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Our virtues? It's probable that we also still have our virtues, although it's reasonable to think that they will not be those naïve, four-square virtues for whose sake we respect our grandfathers, at the same time holding them at arm's length. We Europeans of the day-after-tomorrow, we first-born of the twentieth century—with our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity and art of disguise, our tender and, so to speak, sweetened cruelty in spirit and sense—if we're to have virtues, we'll presumably have only those which have learned best how to tolerate our most secret and most heartfelt inclinations, our most burning needs. So then let's look for them in our labyrinths, where, as we know, so many different things get lost, so many different things disappear for ever.

And is there anything more beautiful than seeking out one's own virtues? Doesn't this mean that we already almost believe in our own virtues? But this phrase "believe in our own virtues"—isn't that basically the same thing people in earlier times used to call their "good conscience," that long worthy pigtail of an idea which our grandfathers hung behind their heads and often enough behind their understanding as well? Thus, it seems to follow that, no matter how little we may appear to be old fashioned and as respectable as our grandfathers, in one thing we are nonetheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with good consciences: we, too, still carry their pigtail. Oh, if you knew how soon, how very soon things will be otherwise! . . .

215

It sometimes happens in the realm of the stars that two suns determine the orbit of a planet, and in some cases suns of different colours cast their lights around a single planet, sometimes red light, sometimes green light, and then again lighting it both at once, flooding it with colours. In the same way we modern men, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our "starry heaven," are determined by different moralities—our actions change their lights into different colours. They are rarely unambiguous. And there are enough cases where our actions have many colours.

216

Love one's enemies? I think that has been well learned. These days it happens thousands of times, in small and big things. Now and then something higher and more sublime takes place—we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best—but all this is unconscious, without any fuss, without any pomp and circumstance, rather with that modest and secret goodness which prohibits solemn words and virtuous formulas. Morality as a pose—that offends our taste nowadays. That's also progress, just as our fathers progressed when religion as a pose finally offended their taste, including hostility to and a Voltairean bitterness against religion (and everything that formerly went along with the sign language of free thinkers). It's the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, which makes the sound of all Puritan litanies, all moral sermons, and petty bourgeois respectability sound out of tune.

217

Be careful of those who set a high value on people's ascribing to them moral tact and refinement in drawing moral distinctions! They never forgive us if they ever make a mistake in front of us (or even against us). Inevitably they become people who instinctively slander and damage us, even when they still remain our "friends." Blessed are the forgetful, for they are done with their stupidities as well.

218

Psychologists in France—and where else are there still any psychologists nowadays?—still haven't stopped enjoying the bitter and manifold pleasure they get from bêtise bourgoise —it's as if once they'd had enough of it, they'd reveal something. For example, Flaubert, that solid citizen of Rouen, finished up by seeing, hearing, and tasting nothing else any more (1). That was his kind of self-torture and more refined cruelty.

Now, for a change (since this is becoming tedious) I recommend something else for our delight—and that's the unconscious shiftiness with which all good, thick, solid, average spirits react to higher spirits and their functions, that subtle complicated Jesuitical shiftiness, which is a thousand times more subtle than the understanding and taste of these average people in their best moments—or even than the understanding of their victims as well. This is repeated evidence for the fact that "Instinct" is the most intelligent of all forms of intelligence which have been discovered so far.

Briefly put—you psychologists should study the philosophy of the "norm" in its war against the "exception." There you'll see a drama good enough for the gods and divine maliciousness. Or to put the matter still more clearly: practise vivisection on the "good people," on the "homo bonae voluntatis," on yourselves (2)!

219

Moral judgment and condemnation are the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those who are less limited, as well as a form of compensation for the fact that Nature has thought ill of them, and finally a chance to acquire some spirit and become refined:—spiritualized malice. Basically it does their hearts good that there is a standard before which those plentifully endowed with wealth and spiritual privilege stand, just like them. They fight for the "equality of all before God" and almost require a faith in God just for that purpose. Among them are the most powerful opponents of atheism. A person who said to them "A high spirituality can't be compared with the solidity and respectability of a man who is merely moral" would make them furious. I'll be careful not to do this.

I'd much prefer to flatter them with my principle that a high spirituality itself arises only as the final offspring of moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all those conditions which are ascribed to the "merely moral" man, after they've been acquired one by one through long discipline and practice, perhaps through an entire chain of generations, that high spirituality is precisely the spiritualization of justice and that kind severity which knows that its task is to maintain the order of rank in the world, not only among men, but among things themselves.

220

Given the present popular praise of "disinterestedness," we must bring to mind, perhaps not without a certain danger, what it is that really interests the populace, and what, in general, are those things about which the common man is fundamentally and deeply concerned—including educated people, even scholars, and, unless I'm mistaken, perhaps philosophers as well. From that fact it turns out that the vast majority of what interests and charms more refined and discriminating tastes and every higher nature seems totally "uninteresting" to the average man. Nonetheless, when he notices a devotion to these things, he calls it "désintéressé" and wonders to himself how it is possible to act "without interest" (3). There have been philosophers who have known how to confer a seductive and mystically transcendental form of expression upon this popular wonder (perhaps because in their own experience they knew nothing of higher nature?)—instead of presenting what's reasonable—the honest naked truth that the "disinterested" action is a very interesting and interested action, provided . . . .

"And love?"—What's that! Is even an action done from love supposed to be "unegoistic"? You idiots! What about the praise for those who make sacrifices? But anyone who has really made a sacrifice knows that he wanted something for it and got it—perhaps something of himself in exchange for something of himself—he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more or at least to feel himself as "more." But this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more discriminating guest does not like to remain, for here even truth finds it necessary to suppress her yawns if she must answer. In the last analysis, Truth is a woman: we should not treat her with force.

221

It so happens, said a moralistic pedant and pettifogger, that I respect and honour a selfless man, not because he is selfless but because he seems to me to have a right to be of use to another man at his own expense. All right, but it's always a question of who he is and who the other is. For example, in a man who is marked out and made to command, self-denial and modest holding back would not be a virtue but a waste of virtue—that's what it seems like to me. Every unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and applies itself to everyone sins not only against taste; it also provokes sins of omission, one more seduction under the guise of philanthropy, and, in particular, a seduction for and injury to the higher, rarer, and privileged people.

We must compel morality first and foremost to give way before the order of rank. We must force into the conscience of moralists an awareness of their own arrogance—until they finally are collectively clear about the fact that it is immoral to say "What's right for one man is fair to another." As for my moralistic pedant and fine little man—does he deserve it when people laugh at him as he advises moralities in this way to become moral? But people should not be too much in the right if they want those who laugh on their side. A small grain of wrong is even a part of good taste.

222

Nowadays wherever people preach compassion—and, if one listens correctly, is there any other religion preached any more?—the psychologist should keep his ears open: through all the vanity, through all the noise characteristic of these preachers (like all preachers), he'll hear a hoarser, moaning, genuine sound of self-contempt. It's part of that process of making Europe dark and ugly which has been growing now for a hundred years (and whose first symptoms were placed in the documentary record in a thoughtful letter from Baliani to Madame d'Epinay): unless it's the cause of this development! A man of "modern ideas," this proud ape, is uncontrollably unhappy with himself—that's established. He's suffering. And his vanity wishes him only to suffer "with others."

223

At any rate, the hybrid European man—a reasonably ugly plebian, all in all—needs a costume. He needs history as a pantry for costumes. Naturally, he then notices that none of them fits his body properly. He changes and changes. Just take a look at the nineteenth century, keeping in mind these rapid preferences and changes in the masquerade of style, along with the moments of despair over the fact that "nothing suits us." It no use to present oneself romantically or classically or in a Christian or Florentine or Baroque or nationalist manner in moribus et artibus (4)—"it doesn't suit us"! But the "spirit," in particular the "historical spirit," sees an advantage for itself precisely in this despair: a new piece of pre-history and a foreign country are always explored, put on, set aside, packed away, and above all studied. We are the first age thoroughly educated in "costume"—I mean in morality, articles of faith, tastes in art and religion. We're prepared as no other time ever was for a carnival in the grand style, for a spiritual revelry of laughter and high spirits, for a transcendental high of the loftiest nonsense and Aristophanic mockery. Perhaps this is the place where we'll discoverer the realm of our own inventiveness, that realm where we too can still be original as some sort of satirists of world history and God's clowns—perhaps when nothing else today has a future, perhaps it's our laughter that still has one.

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The historical sense (or the capability to make quick guesses about the rank ordering of value judgments according to which a people, a society, or a man has lived, the "instinct for divination," for the relations between these value judgments, for the connections between the authority of value and the authority of effective forces)—this historical sense which we Europeans claim as our distinctive characteristic, came to us as a consequence of the enchanting and wild semi-barbarianism into which Europe was plunged through the democratic intermixing of the classes and races—the nineteenth century knew about this sense for the first time as its sixth sense. The past of every form and manner of living, of cultures which earlier lay right alongside each other or under each other flows, thanks to this intermixing, out into us "modern souls"; our instincts now run back all over the place; in ourselves we are a kind of chaos.

Finally "the spirit," as I have said, sees an advantage in all this. Because of our semi-barbarism in body and desires we have secret entrances in all directions, in a way no noble age ever possessed, above all the entrances to the labyrinths of unfinished cultures and to that semi-barbarism which has always been present on earth so far. Inasmuch as the most considerable part of human culture up to now has been semi-barbarism, the "historical sense" almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything. And that establishes right away that it's an unworthy sense.

For example, we enjoy Homer again. It's perhaps our happiest asset that we understand how to take pleasure from Homer, something which men of a noble culture don't know and didn't know how to appropriate and which they hardly allowed themselves to enjoy—for example, the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint Evremond, who criticized him for his esprit vaste, and even Voltaire, their final chorus (5). That very emphatic yes and no of their palate, their easy disgust, their hesitant holding back with respect to everything exotic, their fear of bad taste, even of lively curiosity, and, in general, the bad will of every noble and self-satisfied culture to acknowledge a new desire, a dissatisfaction with what one has, an admiration for something strange—all this disposes and makes them hostile even to the best things of the world which are not their own property or couldn't become one of their trophies. And no sense is more incomprehensible to such people than the historical sense and its obsequious plebian curiosity.

The situation is no different with Shakespeare, that amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste, who would have made an old Athenian, one of Aeschylus' friends, laugh himself almost to death or irritated him. But we take up this wild range of colours, this confusion of the most delicate, coarsest, and most artificial things with a secret confidence and good will. We enjoy him as the refinement of art saved especially for us and don't allow ourselves to be disturbed at all by the unpleasant stink and the proximity of the English rabble in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives, no more so than on the Chiaja in Naples, where we go on our way with all our senses enchanted and willing, no matter how much the sewers of the rabble's quarter fill the air.

We men with the "historical sense," we have our corresponding virtues. That's beyond dispute. We are undemanding, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-restraint, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very obliging. With all that we perhaps don't have very good taste. Let's finally admit it to ourselves: what's hardest for us men of "historical sense" to grasp, to feel, to taste again, to love again, what we're basically prejudiced about and almost hostile to is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, what is really noble in a work or in men, the moment when the sea is smooth and they have halcyon self-sufficiency, the gold and the coldness displayed by all things which have perfected themselves.

Perhaps the great virtue of our historical sense stands in a necessary opposition to good taste, at least to the very best taste, and we can recapture only with difficulty and hesitantly the small, short, and highest strokes of luck and transfigurations of human life, as they suddenly shine out here and there, only by forcing ourselves—those moments and miracles where a great force voluntarily remains standing before the boundless and unlimited, where an excess of sophisticated pleasure was enjoyed in sudden restraint and petrifaction, in standing firm and holding oneself steady on still trembling ground.

Restraint is strange to us. Let's admit that to ourselves. Our itch is an itch for the unlimited, the unmeasured. Like the rider on a horse snorting its way forward we let the reins fall before the infinite, we modern men, we half-barbarians—and reach our bliss for the first time in a place where we are most in danger.

225

Whether hedonism, or pessimism, or utilitarianism, or eudaimonianism (6)—all these ways of thinking, which measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to contingent circumstances and secondary issues, are ways of thinking in the foreground and naïveté, which everyone who knows about creative forces and an artistic conscience will look down on, not without ridicule and not without compassion. Compassion for yourself—that is, of course, not compassion the way you mean the term: it's not pity for social "needs," for "society" and its sick and unlucky people, with those depraved and broken down from the start, and with the way they lie on the ground all around us—even less is it compassion for the grumbling oppressed, the rebellious slave classes, who strive for mastery—they call it "Freedom."

Our compassion is a higher compassion which sees further—we see how man is making himself smaller, how you make him smaller—and there are moments when we look at your compassion with an indescribable anxiety, where we defend ourselves against this compassion—where we find your seriousness more dangerous than any carelessness. You want, if possible—and there is no wilder "if possible"—to do away with suffering. What about us? It does seem that we would prefer it to be higher and worse than it ever was! Well being, the way you understand it, that's no goal. To us that looks like an end, a condition which immediately makes human beings laughable and contemptible, something which makes their destruction desirable!

The culture of suffering, of great suffering, don't you realize that up to this point it is only this suffering which has created all the things which raise man up? That tension of a soul in misery which develops its strength, its trembling when confronted with the great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in bearing, holding out against, interpreting, and using unhappiness, and whatever has been conferred upon it by way of profundity, secrecy, masks, spirit, cunning, and greatness—has that not been given to it through suffering, through the cultivation of great suffering?

In man, creature and creator are united. In man is material stuff, fragments, excess, clay, mud, nonsense, chaos, but in man there is also creator, artist, hammer hardness, the divinity of the spectator and the seventh day—do you understand this contrast? And do you understand that your compassion for the "creature in man" is for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn apart, burned, glow, purified—for what must necessarily suffer and should suffer? And our pity—don't you understand for whom our reverse pity matters, when it protects itself against your pity as against the most serious of all mollycoddling and weakness? And thus pity for pity! But, to say the point again, there are higher problems than all those of enjoyment, suffering, and compassion, and every philosophy that leads only to these is something naïve.—

226

We immoral ones! This world, which we're concerned with, in which we have to fear and live, this almost invisible and inaudible world of sophisticated commanding, sophisticated obeying, a world of "almost" from every way of looking at it—entangled, embarrassing, cutting, and tender—yes, this world is well defended against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We have been woven into a strict yarn and shirt of duty and cannot get out—in that respect we too are "men of duty," yes, we as well! Now and then, it's true, we dance happily in our "chains" and between our "swords." More often, it's no less true, we gnash our teeth about it and are impatient with all the secret hardness of our fate. But we can do what we like: the fools and appearances speak against us—"They are men without duty." We always have fools and appearances against us.

227

If we assume that honesty is a virtue of ours from which we cannot escape, we free spirits—well, we'll want to work on it with all our malice and love and not grow tired of "making ourselves perfect" in the one virtue which remains ours: may its brilliance one day remain lying like a gold-painted, blue, mocking evening light over this aging culture and its dull and dark seriousness! And if nonetheless our honesty one day becomes tired and sighs and stretches its limbs and find us too hard and would like to have things better, lighter, more loving, like a pleasing vice, let us remain hard, we final Stoics! And let us send her by way of help only what we have in us of devilry—our disgust with what is crude and approximate, our "nitimur in vetitum" (7), our courage as adventurers, our shrewd and discriminating curiosity, our most refined, most disguised, and most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the world which roams and swarms greedily around all future realms—let us come to the aid of our "God" with all our "devils"!

It is likely that people fail to recognize us and get us confused with others—what does that matter? People will say "Your honesty—that's your devilry, nothing more than that." What does that matter? Even if they were right, have not all gods up to now been like that, devils who became holy by being re-christened? What finally do we know about ourselves? And that spirit which guides us, what does that want us to call it? (It is a matter of names). And how many spirits are we hiding? Our honesty, we free spirits, let us take care that it does not become our vanity, our finery and splendour, our frontier, our stupidity! Every virtue tends towards stupidity, every stupidity tends towards virtue: "stupid all the way to holiness" people say in Russia—let us take care that we don't end up becoming saints and bores through our honesty! Isn't life a hundred times too short to get bored with it? We'd already have to believe in eternal life, in order to. . . .

228

I hope people forgive me the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and has belonged among things which send us to sleep and that, in my eyes, "virtue" has been impaired by nothing so much as by the tediousness of its advocates. In saying this I don't wish to deny its general utility. A great deal rests on the fact that as few people as possible think about morality—and so it's important that morality does not one day become something interesting! But that's not something people should worry about! These days things still stand they way they always have: I don't see anyone in Europe who could have (or could provide) some idea about how reflecting on morality could be conducted dangerously, awkwardly, or seductively—that there could be some disaster in the process.

People should consider the tireless unavoidable English utilitarians, how they wander around crudely and honorably in Bentham's footsteps, moving this way and that (a Homeric metaphor says it more clearly), just as Bentham himself had already wandered in the footsteps of the honorable Helvetius (and this Helvetius—he was no dangerous man!) (8). No new idea, nothing of a more refined expression and bending of an old idea, not even a real history of an earlier idea—an impossible literature in its totality, unless we understand how to spice it up with some malice. For, in fact, even with these moralists (whom we must not read with any extraneous thoughts, if we have to read them) that old English vice called cant, which is moral hypocrisy, has inserted itself, but this time hidden under a new form of scientific thinking. Nor is there any lack of a secret resistance against the pangs of a guilty conscience, something a race of former Protestants justifiably suffers in all its scientific preoccupations with morality. (Isn't a moralist the opposite of a Puritan, at least insofar as he thinks about morality and takes it as something questionable, worth raising questions about, in short, as a problem? Shouldn't moralists be immoral?).

In the end they all want English morality to be considered right, so that then mankind or "general needs" or "the happiness of the majority"—no, England's good fortune—will be best served. They want to prove with all their might that striving for English happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion (and, in the highest positions, a seat in Parliament) is also the right path to virtue, in fact, that all virtue which has existed in the world so far has consisted of just such striving. Not one of all these ponderous herd animals with uneasy consciences (who commit themselves to taking the issue of egotism as an issue of general welfare) wants to know or catch a whiff of the fact that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, not even a concept one can somehow or other grasp, but is only an emetic—that what is right for one man cannot in any way also be right for another man, that the demand of a single morality for everyone is a direct restriction on the higher men, in short, that there is a rank ordering between man and man, and thus, as a result, between morality and morality. This utilitarian Englishman is a modest and thoroughly mediocre kind of man and, as mentioned, insofar as they are boring, we cannot think highly enough of their utility. We should even encourage them, just as, to some extent, someone has tried to do in the following rhyme:

Hail to you, brave working lout,
"It's always better when drawn out."
Always stiff in head and knee
Never funny, never keen,
Always sticking to the mean.
Sans genie et sans esprit. (9)

229

In those recent ages which are so proud of their humanity, there remains so much residual fear, so much superstitious fear of the "wild cruel beasts"—animals which these more humane ages are typically proud of having overcome—that even palpable truths stay unspoken for hundreds of years, as if by some agreement, because they look as if they might help these wild beasts, which have been finally slaughtered, come back to life. Perhaps I am daring something if I allow one such truth to escape me: let others catch it again and give it so much "milk of the devout ways of thinking" to drink until it lies forgotten in its old corner. People should learn to think differently about cruelty and open their eyes. They should finally learn to get impatient, so that such presumptuous fat errors no longer brazenly wander around as virtues, the way they've been fed to us, for example, by old and new philosophers in connection with tragedy.

Almost everything which we call "higher culture" rests on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty—that's my claim. That "wild beast" hasn't been killed at all: it's alive, it's flourishing. It's only turned itself into—a god. What constitutes the painful delight in tragedy is cruelty. What has a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, and basically even in everything awe-inspiring right up to the highest and most delicate trembling of metaphysics, gets its sweetness only from the addition to the mixture of cruelty. What Romans in the arena, Christ in the raptures of the cross, the Spanish with a burning at the stake or a bull fight, the Japanese today who crowd into tragedies, the Parisian suburban worker who feels nostalgic for a bloody revolution, the female fan of Wagner who, with her will unhinged, lets herself "submit to" Tristan and Isolde—what all these people enjoy and try to drink down with mysterious enthusiasm is the spicy liquor of the great goddess Circe, "cruelty."

In saying this, we must of course chase off the foolish psychology of former times, which, so far as cruelty is concerned, knew only how to teach us that it arose at the sight of someone else's suffering. There is a substantial over-abundant enjoyment also with one's own suffering, with making oneself suffer—and wherever people let themselves be convinced about self-denial in a religious sense or about self-mutilation, as with the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general about depriving themselves of sensual experience and the flesh, about remorse, Puritan pangs of repentance, a vivisection of the conscience, and Pascal's sacrifizio dell'intelletto he is secretly seduced and pushed on by his cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of cruelty turned against oneself (10).

Finally, people should consider that even the knowledgeable man, when he compels his spirit to acknowledge things against his mind's inclinations and often enough against his heart's desires—that is, to say no where he'd like to affirm something, to love and worship, rules as an artist and a transformer of cruelty. Every attempt to be profound and thorough is already a forceful violation, a willingness to do harm to the basic will of the spirit, which always wants what's apparent and superficial. Even in that desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty.

230

Perhaps people don't readily understand what I've said here about a "basic will of the spirit." So permit me to offer an explanation. The something which commands, which people call "the spirit," wishes to be master in and around itself and to feel that it's the master. It possesses the will to go from multiplicity to simplicity, a will which ties up, tames, desires to dominate, and truly does rule. Its needs and capabilities are in this respect the same as those which physiologists indicate belong to everything which lives, grows, and reproduces itself. The power of the spirit to appropriate other things for itself is revealed in its strong inclination to assimilate the new with the old, to simplify what is diverse, to ignore or push away what is totally contradictory, just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, brings out, and falsifies for its own purposes certain characteristics and lines in what is foreign in every piece of the outside world. Its intention in doing this is the annexation of new "experiences," the organization of new things in an old system—and also for growth, or, to put the matter more clearly, for the feeling of growth, for the feeling of increased power.

An apparently contradictory spiritual drive serves this same will, a suddenly erupting decision in favour of ignorance, a voluntary shutting out, a slamming of its window, an inner cry of No to this or that thing, a refusal to let something in, a kind of defensive condition against much that can be known, a satisfaction with the darkness, with the sealed-off horizon, an affirmation and endorsement of ignorance: and all this is necessary in proportion to its appropriating power, its "power of digestion," to speak metaphorically—and "the spirit" is in fact most like a stomach.

With this also belongs the occasional will in the spirit to allow itself to be deceived, perhaps with a high-spirited premonition that something or other is not the case, that we only allow something or other to be valid, a joy in all uncertainty and ambiguity, a exulting enjoyment of the self in the arbitrary narrowness and secrecy of some corner, in what is all-too-near-at-hand, in the foreground, in what is magnified or made smaller, in what has been shifted around or made more beautiful, a self-delight in the arbitrariness of all these expressions of power.

Finally with these belongs that not unobjectionable willingness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to play act in front of them, that constant urge and pressure of a creative, formative, changeable force: here the spirit enjoys its capacity for adopting multiple masks and shiftiness; it also enjoys the feeling of its security in this activity—precisely through its Protean art is the spirit, in fact, best defended and hidden!

Working against this will to appearances, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface—for every surface is a cloak—is that sublime tendency of the person looking for knowledge who grasps and wants to grasp things thoroughly in their profundity and multiplicity, as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every bold thinker will recognize in himself, provided that he, as is appropriate, has hardened and sharpened his eye for himself long enough and has grown accustomed to strict discipline and to stern language. He'll say, "There's something cruel in my spiritual inclinations"—let the virtuous and charming try to persuade him that's not so! In fact, it would sound better if, instead of cruelty, people talked of or whispered about or credited us free, very free spirits as having "excessive honesty"—and so perhaps one day that's how it will really ring out (our posthumous reputation?).

In the meantime, for there is plenty of time until then, I imagine we ourselves will be the least inclined to dress ourselves up in the finery of all those kinds of moralistic word sequins and fringes: our entire work so far spoils for us this taste and its merry opulence. These are the beautiful, sparkling, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful—there is something in them that makes the pride swell up in a man. But we hermits and marmots, we persuaded ourselves long ago, with all the secrecy of a hermit's conscience, that this worthy verbal pomp also belongs with the old lying finery, rubbish, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that underneath such flattering colours and repainted surfaces we must once again recognize the terrifying basic text of homo natura (11).

In fact, to translate men back into nature, to master the many vain and effusive interpretations and connoted meanings which so far have been scribbled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura, to bring it about that in future man stands before man in the same way he already stands these days before the rest of nature grown hard in the discipline of science, with the fearless eyes of Oedipus and the blocked ears of Odysseus, deaf to the tempting sirens among the old metaphysical bird-catchers, who for far too long have been piping at him, "You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!"—that may be a peculiar and mad task, but it is a task. Who will deny that? Why did we choose this mad task? Or, to put the matter differently, "Why knowledge at all?" Everyone will ask us about that. And we, pressured like this, we, who have already asked ourselves that very question a hundred times, we've found and find no better answer . . . .

231

Learning changes us. It does what all feeding does which doesn't merely "preserve," as a physiologist knows. But deep in us, really "down there," is naturally something uneducable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decisions and answers to predetermined selected questions. In every important problem a steadfast "that's what I am" speaks out. About men and a women, for example, a thinker cannot learn to think differently; he can only complete his learning—only finally discover how things "stand with him" on this question.

Sometimes we find certain solutions to problems which create a strong faith in us right away. Perhaps from then on we call them our "convictions." Later we see in them mere footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem which we are—or, better, to the great stupidity which we are, to our spiritual fate, to the unteachable part way "down there."

After this rich civility I have just displayed with respect to myself, perhaps there's a better chance that I'll be allowed to speak out a few truths about "woman as such," so long as people from now on realize from the start just how very much these are only my truths.

232

A woman wants to become independent—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about "woman as such"—and that's among the most deleterious developments in the general process of making Europe ugly. For what must these crude attempts of female scholarship and self-exposure bring to light! Woman has so many reasons for shame; hidden in women is so much pedantry, superficiality, so many characteristics of the school teacher, petty arrogance, petty indulgence, and immodesty. Just look at the way they interact with children! Up to now basically these qualities have best been kept repressed and controlled by fear of men.

Woe when the "eternally boring in woman"—she is rich in that—is first allowed to dare to emerge, when she begins thoroughly and fundamentally to forget her shrewdness and art, her qualities of grace, of play, of driving cares away, of mitigating troubles and taking things lightly, and her delicate skill with agreeable pleasures! Nowadays we can already hear women's voices which—holy Aristophanes!—are frightening. They threaten with medical clarity what woman wants from man, from start to finish.

Isn't it in the very worst taste for woman to prepare like this to become scientific? So far, enlightening has fortunately been a man's business, a man's talent—in the process we remained "among ourselves." In dealing with everything which women write about concerning "woman," we can retain a healthy mistrust whether woman really wants enlightenment about herself—or is capable of wanting it. Unless a woman by doing this is seeking some new finery for herself—so I do think that self-adornment is part of the eternally feminine?—she does want to excite fear of her: in that way she perhaps wants control. But she does not want the truth. What does a woman have to do with truth! From the very beginning nothing is stranger, more unfavorable, or more hostile to women than the truth. Her great art is the lie, her highest concern appearance and beauty. We men should admit it—we honour and love precisely this art and instinct in woman, we who have a hard time of it and are happy to get relief by associating with beings under whose hands, looks, and tender foolishness our seriousness, our gravity and profundity seem almost silly.

Finally I put this question: has a woman ever herself conceded that a woman's head is profound, that a woman's heart is just? And isn't it true that, speaking generally, "woman" up to this point has been held in contempt mostly by woman herself—and not at all by us? We men want woman not to continue to compromise herself by enlightenment, just as it was masculine care and consideration for woman that made the church decree mulier taceat in ecclesia! That was an advantage for woman, as Napoleon let the all-too-loquacious Madame de Staël understand: mulier taceat in politicis! And I think that a true friend of women is the man who nowadays shouts out to them: mulier taceat de muliere! (12).

233

It reveals a corruption of instincts—quite apart from revealing bad taste—when a woman makes a direct reference to Madame Roland or Madame de Stael or Mr. George Sand, as if they had something to prove in favour of the "woman as such" (13). Among men those names are the three comical woman as such—nothing more!—and precisely the best unintentional counter-arguments against emancipation and female high-handedness.

234

Stupidity in the kitchen, woman as cook, the ghastly absence of intelligent thought in caring for the nourishment of the family and the man of the house! Woman understands nothing about what food means—and she wants to be cook! If woman were a thinking creature, then, as cook for thousands of years, she'd surely have found out the most important physiological facts, while at the same time she'd have had to take ownership of the art of healing! Because of bad cooks and the complete lack of reason in the kitchen, the development of human beings has been held up for the longest time and suffered the worst damage. Even today things are little better. A speech for young ladies.

235

There are expressions and successful projections of the spirit; there are aphorisms, a small handful of words, in which an entire culture, an entire society, suddenly crystallizes. Among these belongs the remark Madame de Lambert made at some point to her son: "Mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que de folies, qui vous feront grand plaisir," which is, by the way, the most motherly and cleverest remark that has ever been directed to a son (14).

236

What Dante and Goethe believed about women—the former when he sang "ella guardava suso, ed io in lei" (15) and the latter when he translated this passage as "the Eternally Feminine draws us upwards"—I have no doubt that every more aristocratic woman will resist this faith, for she believes the very same about the Eternally Masculine. . . .

237

Seven Short Maxims About Women

How the longest boredom flees—when man crawls to us on his knees.

Old age, alas, and science, too, give strength to even weak virtue.

Dressed in black and speaking never—every woman then looks clever.

When things go well, my gratitude goes—to God and the woman who cuts my clothes.

When young, a flowery cavern home—when old, a dragon on the roam.

A noble name, legs are fine—a man as well—would he were mine!

Brief in speech, the sense quite nice—a female ass on treacherous ice!

237a

Up to now women have been treated by men like birds which have strayed down to them from some high place or other—like something finer, more sensitive, wilder, stranger, sweeter, and with more soul—but like something which man must lock up so that it doesn't fly away.

238

To grasp incorrectly the basic problem of "man and woman," to deny the most profound antagonism here and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps in this matter to dream about equal rights, equal education, equal entitlements and duties—that's a typical sign of superficial thinking. And a thinker who has shown that he's shallow in this dangerous place—shallow in his instincts!—can in general be considered suspicious or, even worse, betrayed and exposed. Presumably he'll be too "short" for all the basic questions of life and of life in the future, and he'll be incapable of any profundity.

By contrast, a man who does have profundity in his spirit and in his desires as well, together with that profundity of good will capable of severity and hardness and easily confused with them, can only think about woman in an oriental way: he has to grasp woman as a possession, as a property which he can lock up, as something predetermined for service and reaching her perfection in that service. He must take a stand on the immense reasoning of Asia, on the instinctual superiority of Asia: just as the Greeks in earlier times, the best heirs and students of Asia, who, as is well known, from Homer to the time of Pericles, as they advanced in culture and the extent of their power, also became step by step stricter against women, in short, more oriental. How necessary, how logical, even how humanly desirable this was—that's something we'd do well to think about.

239

In no age has the weak sex been treated with such respect on the part of men as in our age—that's part of the tendency and basic taste of democracy, just like the disrespect for old age. Is it any wonder that right away this respect leads to abuse? People want more; people learn to make demands. They finally find this toll of respect almost sickening and would prefer a competition for rights, in fact, a genuine fight. It's enough that woman loses her shame. Let's add to that immediately that she also loses her taste. She forgets how to be afraid of man. But the woman who "forgets fear" abandons her most womanly instincts. The fact that woman dares to come out when that part of men which inspires fear—let's say it more clearly—when the man in men—is no longer wanted and widely cultivated is reasonable enough, even understandable enough.

What's much more difficult to grasp is that in this very process woman degenerates. That's happening today—let's not deceive ourselves about it. Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now strives for the economic and legal independence of a shop assistant: "woman as clerk" stands out on the door of the modern society which is now developing. As she thus empowers herself with new rights and strives to become "master" and writes the "progress" of woman on her banners and little flags, it becomes terribly clear that the opposite is taking place: woman is regressing.

Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown smaller in proportion to the increase in her rights and demands, and the "Emancipation of Woman," to the extent that that is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not just by superficial men), has, as a result, produced a peculiar symptom of the growing weakening and deadening of the most feminine instincts. There is a stupidity in this development, an almost masculine stupidity, about which a successful woman—who is always an intelligent woman—would have to feel thoroughly ashamed.

To lose the instinct for the ground on which one is surest to gain victory, to neglect to practice the art of one's own true weapons, to allow oneself to let go before men, perhaps even "to produce a book," where previously one used discipline and a refined, cunning humility to work with a virtuous audacity against man's faith in a fundamentally different ideal concealed in woman, an eternally and necessarily feminine, with constant chatter to talk men emphatically out of the idea that woman, like a delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasing domestic animal, must be maintained, cared for, protected, and looked after, the awkward and indignant gathering up of everything slavish and serf-like, which has inherently belonged to the position of women in the social order up to this point and which still does (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition of every higher culture, every enhancement in culture)—what does all this mean, if not a crumbling away of feminine instinct, a loss of femininity?

Of course, there are enough idiotic friends of women and corrupters of women among the scholarly asses of the male sex who counsel woman to de-feminize herself in this manner and to imitate all the foolish things which make "man" in Europe and European "manliness" sick, people who want to bring woman down to the level of a "common education," perhaps even to reading the newspapers and discussing politics. Here and there they want even to make women into free spirits and literati: as if a woman without piety were not something totally repulsive and ridiculous to a profound and godless man. Almost everywhere people ruin woman's nerves with the most sickly and dangerous of all forms of music (our most recent German music) and make her more hysterical every day and incapable of her first and last profession, giving birth to strong children. They want to make her in general even more "cultivated" and, as they say, make the "weak sex" strong through culture, as if history didn't teach us as emphatically as possible that "cultivating" human beings and making them weak (that is, enfeebling, fracturing, making the power of the will sick) always go hand in hand and that the most powerful and most influential women of the world (in most recent times even Napoleon's mother) can thank the power of their own wills—and not their school masters—for their power and superiority over men.

The thing in woman that arouses respect and often enough fear is her nature, which is "more natural" than man's nature, her genuine predatory and cunning adaptability, the tiger's claws under the glove, the naiveté of her egotism, her uneducable nature, her inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, breadth, and roaming of her desires and virtues. . . . With all this fear, what creates sympathy for this dangerous and beautiful cat "woman" is that she appears to suffer more, to be more vulnerable and in need of love, and to be condemned to suffer disappointment more than any animal. Fear and compassion—with these feelings man has stood before woman up to this point, always with one foot in tragedy, which tears to pieces while it delights.

How's that? And is this now coming to an end? Is the magic spell of woman now in the process of being broken? Is the process of making woman boring gradually coming about? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which has always been most attractive to you. Its danger still constantly threatens you! Your old fable could still at some point become "history"—once again a monstrous stupidity could gain mastery of you and drag you away from it! And no god is hiding underneath it, no, only an "idea," a "modern idea"! . . .

Notes

(1) bêtise bourgoise: bourgeois stupidity. Flaubert: Gustave Flaubert (1820-1880), a very famous French novelist.

(2)homo bonae voluntatis: man of good will.

(3) désintéressé: disinterested, impartial.

(4) in moribus et artibus: in customs and the arts.

(5) esprit vaste: vast or all-encompassing mind.

(6) eudaimonianism: the doctrine that our highest goal is happiness.

(7) "nitimur in vetitum": we seek what is forbidden.

(8) Bentham . . . Helvetius: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English utilitarian philosopher and social reformer; Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771), French philosopher, condemned by the pope and the government for his godlessness.

(9). . . esprit: Without genius and without intelligence.

(10) sacrifizio dell'intelletto: sacrifice of the intellect.

(11) homo natura: man by nature.

(12) mulier taceat in ecclesia: let woman remain silent in church; mulier taceat in politicis: let woman remain silent in politics; mulier taceat de muliere: let woman remain silent about woman.

(13) Madame Roland (1754-1793), French historian and writer; Madame de Stael (1766-1817), French writer; George Sand: pen name for Amandine Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), French novelist.

(14) . . . grand plaisir: My dear, never allow yourself anything but those follies which will bring you great pleasure.

(15) ella guardava suso, ed io in lei: She looked upward and I at her.