's tastes endeavor to defend the name of Molieri, Coronelli and Rancceine, and not without bitterness against such a wild genius as Shakespeare, all this does not prevent me from regarding even the latter day Frenchmen also as charming companions. I can think of absolutely no century in history in which are net full of more inquisitive and at the same time more subtle psychologists could be drawn up together than in Paris of the present day. Let me mention a few at random, for the number is by no means small. Paul Borges, Pierre L'tti, hip Mail, hack Anatole France, Jule la Match, or to point to one of strong race, a genuine Latin, of whom I am particularly fond guide to Mount Passant between ourselves, I preferred this generation even to its masters, all of whom were corrupted by German philosophy, obtained for instance by Hegel, who he has to thank for his misunderstanding of great men and great periods. Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture. It was the war which first saved the spirit of France. Stendhaul is one of the happiest accidents of my life. For everything that marks an epoch in it has been brought to me by accident, and never by means of a recommendation. He is quite priceless with his psychologist's arm, quick at forestalling and anticipating, with his grasp of facts, which is reminiscent of the same art in the greatest of all masters of fact Exon guid Napoliemne. And last but not least, as an honest atheist, a specimen which is both rare and difficult to discover in France. All honor to prosper marry me. Maybe I am even envious of Standal. He robbed me of the best atheistic joke which I, of all people, could have perpetrated. God's only excuse is that he does not exist. I myself have said somewhere, what has been the greatest rejection to life? Hitherto God? Four? It was Heinrich Heine who gave me the most perfect idea of what a lyrical poet could be in vain do. I searched through all the kingdoms of antiquity or of modern times for anything to resemble his sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine wickedness without which perfection itself becomes unthinkable to me. I estimate the value of men of races according to the extent to which they are unable to conceive of a God who has not a dash of the satir in him, and with what mastery he wields his native tongue. One day it will be said of hine and me that we were by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in this language and in chalm curable distance behind us. I must be profoundly related to Byron's Manfried. Of all the dark abysses in this work, I found the counterparts in my own soul. At the age of thirteen, I was ripe for this book. Words fail me. I have only a look for those who dare to utter the name of Faust. In the presence of Manfried. The Germans are incapable of conceiving anything sublime. For the proof of this, look at Schumann. Out of anger, for this mawkish Saxon, I once deliberately composed a counter overture to Manfred, of which Hans von Boullau declared he had never seen the like before on paper. Such compositions amounted to a violation of uturp. When I cast about me for my highest formula of Shakespeare, I can invariably find but this one that he conceived the type of Caesar. Such things a man cannot guess, either he is a thing or he is not. The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. This is so to such an extent that often, after a lapse of time, he can no longer endure his own work. After casting a glance between the pages of my Zarathustra, I pace my room to and fro for half an hour at a time, unable to overcome an insufferable fit of tears. I know of no more heart rending reading than Shakespeare. How a man must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown? Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt but certitude that drives one mad. But in order to feel this one must be profound, one must be an abyss and philosopher. We all fear the truth and to make a confession. I feel instinctively certain and convinced that Lord Bacon is the originator the self torture of this most sinister kind of literature. What do I care about the miserable gabble of American moddlers and blockheads. But the power for the greatest realism in vision is not only compatible with the greatest realism indeeds with a monstrous indeeds with crime, it actually presupposes the latter. We do not know half enough about Lord Bacon, the first realist in all the highest acceptation of this word. To be sure of everything he did, everything he willed, and everything he experienced in his inmost soul. Let the critics go to hell. Suppose I had christened my Zarathustra with a name not my own. Let us say, with Richard Wagner's name, the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess that the author of human all to human was the visionary of Zarathustra. Five. As I am here speaking of the recreations of my life, I feel I must express a word or two of gratitude for that which has refreshed me by far the most heartily and most profoundly. This, without the slightest doubt, was my intimate relationship with Richard Wagner. All my other relationships with men I treat quite lightly. But I would not have the day I spent at Tribushen, those days of confidence, of cheerfulness, of sublime flashes, and of profound moments blotted from my life at any price. I know not what Wagner may have been for others, but no cloud ever darkened hour sky, and this brings me back again to France. I have no arguments against Wagnerites and hoc genus omni who believe that they do honor to Wagner by believing him to be like themselves. For such people I have only a contemptuous curl of my lip, with a nature like mine which is so strange to everything Teutonic that even the presence of a German retards my digestion. My first meeting with Wagner was the first moment in my life in which I breathed freely. I felt him, I honored him as a foreigner as the opposite and the incarnate contradiction of all German virtues. We who as children breathed the marshy atmosphere of the fifties unnecessarily pessimists in regard to the concept German. We cannot be anything else than revolutionariests. We can assent to no state of affairs which allows the canting bigot to be at the top. I care not a jot where this canting bigot acts in different colours today, whether he dresses in scarlet or dons a uniform of a Husser translator's footnote, the favorite uniform of the German Emperor William the Second and translator's note very well. Then Wagner was a revolutionary. He fled from the Germans as an artist. A man has no home in you use Europe, save in Paris. That subtlety of all the five senses which Wagner's art presupposes, those fingers that can detect slight gradations, psychological morbidities, All these things can only be found in Paris. Nowhere else can you meet with this passion for questions of form, this earnestness in matters of mis as sen which is the Parisian earnestness par excellence in Germany. No one has any idea of the tremendous ambition that fills the heart of a Parisian artist. The German is a good fellow. Wagner was by no means a good fellow. But I have already said quite enough on the subject of Wagner's real nature see Beyond Good and Evil Aphorism two six ' nine. And about those to whom he is most closely related. He is one of the late French Romanticists, that high, soaring and heaven aspiring band of artists like Delacroix and BerliOS, who in their inmost natures are sick and incurable, and who are all fanatics of expression and virtuosos through and through, Who in sooth was the first intelligent follower of Wagner, Charles Baudelaire, the very man who first understood de Lacroix, that typical decadence in whom a whole generation of artists saw their reflection. He was perhaps the last of them two. What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner the fact that he condescended to the Germans, that he became a German imperialist, wherever Germany spreads, she ruins the culture. Six Taking everything into consideration, I could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music, for I was condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wished to get rid of a feeling of insufferable oppression, he has to take to Hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner. Wagner is the counter poison to everything essentially German. The fact that he is a poison too, I do not deny from the moment that Tristan was arranged for the piano, all honor to you, Hair von Bulow. I was a Wagnerite. Wagner's previous works seemed beneath me. They were too commonplace, too German. But to this day I am still seeking for a work which would be a match to Tristan in dangerous fascination and possess the same gruesome and dulce at quality of infinity. I seek. Among all the arts in Vain, all the quaint features of Leonardo da Vinci's work lose their charm at the sound of the first bar. In Tristan, this work is, without question Wagner's nunplus ultra after its creation. The composition of the master Singers and of the Ring was a relaxation to him to become more healthy. This, in a nature like Wagner's, amounts to going backwards. The curiosity of the psychologist is so great in me that I regard it as quite a special privilege to have lived at the right time, and to have lived precisely among Germans. In order to be ripe for this work, the world must indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for this infernal voluptuousness. It is allowable, it is even imperative to employ a mystic formula for this purpose. I suppose I know better than any one the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange exstasies to which no one else had wings to soar. And as I am alive to day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger, I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony even at each other's hands than most men are able to bear nowadays, and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men. Four. Just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so in truth am I and ever will be. Ye lack two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen, but ye can never recover the time lost. Seven to the most exceptional of my readers, I should like to say just one word about what I really exact from music. It must be cheerful and yet profound, like an October afternoon noon. It must be original, exuberant and tender, and like a dainty soft woman in roguishness and grace. I shall never admit that a German can understand what music is. Those musicians who are called German, the greatest and most famous foremost, are all foreigners, either Slavs, Croats, Italians, dutch Men or Jews or else Like Heinrich Schultz, Bark and Handle, they are Germans of a strong race which is now extinct. For my own part, I have still enough of the pole left in me to let all other music go. If only I can keep Chopan. For three reasons, I would accept Wagner's seagfree to eat, and perhaps also one or two things of Liszts, who excelled all other musicians in the noble tone of his orchestration. And finally everything that has been produced beyond the Alps this side of the Alps. Translator's note. In the later years of his life, Nietzsche practically made Italy his home. And translator's note, I could not possibly dispense with Rossini as still less with my southern soul in music, the work of my Venetian maestro Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps, all I really mean is Venice. If I try to find a new word for music, I can never find any other than Venice. I know not how to draw any distinction between and music. I do not know how to think either of joy or of the South without a shudder of fear. On the bridge I stood lately in gloomy night, came a distant song in golden drops. It rolled over the glittering rim away music, gondolas, lights drunk swam far forth in the gloom. A stringed instrument my soul sang imperceptibly moved A gondola song, by stealth, gleaming for gaudy blessedness, hearkened any there too. Eight. In all these things, in the choice of food, place, climate, and recreation, the instinct of self preservation is dominant, and this instinct manifests itself with the least ambiguity when it acts as an instinct of defense to close one's eyes to much, to seal one's ears to much, to keep certain things at a distance. This is the first principle of prudence, the first proof of the fact that a man is not an accident but a necessity. The popular word for this instinct of defense is taste. A man's imperative command is not only to say no in cases where yes would be a sign of disinterestedness, but also to say no as seldom as possible. One must part with all that which compels one to repeat no with ever greater frequency. The rationale of this principle is that all discharges of defensive forces, however slight they may be, involve enormous and absolutely superfluous losses when they become regular and habitual. Our greatest expenditure of strength is made up of those small and most frequent discharges of it. The act of keeping things off, of holding them at a distance, amounts to a discharge of strength. Do not deceive yourselves on this point, and an expenditure of energy directed at purely negative ends. Simply by being compelled to keep constantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak as to be unable any longer to defend himself. Suppose I were to step out of my house, and instead of the quiet and aristocratic city of Turin, I was to find a German provincial town. My instinct would have to brace itself together in order to repel all that which would pour in upon it from this crushed down and cowardly world. Or suppose I was to find a large German city, that structure of vice in which nothing grows, but where every single thing, whether good or bad, is squeezed in from outside. In such circumstances, should I not be compelled to become a hedgehog. But to have prickles amounts to a squandering of strength. They even constitute a twofold luxury, when if only we choose to do so, we could dispense with them and open our hands instead. Another form of prudence and self defense consists in trying to react as seldom as possible, and to keep one's self aloof from those circumstances and conditions wherein one would be condemned, as it were, to suspend one's liberty and one's initiative and become a mere reacting medium. As an example of this, I pointed the intercourse with books. The scholar, who in sooth does little else than handle books with the philologist of average attainments, the number may amount to two hundred a day, ultimately forgets entirely and completely the capacity of thinking for himself. When he has not a book between his fingers, he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to a stimulus a thought he has read. Finally, all he does is to react. The scholar exhausts his whole strength in saying either yes or or no to matter which has already been thought out, or in criticizing it. He is no longer capable of thought on his own account. In him, the instinct of self defense has decayed, Otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar is a decadent. With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly endowed and free spirited natures already read to ruins at thirty and mere wax vestas that have to be rubbed before they can give off any sparks or thoughts. Two set too early in the morning, at the break of day, in all the fullness and dawn of one's strength, and to read a book. This I call positively vicious. Nine. At this point I can no longer evade a direct answer to the question how one becomes what one is? And in giving it I shall have to touch upon that masterpiece in art of self preservation, which is selfishness. Granted that one's life task, the determination and the fate of one's life task, greatly exceeds the average measure of such things, nothing more dangerous could be conceived than to come face to face with one's self by the side of this life task. The fact that one becomes what one is presupposes that one has not the remotest suspicion of what one is. From this standpoint, even the blunders of one's life have their own meaning and value, the temporary deviations and aberrations, the moments of hesitation and of modesty, the earnestness wasted upon duties which lie outside the actual life task. In these matters, great wisdom, perhaps even the highest wisdom, comes into activity in these circumstances in which nous giertepsum would be the sure road to ruin. Forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, belittling oneself, narrowing oneself, and making oneself mediocre amount to reason itself expressed morally. To love one's neighbor, and to live for others and for other things may be the means of protection employed to maintain the highest kind of egotism. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my principle and conviction, take the side of the altruistic instincts, for here they are concerned in subserving selfishness and self discipline the whole surface of consciousness, For consciousness is a surface must be kept free from any one of the great imperatives. Beware, even of every striking word, of every striking attitude, there are also many risks which the instinct runs of understanding itself too soon. Meanwhile, the organizing idea, which is destined to become master, grows and continues to grow into the depths it begins to command. It leads you slowly back from your deviations and aberrations. It prepares individual qualities and capacities which one day will make themselves felt as indispensable to the whole of your task. Step by step it cultivates all the serviceable faculties before it even whispers a word concerning the dominant task, the goal, the object, and the meaning of it. All looked at from this standpoint, my life is simply amazing. For the task of transvaluing values. More capacities were needful, Perhaps then could well be found side by side in one individual. Above all antagonistic capacities, which had to be free from the mutual strife and destruction which they involve, an order of rank among capacities, distance, the art of separating without creating hostility, to refrain from confounding things, to keep from reconciling things, to possess enormous multifariousness, and yet to be the reverse of chaos. All this was the first condition. The long secret work, and the artistic mastery of my instinct. Its superior guardianship, manifested itself with such exceeding strength that not once did I ever dream of what was growing within me, until suddenly all my capacities were ripe, and one day burst forth in all the perfection of their highest bloom. I cannot remember ever having exerted myself. I can point to no trace of struggle in my life. I am the reverse of a heroic nature to will something, to strive after something, to have an aim, or a desire in my mind. I know none of these things from experience. Even at this moment, I look out upon my future, a broad future, as upon a calm sea. No sigh of longing makes a ripple on its surface. I have not the slightest wish that anything should be otherwise than it is. I myself would not be otherwise. But in this matter I have always been the same. I have never had a desire. A man who after his four and fortieth year can say that he has never bothered himself about honors, women, or money, not that they did not come his way. It was thus that I became one day a university professor. I never had the remotest idea of such a thing, for I was scarcely four and twenty years of aileach. In the same way two years previously, I had one day become a philologist. In the sense that my first philological work, my start in every way was expressly obtained by my master Ritschau for publication in his Rhini Chez Museum. Translator's note see note on page thirty seven and translator's note narrator's note. This refers to the footnote in Aphorism III and narrator's note. Richel and I say it in all Reverence was the only genial scholar that I have ever met. He possessed that pleasant kind of depravity which distinguishes us Thuringians, and which makes even a German sympathetic. Even in the pursuit of truth, we prefer to avail ourselves of roundabout ways. In saying this, I do not mean to underestimate in any way my Thuringian brother, the intelligent Leopold von rank Ten. You may be wondering why I should actually have related all these trivial and, according to traditional accounts, insignificant details to you. Such action can but tell against me more, particularly if I am fated to figure in great causes to this are replied that these trivial matters diet, locality, climate, and one's mode of recreation, the whole causistry of self love, are inconceivably more important than all that which has hitherto been held in high esteem. It is precisely in this quarter that we must begin to learn afresh. All those things which mankind has valued with such earnestness heretofore are not even real. They are mere creations of fancy, or more strictly speaking, lies, born of the evil instincts of diseased and in the deepest sense, noxious natures. All the concepts God, soul, virtue, sin, beyond truth, eternal life, but the greatness of human nature, its divinity, were sought for in them. All questions of politics, of social order, of education have been falsified root and branch, owing to the fact that the most noxious men have been taken for great men, and that people were taught to despise the small things, or rather the fundamental things of life. If I now choose to compare myself with those creatures who have hitherto been honored as the first among men, the difference becomes obvious. I do not reckon the so called first men, even as human beings. For me, they are the excrements of mankind, the products of disease, and of the instincts of revenge. They are so many monsters laden with rottenness. So many hopeless incurables who avenge themselves on life. I wish to be the opposite of these people. It is my privilege to have the very sharpest discernment for every sign of healthy instincts. There is no such thing as a morbidray in me. Even in times of serious illness, I have never grown morbid. You might seek in vain for a trace of fanaticism in my nature. No one can point to any moment of my life in which I have assumed either an arrogant or a pathetic attitude. Pathetic attitudes are not in keeping with greatness. He who needs attitudes is false. Beware of all picturesque men. Life was easy, in fact easiest to me in those periods when it exacted the heaviest duties from me. Whatever could have seen me during the seventy days of this autumn, when without interruption I did a host of things of the highest rank, things that no man can do nowadays, with a sense of responsibility for all the ages yet to come, would have noticed no sign of tension in my condition, but rather a state of overflowing freshness and good cheer. Never have I eaten with more pleasant sensations. Never has my sleep been better. I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks than as play. This is a sign of greatness, is an essential prequisite. The slightest constraint, the somber main, any hard accent in the voice. All these things are objections to a man, But how much more to his work. One must not have nerves. Even to suffer from solitude is an objection. The only thing I have always suffered from is the multitude. Translator's note. The German words are in in some kite and feel sam kite. The latter was coined by Nietzsche. The English words multitude should therefore be understood as signifying multifarious instincts and gifts, which, in Nietzsche strove for ascendency and caused him more suffering than any solitude. Complexity of this sort held in check by a dominant instinct, as a Nietzsche's case, is of course the only possible basis for an artistic nature. End translator's note. At an absurdly tender age. In fact, when I was seven years old, I already knew that no human speech would ever reach me. Did any one ever see me sad on that account. At present I still possess the same affability towards everybody. I am even full of consideration for the lowest. In all this, there is not an atom of haughtiness or of secret contempt. He whom I am despised soon guesses that he is despised by me. The very fact of my existence is enough to rouse indignation in all those who have polluted blood in their veins. My formula for greatness in man is amor fatty, the fact that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, or for all eternity. Not only must the necessary be borne, and on no account concealed. All idealism is faltered in the face of necessity, but it must also be loved. And of why I am so clever.