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188. In contrast to laisser-aller, every system of morals is a sort of
tyranny against "nature" and also against "reason", that is, however, no
objection, unless one should again decree by some system of morals, that
all kinds of tyranny and unreasonableness are unlawful What is
essential and invaluable in every system of morals, is that it is a
long constraint. In order to understand Stoicism, or Port Royal,
or Puritanism, one should remember the constraint under which every
language has attained to strength and freedom--the metrical constraint,
the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm. How much trouble have the poets and
orators of every nation given themselves!--not excepting some of
the prose writers of today, in whose ear dwells an inexorable
conscientiousness--"for the sake of a folly," as utilitarian bunglers
say, and thereby deem themselves wise--"from submission to arbitrary
laws," as the anarchists say, and thereby fancy themselves "free," even
free-spirited. The singular fact remains, however, that everything
of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly
certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself,
or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art just as in
conduct, has only developed by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary
law, and in all seriousness, it is not at all improbable that precisely
this is "nature" and "natural"--and not laisser-aller! Every artist
knows how different from the state of letting himself go, is his
"most natural" condition, the free arranging, locating, disposing,
and constructing in the moments of "inspiration"--and how strictly and
delicately he then obeys a thousand laws, which, by their very rigidness
and precision, defy all formulation by means of ideas (even the most
stable idea has, in comparison therewith, something floating, manifold,
and ambiguous in it). The essential thing "in heaven and in earth" is,
apparently (to repeat it once more), that there should be long OBEDIENCE
in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in
the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance,
virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality--anything whatever
that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine. The long bondage of
the spirit, the distrustful constraint in the communicability of
ideas, the discipline which the thinker imposed on himself to think
in accordance with the rules of a church or a court, or conformable
to Aristotelian premises, the persistent spiritual will to interpret
everything that happened according to a Christian scheme, and in every
occurrence to rediscover and justify the Christian God:--all this
violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness,
has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has
attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility;
granted also that much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be
stifled, suffocated, and spoilt in the process (for here, as everywhere,
"nature" shows herself as she is, in all her extravagant and INDIFFERENT
magnificence, which is shocking, but nevertheless noble). That
for centuries European thinkers only thought in order to prove
something--nowadays, on the contrary, we are suspicious of every thinker
who "wishes to prove something"--that it was always settled beforehand
what WAS TO BE the result of their strictest thinking, as it was perhaps
in the Asiatic astrology of former times, or as it is still at the
present day in the innocent, Christian-moral explanation of immediate
personal events "for the glory of God," or "for the good of the
soul":--this tyranny, this arbitrariness, this severe and magnificent
stupidity, has EDUCATED the spirit; slavery, both in the coarser and
the finer sense, is apparently an indispensable means even of spiritual
education and discipline. One may look at every system of morals in this
light: it is "nature" therein which teaches to hate the laisser-aller,
the too great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons, for
immediate duties--it teaches the NARROWING OF PERSPECTIVES, and thus, in
a certain sense, that stupidity is a condition of life and development.
"Thou must obey some one, and for a long time; OTHERWISE thou wilt come
to grief, and lose all respect for thyself"--this seems to me to be the
moral imperative of nature, which is certainly neither "categorical,"
as old Kant wished (consequently the "otherwise"), nor does it address
itself to the individual (what does nature care for the individual!),
but to nations, races, ages, and ranks; above all, however, to the
animal "man" generally, to MANKIND.

189. Industrious races find it a great hardship to be idle: it was a
master stroke of ENGLISH instinct to hallow and begloom Sunday to such
an extent that the Englishman unconsciously hankers for his week--and
work-day again:--as a kind of cleverly devised, cleverly intercalated
FAST, such as is also frequently found in the ancient world (although,
as is appropriate in southern nations, not precisely with respect
to work). Many kinds of fasts are necessary; and wherever powerful
influences and habits prevail, legislators have to see that intercalary
days are appointed, on which such impulses are fettered, and learn to
hunger anew. Viewed from a higher standpoint, whole generations and
epochs, when they show themselves infected with any moral fanaticism,
seem like those intercalated periods of restraint and fasting, during
which an impulse learns to humble and submit itself--at the same time
also to PURIFY and SHARPEN itself; certain philosophical sects likewise
admit of a similar interpretation (for instance, the Stoa, in the midst
of Hellenic culture, with the atmosphere rank and overcharged with
Aphrodisiacal odours).--Here also is a hint for the explanation of the
paradox, why it was precisely in the most Christian period of European
history, and in general only under the pressure of Christian sentiments,
that the sexual impulse sublimated into love (amour-passion).