Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy (Wisehouse Classics). Фридрих Вильгельм Ницше
hate, envy, greed, and ruling as the affects which determine life, as something that, in the whole household of life, have to be present fundamentally and essentially, and, as a result, still have to be intensified if life is still to be further intensified—he suffers from an orientation in his judgment as if he were seasick. Nevertheless, even this hypothesis is not nearly the most awkward or the strangest in this immense and still almost new realm of dangerous discoveries;—and, in fact, there are a hundred good reasons that everyone should stay away from it, anyone who can! On the other hand, if someone aboard ship ends up here at some point—well, then! Come on! Now’s the time to keep one’s teeth tightly clenched, the eyes open, and the hand firm on the tiller!—We’re moving directly over and away from morality, and in the process we’re overwhelming, perhaps smashing apart, what’s left of our morality, as we dare make our way there—but what does that matter to us! Never before has a more profound world of insights revealed itself to daring travellers and adventurers: and the psychologist who in this manner “makes a sacrifice”— it is not the sacrifizio dell’intelletto [sacrifice of the intellect], quite the opposite—will for that reason at least be permitted to demand that psychology is recognized again as the mistress of the sciences, with the other sciences there to prepare things in her service. For from now on psychology is once more the route to fundamental problems.
ji
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O sancta simplicitas [blessed simplicity]! Human beings live in such a peculiarly simple and counterfeit way! Once a man develops eyes to see this wonder, he cannot check his amazement! How bright and free and light and simple we have made everything around us! How we have learned to give our senses free license for everything superficial, our thinking a divine craving for wanton leaps and erroneous conclusions! How we have learned ways, right from the start, to maintain our ignorance in order to enjoy a hardly conceivable freedom, safety, carelessness, heartiness, and merriment in life—in order to enjoy life. And only on this now firm granite foundation of ignorance could scientific knowledge up to now rise up, the will to know on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will not to know, to uncertainty, to what is not true! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement! For if language, here as elsewhere, does not cast off its clumsiness and continues to speak about opposites, where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation, and similarly if inveterate Tartufferie [hypocrisy] in morality, which nowadays belongs to our invincible “flesh and blood,” turns the words even of us knowledgeable people around in our mouths, here and there we understand that and laugh about how it’s precisely the best scientific knowledge that most wants to hold us in this simplified, completely artificial, appropriately created, and appropriately falsified world, how it loves error, voluntarily and involuntarily, because, as something alive—it loves life!
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After such a cheerful start, I’d like you to not to miss hearing a serious word: it’s directed at the most serious people. Be careful, you philosophers and friends, of knowledge— protect yourself from martyrdom! From suffering “for the sake of the truth”! Even from defending yourselves! That corrupts all the innocence and refined neutrality in your consciences. It makes you stubborn against objections and red rags; it dulls your minds, brutalizes you, and puts you in a daze when, in the struggle with danger, malice, suspicion, expulsion, and even dirtier consequences of your hostility, you finally have to play out your role as the defenders of truth on earth, as though “the truth” were such a harmless and clumsy character as to require defenders! And as for you, you knights with the sorrowful countenances, my good gentlemen, you spiritual loafers and cobweb spinners! Ultimately you yourselves know well enough that it really doesn’t matter if you are the ones who are right. You also know that up to now no philosopher has been right and that a more praiseworthy truthfulness could lie in every small question mark which you set after your favourite words and cherished doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves), than in all the ceremonial gestures and trump cards before prosecutors and courts of justice! Better to stand aside! Run off to some secluded place! And retain your mask and your subtlety, so that people confuse you with someone else—or fear you a little! And for my sake don’t forget the garden, the garden with the golden trellis! And have people around you who are like a garden—or like music over water in the evening, when the day is already becoming a memory. Choose good solitude, the free, high-spirited, easy solitude, which gives you also a right to remain, in some sense or other, still good yourselves! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad every long war makes us, when it does not let us fight with open force! How personal a long fear makes us, a long attention on our enemies, on potential enemies! These social outcasts, these men long persecuted and wickedly hunted down—as well as the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos15—in the end always become, maybe under a spiritual masquerade and perhaps without realizing it themselves, sophisticated avengers and makers of poisons (just dig into the foundation of Spinoza’s ethics and theology)— to say nothing of the foolishness of moral indignation, which in a philosopher is the unmistakable sign that his philosophical humour has run away from him. The martyrdom of a philosopher, his “sacrifice for the truth,” brings forcefully to light how much of the agitator and actor he contains within himself. And if people have looked at him with only an artistic curiosity up to this point, then, in the case of several philosophers, we can naturally understand the dangerous wish to see him also in his degeneration (degenerated into a “martyr,” into a brawler on the stage and in tribunals). But with such a wish, people must be clear about what they are going to see in every case—only a satyr play, only a farcical epilogue, only continuing proof that the long, real tragedy is over, assuming that every philosophy in its origin was a long tragedy.
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Every special human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the majority, where he can forget the rule-bound “people,” for he is an exception to them—but for the single case where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these rules, as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense. Anyone who, in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer with all the colours of distress—green and gray with disgust, surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness—is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, always keeps away from it, and stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for, knowledge. For if he were, he would one day have to say to himself, “The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception—than I am, the exception!”— and he would make his way down, above all, “inside.” The study of the average man—long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company—all company is bad company except with one’s peers—that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part, the richest in disappointments. But if he’s lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he encounters real short cuts and ways of making his task easier—I’m referring to the so-called cynics, those who, as cynics, simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the “rule-bound man” in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses;—now and then they even wallow in books, as if in their very own dung. Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder and more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust: for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat and ape—as in the Abbé Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted, and perhaps also the foulest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently