40

  Of the Absence of Noble Demeanour

  Soldiers and their leaders always comport themselves towards one another in a loftier manner than workers and their employers. At least for the time being, culture with a military basis still stands high above all so-called industrial culture which, as presently constituted, is unquestionably the most debased form of life that ever was. Here, everything is determined by sheer need: workers want to live and have to sell themselves, but despise him who exploits this need and buys them. It is curious that submission to powerful, awe-inspiring and even terrible individuals, to tyrants and generals, is felt far less acutely than submission to such generic bores as our captains of industry: in the employer, workers usually see nothing but a sly dog who feeds on the misery of others, whose name, stature, character and reputation are a matter of perfect indifference to him. It is probable that in all those forms and insignia of a superior race which alone make a person interesting, industrialists and commercial magnates have thus far been woefully deficient; had they the distinction of noble birth in their look and bearing, there might not be any interest in socialism among the masses. For fundamentally the masses are ready for slavery of any kind, provided that their betters are unfailingly legitimized as superior and born to command – by their noble demeanour! The common man feels that nobility is not to be improvised, and that he has to honour it as the fruit of a long development – but the absence of superior demeanour, and the blatant vulgarity of grubby-handed industrialists, gives rise to the thought that only luck has placed one above the other. ‘Well then,’ he reasons to himself, ‘for once let us try our luck! For once let us throw the dice!’ And then you have socialism.

  41

  Against Rue

  In his own actions, the thinker sees experiments and enquiries from which he seeks to obtain insight: to him, success and failure are, first of all, answers. But to be vexed at or even to rue the fact that something goes awry – that he would leave to those who act because someone commands them, and who expect a beating when their gracious lord is not satisfied with the result.

  42

  Work and Tedium

  Seeking work for the sake of the wages – in the civilized world today almost everybody does that. Work has become a means, not an end, which is why people are not very discerning in their choice of employment as long as they are amply rewarded. Now there are those rare few who would rather die than work without taking pleasure in it, people who are particular and hard to please, who are not served by an ample reward if the work itself is not rewarding. This rare breed includes all manner of artists and contemplatives, but also men of leisure who spend their lives hunting and travelling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of them will endure toil and hardship if it is associated with pleasure, and the heaviest, hardest toil, if need be. But otherwise, they are resolutely idle, even if this idleness goes hand in hand with poverty, disgrace and danger to life and limb. It is not tedium they fear so much as work without pleasure: they even need a fair amount of tedium, if their own work is to succeed. For the thinker, and for any inventive genius, tedium is that disconcerting state of a soul ‘becalmed’ which precedes the happy voyage and fair winds; he must bear it and await its effect on him – it is precisely this which lesser natures cannot quite manage! To dispel tedium by any means necessary is uncouth, just as working without pleasure is uncouth. The Asiatics are perhaps distinguished from the Europeans by their capacity for a longer and deeper calm; even their narcotics take effect slowly and require patience, in contrast with the appalling rapidity of the European poison, alcohol.

  43

  Laws and What They Betray

  One errs greatly in the study of a people’s criminal laws, if one regards them as an expression of its character; the laws do not betray who they are, but rather what seems foreign, alien, monstrous and strange to them. The laws pertain to deviations from their traditional ethos, and the severest penalties fall on that which is in accord with the traditions of neighbouring peoples. The Wahhabi have only two mortal sins: having a god other than the Wahhabi god,25 and – smoking (which they refer to as ‘the disgraceful kind of drinking’). On learning these things, an astonished Englishman26 once asked, ‘And what about murder and adultery?’ ‘Well, God is gracious and merciful,’ the old chief replied.

  The ancient Romans were of the opinion that there were only two mortal sins for a woman: committing adultery and – drinking wine. Old Cato believed that the only reason for the tradition of kissing between relatives was to keep women under control in this regard; a kiss meant ‘Was the smell of wine on her breath?’ Women who were caught drinking wine were actually put to death; and certainly not just because under its influence women sometimes forget how to say ‘no’; above all else, the Romans feared something by which the women of the European South who were then new to wine were occasionally beset, something of an orgiastic and Dionysian nature, something foreign and monstrous that offended Roman sensibilities; to them it seemed a betrayal of Rome, the incorporation of what was foreign.

  44

  The Motives in Which We Believe

  As important as it may be to know the motives mankind has really acted upon thus far, for the knowledge-seeker perhaps still more essential is the belief in this or that motive, i.e. the motives mankind has imputed to itself and imagined to be the real mainspring of its actions thus far. Men’s inner happiness and misery are apportioned according to their belief in this or that motive – not by the actual motive! The latter is of but secondary interest.

  45

  Epicurus

  Yes, I am proud to feel differently about the character of Epicurus than perhaps anyone else, and to enjoy in all that I read and hear of him the afternoon of antiquity and its happiness – I see his eye gazing out on a wide, white sea, past the cliffs on which the sun shines, while in this light creatures great and small are playing, as quiet and confident as the light and as that eye itself. Such happiness could only have been contrived by one who had suffered constantly, the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has become calm, and which now never tires of the view of its surface, of this many-hued, delicate, trembling skin of the sea; never before was there such modesty in voluptuousness.

  46

  Our Astonishment

  It is deeply and thoroughly fortunate that scientific discoveries withstand scrutiny, and consistently furnish the basis for further discoveries – things could well have been otherwise! Indeed, so convinced are we of the uncertain and fanciful quality of our judgements, and of the ever-transitory nature of all human laws and concepts, that it is truly astonishing how well the results of science hold up! Formerly nothing was known of this transitoriness of everything human; obedience to the traditional ethos perpetuated the belief that the whole inner life of man yields to iron necessity, bound by eternal fetters; at that time, perhaps when people listened to fables and fairy tales, they felt an astonished delight akin to ours. Those who occasionally wearied of the time-honoured and the timeless must have enjoyed quite a respite from them in the miraculous. Not to stand on firm ground for once! To hang in air! To stray! To go mad! Once upon a time, it was paradise to luxuriate in the miraculous; whereas our supreme happiness resembles that of the castaway who, having climbed ashore, stands with both feet on the old, solid earth – astonished that it does not rise and fall.

  47

  Of the Suppression of the Passions

  When the expression of the passions is consistently prohibited as something ‘common’, and consigned to coarser natures, both bourgeois and peasant – that is, when what is wanted is not the suppression of the passions as such, but only passionate language and gesticulation, nevertheless the result is precisely what is not wanted: the passions themselves become suppressed, or at least weakened and altered – witness the court of Louis XIV and all that depended upon it as the most instructive example of this. Men of the subsequent generation, having been brought up not to express them, came to lack the passions themselves, which were supplanted by a superficial, charming and playful disposition – and thereby became incapable of rudeness to such a degree that they received and responded even to insults with nothing but obliging words. Perhaps our own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpart to theirs: wherever I look, in life, in the theatre, and last but not least in literature, people are comfortable with all the coarser kinds of passionate outbursts and gesticulations; a certain conventional display of passion is now even expected – but not the passion itself! Even so, in this way we will eventually achieve it, and those who come after us will not just be savage and unruly in form, but truly savage.

  48

  Knowledge of Hardship

  Perhaps nothing separates men and eras from one another quite so much as the extent of their knowledge of hardship, mental as well as physical. With respect to the latter, it may be that our contemporaries are all amateurs who, lacking sufficient first-hand experience, must rely on conjecture, their frailties and infirmities notwithstanding. By contrast, those who lived in the age of fear – the longest of all ages – had to protect themselves from violence, and to that end had to be violent themselves. In those days, a man received a long schooling in bodily pain and privation, in the knowledge that even a certain cruelty towards himself, a willingness to suffer, was necessary for his preservation; in those days, a person gave his companions an education in enduring pain, inflicting it quite readily, and when he saw the most terrible things of this kind happen to others, he felt nothing but his own safety. Where mental hardship is concerned, I now look at every man to see if he knows it by experience or by description; if he still considers it necessary to feign this knowledge, as a mark of refinement, say; or if deep down in his heart he does not believe in mental sufferings at all, and is the same at the mention of them as at the mention of great physical ordeals, which bring to mind his toothaches and stomachaches. So it seems to me with most people these days. The fact that so few have experienced pain of either kind, and that the sight of suffering has become comparatively rare, has important consequences: pain is considered more hateful and arouses more indignation than ever before; indeed, the mere thought of pain is considered almost unbearable, a source of moral anxiety and a reproach to the whole of existence. The emergence of pessimistic philosophies is by no means a sign of some great and terrible distress; rather, these question marks regarding the worth of life arise when the human condition has been so improved and ameliorated that the inevitable mosquito bites of body and soul are found to be altogether too gruesome and gory, and in the poverty of their experience of actual pain, people will even take being troubled by ideas to be suffering of the highest order.

  There is already a remedy for pessimistic philosophies and the squeamishness which seems to me our real hardship, the real ‘crying need of the hour’ – but perhaps this remedy sounds too cruel, and would itself be reckoned among the signs on the basis of which one now proclaims: ‘existence is evil’. Well then! The remedy for this ‘hardship’ is: hardship.

  49

  Magnanimity and Related Matters

  When a sentimental person suddenly becomes cold, or a melancholic person amused, and above all when, out of magnanimity, an envious or vengeful person suddenly renounces the gratification of such desires – these paradoxical phenomena occur in men in whom there is a powerful inner momentum, in men of sudden satiety and revulsion. Their desires are so quickly and intensely gratified that aversion and disgust soon follow, and then their taste runs to the opposite extreme, provoking a spasm of emotion: in one person sudden coldness, in another laughter, and in a third tears and self-sacrifice. It seems to me that magnanimous people – at least those who have always made the greatest impression – are men with the most extreme thirst for vengeance, to whom the prospect of gratification presents itself, and who drink so deeply of it and so thoroughly drain it to the last drop in their imaginations that a tremendous and rapid revulsion follows this rash intemperance – such a man now rises ‘above himself’, as we say, and forgives his enemies, even blessing and honouring them. With this self-violation, with this outrage against a still-powerful vengefulness, he merely indulges in a new impulse which has now become powerful in him (revulsion) and does so as impatiently and intemperately as he had a short time before anticipated the joy of revenge and exhausted it in fantasy. There is as much egoism in magnanimity as there is in revenge, but of a qualitatively different kind.

  50

  The Argument of Isolation

  The reproach of conscience, even in the most conscientious, is weak when set against the feeling: ‘This and that are contrary to the wholesome traditions of your society.’ A cold look or lips curled in scorn by those with whom and for whom one was brought up strikes fear even in the strongest. What are we afraid of? Isolation! As the argument which rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause!

  So speaks the gregarious instinct in us.

  51

  Sense of Truth

  I commend any form of scepticism to which I might reply: ‘Let us put it to the test!’ But I should like to hear nothing more of things and questions which do not admit of experiment. That is the limit of my ‘sense of truth’; beyond that bravado has lost its rights.

  52

  What Others Know of Us

  What we know of ourselves, what we have in our memory, is not as important to our happiness as people think. One day what others know (or think they know) about us is forcefully brought home to us – and then we have to admit that it is the more powerful. A bad conscience is more easily borne than a bad reputation.

  53

  Where Goodness Begins

  Where the evil impulse has become so subtle as to be invisible, man imagines a realm of goodness, and the feeling of having entered it at the same time arouses feelings of safety, comfort, benevolence and the like, which before had been deterred and inhibited by the presence of evil impulses. So: the duller the vision, the greater the extent of the good! Hence the perpetual cheerfulness of ordinary people and children! Hence the heartache, the remorseful despair of the great thinkers!

  54

  The Consciousness of Appearances

  Knowing what I know, how wonderful and new, and yet how disturbing and ironic my situation is with respect to the whole of existence! I have discovered first-hand that human and animal nature, indeed the whole history and prehistory of feeling within me, continues to love, hate, concoct and conclude – I have suddenly awakened in the middle of this dream, but only to the consciousness of dreaming, and that I must continue to dream lest I perish, just as the sleepwalker must continue to dream lest he slip and fall. What is ‘appearance’ to me now! Surely not what is in opposition to some essence – what can I attribute to any essence other than the predicates of its appearance! Surely not a dead mask that conceals the face of some unknown variable, and which might well be torn off it! To me, appearance itself is alive and effective, and it goes so far in its self-mockery as to give the impression that it is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and dance of spirits and nothing more – and that I too among all these dreamers, I the ‘knowledge-seeker’, also dance my dance, that the knowledge-seeker is a means of prolonging this worldly dance, and is to that extent one of the stewards of life’s festival, and that the sublime consistency and consilience of all that we know is perhaps the best means of preserving the community of reverie, preserving the perfect intelligibility of all the dreamers to one another, and in so doing preserving the continuity of the dream.

  55

  The Ultimate Sense of Nobility

  What then makes a person ‘noble’? Certainly not that he makes sacrifices; even the desperate libertine makes sacrifices. Certainly not that he follows his passions; there are despicable passions. Certainly not that he acts for others, without selfishness; perhaps the consistency of selfishness is at its greatest precisely in the noble.

  Rather, the passion that agitates the noble man is, unbeknownst to him, a thing apart: the use of a rare and singular standard, bordering on folly; warming to things that feel cold to all others; divining the worth of things for which scales have not yet been invented; sacrificing on altars consecrated to an unknown god; a bravery that forgoes honour; an abundant self-sufficiency which bestows upon men and things. Hitherto it has been what is rare in man, and blindness to this rarity, that made men noble. Here, however, let us consider that everything customary, parochial and indispensable – in short, what has most preserved the species and what, generally speaking, has been in the course of mankind the rule thus far – has been unfairly judged and on the whole maligned, in favour of the exceptions. To become the advocate of the rule – that may be perhaps the ultimate refinement, the ultimate form in which the sense of nobility will reveal itself on earth.

  56

  The Desire for Suffering

  When I think of the desire to do something, how it constantly arouses and incites millions of young Europeans who can endure neither their boredom nor themselves, then I realize that they must harbour a desire to suffer, and to draw from their suffering a plausible reason for action, for deeds. Absence of hardship is the real hardship!27 Hence the political demagoguery, hence the many false, imaginary, exaggerated ‘crises’ of every possible variety, and the blind willingness to believe in them. The world of youth demands that unhappiness, not happiness, should come or be visible from without; from the very beginning their imaginations are busily making a dragon out of it so that in the end they might slay it. If these youths with their addiction to hardship had the strength to do themselves some good, to draw upon their inner resources, they would also know how to create hardships of their very own. Then what they imagine might be more subtle, and what gratifies them more melodious; whereas now they fill the world with their outrage about hardship, and hence all too often with the sense of hardship in the first place! They do not know what to do with themselves – and so they make a mural of others’ unhappiness; they always need others! And always other others! Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to make a mural of my happiness.