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CHAPTER II. THE FREE SPIRIT


24. O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and
falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has
got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around
us clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give
our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike
desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences!--how from the beginning,
we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost
inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness,
and gaiety--in order to enjoy life! And only on this solidified,
granite-like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself
hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful
will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as
its opposite, but--as its refinement! It is to be hoped, indeed, that
LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and that
it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees
and many refinements of gradation; it is equally to be hoped that the
incarnated Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable
"flesh and blood," will turn the words round in the mouths of us
discerning ones. Here and there we understand it, and laugh at the way
in which precisely the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this
SIMPLIFIED, thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined, and suitably
falsified world: at the way in which, whether it will or not, it loves
error, because, as living itself, it loves life!

25. After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be
heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care, ye philosophers
and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for the
truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It spoils all the innocence
and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against
objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when
in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even
worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card
as protectors of truth upon earth--as though "the Truth" were such an
innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of
all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and
Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that
it cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know
that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might
be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark
which you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and
occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and
trumping games before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out of the way!
Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may
be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don't forget
the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around
you who are as a garden--or as music on the waters at eventide, when
already the day becomes a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free,
wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to
remain good in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad,
does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means
of force! How PERSONAL does a long fear make one, a long watching
of enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of society, these
long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones--also the compulsory recluses, the
Spinozas or Giordano Brunos--always become in the end, even under the
most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware
of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare
the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of
the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a
philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him. The
martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth,"
forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him;
and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity,
with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous
desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a
"martyr," into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary
with such a desire to be clear WHAT spectacle one will see in any
case--merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the
continued proof that the long, real tragedy IS AT AN END, supposing that
every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin.

26. Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy,
where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority--where he may
forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;--exclusive only of
the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger
instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. Whoever, in
intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the green
and grey colours of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy,
gloominess, and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes;
supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this burden
and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, and remains,
as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is then
certain: he was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge. For as
such, he would one day have to say to himself: "The devil take my good
taste! but 'the rule' is more interesting than the exception--than
myself, the exception!" And he would go DOWN, and above all, he would
go "inside." The long and serious study of the AVERAGE man--and
consequently much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad
intercourse (all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's
equals):--that constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every
philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing
part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge
should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and
lighten his task; I mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize
the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the
same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them
talk of themselves and their like BEFORE WITNESSES--sometimes they
wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only
form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the
higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and
congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before
him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where
enchantment mixes with the disgust--namely, where by a freak of nature,
genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the
case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also
filthiest man of his century--he was far profounder than Voltaire, and
consequently also, a good deal more silent. It happens more frequently,
as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a
fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means
rare, especially among doctors and moral physiologists. And whenever
anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather quite innocently, of man
as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever any one
sees, seeks, and WANTS to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity
as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when any one
speaks "badly"--and not even "ill"--of man, then ought the lover of
knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in general,
to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation. For the
indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with
his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society),
may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and
self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary,
more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a LIAR
as the indignant man.

27. It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks and
lives gangasrotogati [Footnote: Like the river Ganges: presto.] among
those only who think and live otherwise--namely, kurmagati [Footnote:
Like the tortoise: lento.], or at best "froglike," mandeikagati
[Footnote: Like the frog: staccato.] (I do everything to be "difficultly
understood" myself!)--and one should be heartily grateful for the
good will to some refinement of interpretation. As regards "the good
friends," however, who are always too easy-going, and think that as
friends they have a right to ease, one does well at the very first to
grant them a play-ground and romping-place for misunderstanding--one can
thus laugh still; or get rid of them altogether, these good friends--and
laugh then also!