1
− WHY do I know a few more things? Why am I so clever altogether? I have never reflected on questions that are none − I have not squandered myself. − I have, for example, no experience of actual religious difficulties. I am entirely at a loss to know to what extent I ought to have felt ‘sinful’. I likewise lack a reliable criterion of a pang of conscience: from what one bears of it, a pang of conscience does not seem to me anything respectable… I should not like to leave an act in the lurch afterwards, I would as a matter of principle prefer to leave the evil outcome, the consequences, out of the question of values. When the outcome is evil one can easily lose the true eye for what one has done: a pang of conscience seems to me a kind of ‘evil eye’. To honour to oneself something that went wrong all the more because it went wrong − that rather would accord with my morality. − ‘God’, ‘immortality of the soul’, ‘redemption’, ‘the Beyond’, all of them concepts to which I have given no attention and no time, not even as a child − perhaps I was never childish enough for it? − I have absolutely no knowledge of atheism as an outcome of reasoning, still less as an event: with me it is obvious by instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too high spirited to rest content with a crude answer. God is a crude answer, a piece of indelicacy against us thinkers − fundamentally even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!… I am interested in quite a different way in a question upon which the ‘salvation of mankind’ depends far more than it does upon any kind of quaint curiosity of the theologians: the question of nutriment. One can for convenience’ sake formulate it thus: ‘how to nourish yourself so as to attain your maximum of strength, of virtù in the Renaissance style, of moraline-free virtue?’ – My experiences here are as bad as they possibly could be; I am astonished that I heard this question so late, that I learned ‘reason’ from these experiences so late. Only the perfect worthlessness of our German education – its ‘idealism’ – can to some extent explain to me why on precisely this point I was backward to the point of holiness. This ‘education’ which from the first teaches one to lose sight of realities so as to hunt after altogether problematic, so-called ‘ideal’ objectives, ‘classical education’ for example − as if it were not from the first an utterly fruitless undertaking to try to unite ‘classical’ and ‘German’ in one concept! It is, moreover, mirth-provoking − just think of a ‘classically educated’ Leipziger! − Until my very maturest years I did in fact eat badly − in the language of morals ‘impersonally’, ‘selflessly’, ‘altruistically’, for the salvation of cooks and other fellow Christians. With the aid of Leipzig cookery, for example, which accompanied my earliest study of Schopenhauer (1865), I very earnestly denied my ‘will to live’. To ruin one’s stomach so as to receive inadequate nutriment − the aforesaid cookery seems to me to solve this problem wonderfully well. (It is said that 1866 produced a change in this domain −.) But German cookery in general − what does it not have on its conscience! Soup before the meal (in Venetian cookery books of the sixteenth century still called alla tedesca); meat cooked to shreds, greasy and floury vegetables; the degeneration of puddings to paperweights! If one adds to this the downright bestial dinner-drinking habits of the ancient and by no means only the ancient Germans one will also understand the origin of the German spirit − disturbed intestines… The German spirit is an indigestion, it can have done with nothing. − But to the English diet too, which compared with the Germans, even with the French, is a kind of ‘return to nature’, that is to say to cannibalism, my own instinct is profoundly opposed; it seems to me to give the spirit heavy feet − the feet of Englishwomen… The best cookery is that of Piedmont. Aleoholic drinks are no good for me; a glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to make life for me a ‘Vale of Tears’ – Munich is where my antipodes live. Granted I was a little late to grasp this – I experienced it really from childhood onwards. As a boy I believed wine-drinking to be, like tobacco-smoking, at first only a vanity of young men, later a habit. Perhaps the wine of Naumburg is in part to blame for this austere judgement. To believe that wine makes cheerful I would have to be a Christian, that is to say believe what is for precisely me an absurdity. Oddly enough, while I am put extremely out of sorts by small, much diluted doses of alcohol, I am almost turned into a sailor when it comes to strong doses. Even as a boy I showed how brave I was in this respect. To write a long Latin essay in a single night’s sitting and then go on to make a fair copy of it, with the ambition in my pen to imitate in severity and concision my model Sallust, and to pour a quantity of grog of the heaviest calibre over my Latin, was even when I was a pupil of venerable Schulpforta in no way opposed to my physiology, nor perhaps to that of Sallust – however much it might have been to venerable Schulpforta… Later, towards the middle of life, I decided, to be sure, more and more strictly against any sort of ‘spirituous’ drink: an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard Wagner, who converted me, I cannot advise all more spiritual natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely. Water suffices… I prefer places in which there is everywhere opportunity to drink from flowing fountains (Nice, Turin, Sils); a small glass runs after me like a dog. In vino Veritas: it seems that here too I am again at odds with all the world over the concept ‘truth’ − with me the spirit moves over the water… A couple more signposts from my morality. A big meal is easier to digest than one too small. That the stomach comes into action as a whole, first precondition of a good digestion. One has to know the size of one’s stomach. For the same reason those tedious meals should be avoided which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts, those at the table d’hôte. − No eating between meals, no coffee: coffee makes gloomy. Tea beneficial only in the morning. Little, but strong: tea very detrimental and sicklying o’er the whole day if it is the slightest bit too weak. Each has here his own degree, often between the narrowest and most delicate limits. In a very agaçant climate it is inadvisable to start with tea: one should start an hour earlier with a cup of thick oil-free cocoa. − Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about − in which the muscles too do not hold a festival. All prejudices come from the intestines. − Assiduity − I have said it once before − the actual sin against the holy spirit. −
2
Most closely related to the question of nutriment is the question of place and climate. No one is free to live everywhere; and he who has great tasks to fulfil which challenge his entire strength has indeed in this matter a very narrow range of choice. The influence of climate on the metabolism, its slowing down, its speeding up, extends so far that a blunder in regard to place and climate can not only estrange anyone from his task but withhold it from him altogether: he never catches sight of it. His animalic vigor never grows sufficiently great for him to attain to that freedom overflowing into the most spiritual domain where he knows: that I alone can do… A never so infinitesimal sluggishness of the intestines grown into a bad habit completely suffices to transform a genius into something mediocre, something ‘German’; the German climate alone is enough to discourage strong and even heroic intestines. The tempo of the metabolism stands in an exact relationship to the mobility or lameness of the feet of the spirit; the ‘spirit’ itself is indeed only a species of this metabolism. Make a list of the places where there are and have been gifted men, where wit, refinement, malice are a part of happiness, where genius has almost necessarily made its home: they all possess an excellent dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens − these names prove something: that genius is conditioned by dry air, clear sky − that is to say by rapid metabolism, by the possibility of again and again supplying oneself with great, even tremendous quantities of energy. I have in mind a case in which a spirit which might have become significant and free became instead narrow, withdrawn, a grumpy speciahst, merely through a lack of instinctive subtlety in choice of climate. And I myself could in the end have become this case if sickness had not compelled me to reason, to reflect on reason in reality. Now, when from long practice I read climatic and meteorological effects off from myself as from a very delicate and reliable instrument and even on a short journey, from Turin to Milan for instance, verify on myself physiologically the change in degrees of humidity, I recall with horror the uncanny fact that my life up to the last ten years, the years when my life was in danger, was spent nowhere but in wrong places downright forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia in general, Leipzig, Basel, Venice – so many ill-fated places for my physiology. If I have no welcome memories at all of my whole childhood and youth, it would be folly to attribute this to so-called ‘moral’ causes − the undeniable lack of adequate company, for instance: for this lack exists today as it has always existed without preventing me from being brave and cheerful. Ignorance in physiologis − accursed ‘idealism’ − is the real fatality in my life, the superfluous and stupid in it, something out of which nothing good grows, for which there is no compensation, no counter-reckoning. It is as a consequence of this ‘idealism’ that I elucidate to myself all the blunders, all the great deviations of instinct and ‘modesties’ which led me away from the task of my life, that I became a philologist for example − why not at least a physician or something else that opens the eyes? In my time at Basel my entire spiritual diet, the division of the day included, was a perfectly senseless abuse of extraordinary powers without any kind of provision for covering this consumption, without even reflection on consumption and replacement. Any more subtle selfishness, any protection by a commanding instinct was lacking, it was an equating of oneself with everyone else, a piece of ‘selflessness’, a forgetting of one’s distance − something I shall never forgive myself. When I was almost done for, because I was almost done for, I began to reflect on this fundamental irrationality of my life − ‘idealism’. It was only sickness that brought me to reason. –
3
Selectivity in nutriment; selectivity in climate and place; − the third thing in which one may at no cost commit a blunder is selectivity in one’s kind of recreation. Here too the degree to which a spirit is sui generis makes ever narrower the bounds of what is permitted, that is to say useful to him. In my case all reading is among my recreations: consequently among those things which free me from myself, which allow me to saunter among strange sciences and souls − which I no longer take seriously. It is precisely reading which helps me to recover from my seriousness. At times when I am deeply sunk in work you will see no books around me: I would guard against letting anyone speak or even think in my vicinity. And that is what reading would mean… Has it really been noticed that in that state of profound tension to which pregnancy condemns the spirit and fundamentally the entire organism, any chance event, any kind of stimulus from without has too vehement an effect, ‘cuts’ too deeply? One has to avoid the chance event, the stimulus from without, as much as possible; a kind of self-walling-up is among the instinctual sagacities of spiritual pregnancy. Shall I allow a strange thought to climb secretly over the wall? − And that is what reading would mean… The times of work and fruitfulness are followed by the time of recreation: come hither, you pleasant, you witty, you clever books! Will they be German books?… I have to reckon back half a year to catch myself with a book in my hand. But what was it? − An excellent study by Victor Brochard, les sceptiques Grecs, in which my Laertiana are also well employed. The Sceptics, the only honourable type among the two− and five-fold ambiguous philosophical crowd!… Otherwise I take flight almost always to the same books, really a small number, those books which have proved themselves precisely to me. It does not perhaps lie in my nature to read much or many kinds of things: a reading room makes me ill. Neither does it lie in my nature to love much or many kinds of things. Caution, even hostility towards new books is rather part of my instinct than ‘tolerance’, ‘largeur du coeur’ and other forms of ‘neighbour love’… It is really only a small number of older Frenchmen to whom I return again and again: I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself ‘culture’ a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture… The few instances of high culture I have encountered in Germany have all been of French origin, above all Frau Cosima Wagner, by far the first voice I have heard in questions of taste. − That I do not read Pascal but love him, as the most instructive of all sacrifices to Christianity, slowly murdered first physically then psychologically, the whole logic of this most horrible form of inhuman cruelty; that I have something of Montaigne’s wantonness in my spirit, who knows? perhaps also in my body; that my artist’s taste defends the names Molière, Corneille and Racine, not without wrath, against a disorderly genius such as Shakespeare: this does not ultimately exclude my finding the most recent Frenchmen also charming company. I cannot at all conceive in which century of history one could haul together such inquisitive and at the same time such delicate psychologists as one can in contemporary Paris: I name as a sample − for their number is by no means small, Messrs Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre, or to pick out one of the stronger race, a genuine Latin to whom I am especially attached, Guy de Maupassant. Between ourselves, I prefer this generation even to their great teachers, who have all been ruined by German philosophy (M. Taine for example by Hegel, whom he has to thank for this misunderstanding of great human beings and ages). As far as Germany extends it ruins culture. It was only the war that ‘redeemed’ the spirit in France… Stendhal, one of the fairest accidents of my life − for whatever marks an epoch in my life has been brought to me by accident, never by a recommendation − is utterly invaluable with his anticipating psychologist’s eye, with his grasp of facts which reminds one of the proximity of the greatest man of the factual (ex ungue Napoleonem −); finally not least as an honest atheist, a rare, almost undiscoverable species in France − with all deference to Prosper Mérimée… Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best atheist joke which precisely I could have made: ‘God’s only excuse is that he does not exist’… I myself have said somewhere: what has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence? God…
4
The highest conception of the lyric poet was given me by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of millennia for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection − I assess the value of people, of races according to how necessarily they are unable to separate the god from the satyr. − And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language − at an incalculable distance from everything which mere Germans have done with it. − I must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred: I discovered all these abysses in myself − I was ripe for this work at thirteen. I have no words, only a look for those who dare to say the word Faust in the presence of Manfred. The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann. Expressly from wrath against this sugary Saxon, I composed a counter-overture to Manfred, of which Hans von Bülow said he had never seen the like on manuscript paper: it constituted a rape on Euterpe. − When I seek my highest formula for Shakespeare I find it always in that he conceived the type of Caesar. One cannot guess at things like this − one is it or one is not. The great poet creates only out of his own reality − to the point at which he is afterwards unable to endure his own work… When I have taken a glance at my Zarathustra I walk up and down my room for half an hour unable to master an unendurable spasm of sobbing. − I know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: what must a man have suffered to need to be a buffoon to this extent! − Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt, it is certainty which makes mad… But to feel in this way one must be profound, abyss, philosopher… We all fear truth… And, to confess it: I am instinctively certain that Lord Bacon is the originator, the self-tormentor of this uncanniest species of literature: what do I care about the pitiable chatter of American shallow-pates and muddle-heads? But the power for the mightiest reality of vision is not only compatible with the mightiest power for action, for the monstrous in action, for crime − it even presupposes it… We do not know nearly enough about Lord Bacon, the first realist in every great sense of the word, to know what he did, what he wanted, what he experienced within himself… And the devil take it, my dear critics! Supposing I had baptized my Zarathustra with another name, for example with the name of Richard Wagner, the perspicuity of two millennia would not have sufficed to divine that the author of ‘Human, All Too Human’ is the visionary of Zarathustra…
5
Here where I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I need to say a word to express my gratitude for that which of all things in it has refreshed me by far the most profoundly and cordially. This was without any doubt my intimate association with Richard Wagner. I offer all my other human relationships cheap; but at no price would I relinquish from my life the Tribschen days, those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime incidents − of profound moments… I do not know what others may have experienced with Wagner: over our sky no cloud ever passed. − And with that I return again to France − I cannot spare reasons, I can spare a mere curl of the lip for Wagnerians et hoc genus omne who believe they are doing honour to Wagner when they find him similar to themselves… Constituted as I am, a stranger in my deepest instincts to everything German, so that the mere presence of a German hinders my digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also the first time in my life I ever drew a deep breath: I felt, I reverenced him as a being from outside, as the opposite, the incarnate protest against all ‘German virtues’. − We who were children in the swamp-air of the fifties are necessarily pessimists regarding the concept ‘German’; we cannot be anything but revolutionaries − we shall acquiesce in no state of things in which the bigot is on top. It is a matter of complete indifference to me if today he plays in different colours, if he dresses in scarlet and dons the uniform of a hussar… Very well! Wagner was a revolutionary − he fled from the Germans… As an artist one has no home in Europe except in Paris: the delicatesse in all five senses of art which Wagner’s art presupposes, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity, is to be found only in Paris. Nowhere else does there exist such a passion in questions of form, this seriousness in mise en scène − it is the Parisian seriousness par excellence. There is in Germany absolutely no conception of the tremendous ambition which dwells in the soul of a Parisian artist. The German is good-natured − Wagner was by no means good-natured… But I have already said sufficient (in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ §256) as to where Wagner belongs, in whom he has his closest relatives: the French late romantics, that high-flying and yet exhilarating kind of artists such as Delacroix, such as Berlioz, with a fond of sickness, of incurability in their nature, sheer fanatics for expression, virtuosi through and through… Who was the first intelligent adherent of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire, the same as was the first to understand Delacroix, that typical décadent in whom an entire race of artists recognized themselves − he was perhaps also the last… What I have never forgiven Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans − that he became reichsdeutsch… As far as Germany extends it ruins culture. −
6
All in all I could not have endured my youth without Wagnerian music. For I was condemned to Germans. If one wants to get free from an unendurable pressure one needs hashish. Very well, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the counter-poison to everything German par excellence − still poison, I do not dispute it… From the moment there was a piano score of Tristan − my compliments, Herr von Bülow! − I was a Wagnerian. The earliest works of Wagner I saw as beneath me − still too common, too ‘German’… But I still today seek a work of a dangerous fascination, of a sweet and shuddery infinity equal to that of Tristan − I seek in all the arts in vain. All the strange-nesses of Leonardo da Vinci lose their magic at the first note of Tristan. This work is altogether Wagner’s non plus ultra; he recuperated from it with the Meistersinger and the Ring. To become healthier − that is retrogression in the case of a nature such as Wagner… I take it for a piece of good fortune of the first rank to have lived at the right time, and to have lived precisely among Germans, so as to be ripe for this work: my psychologist’s inquisitiveness goes that far. The world is poor for him who has never been sick enough for this ‘voluptuousness of hell’: to employ a mystic’s formula is permissible, almost obligatory, here. I think I know better than anyone what tremendous things Wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange delights to which no one but he had wings; and as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. That in which we are related, that we have suffered more profoundly, from one another also, than men of this century are capable of suffering, will eternally join our names together again and again; and as surely as Wagner is among Germans merely a misunderstanding, just as surely am I and always will be. − Two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline first, my Herr Germans!… But one cannot catch up that amount. –
7
− I shall say another word for the most select ears: what I really want from music. That it is cheerful and profound, like an afternoon in October. That it is individual, wanton, tender, a little sweet woman of lowness and charm… I shall never admit that a German could know what music is. What one calls German musicians, the greatest above all, are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Netherlanders − or Jews: otherwise Germans of the strong race, extinct Germans, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach and Handel. I myself am still sufficient of a Pole to exchange the rest of music for Chopin; for three reasons I exclude Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, perhaps also a few things by Liszt, who excels all other musicians in the nobility of his orchestral tone; finally all that has grown up beyond the Alps − this side… I would not know how to get on without Rossini, even less without my south in music, the music of my Venetian maestro Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps I am really saying only Venice. When I seek another word for music I never find any other word than Venice. I do not know how to distinguish between tears and music − I do not know how to think of happiness, of the south, without a shudder of faintheartedness.
Lately I stood at the bridge
in the brown night.
From afar there came a song:
a golden drop, it swelled
across the trembling surface.
Gondolas, lights, music –
drunken it swam out into the gloom…
My soul, a stringed instrument,
touched by invisible hands
sang to itself in reply a gondola song,
and trembled with gaudy happiness.
− Was anyone listening?
8
In all this − in selection of nutriment, of place and climate, of recreation − there commands an instinct of self-preservation which manifests itself most unambiguously as an instinct for self-defence. Not to see many things, not to hear them, not to let them approach one − first piece of ingenuity, first proof that one is no accident but a necessity. The customary word for this self-defensive instinct is taste. Its imperative commands, not only to say No when Yes would be a piece of ‘selflessness’, but also to say No as little as possible. To separate oneself, to depart from that to which No would be required again and again. The rationale is that defensive expenditures, be they never so small, become a rule, a habit, lead to an extraordinary and perfectly superfluous impoverishment. Our largest expenditures are our most frequent small ones. Warding off, not letting come close, is an expenditure − one should not deceive oneself over this − a strength squandered on negative objectives. One can merely through the constant need to ward off become too weak any longer to defend oneself. − Suppose I were to step out of my house and discover, instead of calm and aristocratic Turin, the German provincial town: my instinct would have to blockade itself so as to push back all that pressed upon it from this flat and cowardly world. Or suppose I discovered the German metropolis, that builded vice where nothing grows, where every kind of thing, good and bad, is dragged in. Would I not in face of it have to become a hedgehog? − But to have spikes is an extravagance, a double luxury even if one is free to have no spikes but open hands…
Another form of sagacity and self-defence consists in reacting as seldom as possible and withdrawing from situations and relationships in which one would be condemned as it were to suspend one’s ‘freedom’, one’s initiative, and become a mere reagent. I take as a parable traffic with books. The scholar, who really does nothing but ‘trundle’ books − the philologist at a modest assessment about 200 a day − finally loses altogether the ability to think for himself. If he does not trundle he does not think. He replies to a stimulus (− a thought he has read) when he thinks − finally he does nothing but react. The scholar expends his entire strength in affirmation and denial, in criticizing what has already been thought − he himself no longer thinks… The instinct for self-defence has in his case become soft; otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar − a décadent. − This I have seen with my own eyes: natures gifted, rich and free already in their thirties ‘read to ruins’, mere matches that have to be struck if they are to ignite − emit ‘thoughts’. − Early in the morning at the break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book − I call that vicious! −
9
At this point I can no longer avoid actually answering the question how one becomes what one is. And with that I touch on the masterpiece in the art of self-preservation − of selfishness… For assuming that the task, the vocation, the destiny of the task exceeds the average measure by a significant degree, there would be no greater danger than to catch sight of oneself with this task. That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life − the temporary sidepaths and wrong turnings, the delays, the ‘modesties’, the seriousness squandered on tasks which lie outside the task − have their own meaning and value. They are an expression of a great sagacity, even the supreme sagacity: where nosce te ipsum would be the recipe for destruction, self-forgetfulness, self*-misunderstanding,* self-diminution, −narrowing, −mediocratizing becomes reason itself. Expressed morally: love of one’s neighbour, living for others and other things can be the defensive measure for the preservation of the sternest selfishness. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my rule and conviction, take the side of the ‘selfless’ drives: here they work in the service of selfishness, self-cultivation. − The entire surface of consciousness – consciousness is a surface − has to be kept clear of any of the great imperatives. Even the grand words, the grand attitudes must be guarded against! All of them represent a danger that the instinct will ‘understand itself too early − −. In the meantime the organizing ‘idea’ destined to rule grows and grows in the depths − it begins to command, it slowly leads back from sidepaths and wrong turnings, it prepares individual qualities and abilities which will one day prove themselves indispensable as means to achieving the whole − it constructs the ancillary capacities one after the other before it gives any hint of the dominating task, of the ‘goal’, ‘objective’, ‘meaning’. − Regarded from this side my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a revaluation of values more capacities perhaps were required than have dwelt together in one individual, above all antithetical capacities which however are not allowed to disturb or destroy one another. Order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of dividing without making inimical; mixing up nothing, ‘reconciling’ nothing; a tremendous multiplicity which is none the less the opposite of chaos − this has been the precondition, the protracted secret labour and artistic working of my instinct. The magnitude of its higher protection was shown in the fact I have at no time had the remotest idea what was growing within me − that all my abilities one day leapt forth suddenly ripe, in their final perfection. I cannot remember ever having taken any trouble − no trace of struggle can be discovered in my life, I am the opposite of an heroic nature. To ‘want’ something, to ‘strive’ after something, to have a ‘goal’, a ‘wish’ in view − I know none of this from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future − a distant future! − as upon a smooth sea: it is ruffled by no desire. I do not want in the slightest that anything should become other than it is; I do not want myself to become other than I am… But that is how I have always lived. I have harboured no desire. Someone who after his forty-fourth year can say he has never striven after honours, after women, after money! − Not that I could not have had them… Thus, for example, I one day became a university professor − I had never had the remotest thought of such a thing, for I was barely twenty-four years old. Thus two years earlier I was one day a philologist: in the sense that my first philological work, my beginning in any sense, was requested by my teacher Ritschl for his ‘Rheinisches Museum’ (Ritschl − I say it with respect − the only scholar gifted with genius whom I have encountered up to the present day. He was characterized by that pleasant depravity which distinguishes us Thuringians and which can render even a German sympathetic − to get to the truth we even prefer to go by secret paths. I should not with these words like to have in any way undervalued my close compatriot, the sagacious Leopold von Ranke…)
10
− I shall be asked why I have really narrated all these little things which according to the traditional judgement are matters of indifference: it will be said that in doing so I harm myself all the more if I am destined to fulfil great tasks. Answer: these little things − nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness − are beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto. It is precisely here that one has to begin to learn anew. Those things which mankind has hitherto pondered seriously are not even realities, merely imaginings, more strictly speaking lies from the bad instincts of sick, in the profoundest sense injurious natures − all the concepts ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘virtue’, ‘sin’, ‘the Beyond’, ‘truth’, ‘eternal life’… But the greatness of human nature, its ‘divinity’, has been sought in them… All questions of politics, the ordering of society, education have been falsified down to their foundations because the most injurious men have been taken for great men − because contempt has been taught for the ‘little’ things, which is to say for the fundamental affairs of life… Now, when I compare myself with the men who have hitherto been honoured as pre-eminent men the distinction is palpable. I do not count these supposed ‘pre-eminent men’ as belonging to mankind at all − to me they are the refuse of mankind, abortive offspring of sickness and vengeful instincts: they are nothing but pernicious, fundamentally incurable monsters who take revenge on life… I want to be the antithesis of this: it is my privilege to possess the highest subtlety for all the signs of healthy instincts. Every morbid trait is lacking in me; even in periods of severe illness I did not become morbid; a trait of fanaticism will be sought in vain in my nature. At no moment of my life can I be shown to have adopted any kind of arrogant or pathetic posture. The pathos of attitudes does not belong to greatness; whoever needs attitudes at all is false… Beware of all picturesque men! − Life has been easy for me, easiest when it demanded of me the most difficult things. Anyone who saw me during the seventy days of this autumn when I was uninterruptedly creating nothing but things of the first rank which no man will be able to do again or has done before, bearing a responsibility for all the coming millennia, will have noticed no trace of tension in me, but rather an overflowing freshness and cheerfulness. I never ate with greater relish, I never slept better. − I know of no other way of dealing with great tasks than that of play: this is, as a sign of greatness, an essential precondition. The slightest constraint, the gloomy mien, any kind of harsh note in the throat are all objections to a man, how much more to his work!… One must have no nerves… To suffer from solitude is likewise an objection − I have always suffered only from the ‘multitude’… At an absurdly early age, at the age of seven, I already knew that no human word would ever reach me: has anyone ever seen me sad on that account? − Still today I treat everyone with the same geniality, I am even full of consideration for the basest people: in all this there is not a grain of arrogance, of secret contempt. He whom I despise divines that I despise him: through my mere existence I enrage everything that has bad blood in its veins… My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it − all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity − but to love it…