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00 - Translators Introduction & Preface - Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche · Logic Library

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  Translator's introduction. Eke Homo is the last prose work that nietzschu wrote. It
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  is true that the pamphlet Nietsure contra Wagner was prepared a month later than the
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  autobiography, But we cannot consider this pamphlet as anything more than a compilation,
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  seeing that it consists entirely of aphorisms drawn from such previous works as Joyful Wisdom,
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  beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy of Morals, et cetera. Coming
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  at the end of a year in which he had produced the Case of Wagner,
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  The Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist, eke Homo is not only
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  a coping stone worthy of the wonderful creations of that year, but also a
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  fitting conclusion to his whole life, in the form of a grand summing up
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  of his character as a man, his purpose as a reformer, and his
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  achievement as a thinker. As if half conscious of his approaching spiritual end,
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  Nietzsche here bids his friend's farewell, just in the manner in which in the
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  Twilight of the Idols Aphorism thirty six, Part nine, he declares that everyone
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  should be able to take leave of his circle of relatives and intimates when his
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  time seems to have come, that is to say, while he is still
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  himself, while he still knows what he is about, and is able to
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  measure his own life and life in general, and speak of both in a
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  manner which is not vouchsafed to the groaning invalid, to the man lying on
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  his back, decrepid and exhausted, or to the more abundant victim of some
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  wasting disease. Nietzsch's spiritual death, like his whole life, was in singular
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  harmony with his doctrine. He died suddenly and proudly soared in hand war which
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  he, and he alone, among all the philosophers of Christendom, had praised
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  so wholeheartedly, at last struck him down in the full vigor of his manhood,
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  and left him a victim on the battlefield, the terrible battlefield of thought,
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  on which there is no quarter, and for which no Geneva convention has
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  yet been established or even thought of. To those who know Nietzsch's life work,
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  no apology will be needed for the form and content of this wonderful work.
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  They will know at least that a man either is or is not aware
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  of his significance and of the significance of what he has accomplished, and that
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  if he is aware of it, then self realization, even of the kind
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  which we find in these pages, is neither morbid nor suspicious, but necessary
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  and inevitable. Such chapter headings as why I am so wise, why I
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  am a fatality, why I write such excellent books, however much they may
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  have disturbed the equanimity and objectivity in particular of certain nature biographers, can be
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  regarded as pathological only in a democratic age in which people have lost all sense
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  of gradation and rank, and in which the virtues of modesty and humility had
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  to be preached far and wide as a corrective against the vulgar pretensions of thousands
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  of wretched nobodies. For little people can be enjoyed only as modest citizens or
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  humble Christians. If, however, they demand a like modesty on the part
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  of the truly great, if they raise their voices against Nietzsche's lack of the
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  very virtue they so abundantly possess or pretend to possess, it is time to
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  remind them of Goeta's famous remark nur Di Lupens sind bischeiden. Only nobodies are
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  ever modest. It took Nietzschere barely three weeks to write this story of his
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  life. Begun on the fifteenth of October eighteen eighty eight, his four and
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  fortieth birthday, it was finished on the fourth of November of the same year,
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  and, but for a few trifling modifications and editions, is just as
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  Nietzsche left it. It was not published in Germany until the year nineteen o
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  eight, eight years after Nietzsa's death. In a letter dated the twenty seventh
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  of December eighteen eighty eight, addressed to the musical composer Fuchs, the author
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  declares the object of the work to be to dispose of all discussion, doubt,
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  and inquiry concerning his own personality, in order to leave the public mind
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  free to consider merely the things for the sake of which he existed. Di
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  dinger darend vingen ich darbin and true to his intention, Nietzsche's honesty in these
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  pages is certainly one of the most remarkable features about them, From the first
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  chapter, in which he frankly acknowledges the decadent elements within him, to the
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  last page, whereon He characterizes his mission, his life task, and his
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  achievement by means of the one symbol Dionysus versus Christ. Everything comes straight from
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  the shoulder, without hesitation, without fear of consequences, and above all,
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  without concealment. Only in one place does he appear to conceal something, and
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  then he actually leads one to understand that he is doing so. It is
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  in regard to Wagner, the greatest friend of his life, who doubts.
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  He says that I old artillery man that I am, would be able if
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  I liked to point my heavy guns at Wagner. But he adds everything decisive
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  in this question, I kept to myself, I have loved Wagner page one,
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  two two. To point, as many have done, to the proximity
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  of all Nietzure's autumn work of the year eighteen eighty eight, to his breakdown
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  at the beginning of eighteen eighty nine, and to argue that, in all
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  its main features it foretells the catastrophe that is imminent. Seems a little too
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  plausible, a little too obvious and simple to require refutation that Nietzsche really was
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  in a state which in medicine is known as euphoria, that is to say,
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  that state of highest well being and capacity which often precedes a complete breakdown.
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  Cannot, I suppose, be questioned for his style, his penetrating vision,
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  and his vigor reached the zenith in the works written in this autumn of
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  eighteen eighty eight. But the contention that the matter the substance of these works
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  reveals any signs whatsoever of waning mental health, or, as a certain French
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  biographer has it, of an inability to hold himself and his judgments in check,
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  is best contradicted by the internal evidence itself. To take just a few
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  examples at random, examine the cold and calculating tone of self analysis in chapter
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  one of the present work. Consider the reserve and the restraint with which the
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  idea in Aphorism seven of that chapter is worked out, not to speak of
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  the restraint and self mastery in the idea itself, namely, to be one's
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  enemies equal. This is the first condition of an honorable duel. Where one
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  despises, one cannot wage war, where one commands, where one sees something
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  beneath one, one ought not to wage war. My war tactics can be
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  reduced to four principles. First, I attack only things that I triumphant.
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  If necessary, I wait until they become triumphant. Secondly, I attack only
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  those things against which I find no allies, against which I stand alone,
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  against which I compromise nobody but myself. Thirdly, I never make personal attacks.
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  I use a personality merely as a magnifying glass, by means of which
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  I render a general, but elusive and scarcely noticeable evil more apparent. Fourthly,
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  I attack only those things from which all personal differences are excluded, in
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  which any such thing as a background of disagreeable experiences is lacking. And now
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  notice the gentleness with which, in chapter two Wagner, the supposed mortal enemy
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  and the supposed envid rival to Nietzschure, is treated. Are these the words
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  and the thoughts of a man who has lost or who is losing control?
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  And even if we confine ourselves simply to the substance of this work and put
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  the question, is it a new niature or the old nature that we find
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  in these pages? Is it the old countenance with which we are familiar?
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  Or are the features distorted, awry, disfigured? What will the answer be?
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  Obviously there is no new or even deformed Nietzsche here, because he is
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  still faithful to the position which he assumed in thus spake Zarathustra five years previously,
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  and is perfectly conscious of this fidelity see page one four one. Neither
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  can he be even on the verge of any marked change, because the whole
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  of the third chapter, in which he reviews his life work, is simply
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  a reiteration and a confirmation of his old points of view, which are here
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  made all the more telling by additional arguments suggested no doubt by maturer thought.
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  In fact, if anything at all is new in this work, it is
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  its cruel certainty, its severe deliberateness, and its extraordinarily incisive vision, as
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  shown for instance in a summing up of the genuine import of the third and
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  fourth essays in the Thoughts out of Season pages seventy five to seventy six,
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  eighty eighty one, and eighty two, a summing up which are most critical
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  analysis of the essays in question, can but verify Romanticism, Idealism, Christianity
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  are still scorned and despised. Another outlook, a nobler, braver, and
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  more earthly outlook, is still upheld and revered. The great yay to life,
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  including all that it contains that is terrible and questionable, is still pronounced
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  in the teeth of pessimists, nihilists, anarchists, Christians and other decadence,
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  and Germany, Europe's flat land, is still subjected to the most relentless criticism.
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  If there are any signs of change besides those of mere growth in this
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  work, they certainly succeed in eluding the most careful search undertaken with a full
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  knowledge of Nietzsche's former opinions, and it would be interesting to know precisely where
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  they are found by those writers whom the titles of the chapters alone seem so
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  radically to have perturbed. But the most striking thing of all, the miracle,
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  so to speak, of this autobiography, is the absence from it of
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  that loathing, that suggestion of serfet with which a life such as the one
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  Nietzsche had led would have filled any other man, even of power approximate to
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  his own. This anchorte, who, in the last years of his life
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  as a healthy human being, suffered the experience of seeing even his oldest friends,
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  including Goroda, show the most complete indifference to his lot. This wrestler
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  with fate, for whom recognition in the persons of Brannus, Taine and Strindberg
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  have come all too late, and whom even support, sympathy and help riving
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  as it did at last through Deussen and from Madame Darsalis, Marshal could no
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  longer cheer or comfort. This was the man who was able, notwithstanding to
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  inscribe the device amor fatty upon his shield on the very eve of his final
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  collapse, as a victim of the unspeakable suffering he had endured. And this
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  final collapse might easily have been foreseen. Nietzsche's censorium, as his autobiography proves,
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  was probably the most delicate instrument ever possessed by human being. And with
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  this fragile structure the prequisite by the bye of all genius, his terrible will
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  compelled him to confront the most profound and most recondite problems we happen to know
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  from another artist and profound thinker, Benjamin Disraeli, who himself had experienced a
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  dangerous breakdown. What the consequences pressed icly are of indulging in excessive activity in
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  the sphere of the spirit, more particularly when that spirit is highly organized.
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  Disraeli says, in contraryy Fleming, Part four, Chapter five, I have
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  sometimes half believed, although the suspicion is mortifying, that there is only one
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  step between his state, who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation and insanity. For
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  I will remember that at this period of my life, when I indulge in
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  meditation to a degree that would now be impossible, and I hope unnecessary,
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  my senses sometimes appear to be wandering. And artists are the proper judges of
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  artists, not Oxford dons, like doctor Schiller, who, in his impertent
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  attempt at dealing with something for which his pragmatic hands are not sufficiently delicate,
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  eagerly avails himself of popular help in his article on Nietzsche in the eleventh edition
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  of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and implies the hackneyed and wholly exploded belief that Nietzsche's
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  philosophy is madness in the making. As German philosophies, however, are said
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  to go to Oxford only when they die, we may perhaps conclude from this
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  want of appreciation in that quarter, how very much alive Nietzsche's doctrine still is
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  not that Nietzsche went mad so soon, but that he went mad so late
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  is the wonder of wonders. Considering the extraordinary amount of work he did,
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  the great task of the transvaluation of all values, which he actually accomplished,
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  and the fact that he enjoyed such long years of solitude, which to him,
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  the sensitive artist to whom friends were everything, must have been a terrible
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  hardship. We can only wonder at his great health, and can well believe
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  his sister's account of the phenomenal longevity and bodily vigor of his ancestors. No
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  one, however, who is initiated, No one who reads this work with
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  understanding, will be in need of this introductory note of mine, for to
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  all who know these pages must speak for themselves. We are no longer in
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  the nineteenth century. We have learned many things since then, and if caution
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  is only one of these things, at least it will prevent us from judging
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  a book such as this one, with all its apparent pontifical pride and surging
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  self alliance, with undue haste, or with that arrogant assurance with which the
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  ignorance of the humble and the modest has always confronted everything truly great Antony M.
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  Ludovici and of Translator's introduction preface one. As it is my intention,
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  within a very short time to confront my fellow men with the very greatest demand
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  that has ever yet been made upon them, it seems to me above all
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  necessary to declare here who and what I am. As a matter of fact,
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  this ought to be pretty well known already, for I have not held
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  my tongue about myself. But the disparity which obtains between the greatness of my
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  tak and the smallness of my contemporaries is revealed by the fact that people have
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  neither heard me nor yet seen me. I live on my own self made
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  credit, and it is probably only a prejudice to suppose that I am alive
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  at all. I do but require to speak to any one of the scholars
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  who come to the ober Enger Dean in the summer in order to convince myself
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  that I am not alive under these circumstances. It is a duty and one
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  against which my customary reserve, and to still a greater degree the brider my
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  instincts rebel to say, listen, for I am such and such a person.
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  For Heaven's sake, do not confound me with anyone else two. I
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  am, for instance, in no wise a bogey man or more old monster.
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  On the contrary, I am the very opposite in nature to the kind
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  of man that has been honored hitherto as virtuous between ourselves. It seems to
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  me that this is precisely a matter on which I may feel proud. I
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  am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even
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  a satier than a saint. But just read this book. May be I
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  have here succeeded in expressing this contrast in a cheerful and at the same time
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  sympathetic manner. Maybe this is the only purpose of the present work. The
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  very last thing I should promise to accomplish would be to improve mankind. I
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  do not set up any new idols. May old idols. Only learn what
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  it costs to have legs of clay to overthrow idols. Idols is the name
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  I give to all ideals. Is much more like my business in proportion,
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  as an ideal world has been falsely assumed, reality has been robbed of its
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  value, its meaning, and its truthfulness. The true world and the apparent
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  world in plain English, the fictitious world and reality hitherto the lie of the
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  ideal has been the curse of reality. By means of it, the very
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  source of mankind's instincts has become mendacious and false, so much so that those
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  values have come to be worshiped which are the exact opposite of the ones which
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  would ensure man's prosperity, his future, and his great right to a future.
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  Three. He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings
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  is conscious that it is the air of the heights that it is bracing.
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  A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances are it will chill
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  him. The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible. But how serenely
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  everything lies in the sunlight, how freely one can breathe, how much one
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  feels lies beneath one. Philosophy, as I have understood it, hitherto,
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  is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain peaks, the seeking out
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  of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which hitherto morality has set
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  its ban. Through long experience derived from such wanderings in forbidden country, I
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  acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem generally desirable. Of the
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  causes which hitherto have led to men's moralizing and idealizing, the secret history of
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  philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How
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  much truth can a certain mind endure? How much truth can it dare?
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  These questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values.
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  Error, the belief in the ideal, is not blindness. Error is cowardice.
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  Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage,
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  of hardness towards one's self, of cleanliness towards one's self. I do
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  not refute ideals. All I do is to draw on my gloves in their
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  presence, nittimour inevetitum. With this device, my philosophy will one day be
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  victorious. For that which has hitherto been most stringently forbidden is without exception truth.
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  Four In my life work, my Zarathustra holds a place apart with it.
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  I gave my fellow men the greatest gift that has ever been bestowed upon
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  them. This book, the voice of which speaks out across the ages,
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  is not only the loftiest book on earth, literally the book of mountain air.
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  The whole phenomenon mankind lies at an incalculable distance beneath it. But it
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  is also the deepest book, born of the inmost abundance of truth, an
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  inexhaustible well into which no picture can be lowered without coming up again laden with
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  gold and with goodness. Here it is not a prophet who speaks one of
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  those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power, whom men called founders of
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  religion. If a man would not do a sad wrong to his wisdom,
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  he must above all give proper heat to the tones, the halcionic tones that
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  fall from the lips of Zarathustra. The most silent words are harbringers of the
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  storm. Thoughts that come on dove's feet lead the world. The figs fall
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  from the trees. They are good and sweet, and when they fall,
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  their redskins are rent a north wind, am I, and to ripe figs.
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  Thus, like figs, do these precepts drop down to you? My
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  friends, now drink their juice, their sweet pulp. It is autumn all
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  around, and clear sky and afternoon. No fanatic speaks to you hear.
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  This is not a sermon. No faith is demanded in these pages. From
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  out an infinite treasure of light and well of joy. Drop by drop,
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  my words fall out. A slow and gentle gait is the cadence of these
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  discourses. Such things can reach only the most elect It is a rare privilege
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  to be a listener here. Not everyone who likes can have ears to hear.
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  Zarathustra is not Zarathustra because of these things a seducer. But what indeed
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  does he himself say when for the first time he goes back to his solitude,
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  just the reverse of that which any sage, saint, savior of the
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  world and other decadent would say, not only his words, but he himself
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  is other than they alone? Do I know? Go my disciples, get
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  ye also hence and alone? Thus would I have it? Verily? I
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  beseech you take your leave of me, and arm yourselves against Zarathustra, and
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  better still, be ashamed of him. Maybe he hath deceived you. The
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  Knight of Knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to
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  hate his friends. The man who remaineth a pupil or quiteth his teacher,
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  but ill and why would ye not pluck at my wreath? Ye honor me,
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  But what if your reverence should one day break down? Take heed lest
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  a statue crush you. Ye say, ye believe in zarahth Ethustra. But
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  of what account is Zarathustra? Ye are my believers, But of what account
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  are all believers? Ye had not sought yourselves when he found me. Thus
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  to all believers, therefore is all believing worth so little? Now I bid
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  you lose me and find yourselves. And only when you have all denied me
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  will I come back unto you. Friedrich Nietzsche. On this perfect day,
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  when everything is ripening, are not only the grapes are getting brown? A
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  ray of sunshine has fallen on my life. I looked behind me, I
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  looked before me, And never have I seen so many good things all at
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  once. Not in vain have I buried my four and fortieth year to day
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  I had the right to bury it, that in it which still had life
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  has been saved and is immortal. The First Book of the Transvaluation of all
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  Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt
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  to velociize with the hammer all these things are the gift of this year,
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  and even of his last quarter. How could I help being thankful to the
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  whole of my life. That is why I am now going to tell myself
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  the story of my life. End of preface