Read Beyond God and Evil Online

212. It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man
INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever
found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in contradiction
to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his
day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one
calls philosophers--who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom,
but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found
their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end,
however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of
their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very
VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been
for the sake of a NEW greatness of man, a new untrodden path to
his aggrandizement. They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy,
indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was
concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how
much virtue was OUTLIVED, they have always said "We must remove hence to
where YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern ideas,"
which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a "specialty," a
philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled
to place the greatness of man, the conception of "greatness," precisely
in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he
would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety
of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the
EXTENT to which a man could stretch his responsibility Nowadays the
taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is
so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will consequently, in
the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity
for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception
of "greatness", with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its
ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to
an opposite age--such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its
accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods
of selfishness In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out
instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go--"for the
sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their
conduct indicated--and who had continually on their lips the old pompous
words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led,
IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic
assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his
own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that
said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here--we are equal!"
At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding-animal
alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of
right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong--I mean to
say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged,
against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher
responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness--at present
it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be
apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live
by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his
own ideal when he asserts "He shall be the greatest who can be the most
solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good
and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will;
precisely this shall be called GREATNESS: as diversified as can be
entire, as ample as can be full." And to ask once more the question: Is
greatness POSSIBLE--nowadays?

213. It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot
be taught: one must "know" it by experience--or one should have the
pride NOT to know it. The fact that at present people all talk of things
of which they CANNOT have any experience, is true more especially
and unfortunately as concerns the philosopher and philosophical
matters:--the very few know them, are permitted to know them, and
all popular ideas about them are false. Thus, for instance, the truly
philosophical combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs
at presto pace, and a dialectic rigour and necessity which makes no
false step, is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own
experience, and therefore, should any one speak of it in their
presence, it is incredible to them. They conceive of every necessity as
troublesome, as a painful compulsory obedience and state of constraint;
thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and hesitating,
almost as a trouble, and often enough as "worthy of the SWEAT of the
noble"--but not at all as something easy and divine, closely related
to dancing and exuberance! "To think" and to take a matter "seriously,"
"arduously"--that is one and the same thing to them; such only has been
their "experience."--Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they
who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything
"arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom,
of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping,
reaches its climax--in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are
then the same thing with them. There is, in fine, a gradation of rank
in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems
corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who
ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution
by the loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what use is it for
nimble, everyday intellects, or clumsy, honest mechanics and empiricists
to press, in their plebeian ambition, close to such problems, and as
it were into this "holy of holies"--as so often happens nowadays! But
coarse feet must never tread upon such carpets: this is provided for in
the primary law of things; the doors remain closed to those intruders,
though they may dash and break their heads thereon. People have always
to be born to a high station, or, more definitely, they have to be BRED
for it: a person has only a right to philosophy--taking the word in
its higher significance--in virtue of his descent; the ancestors, the
"blood," decide here also. Many generations must have prepared the way
for the coming of the philosopher; each of his virtues must have been
separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted, and embodied; not only the
bold, easy, delicate course and current of his thoughts, but above all
the readiness for great responsibilities, the majesty of ruling glance
and contemning look, the feeling of separation from the multitude with
their duties and virtues, the kindly patronage and defense of whatever
is misunderstood and calumniated, be it God or devil, the delight and
practice of supreme justice, the art of commanding, the amplitude of
will, the lingering eye which rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely
loves....